Original language: German
Nebahat Akkoc was born in a small town in eastern Turkey. Before devoting herself to women’s rights work, she worked as a teacher for several years. In 1980, she became politically active.
Nebahat Akkoc was born on February 23, 1955, in eastern Turkey, in the small town of Karliova near Bingöl. Her family lived in Karliova because her father was stationed there as a civil servant. She grew up as the third of eight children in a large family.
She attended elementary school in the Hazro and Silvan districts of Diyarbakır. She then attended a girls’ boarding school in Mardin, where students were trained to become elementary school teachers. In 1970, as part of an “East-West Integration” program, she was sent to a girls’ boarding school in Manisa in the Aegean region, where she completed her professional training as an elementary school teacher.
While working as a teacher, she completed a two-year continuing education program at Anadolu University in Eskişehir.
NebahatAkkoç married at the age of 18 and had a daughter and a son. For 22 years, she worked not only in downtown Diyarbakır but also for many years in the villages and small towns of the province.
Before the 1980 military coup, she became politically active and joined the left-leaning “Union of Turkish Teachers” (TÖB-DER, Türkiye Öğretmenler Birliği Derneği). The military coup and its aftermath—the ban on all political organizations and the large-scale waves of arrests—marked a turning point in Ms. Akkoç’s life.
Her husband was also among those detained. During her visits to the Diyarbakır prison, she met many women who could neither read nor write and did not speak Turkish. She tried to support these women. Through her conversations with these women, she realized that they were suffering doubly: both political violence and domestic violence profoundly affected the women’s lives.
When the Education and Science Union (EĞİT-SEN, Eğitim ve Bilim Emekçileri Sendikası) opened a branch in Diyarbakır in 1990, NebahatAkkoç became the union’s district chair.
But until 1993, she was unable to carry out any activities related to educational issues within the union, as the fighting continued. Teachers were murdered by unknown assailants. Because of her press statements denouncing these atrocities, she was subjected to internal and police investigations.
In 1993, her husband was also shot and killed on his way to school.
After her husband’s death, she took early retirement so she could become more active in the field of human rights. She joined the national executive board of the Human Rights Association (IHD, İnsan Hakları Derneği) and represented the organization in her district of Diyarbakır. This was followed by a brief stint as a member of a political party; in 1994, she served for four months as an alternate member of the Grand Party Assembly of the Kurdish Democratic People’s Party (DEP, Demokratik Halk Partisi).
In February 1994, Ms.Akkoç was detained for 12 days. While in detention, she was subjected to torture methods specifically targeting women. It was during that time that she decided to devote herself entirely to women’s rights work.
From 1994 to 1997, she was arrested a total of 15 times and severely mistreated. She successfully filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg regarding the restriction of her freedom of expression, the investigation into her husband’s murder, and her detention and torture. The charges were consolidated into a single case file, and she won her case in 1999.
The“Akkoç case” was not only the first case from Turkey to be heard by the European Court of Human Rights; it was also one of only two cases accepted in Strasbourg without the domestic legal remedies having been exhausted.
In 1996,Akkoç converted a room in her apartment into an office and began her advocacy work for women from there. In August 1997, she founded KAMER, initially as a registered company. To expand KAMER’s activities, it was converted into a foundation in 2005.
Together with the women of KAMER, NebahatAkkoç established branches in 23 cities across Southeast and Eastern Anatolia to defend women’s human rights there. Since 2005, KAMER has also been running the program “Every Woman Needs a Chance.” The goal is to give women in villages, small towns, and cities the opportunity to free themselves from violence, embrace their traditional roles, and transform them.
Ms.Akkoç, who continues to devote her energy to KAMER, now has three grandchildren. She sums up her experiences from decades of women’s rights work with these words:
“As we women fight to free ourselves from the violence against us, we gain new perspectives and experiences, and in doing so, we show that a new world is possible.”
Contact:
Nebahat Akkoç
KAMER Vakfı
Kamer Foundation
Yenişehir, Ali Emiri 3rd Street 1/1
ES-ŞAL Apt.
21100 Diyarbakır
Tel.: 00 90 412 228 10 53
E-mail d.kamer@superonline.com
