Roj Bash Kurdistan

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Last month, the Roj Women’s Assembly organized the ninth Zilan’s Kurdish Women Festival in London.
The festival aims to educate Kurds, mostly from Turkey, about women’s rights.

“We have a lot of problems as Kurdish women. We want to help our people,” said Selda Aksoy, a representative of Roj Women.
The festival is named after Zeynep Kınacı (Zilan), an insurgent of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who strapped a bomb to her body and blew herself up at a military ceremony in 1996.

In her farewell letter, Zilan wrote that the PKK “has started on the road to liberation under extremely difficult circumstances. Its attitude to religion, to questions of identity and family, is unique. The arming of women and women's conferences and congresses have been organized by our party.”
The PKK is known for trying to change the position of women in traditional Kurdish society, and supporters of the group see Zilan’s act as especially courageous since women are often perceived as playing less of a role on the battlefield than men.

According to Aksoy, the festival is named after Zilan because she was a female Kurdish leader. This year’s program also focused on the isolation of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned on Imrali island in Turkey for more than a decade.

Suna Parlak, a member of Roj Women, told Rudaw that Zilan was one of the first fighters of the Kurdish women’s movement. “Before her death, her friends told her she was not strong enough, but she had a strong mind and before the action she wrote a letter to the media,” Parlak said.
She added, “We are all against death. We need to organize better and come together. Not only against the state, but against the patriarchal community as well.”

Aliza Marcus, author of “Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence,” told Rudaw that Zilan fits into the pattern of other PKK martyrs.
“The PKK never celebrates or honors those who are still alive. That's an old tradition, which has to do with Ocalan's desire to protect his power. So you can praise those who are dead, because they can't be a rival, but not those who are alive,” Marcus said.

Furthermore, she points out that the “fact that [Zilan] is a woman is second to the fact that she sacrificed herself for the PKK, in their eyes. So, I suppose it is sort of ‘feminist’ in that she is a woman, but I think it's the wrong sort of feminism [using suicide as method of resistance].”
The event also criticized a statement made by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in May that claimed abortion was similar to murder. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is seen as a main rival to the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).

The festival’s Kurdish slogan – “We are not anybody's honor. Our honor is our freedom” -- was seen as a response to Erdogan’s statement. BDP MP Sebahat Tuncel emphasized that the government shouldn’t develop policies on birth control methods for women.
Everything at the festival was provided by the women themselves. “Women have organized the festival themselves,” Parlak said. “Even the kebab. It is important to rebuild their self-esteem.”

Munerver Dogan, a member of the education committee with Roj Women, agrees. “This festival helps women leave the kitchen, come together and have their own festival for two or three days,” she says.

“Although they come from strongly conservative and patriarchal backgrounds, women still have the capability to be visible in social and political circles in the Kurdish movement,” Seref Kavak, a Ph.D. student focusing on the Kurdish diaspora at Keele University in the U.K., told Rudaw.

As a result, Kurdish women are prominent in the BDP, and the party also applies a 40 percent quota for women.
“This is a very new thing not only for Kurds, but also for Turkish society. This is clearly manifested by the female representation of pro-Kurdish parties being well above the average of Turkish Parliament,” Kavak said.

As part of his research, Kavak interviewed women who voted of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) – the banned predecessor of the BDP – in 2010. He said that the women reported having problems with their husbands and brothers when they first started to engage in politics and attend DTP activities.
“Later on, because of influence of the leadership of the Kurdish movement [Öcalan], their male ‘guards’ softened. They started to let them attend political circles of the Kurdish movement. At the time, they became more independent; they could act more on their own behalf.”
He points out that the Kurdish women’s festival is another sign of this influence. “The audience of the program mostly included women, but some men as well. They did their own theater where they criticized forced marriage, honor killing and other obstacles women face in predominantly Kurdish areas.”

Dr. Vera Eccarius-Kelly, author of “The Militant Kurds: A Dual Strategy for Freedom,” told Rudaw that the PKK has provided an opportunity for women to assert themselves, particularly in rural areas.

“The PKK emphasized women's rights such as the ability to work outside the home, the rejection of arranged marriages, the condemnation of the practice of using physical punishment to control women and of paying bride prices,” she said.
In addition, the PKK’s rebel army is seen as a way for girls to escape their families, forced marriages and societal pressure. “Kurdish women often joined the PKK to advance their personal freedom, and to also broadly improve the rights of women,” Eccarius-Kelly added.

Furthermore, the author noted that Kurdish women from different backgrounds have long pursued leadership roles in their society. “In that sense, both the experience with leadership and the struggle against patriarchy mobilized many Kurdish women to support the PKK,” she said.

Marcus agrees that the fact that the PKK has women fighters is already a huge step. “Imagine the way female fighters are greeted in small villages. They are treated with respect in a way that many local women would never be treated. Over time, this causes men to at least acknowledge that women can play a different role than the traditional one. And it gives women a new way to see themselves.”

Additionally, Marcus remarked that girls “can run away and join the rebels to avoid a forced marriage, or they can use the threat of joining the rebels as a way to pressure their families into allowing them to do things, like go to high school or university. This has been very important for girls themselves.”
She concludes that, at a political level, “it's thanks to the PKK's verbal statements for women's rights that women are so prominent in Kurdish politics, for example. I don't know if the men around them change but for women, certainly, the PKK has always been an organization that has insisted that they get equal, or at least near-equal, treatment.”


http://www.rudaw.net/english/news/turkey/5120.html