Mazlum Doğan
Mazlum Doğan (born 1956, Karakoçan, Elazığ Province – died 21 March 1982, Diyarbakır, Turkey) was a journalist and a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).Mazlum Doğan committed suicide in protest of the Turkish coup d'état and the inhumane conditions he and other prisoners were facing inside of the penitentiary.In 1971 Öcalan joined the underground movements trying to overthrow the government, which he saw as an oppressive and fascist; this occurred when he was a student at the Ankara University Political Sciences Faculty.[5] What made Apocus, later the PKK or Kurdistan Workers' Party, different was that it decided to move its activities from Ankara, the capital city, to the southern border towns of Turkey.Transferring to southern border towns with a radical left rhetoric gave the Apocus movement initial resources during a time when Turkey had problems with Syria.[6] Mazlum Doğan and other leftist actors under the lead of Abdullah Öcalan who were participating in the Kurdish student movement continued to organize and eventually developed into an official political party on 25 November 1978 in the village of Fis near Lice.[8][9] Shortly after the founding of the party in 1978, forecasting the military coup d’état of Turkey in 1980, thousands of Kurdish and Turkish left-revolutionaries were jailed, leading many of the existing groups to lose their organizational structures.He had planned on leaving Turkey and head towards Syria, but was arrested on 30 September over accusations of founding and leading the Kurdistan Workers' Party, what the Turkish coup d'état labeled a terrorist organisation, taking part in the liberation of a comrade from a state hospital in Diyarbakır, and identity document forgery.Following Mazlum Doğan's action, four inmates, Ferhat Kurtay, Eşref Anyık, Necmi Öner and Mahmut Zengin lit themselves on fire in protest.Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Serxwebûn and Berxwedan continued to publish commemoration articles regarding the acts of resistance from Doğan as well as other important figures such as Gülnaz Karataş and Zekiye Alkan.