She was co-founder, with her husband Ragıp Zarakolu, of notable Turkish publishing house Belge[1] and, in the 1980s, became the director of book-distribution company Cemmay, the first woman in the nation to hold such a position.
[4] According to The New York Times, which in 1997 identified Zarakolu as "one of the most relentless challengers to Turkey's press laws", books she published "denounce[d] the Government's war against Kurdish guerrillas, accuse[d] the security forces of involvement with death squads and document[ed] mass killings of Armenians in the early years of the century.
"[7] In press release, the organization noted that not only had she been willing to publish İsmail Beşikçi's Kurdistan, an Inter-States Colony in defiance of a ban on the word "Kurd", but that she had "started debate on the question of "Armenian Genocide" which still remains as a taboo in Turkey.
Some specific publications by Belge in Turkey that were subjects of controversy include the poems of Mehdi Zana, Les Arméniens: histoire d'un génocide (The Armenians: history of a genocide) by Yves Ternon, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, several books by İsmail Beşikçi, and the essays of Lissy Schmidt, a German journalist who had died while covering conditions in Iraqi Kurdistan.
[7] In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Turkey for its conviction of Zarakolu in connection to her publication of a book detailing the story of Ferhat Tepe, a murdered journalist.
[15] In 2007, the metropolitan municipality of Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey named the "Ayşenur Zarakolu Free Women's Park Forest" on Dicle Kent Boulevard in her honor.