Ahmet Kaya was a Kurdish singer born in 1957 in Malatya, southeastern Turkey. He was phenomenally popular and sold millions of records in the 1980s and 1990s. He was also an anti-Kemalist artist who had bluntly challenged the official state ideology. He never hesitated to charge that the state under the control of the Turkish army was trying to eradicate the Kurds. Kaya was also a stout defender of the religious, Alevi and non-Muslim groups oppressed by the Kemalist regime. He is remembered for defending Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now the prime minister, then imprisoned for reciting an anti-Kemalist poem in the 1990s. At a concert on Oct. 29, 1998, at Taksim Square, he denounced what was done to Erdogan.

Sadly, he paid for his liberal views with his life. In 1999, the Turkish mainstream media pilloried Kaya for being a Kurd. The mainstream media under the former regime was racist and extremely nationalist. That is why the members of the racist media of the time have no credibility in Turkey today. They can only fool Western readers who don’t know Turkey.

Kaya was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor and praised by President Abdullah Gul during the recent ceremony.

A summary of what Kaya lived through will help explain his amazing life story. In 1999, Kaya was given an award by the Magazine Journalists Association. While receiving the honor, Kaya said, "I am receiving this award on behalf of everyone struggling for human rights. In my next album, I will sing in Kurdish and will make a Kurdish video clip. I am sure there are courageous TV people who will air these.”