Ahmet Kaya

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Ahmet Kaya

Ahmet Kaya (Kurdish: Ehmed Kaya) (28 October 1957, Malatya, Turkey – 16 November 2000, Paris, France) was a Kurdish poet, singer, and a leading artist in Turkey.

1 Career
2 Awards controversy
3 Exile and death
4 Discography
5 Further reading
6 External links

[edit] Career

Ahmet Kaya worked for a while as a taxi driver in Istanbul before becoming well-known as a singer in the mid-1980s. During his career he recorded about 20 albums and was known for his protest music and positions on social justice. Nearly all his work is in Turkish because of Turkey's restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language. Ahmet Kaya was a leading defender of equality and human rights for Turkish Kurds.

[edit] Awards controversy

At a 1999 televised annual music awards ceremony, SHOW TV, at which he was to be named Musician of the Year, he spoke out about his 'Kurdish' background and said that he wanted to produce music in his native Kurdish as naturally as he does in Turkish. He announced that he had recorded a song in Kurdish (Kerwan, released on the Hoşçakalın Gözüm album in 2001) and intended to produce a video to accompany it. At this event he was attacked by some Turkish singers because of his stance on the use of Kurdish. However, some of the same singers were among the first people to make Kurdish albums when the government gave in to pressure from Europe to relax the restrictions on the use of Kurdish language.[1]

[edit] Exile and death

Kaya went into exile in France in June 1999 on account of various charges arising from his political views. Among them were the accusations that he had performed in front of a poster for the Kurdistan Workers Party at a 1993 concert in Germany, and that he had made statements in support of Abdullah Öcalan and had referred to Turkey as a "dishonourable people's country".^{[citation needed]} In March 2000 he was sentenced in absentia to three years and nine months in prison on the charge of spreading separatist propaganda. He died of a heart attack in Paris in 2000, at the age of 43, and is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery.