Journalist Jale Özgentürk described the SES Women of the Year 2025 Awards Ceremony as a tribute to women who had been forced to turn survival into a form of resistance.
Jale Özgentürk
Today marks nineteen years since Hrant Dink’s life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet. He lived in what he called a “pigeon-like anxiety,” and still we don’t know the full truth of who killed him or why. Justice remains elusive, not just in his case, but for so many in this country. The search for justice has become a dream that sits at the centre of life for everyone here, from the youngest to the oldest, extending even to the trees and animals that share our land.
Last Thursday evening, I attended an awards ceremony that refused to let me remain a spectator. The SES Equality and Solidarity Association’s Women of the Year Awards, founded through Gülseren Onanç’s initiative, was not the kind of event you watch and forget. It demanded a witness.
The women who took the stage were not being celebrated for conventional success. They were being honoured for something far more profound: for transforming survival itself into resistance.
The Weight of Witness
The hall was filled with women whose struggles I’ve followed for years. When awards were presented to Palestinian, Iranian, and Afghan women, these were not symbolic gestures. They were acts of political witness, acknowledging that in certain places, simply staying alive is an act of defiance.
For Palestinian women, life is a sentence constantly interrupted. Homes destroyed, hospitals bombed, children buried in rubble. Yet women remain, mourning beside the ruins while simultaneously trying to rebuild. The award given to journalists Bisan Owda, Maha Hussaini, and Mariam Barghouti carried a clear message: “We see you. We will not forget.”
The award recognising Iranian women’s resistance represented by Parastoo Ahmadi, Nina Golestani, and Narges Mohammadi reminded us of the price paid for the slogan “Woman, life, freedom.” Batons. Detention. The threat of execution. This award documented a protest that powerful forces tried to silence.
For Afghan women, time flows backwards. The Taliban has issued 135 decrees restricting women’s lives in a country where even dreaming has become forbidden. Femena’s report, which received the award, captured it perfectly: “Afghanistan did not just fall, it fell on women.”
Resistance at Home
The Turkish women and collectives honoured had gathered strength in the most suppressed fields: labour, environment, memory, justice, education, and local governance.
The Hrant Dink Foundation’s award underlined the excavation of memory led by Rakel Dink, insisting that what happened in this country will not be forgotten.
Dilek İmamoğlu, accepting on behalf of the Family Solidarity Network (selected by nearly four thousand participants), emphasised that law and justice themselves are under attack. Her words were a call to resist a politics designed through the judiciary.
In environmental struggles from Gökçeyazı to Türkmen Mountain to the Black Sea valleys, saying “women are at the forefront” no longer captures the full picture. The Private Sector Teachers’ Union’s award highlighted the invisible exploitation in education that women have brought to light. The young women who broke through police barriers at Saraçhane and occupied university floors are not just building the future, they are building the present.
SES founding chair Gülseren Onanç defined 2025 as “the year of women who object.” The ceremony, which also recognised Greta Thunberg, Yasemin Acar, feminist writer Berrin Sönmez, the Before Children and Women Association, the Istanbul Gender Museum, and the Gola Association, crystallised a truth: women’s pain is universal, but our responsibilities are local and political.
Silence is not neutrality. Silence is complicity.