Dr. Ozlem Goner
Opening Remarks
Thank you, Washington Kurdish Institute for organizing this panel, it’s such a timely month because actually this month is the anniversary of the assassination of Sakine Cansiz and her comrades, her fellows in Paris by the Turkish intelligence agency that was never accounted for just like the other Turkish killings of the Kurdish women. So this month is especially a good month to talk about this. It’s also the month of a campaign that’s been undertaken by Kurdish women activism called “100 reasons of femicide” to persecute Erdogan because of his continuous war, not only against the Kurdish populations, but especially against Kurdish women as Homa and Guilia nicely put, have been pioneers of these struggles. So I will as you said that these guns and their popularity, I’m going to say even there’s something more to the gun itself, but you know, there’s so much more beyond that as well.
So I want to take us to the dialectics of oppression of Kurdish women at the hands of these colonial States that have colonized them in the beginning of the 20th century. So while Kurdish populations were colonized on four different nation States, the ones that you’ve mentioned, the ones that have separated our communities from each other:Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, they also especially led femicide processes against the Kurdish woman. So we have this combination of poetry article femicide processes of the Turkish state against Kurdish women, particularly. So an intersection of oppression also gives birth to an intersection of struggle that I will try to talk about by brief historical references and three generations of women who have been active and who have created started a movement, the products of which became popularized in Syria with Rojava revolution, the world came to recognize the importance of Kurdish women and their struggle. Not only to create a democratic society for their own, but to give hope for the Middle East, for peace in the Middle East and to the broader world, if we’re thinking of radical alternatives, so the current failing system of patriarchy, state dominance, and capitalism. So these women stay at the center. So what I’ll try to do is to look at them, the background of Kurdish women and their struggle with the cases that I’m most familiar with. I’ve done my research, mostly within the borders of Turkey within Bakur, Kurdistan. I’m going to take us back to an earlier massacre in the Turkish history and the way that the Turkish State oppressed Kurdish women, especially, and the Kurdish women’s resilience and struggle that was born out of this double oppression.
So this is 1938 the massacres in Dersim which is in the boundaries of Turkish State. So the colonial state of Turkey have undertaken a huge genocide in the Eastern Turkey, North Western Kurdistan called Dersim, killing thousands of people and forcing thousands more to move out of the town. These massacres were part of a genocidal project to exterminate any potential opposition from this Kurdish Alevi and also Armenian residents of Dersim. This is also important by us speaking about Kurdish women to also break that singular definition of an essential Kurdish woman, because as we know, there’s a multiplicity diversity in the group of women that we’re talking about, which only makes the struggles of these women towards a more democratic society, more prominent. So this particular town is also an Alevi town, which was also a religious minority among the Turkish state and among the Kurds also. So what is important here, just like in any form of genocidal state violence that you look at, is that this isn’t only a Genocide against the Kurdish populations, but a particular one is specific one that’s targeting women in this society in different ways.volution the world came to recognize the importance of Kurdish women and their struggle.
So we have sexual gender violence that the Turkish State have used against the Kurdish Alevi women of this town. By means of rape by means of sexual violence by means of assimilation, by means of forced adoption of the young girls at the hands of the Turkish military. It was a complete genocidal and femicideal project of extermination against the Kurdish women of this particular region in 1938. So this is the first generation also of women who have struggled and who have resisted Turkish oppression by bear means of survival. And I’m going to say survival under the means of the colonial extermination policies of this Turkish State. Survival itself becomes a struggle and becomes resistance against this particular genocide or violence of the early 1930s, early formation of the Turkish nation state, which oppressed and exterminated all forms of resistance, via its religious, via its ethnic so that made the Kurdish women at the bottom of this hierarchy. So we have to see this intersectional violence against Kurdish communities, but also against the Kurdish women, and in this case, Kurdish Alevi women whom to the State were not to survive. So their survival was a form of resistance as early as the 1930s and 1940s, but it wasn’t only their survival, It was another process that these women were emboldened. So despite tens of thousands of people being killed, the massacres in Dersim had been hidden, secret from the Turkish population. And even the Kurdish population didn’t have extensive knowledge of it until very recently where oral history, memory projects like mine, but also many, many others have tried to look into memories of State violence by the Kurdish populations. Interestly those who remembered and those who transferred these stories of massacre and oppression were mostly the women. Men were more resistant to share. Men kept it more quiet. This is because of patriarchy society. So it’s not the femicide at the hands of the Turkey state, but as we know, the societies themselves were also patriarchal. So women weren’t only oppressed at the hands of the state, but also within their own societies, they had to struggle for their own survival and freedom.
So men in Dersim doing their military duty by the state, getting more of the state education, and learning the language of Turkish were more hesitant to talk about these early massacres. So in this sense, this is very interesting to me, and actually even emotional that Sakine Cansiz, and one of the pioneers that I’m going to talk about next as the second generation of women and their resistance in Bakur, refers to her grandmother’s narratives of 1938 massacres as once that radicalized. As ones that gave her clues to the oppression of the State, because people in their attempts, the older generation, their attempts to protect the newer generations and to make sure that they don’t get punished at the hands of the State the ways that they did. They tried not to communicate these memories of massacres, these memories of genocidal and femicide processes against them by the State. But women did, they talked, they talked in their fractured stories. They talked in their songs. They talk in coming up with narratives of not only what happened to them, but giving this broader, generalized historical consciousness of oppression at the hands of the State. This mobilized. So this is very important for me to not see them only as the ones with the guns, but to also not see them only as the victims of oppression, but as agents of struggle. Even in their brief tellings, that fractured stories and songs of these massacres, they were able to transfer both the language of Kurdish and in this case, in my region, it was the Zazaki Kurdish. So when you speak with these women, even on a daily basis, they start telling you about what they call ‘ake me dît”, which means all that we saw. And if you go into it in detail, it becomes all that we saw at the hands of the Turkish state.
So then you have these narratives, these memories, these stories, these songs, these genres of memories of oppression that transfer to the newer generations, and then hence were mobilized into embodied forms of struggle to the next generation. So the next generation, one of the most important figures of the next generation was Sakine Cansiz who is one of the founders of the Kurdish Workers’ Party known as the PKK. She became involved in this in the 1970s. So in the early formation, she has become a central figure in pushing for not only the Kurds’ rights of self self-determination, but of freedom understood as women’s freedom as well. So early on from the late 1970s, which became especially important in 1980 during her struggle in the infamous Diyarbakir prison because the Turkish State becomes once again, repressive, oppressive against not only the Turkish left in 1980 with the coup d’etat that the Turkish state had undertaken against all forms of oppression. But this is something often missed when Human Right Watch and places like this look at Turkey and it’s human rights violations. They fail to pay attention to how this becomes, especially genocidal and femicide against the Kurdish women. And so in 1980 in the infamous, the Diyarbakir prisons, which were in Bakur. So this is this place that the Turkey State showed its face of oppression most clearly to especially women, because dehumanizing them was what the State tried to do by, again sexual violence by means ofmaking women naked and giving them all sorts of torture to deep humanize them and to ashame them. This is something that the Turkish state and all genocidal States have done is to use sexual violence as a form of dehumanization and putting the shame of its own violance on the oppressed woman. But there was a big resistance against the Kurdish women in the Diyarbakir prisons. So the second generation of women starting to become active in the 1970s and 1980s have formed the earlier moments of Kurdish women movement to resist not only against the oppressive State, but against patriarchal forms and understandings and power relations of their movements themselves. So they wanted to revolutionize and started to develop a theory and practice of revolution that would end up freeing not only the Kurdish societies, but Kurdish women and women in general.
During this period State terror against the Kurdish villages intensified in Turkey. But once again, they electrically, it gave birth to an increased momentum to the Kurdish freedom movement and increase momentum to women who were once again, living under excessive military occupation, were under the threat of not only violence because they were Kurds, but under the oppression of gender femicide violance at the hand of the Turkish State. They found salvation in the mountains. So this is very important for the Kurdish movement. This is the third generation in the 1990s. Kurdish women increasingly participated in the PKK in the freedom movement, but also they were leading a parallele freedom movement within their own movement. We see the products of this coming out, especially in the 1990s, in the multiplication of organizations within the Kurdish freedom movement that are all women’s organizations. And this becomes very central to what we seein Rojava today and in the freedom struggle that became most popularized. But I think it’s important to recognize that these started in the 1990s. We saw for example, there’s a resolution in 1995 within the PKK where the PKK declared this resolution concerning the women’s army and the free women’s movement, which states “the potential women who make up half of the society in the service of the revolution and their hidden and suppressed talents and intelligence in creating an entire society based on equality is the most humane and the most radical characteristic of our evolution.” So this is 1995, and this resolution would grant independence to women’s organizations and opens the way to all women units’ relative power, and they have relative power over the old gender units. So this is as early as 1995, we see a very dramatic move, a success, a revolution of women that wasn’t attained in other freedom movements around the world.
I’m not just talking about the middle East, but I’m talking about broader Europeans and the US. There are similar movements, there are notions of intersectionality. There’s a very strong black woman’s movement that has many parallels of intersectionality, but in terms of accessing their struggle resulting in these all women’s units becomes a very exceptional and unique development that develops in the PKK as early as 1995. Now there’s obviously resistance, by not only the Turkish State, which is already naming this quite radically free movement as a terrorist organization, but also there’s resistance by the man within the PKK itself. And there is power holders and holders of patriarchy, but women’s struggle and Ocalan support at that point also has become very important in the continuing success and continuing developments that leads to a multiplication of women’s organizations, women’s units, all women, independent organizations within the Kurdish freedom movement, all over Bakur and also in diaspora as well.
So we have Kurdish women being very active in the pro-Kurdish political party. You have nowadays known as HDP obviously was closed down and targeted a number of times that had opened in different names. I’m going to end with this: the important thing is that these three generations of women, the 1930s, the resistance, the resilience, the survival, speaking of the language, the memories that they transfer, that then gets mobilized in the movements of the 1970s and 80s. And then within the PKK, they ended up in the 1990s with women increasingly joining the guerilla, but also the political party, they became pioneers of Saturday mothers. So they also point to these forms of gender violence that the colonial States have been conducting in the region. So you have peace mothers pushing for the peace process in Turkey. So you see women of all ages of all generations, of all political experience in education, being involved in a freedom movement with the motto, if a society pushes you to the bottom, not as Kurds only, but it’s Kurdish women, then the only way to come out of that is to revolutionize the whole society.
I’m going to end with this by saying that the freedom movement that the Kurdish woman created starting in Bakur and expanding enlarging has also important lessons for the feminist movement, in the world. I’m situated, for example, in the US. The solidarity work between different feminist movements. That there’s an important lesson that as early as the 1990s is that women cannot be free just based on a struggle based on gender. In other words, gender equality is not possible in an otherwise unequal world. So we know in order to become free that you need to destroy all forms of oppression that at the time were targeting the Kurdish women, beat the nation State, beat patriarchy and beat capitalism as well because the majority of these women are also farmers, workers and agricultural workers. There’s a class that I mentioned. So they developed the avant-garde of revolution. Avant-garde political notion of understanding of freedom that says women are the agents of freedom. But not only freedom from patriarchy, but freedom from the nation State and freedom from capital structures of oppression as well.