Yildiz Culfaz obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/20/yildiz-culfaz-obituary

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My wife, Yildiz Culfaz, who has died of lung cancer aged 66, was a Turkish political activist and a tireless campaigner for women’s rights.

From the 1970s onwards, Yildiz played an active part in organising the influential Progressive Women’s Association (IKD), which had 33 branches and 20,000 members in Turkey and, among other things, ran a powerful campaign throughout the country to put pressure on government officials and factory owners to open day nurseries for the children of female employees.

She also worked as a women’s organiser in Istanbul, despite receiving threats from the disapproving ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves organisation, and for six years was an editor, presenter and speaker on the clandestine communist radio station Bizim Radyo, where she provided inspiration and hope for people bent on resisting Turkey’s military dictatorship.

Yildiz was born in Ankara. Both her mother, Aliye (nee Onkan), and her father, Muhsin Biray, were teachers. She went to Ankara’s Yenimahalle high school and moved to London in 1969 after winning a state scholarship to study abroad. I was at the LSE on a similar Turkish scholarship; we met and married in 1973. After Yildiz gained a degree in metallurgy and material sciences at Imperial College London, followed by an MPhil in metallurgy in 1975, we returned to Turkey, where she worked at the Cekmece Nuclear Research and Training Centre in Istanbul between 1976 and 1979.

Persecution of communists in Turkey still persisted in the late 80s, so we decided to return to Britain. There, Yildiz was involved in setting up, in 1991, a bilingual health advocacy team in Hackney, north-east London, helping newly arrived and disadvantaged members of Turkish and Kurdish communities to gain access to basic healthcare services.

The venture, known as Health Advocacy Services for Turkish and Kurdish Communities, started in partnership with a few Hackney GPs but now, under the new name Derman, deals with more than 10,000 health advocacy requests each year, mainly in north London.

In 2000 Yildiz moved into the NHS, working selflessly with vulnerable people for more than 12 years as a manager in primary care trusts in Kensington and Chelsea, Surrey and Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.

She is survived by me and by our son, Ferhat.