Pervin Buldan
Pervin Buldan is a Turkish politician of Kurdish origin. She was a member of the Democratic Society Party. She was President of Yakay-Der and one of the deputy speakers in the 26th Parliament of Turkey. On 11 February 2018, she was elected co-leader of the Peoples' Democratic Party in the party's 3rd ordinary congress.
Early life
She was born in Hakkâri Province in 1967, where she grew up and went to school. She graduated from high school and started work as an official in the local government administration department. At the age of 19, she married her cousin Savaş Buldan. The couple moved to Istanbul in 1990, where Pervin Buldan was a full-time housewife. One year later, Pervin's first child, Necirvan, was born. Savaş Buldan, a well known businessman and opposition supporter, was murdered. He was accused of being a drug dealer and PKK financier by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization. In 1993, their life changed when Prime Minister Tansu Çiller made a speech declaring that the government had a list of businessmen supporting the Kurdistan Workers' Party whom they would hold accountable. After that speech, Savas received a series of threatening telephone calls. The period of "killings by unidentified murderers" against businessmen, including Savaş Buldan, began. On 3 June 1994, Pervin's husband Savaş and his two friends, Adnan Yıldırım and Hacı Karay were abducted after leaving the Hotel Çınar in Yesilköy. The next day their bodies were found in Bolu, at the edge of the river Melen. They carried scars of heavy torture and had been shot in the head. Pervin Buldan gave birth to her daughter, Zelal on the same day, 4 June. Later Pervin Buldan appealed to the European Court of Human Rights which ruled in favor of Buldan and acknowledged there was a violation of Art. 2 and 13 of the European Convention of Human Rights, that there were deficiencies in the investigations around the death of Savas Buldan and ordered Turkey to pay her and her family 26'000€.Human rights
In 2001 she founded Yakay-Der, the Association of Solidarity and Assistance for the Families of Missing Persons, to help the families of missing persons in Turkey, of which she is now president. Before this she worked for Mag-Der, an association with similar objectives which was closed down by the Turkish authorities because of alleged irregularities with respect to the Turkish Law of Associations.Yakay-Der grew out of the experience of the Saturday Mothers, who used civil disobedience to gain publicity and bring attention to the ‘disappearances in custody’ cases. These cases became known to the public in Turkey as well as to the world at large. Buldan has described how every week they would hold sit-down demonstrations at the Galatasaray Square to "ask for the people that have disappeared", to the state to talk about the "reality of the disappeared".