"WOMEN, LIFE, FREEDOM": THE STRUGGLE OF KURDISH WOMEN TO PROMOTE HUMAN RIGHTS By SARAH SIQUEIRA DE MIRANDA A Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfilments of the requirements for the MA IN UNDERSTANDING AND SECURING HUMAN RIGHTS Institute of Commonwealth Studies University of London September 2015 Table of contents INTRODUCTION 6 1. THE EMERGENCE OF THE KURDISH PROBLEM: AN INTERNATIONAL ISSUE 11 PKK: THE SEARCH FOR SOCIAL CHANGE 13 2. OCALAN AND WOMEN'S LIBERATION IDEOLOGY 19 3. THE KURDISH WOMEN'S MOVEMENT: A HISTORY OF RESISTANCE 24 FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO EUROPE: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A TRANSNATIONAL KURDISH WOMEN'S NETWORK 26 "LIBERATION FOR SINJAR WOMEN IS LIBERATION FOR HUMANITY": THE ROLE OF THE DIASPORA IN PROMOTING HUMAN RIGHTS 35 INTERNATIONAL REPRESENTATION OF THE KURDISH WOMEN'S MOVEMENT 38 WOMEN'S MEETING UTAMARA 43 CONCLUSION 49 REFERENCES 51 ABSTRACT The Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), one of the most important secular socio-political movements of the Middle East, has addressed gender issues since its foundation in the late 1970s. However, the question of women's freedom acquired a central position after the 2000s, when the PKK underwent a deep ideological and structural transformation. A foundational tenet is "democratic confederalism", based on a democratic, ecological and gender-emancipatory system. For Abdullah Ocalan, the main leader of the PKK, democracy and freedom can only be achieved through the emancipation of women. Kurdish women have appropriated Ocalan's ideas and to a considerable extent, succeeded in promoting the empowerment of women and advancement of gender equality in the Kurdish societies directly influenced by the PKK: the diaspora and territories in Turkey and Syria. Although they still face a continuous and dual struggle against gender and ethnic oppression, Kurdish women have reached a high political status. As "guerrilleras", members of parliament, and human rights activists, they have disseminated the principles of gender equality throughout Kurdish society. In addition to adopting gender parity in all social, political and military Kurdish organizations, women established autonomous bodies within those organizations, which function through a strong transnational network from the battlefields in Kurdistan to the diaspora. Within this network, female activists in Europe play a central political role. They are the ones who are directly committed to gaining international political leverage, and with this aim the use of human rights conventions as a platform for dialogue constitutes an essential step forward. Furthermore, they play a major role in formulating Kurdish claims in universal terms backed up by human rights instruments. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My gratitude is first and foremost to all Kurdish women who are tirelessly committed to creating a more just and egalitarian society. My special gratitude to those women that at this very moment are on the battlefront fighting against the barbarism perpetrated by fanatic groups and state forces. I would also like to express my gratitude to all Kurdish activists that I had the pleasure to meet throughout the years, in Europe and Kurdistan, for their kindness, availability and openness to allow us foreigners to "enter" the Kurdish world. My special thanks to Fayik Yagizay, Wali Iscen, Havin Guneser, Reimar Heider, Roj Welat, Nursel Kilic, Sultan Kurt, and Selma Akkaya for the precious help in different ways. I'm very thankful to my supervisor Corinne Lenox for the constructive orientation, and to Simon Lund-Lack for the friendly support throughout the MA course. Many thanks to my dear friends Mariana Magnavita and Bill Wicker for the numerous essays corrections, and Michelli Jaques for the kind availability. A very special thanks to Catherine Craig for the valuable help with the final writing. Thanks to all colleagues and teachers for the rich sharing of experiences and knowledge. Finally, but not least, my everlasting gratitude to my grandparents, Geraldo and Marina, for their unconditional support, and to my dear husband, Luis Miranda, with whom I "entered" the Kurdish world. INTRODUCTION In September 2014, the world finally began to recognize "Kurdish heroism". In the city of Kobane, in northern Syria, the brave Kurdish resistance against fierce attacks by the Islamic state (IS) began to be widely covered by mainstream media. Suddenly, Western democracies were introduced to "America's newest allies" (Watson and Tuysuz, 2014) against the fundamentalist Islamic terror: Syria's Kurdish minority. In addition to physically restraining IS's expansion, these fearless and determined combatants were cheered by the media as the heroic protectors of Western enlightened principles, freedom fighters against barbaric terrorists, defenders of secularism and democratic values against fanatical theocracy and totalitarianism - in sum, the very best of humanity" against "the very worst" (Wight, 2014). Moreover, western media headlines have ever since been obsessed with the participation of Kurdish female soldiers1 in the struggle against IS, portrayed as the "angels of Kobane" and "the Islamic State's worse nightmare". The images of brave women standing alongside men, unveiled, challenging the most recent and perverse form of radical jihadism, could not but gain the greatest esteem in the eyes of the West. However, neither the roots of the "Kurdish problem", nor the motivations and ideologies of those "Amazons of Mesopotamia" are explored properly by mainstream media. While the world remains silent on Western responsibility for Middle East conflicts, the media profits from sensationalist statements. The struggle for which thousands of Kurdish women and men give their lives dates far back and is extremely complex. It did not begin as a response to IS, nor is the fanatical organization the only opposing force to the Kurds. The appalling atrocity of IS has been bravely fought by Kurdish forces, with only occasional insufficient support from Western powers. However, even more difficult is the task of changing complex political and societal structures that encourage the birth of fundamentalist organizations 1 It is important to highlight that mainstream media confuses the Peshmerga women, who are the combatants of the regular army of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), in Iraq, and the Yapajas (YPJ), the female units of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the main Kurdish party in Syria. The ones who fight in north Syria are the Yapajas. 6 and prevent Kurds from implementing the democratic principles they defend with such fierceness. Kurdish women fight a continuous and dual struggle: against gender oppression within a traditional patriarchal society, and ethnic oppression as members of an oppressed people within a state. Women largely join the PKK to escape oppressive living conditions, but as social and political agents they consciously opt to join a liberation movement that is engaged in a deep social transformation through women's liberation. Kurdish women are not the first female combatants, nor the only ones to be fighting at this very moment. Nonetheless, the contemporary Kurdish political movement, which comprises a guerrilla2 army, is grounded on a particular ideology based on gender equality. The participation of Kurdish women is not restricted to front line combatants in a desperate war for survival. They are political agents across the various levels of the Kurdish movement. Furthermore, they created their own independent movement within this movement, as well as their own army, party and philosophy (Sellar, 2014). Thus, what makes it worth dying for Kobane is the concrete possibility to establish a revolutionary social project built on the ideology developed by Abdullah Ocalan (Dirik, 2014). Ocalan is the main leader of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) - an armed organization listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. This dissertation aims to ascertain the impact of Kurdish women activists on gender equality within the PKK, its affiliated organizations, and Kurdish society at large. In this sense, it contributes to the wider literature on the Kurdish contemporary political movement and examines the Kurdish women's movement through a human rights perspective. It also contributes to an anthropological perspective of the political mobilization of Kurds under the PKK, as it highlights the perceptions of the subjects involved and 2 The word "guerrilla" will be used to make reference to armed militants who represent local peoples struggling against colonialist and repressive regimes. Their aim is not only to overcome the state's forces, but also to establish a revolutionary project that dramatically changes the status quo (Gross, 2015, p.3-4). More detailed discussions on the organization, aims and tactics of the Kurdish guerrilla, as well as the larger structures that surpass the military wing, are explored in chapter one. 7 considers how they make sense of the PKK as a political project that responds to Kurdish yearning for liberation. Various works address the development of a new ideological framework and the organizational reconstruction of the PKK (and its affiliated organizations) after Ocalan's imprisonment in 1999 (Casier and Jongerden, 2012; Akkaya, 2011; Akkaya and Jongerden, 2012; Grojean, 2014). The diaspora studies emphasize the positive steps made by the Kurdish movement to develop a human rights platform and establish a political dialogue (Baser, 2013a, 2013b; Khayati, 2008; Ostergaard-Nielsen, 2005).