Ziya Pir
Ziya Pir is a Turkish and German entrepreneur and politician of the Peoples' Democratic Party.
Born in Turkey, Pir mostly grew up in Western Germany. Affiliated with the German liberal-conservative Christian Democratic Union party, in 1999, Pir joined the CDU German-Turkish Forum. In 2002, he was tasked by Turkish prime minister Erdoğan with developing an organization for Turkish expatriates in Germany, the Union of European-Turkish Democrats. Appalled by both the UETD's increasing alignment with the AKP party and Erdoğans increasingly authoritarian conduct, he later broke with both.
Pir, who is a nephew of the famous ethnic Turkish co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, Kemal Pir, in 2015 decided to return to Turkey in order to join the newly founded pro-Kurdish opposition party HDP. In the June 2015 general election he was elected to represent his Diyarbakır constituency in the Turkish parliament and was later confirmed in the November 2015 snap election. In November 2016 he was arrested together with 10 other parliamentarians of the HDP party. In 2017 he received a suspended sentence of 11 months and 20 days for calling the prosecutor who ordered raids on the Dicle Haber Ajansi, Azadiya Welat, KURDÎ-DER and Aram Publishing in Diyarbakır province on 28 September 2015, during which 32 journalists got detained a “candidate as a palace jester".
