The country's main pro-Kurdish political party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP), which is boycotting the July 22 poll but backing independents, said Saturday that Leyla Zana would not be standing.

Her three former cellmates, Hatip Dicle, Sirri Sakik and Orhan Dogan, would be trying to win back their seats in parliament which they lost when their party was banned, it said.

They are among some 60 independent candidates which the DTP said Saturday it would support. Others include left-wing academic Baskin Oran, a defender of minority rights who has upset Turkish nationalists.

Many Kurds have become legislators in Turkey as members of mainstream parties.

But pro-Kurdish movements have failed to overcome a bar on parties that fail to win 10 percent of the vote nationally, even though they usually dominate the poll in the mainly Kurdish southeast and routinely win local elections.

The DTP said in May that it would not contest the early legislative elections as a party in protest at the 10 percent national threshold.

Once in parliament, DTP-backed candidates can form a group under the party banner.

However a new law passed in May was widely seen as aiming to foil this tactic by obliging the names of independent candidates to appear on the same ballot as those of the political parties, instead of on separate slips.

Since many voters are illiterate or do not speak Turkish in the Kurdish southeast, they are likely to have trouble picking their candidate's name from the long list of parties and other independents.

Kurdish politicians are routinely accused of being instruments of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has led a bloody separatist insurgency in the southeast since 1984.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community.

The DTP was set up in November 2005 as a successor of other Kurdish political parties outlawed by the courts on grounds of separatism.

It has pledged to try to resolve the Kurdish conflict through peaceful means, but has so far made no progress.

Zana caused a storm following her election as an independent in 1991 by speaking Kurdish in parliament. She was jailed in 1994 after she lost her parliamentary immunity with the banning of the Democracy Party which she had joined.

She was awarded the European Parliament's Sakharov human rights prize in 1995 but could not collect it until after her release in 2004 after a long campaign.

Only last month a Turkish prosecutor called for a new five-year jail term for Zana, 46, after she was accused of praising jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.