Turkish Mayor
Berivan Kilic speaks with residents at a market in her town Kocakoy. Tara
Todras-Whitehill
When Berivan Kilic strolls
through her local market, her neighbors — women especially — flock to her. She
holds an elderly woman’s creased hands as they exchange greetings. Her gentle
smile exudes compassion. Some consider Kilic a local heroine: The 33-year-old
former child bride was recently elected co-mayor of Kocakoy, a rural town in Turkey’s southeastern province
of Diyarbakir, making her the town’s first-ever female leader.
“At first, I did not have confidence and courage,” she said of
the start of her political journey. “My marriage was like a prison for 14
years, with all the abuse I went through.”
Kilic was 15 when she wed her cousin. The violent
relationship ended five years ago. Now her mission is to bring attention to
issues plaguing women in her region, like child marriage and domestic violence.
She says he’ll start by listening to the women who surround her.
She attributes her success to the Peace and
Democracy Party, known by its Turkish acronym, BDP. One of Turkey’s leading opposition parties, the BDP takes pride in its
reputation for egalitarianism, having established a 40 percent quota for female
representation in the party. It upped the ante in the country’s March 30 local
elections by introducing the co-candidate system that got Kilic elected.
“The BDP has been very creative,” said Ilter
Turan, a political science professor at IstanbulBilgiUniversity.
While legally there are not two elected leaders in each district or
municipality, where the BDP has won, the elected leader and his or her vice
mayor take the reins together. “We decide everything together,” Kilic
explained. “After that, we sign the documents together.”
When it comes to women in leadership, Turkey has little to brag about. In the mid-1990s, Tansu Ciller
served as the country’s first and, so far, only female prime minister. Female
representation in parliament is under 15 percent (77 out of 538 representatives
are women). For local leaders, the numbers are even lower. The most recent
election bumped female local representation from less than 1 percent to 3.7
percent, or 37 elected local leaders out of 1,000.
The March 30 local elections brought several firsts. Three of Turkey’s 30 metropolitan governors are now women, compared with
just one before. They hail from different parties: Gultan Kisanak from BDP,
Fatma Sahin from AKP (the country’s leading Justice and Development Party) and
Ozlem Cercioglu from CHP (the major opposition Republican People’s Party). One
of Turkey’s 51 provincial municipalities elected a female head for
the first time. Because of reforms introduced in October, most women in civil
service may now wear headscarves, and seven women who wear headscarves,
including Kilic, were elected.
Women’s rights champions say the gains are modest. Kader, a
leading Turkish women’s rights organization, declared the recent local
elections “another
win for men.” Turkish women gained the right to vote and run for all levels
of local office and parliament by 1934. In the 80 years since, many expect far
more equal representation of women in the political arena.
However, Turan believes any increase is a big deal for Turkey. “Since the founding of the TurkishRepublic, some 30,000 or more males have been elected to mayoral
posts,” he said, “while the number of females elected is around 120.” (Turan
notes that these are ballpark numbers.)
Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast. That is why it is no
surprise that Rezan Zugurli, the 25-year-old mayor of Lice, also in Diyarbakir, won 90 percent of her town’s vote. “When you look at
the people of Lice,” she said, “you see that everyone has a child who went to
jail for the [Kurdish cause] or joined the guerrilla fighters.”
The fighters Zugurli refers to are militants from the Kurdistan
Worker’s Party (PKK), a banned militant group. The PKK, which has
Marxist-Leninist roots, led an armed fight for nationhood from 1984 through
2012, until negotiations with the government led to a ceasefire in March 2013.
Deadly clashes earlier this month show that tensions haven't disappeared.
Zugurli,
center, at a regional mayors council meeting.Tara
Todras-Whitehill
According to Cengiz Gunes, an expert on Kurdish
nationalism who teaches at the United Kingdom's Open University, the region was under military rule
for decades. The conflict destroyed the regional economy, and the state
forcefully displaced more than 3 million people and killed upward of 40,000.
“One of the unique achievements of the Kurdish movement in Turkey is the mobilization of women in large numbers,” Gunes
wrote in an email. By integrating female fighters into the PKK, the Kurdish
movement may have paved the way for the BDP’s success in getting women elected.
Zugurli possesses a soulful hoarseness in her voice, and her
eyes reveal a depth rarely seen in someone so young. Before her release last
June, she spent 13 months as a political prisoner for participating in illegal
rallies on behalf of the PKK.
“No person can be happy [in jail],” she said. “There is no space
to move.” She says she shared a 12-person cell with 24 other prisoners.