Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Women’s Assembly issued a press statement on Monday to announce the findings of the Central Anatolia meetings they held within the scope of their campaign ‘No to Women’s Poverty”, according to MA.
The spokesperson of the assembly Ayşe Acar Başaran said that they met with seasonal agricultural worker women in Konya and in Ankara.
“Everywhere we went, we saw that we, the women, live the poverty in the heaviest form. Women are in poverty, yet all resources of this country are spent on war,” she said. The policies of war and an economy based on unearned income reflects back against women as poverty, hunger, and unemployment.”
”Poverty increases violence against women, poverty ignores women’s domestic labour, poverty imposes cheap labour on women who are employed in precarious jobs. However, the Minister of Family and Social Services is yet able to say, ‘violence can be tolerated’. Here is our anwser: Women do not have any tolerance to violence, to your male-dominant mindset or your misogynist policies.”
Başaran shared their criticisms of war policies and the ongoing cross-border campaign in northern Iraq. “While women and peoples are striving with hunger, while people are pushed to the edge of suicide out of unempoyment, while seasonal agricultural worker women wage a life struggle working and living under inhumane conditions, a rectangle of the capital, state, mafia and political elites consume the resources of the country,” she said.
She shared information that since Operation Gare, launched in February targeting Mount Gare in northern Iraq, Turkey has spent 90 million dollars in cross-border operations. “Here, that is why, we have launched this campaign, against such a waste of resources being spent on war, which condemns us women to poverty,” she said.
Başaran underlined the importance of holding meetings directly with the working women and listening to their stories one by one. “We have organised this campaign to directly listen to the problems of working women and to raise solidarity and struggle to solve these problems together. Here we speak on behalf of these working women, who shared their problems, their demands, their voices with us,” she said.
She added: “We try to make the voice of the agricultural worker women heard more, the voices of the women who resist and struggle to survive despite all kinds of difficulties and exploitation. The living conditions of seasonal agricultural workers needs to be improved. They lack of basic needs, such as water and electricity. This is one of the most pressing and immediate demands they have asked from us to raise.”
