4 - The Kurdish women’s movement

Summary

Kurdish women, as women and as members of an oppressed people suffering ethnic discrimination within the four dominant states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – nation states with a well-rooted patriarchal system spanning several millennia – face a double discrimination. Some in the Kurdish women's movement go further and define the oppression experienced by Kurdish women as threefold, stemming from capitalism, patriarchy and nation states (Käser 2021: 27). “Patriarchy and autocratic nation-states”, says Firat Anli, the former co-mayor of Diyarbakir, “have similar mind-sets, similar souls and similar aims. Both are based on inequality and the imposition of hegemony and one single identity” (Al-Ali & Taş 2018a: 463). Anli and his co-mayor, Gültan Kişanak, like many others elected by the pro-Kurd movement, have been bearing the brunt of Turkey's alarming misuse of terrorist charges (Human Rights Watch 2022). “Of the 171 mayors elected on the HDP's ticket in the past decade, some 154 have been dismissed or prevented from taking office. Dozens have been arrested” (Economist 2023a). And some, like Kişanak, have been languishing in jail since 2016.

The Kurdish women's movement has evolved over time, taking different routes, shapes and forms, but it has always been united in the aim of achieving gender equality and social justice for women in Kurdistan. Whether as part of the Kurdish liberation movements (broadly referring to both clandestine and legal organizations and groups) or independently as champions for ending violence against women and girls, Kurdish women have made an impressive impact on both the prevailing political landscape and women's social status.

Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK/KCK's incarcerated leader, has dedicated the twenty-first century to the liberation of women. He said in 2013:

The struggle for women's freedom must be waged through the establishment of their own political parties, attaining a popular women's movement, building their own non-governmental organizations and structures of democratic politics. All these must be handled together, simultaneously. The better women are able to escape the grip of male domination and society, the better they will be able to act and live according to their independence initiative.