From housewife to Kurdish peace negotiator

Long-running talks between Ankara and Kurdish representatives culminated Feb. 28 in an appeal by jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan on his Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to lay down arms. Among the architects of the process, a Kurdish woman stands out: Pervin Buldan. A parliament member for the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP), Buldan started out as a modest housewife two decades ago. The event that pushed her into politics was the gruesome murder of her husband in 1994.

Buldan was born and raised in Hakkari, Turkey’s southeastern corner bordering Iran and Iraq. After finishing high school, she married her cousin Savas Buldan and the couple moved to Istanbul. In 1991, she gave birth to her first child, Necirvan. Her husband was a businessman.

Buldan led a dull and simple life in those years, but Turkey’s political scene was simmering as the state pursued an armed solution to the Kurdish problem. As a result of this policy, a so-called Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism (JITEM) unit was set up illegally within the gendarme force, and a similar rogue group was formed in the police, involving mostly special forces officers. With those “deep state” structures in action, the Kurdish conflict peaked in the 1990s as Kurdish villages were emptied and burned down and extrajudicial killings occurred almost on a daily basis.

The Buldan family, which was closely involved in Kurdish politics, got its share of the turbulence as well. The occasional death threats that Savas Buldan received took on a more sinister meaning on Nov. 4, 1993, when then-Prime Minister Tansu Ciller told reporters, “We know who the Kurdish businessmen aiding the PKK are. We will call them to account.” A few months later, Kurdish businessman Behcet Canturk was murdered. Yusuf Ekinci and Namik Erdogan soon shared his fate.