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STATON R. WINTER FOR TIME
| torture's soul
Akkoc believes violence begins at home |
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| A Stone in the Eye Of Brute Force |
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By PELIN TURGUT | Istanbul |
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Posted Sunday, April 20, 2003; 14.23 BST
Nebahat Akkoc might seem an unlikely David. A Kurdish primary school teacher and mother of two, she lived and worked in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, a desperately poor and violent region. But in 1993, at the height of a war between separatist Kurdish rebels and Turkish forces, her husband Zubeyir, a teacher and union activist, was gunned down. As with hundreds of so-called mystery murders in the southeast, his assassins were believed to be acting on orders from Turkish security officials. Shortly after his death, Akkoc was arrested by Turkish police and tortured — a shattering and transforming experience at age 40.
She took her case to the European Court of Human Rights, which eventually ordered Turkey to pay her €150,000 in compensation. But it didn't end there. "I began thinking about torture and how one person could inflict that on another," she says. "Only someone who had been exposed to violence as a child could do that. I realized domestic violence was behind all violence." Convinced that the road to peace begins at home, in 1997 she formed Ka-Mer (meaning Women's Center), to advance women's rights in southeast Anatolia, where the U.N. estimates 58% of women are physically abused by their husbands or male relatives.
Her campaign has pitted her against many Goliaths: the government suspected her of separatism, Kurdish politicians accused her of undermining "the cause," and local men felt threatened by her. But she emerged the winner. Ka-Mer began with one center in the southeast regional capital Diyarbakir, offering legal and psychological counseling for abused women, selling food and handicrafts to meet costs.
Today there are centers in seven cities, offering abuse hotlines and day-care centers, with plans for five more by 2006. Akkoc's latest campaign is against "honor killings," an illegal but pervasive custom of rural southeastern Turkey, where a women can be killed by her own family for alleged immoral behavior. When recently consulted by a group of male village elders over their decision to kill a young girl for flirting, she managed to change their minds. "People trust me, they know that I am one of them," Akkoc says. "I became a feminist very late in life. That's why I am always in a hurry, working as if running a marathon."
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