A commemoration event was held in Basel, Switzerland on 29 September for Kurdish journalist and women’s rights activist Nagihan Akarsel who was murdered on 4 October 2022 in Sulaymaniyah (Silêmanî), Iraqi Kurdistan.
During the event, friends and former colleagues of Nagihan Akarsel shared their memories and paid tribute to her journalistic and academic work. Before her murder, Akarsel worked as an editor for Jineoloji, a magazine that published women’s stories and research.
Journalist Roni Eylem remembered Nagihan Akarsel as a woman with a strong spirit who “never stopped fighting”, and recalled the brutal way in which Akarsel had been killed, “shot with 11 bullets as she was leaving her house in the morning”.
The event continued with a speech by the politician Şukran Sîncar, who said that Akarsel had always fought for women’s liberation and that also, as a Kurdish woman who had grown up in Turkey, she had always fought to combat the “attacks of the Turkish state against Kurdish existence on the one hand and against the attacks of the patriarchal system on the other”.
Elif Kaya worked for years with Akarsel at the Jineoloji Academy, which is developing a new model of scholarship centred on women’s knowledge, proposed by the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan. She described Akarsel as “very connected to life” and explained that she was someone who “could feel the pain of every woman and the laughter of every child”.
Kaya stated that Akarsel’s assassination of had been planned by Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MİT) and that it was directly linked to the assassination of Kurdish women’s activist Sakine Cansız in Paris in 2013 and the recent assassination of Kurdish journalist Gulîstan Tara, because the Turkish state “knows that women have become the vanguard of the Kurdish struggle” and wants to “send a message to all women” through the assassinations.
The last speech was made by Necibe Qeredaxi, who had also got to know Akarsel through their work together at the Jineoloji Academy. She stressed that “not just Nagihan, but also a great Kurdish scholar” died with Akarsel’s assassination.
Yesterday, an international initiative demanding justice for Nagihan Akarsel and other journalists killed by the Turkish state renewed its call for international action against Turkey’s alleged involvement in political femicides.
Justice for Nagihan Akarsel initiative calls for action against Turkish state-sponsored femicides
