Meral Çiçek
“We have to create a two-part struggle to defend life. On the one hand, to defend the rights of our pioneers who were taken from us and brutally murdered, to ensure that the murderers are tried and punished, and to fight for justice. On the other hand, to protect pioneer women while they are alive,” writes Meral Cicek for Yeni Ozgur Politika.
Exactly one year ago, a number of pioneers and members of the Rojava Women’s Freedom Movement Kongra Star were killed in a Turkish armed drone attack on the village of Helince in Kobanê. They were assassinated by the fascist Turkish regime, just like Sakine Cansız, Fidan Doğan, and Leyla Şaylemez, murdered in Paris on 9 January 2013. The Kobanê massacre is therefore, like the Paris massacre, a political murder.
Now it can be said that every murder of women is political. Which is true. All forms of masculine violence against women are political. The primary slogan of the Second Wave Women’s Movement, “The private is political”, drew attention to this fact.
But beyond this, we witness that women are increasingly targeted due to their leading roles in the political and social arena. In other words, women pioneers are increasingly targeted and systematically murdered for leading social struggle. They are assassinated. Women who lead the freedom struggle, who are the brave advocates of truth in the field of journalism, who are at the forefront of the defence of the land, and who persuade people to resist against fascist dictators, are murdered.
The perpetrators are often not punished because the killer is the system itself. It is the trio of the state /supranational corporation /paramilitary gang that decides, plans, organises, and implements political assassinations against leading women. The aim of the political murders committed by these main players of patriarchal capitalist modernity is to eliminate women’s leadership in this turn of the 21st century, which is a candidate to be the age of women’s revolution, because the leadership of women in the fields of freedom, democracy, justice, and ecology is the dynamic that most threatens the existence of the dominant system and the mentality on which it is based. This reality is clearly apparent from Kurdistan and Turkey to Belarus, from Chile to the USA, from Afghanistan to Mexico.
Therefore, each political femicide that the system tries to present to us as a singular and isolated event constitutes a part of a systematic whole. That is why it is essential to develop a joint struggle against it.
The aim of the recently established international platform ‘Weaving for Life’ is to unite the local struggle against political femicide. In addition, it is to reveal the facts regarding the background of political assassinations against women pioneers, to expose the murderers, to fight against impunity, and ultimately to defend our pioneer women while they are still alive, thus developing the struggle for self-defence in this area as well.
In this respect, we have to create a two-part struggle to defend life. On the one hand, to defend the rights of our pioneers who were taken from us and brutally murdered, to ensure that the murderers are tried and punished, and to fight for justice. On the other hand, to protect pioneer women while they are alive. This requires women’s self-defence based on cross-border solidarity and standing up for each other. How should such self-defence be conducted and which methods should be used? We will discuss these matters within the platform collectively in the coming period. Likewise, we will also discuss the understanding of communal justice on which our struggle will be based.
It is not enough to condemn and protest alone. The important thing is to call the perpetrators to account and to prevent new massacres from occurring through a holistic and effective struggle. This is the most meaningful response to the memory of the pioneers who have been taken from our struggle.
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Note: Those who want to take part in the Weaving for Life platform can contact via this e-mail.
