Ziya Pir
Ziya Pir (born 1970 in Torul, Gümüşhane Province, Turkey) is a Turkish and German entrepreneur and politician of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). Early life and education Born in Turkey, Pir mostly grew up in Western Germany. Affiliated with the German liberal-conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, in 1999, Pir joined the CDU German-Turkish Forum. In 2002, he was tasked by Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with developing an organization for Turkish expatriates in Germany, the Union of European-Turkish Democrats (UETD). Appalled by both the UETD's increasing alignment with the AKP party and Erdoğans increasingly authoritarian conduct, he later broke with both. Political career in Turkey 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. He was released from detention after he delivered his testimony concerning an indictment around