Fréderike Geerdink
It’s not a word to start a column with because it’s harsh and it triggers many women, so this is a strategic first sentence of a column about rape. Rape and other sexual violence is high on the agenda again, especially in the context of armed conflict, a situation in which sexual violence is often used as a weapon. The struggle against conflict-related sexual violence can’t be strong enough. Part of that struggle must be resistance against the weaponizing of the accusation of sexual violence. Against, in other words, the patriarchy using women as tools to secure its own survival.
Of course, what made me decide to write about this, is the UN report that was published this week (mainly) about conflict-related sexual violence committed during the attack by Hamas in Israel on 7 October last year. The report concludes that there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that rape and other sexual violence has been committed by Hamas. No evidence was found, no survivors were interviewed, no witnesses were traced. The investigation team notes that the information gathered was in a large part sourced from Israeli national institutions. It ‘mitigated’ that issue, they write, but they don’t explain how.
Vulnerable
Let me be clear: nobody can rule out that rape and other sexual violence happened that day, or that some hostages held in Gaza were or are subject to it. It can, after all, never be ruled out when women are attacked or held as captives, especially when they are in such an extremely vulnerable situation as the Israeli women were during the 7 October attacks or are now as captives of Hamas.
If you genuinely care about the safety of women though, you must question the sincerity of the Israeli state when it put this issue on the agenda, right after 7 October. Israel is a settler-colony currently carrying out a genocide in Gaza and continuing the ethnic cleansing of the Westbank and East-Jerusalem. Genocidal regimes do, per definition, not care about women’s rights. They represent the patriarchy in its most extreme form. The patriarchy and the freedom of women categorically exclude one another.
Grotesque
Israel, in other words, doesn’t care about women’s rights, it cares about getting away with genocide. By making grotesque accusations (which were soon factchecked to smithereens, also in the UN report), it set the narrative and triggered investigations by the media and by international bodies, making their opponents look like absolute monsters that must be annihilated at all costs. That there is no evidence for the accusations, not even the less grotesque ones, becomes an easily overlooked side note in a story that every media feels obliged to cover. Who’d want to not be on the women’s side, right?
But by giving credibility to genocidal regimes, we are actually doing the opposite of being on the side of women. We act against women and against humanity. No, I am not an Israel and Palestine specialist and I have reported only a few stories from Palestine, including Gaza, some two decades ago, but I do recognise a state that accuses its opponent of horrible crimes to justify its own crimes when I see one. I report on Turkey and Kurdistan, after all.
Mountains
Turkey, like Israel, has invested decades in painting the population they want to eradicate and the resistance organisations that sprung from those populations as savages, as terrorists, as rapists and monsters. All to justify its own crimes and to get a green light for them from the international community. War crimes and crimes against humanity are among those crimes. Turkey massacred families, shoved the crimes in the PKK’s shoes and framed PKK-leader Öcalan as a ‘baby killer’, a phrase with which many Turks continue to describe him today. Turkish soldiers and their helpers abduct and rape women, as a recent Human Rights Watch report recently showed. Over the years, there have been credible journalistic stories about municipalities in Bakur (Kurdistan in Turkey) that were taken over by the AKP where illegal prostitution rings were set up. Yet Turkey accuses the PKK of abducting young Kurds, and has for decades insinuated that sexual abuse is rampant in the mountains.
Influence
The latter is an especially interesting accusation. Because among the many things I learned while reporting on Kurdistan and the Kurdish armed and unarmed resistance, is that they truly put the liberation of women on the forefront of their struggle. They don’t just fight ‘Turkey’, they fight the patriarchy, also within their own society and the PKK does so also within its own ranks. What I came to understand at a very profound level, is that liberating a woman from the house and society where she is suppressed, abused and silenced, doesn’t change anything if no work is done to smash the patriarchy.
With ‘work’ I mean the larger struggle, but also an individual effort to investigate how the patriarchy shaped us all, and how we should try to break free from that influence. This liberates women – and men, and society as a whole. This means that within the PKK, sexual violence is absolutely unacceptable. Pointing your finger at a woman and raising your voice is already absolutely unacceptable because that is – rightly so – considered patriarchal behaviour. Any patriarchal behaviour is addressed with self-criticism and with obligatory education, education, education.
Framework
I have a good friend who knows the Palestinian liberation struggle very well and has been visiting Gaza many times over the span of three decades, also Gaza under Hamas’ rule. She was impressed by how the Kurdish movement prioritises the liberation of women, and that it has a solid ideological framework to guide its struggle.
A logical consequence is that we have to focus on our own fight and refuse to be taken hostage by the narrative of fascist states. We must fight the patriarchy until it crumbles, and we must fight the usage of women as tools in fascist propaganda. We must fight to fully liberate women, not just from the clutches of those who harm them physically but from the destructive system that rules our world. Unless we do that, the women we liberate will fall into the hands of rapists again, and again, and again.
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/fgeerdink or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan https://frederikegeerdink.com/expert-kurdistan/.
