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#sakinecansiz — Public Fediverse posts
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[#NOVEDAD] 📖'Toda mi vida fue una lucha (Vol. II). Años de prisión'
Tras el primer volumen de sus memorias, donde #SakineCansız narraba su infancia en Dersim y su implicación en el nacimiento del movimiento de liberación kurdo y del #PKK, esta segunda parte nos lleva a los años que pasó en varias cárceles turcas entre 1979 y 1990.
👉 Disponible en librerías el 16 de septiembre
https://descontrol.cat/portfolio/toda-mi-vida-fue-una-lucha-2/ -
I am Sakine Cansiz!
Necibe Qeredaxi
From the moment humans become aware of their existence as a will, they have continuously asked themselves fundamental questions, always searching for the best and most satisfying answers that give meaning to their lives, both personally and socially. The question “Who am I?” has been the question of most truth-seekers, philosophers, prophets, and leaders of social movements. “Who am I?” might be one of the most important questions in the life of every ordinary person, regardless of color, ethnicity, gender, religion, sect, language, and culture. This question carries an even deeper meaning for individuals and social groups whose identity, existence, culture, and history are denied, or worse, face physical and cultural genocide. It becomes a catalyst for different kinds of action compared to others.
This begins at an individual level, becoming a driving force for self-questioning and later transforms into consciousness. In this process, these people consciously search for each other to reach the level of a self-defensive group. In doing so, they work together to build something new and prefigure a different form of life, one that stages their existence against the forces that deny them, both as individuals and as groups. The success of this process of question and answer depends on individuals being immersed in their historical memory. A memory that, with every change, both preserves the roots of its identity and renews itself, being reborn daily.
This process needs other motivations as well: consciousness from the depths of historical and social memory, courage and persistence despite obstacles, determination for all steps including self-sacrifice, the power to struggle against all ugliness, and commitment to promises with those who searched for each other in the initial steps and found each other within the circle of this search. Without extending this introduction further, I will discuss steps that indicate such a birth. Not just a physical birth, but the process of birthing a new identity, beyond that lack of identity and beyond the identity that the ideology and knowledge of those in power have imposed throughout history, especially on women. At stake, are processes of rebirth and self-construction.
One of those people who gave profound meaning to this process from the stage of self-awareness until the age of 56 was Sakine Cansiz, known as “Sara.” She was born on February 12, 1958, in a cold winter in the village of Takhti Khalil in Dersim, Northern Kurdistan, 20 years after the greatest genocide of the 20th century (the Dersim Genocide of 1938). Her parents, grandmother, and many relatives were survivors of the Dersim Genocide. In those extermination campaigns by the Turkish state, being Kurdish and Alevi wasn’t the only crime – being a woman in Kurdish society, trapped between state occupation and tribal relations, was to be in a paradoxical situation. On one hand, they were a weak link of subjugation and multiple layers of occupation, and on the other hand, they possessed an energy always ready for rebellion.
Sakine was the eldest daughter of the family, carrying many household responsibilities. Her mother was a rebellious woman, while her father was a calm and patient man. In general, due to the influence of Alevi culture, women were respected in their family. Sakine was mostly influenced by her grandmother. In the first volume of her book My Whole Life Was A Struggle, Sakine Cansiz describes her grandmother this way:
“My grandmother’s characteristics always caught my attention, I admired her and observed all her behaviors… She never extinguished the fire. At night she would cover it with ashes and start uncovering it again at dawn. For her, it was a sin to go to another house to bring or give fire. If someone asked for fire, she would get angry with them and advise them to keep their own fire under ashes from the night before… For Eze (grandmother), life was about maintaining the fire, praying during lunar and solar eclipses, and being connected to the earth.”[1]
The saying that nature is humanity’s first teacher perfectly fits Sakine’s grandmother. How could one not learn the spirit of patriotism and connection to land and society from her! When she would pray facing the sun daily, saying:
“O Angel of Dawn, who created earth and heaven
Write good fortune for us, poor and innocent humans
O Mother Fatima, O Hazrat Ali, Hassan and Hussein, take up your sword
Be a shield for our youth, protect them and save them… Show your bravery
Free Kurdistan and Dersim. O Khizr, Great Khizr”[2]It’s likely this is the same “Khizr Zine” that we are familiar with from our grandmothers’ stories. Sakine attended primary school in Khozat and completed middle school there as well. Her sister recalls a notable moment from that period regarding their father, saying:
“At that time, our mother was in Germany. Our father would wake up early, brush Ferida and Nesibe’s hair, then Sakine would get us ready and send us to school before going himself.”
Initially, she only knew Dimli (Zazaki) because that was the dialect her family spoke at home. In school, Sakine learned Turkish through the education system, as Kurdish was banned from the establishment of the Turkish Republic until today. However, her mother always told her, “Never be ashamed of being Kurdish.”
In 1968, when the world was awakening to student uprisings and the ’68 revolution, and leftist groups were growing in Turkey and Kurdistan, Sakine’s first self-questioning began during her school years, starting with the language issue. Later, hearing stories of the Dersim genocide from elders, she became aware of the oppression faced by Kurdish society. Hearing about this oppression accumulated questions and the search for answers in Sakine, drop by drop, day by day. Although the elders whispered about these events out of fear, in that terrifying silence her curiosity for knowledge and her adventurous spirit began to emerge. Isn’t it said that “Freedom begins in childhood”[3]? From that stage onward, her determination showed that the elders’ fear created courage in her instead of silence, created curiosity and questioning instead of retreat. Rather than being a mere observer, she threw herself completely into the conflicts and questions, searching for answers.
Regarding Sakine’s first exposure to revolutionary life, Ali Haydar Kaytan (Comrade Fuad), who later became one of PKK’s founding members, says:
“It was 1974, in Dersim their house was in the Dag (Mountain) neighborhood. There was a large house next to theirs. We often stayed there, but occasionally visited that student house near Comrade Sara’s home. That’s how those comrades influenced Comrade Sara.”
Her brother Metin Cansiz describes those moments, saying:
“Sakine was mostly drawn to the leftists. She participated in their marches and demonstrations. She asked questions but never became a member of any ideological group. After she met the Kurdistan revolutionaries, she became very active.”
Her cousin Nurcan Yildirim, who was familiar with this period of Sakine’s life, says:
“It was 1974-1975, she talked about Kurdistan. In that city, I heard the word ‘Kurdistan’ for the first time from that woman. She would tell me about her student comrades, and there was a picture of Leyla Qasim drawn on her wall. She said ‘They drew it and gave it to me as a gift.’”
Her student comrades (who were the first group of Kurdistan revolutionaries) knew that her liberation-seeking tendencies as a woman drew their attention, and they saw her admiration for Leyla Qasim.
In the first volume of her memoirs, Sakine Cansiz writes:
“The inspiration they gave to political and revolutionary work put me on a path that changed my entire life. I knew several men who lived near our home; their lifestyle, their interactions, and their attitude toward values influenced me, and I saw the torch of Dersim’s freedom in them.”
After the 1971 military coup in Turkey, she connected with revolutionary youth and joined the revolutionary movement from Elazığ in Northern Kurdistan. About her interests, she says:
“I read many books, which brought joy and learning. There were ideological discussions, and those who defended these ideologies weren’t ordinary people. They had influential personalities and created enthusiasm in their surroundings. At first, everyone mocked them, calling them 4-5 rebellious Kurdish nationalists. Later, their name changed to Kurdistan Revolutionaries, and they were called Apocu[4].”
She actively participated and was present at the first revolutionary meeting in Dersim at the end of 1976.
Sakine always had conflicts with backward, imposing, and traditional attitudes. She was a woman who rebelled against customs and traditions. Sakine’s activism angered her mother. They were always fighting. About her mother’s personality, Sakine says:
“While she led me to develop a rebellious personality, she also taught me how to fight! I’m very indebted to her for that.”
Because she gave meaning to everything happening around her, instead of cutting off relationship ties, in her youth she tried to understand. This was the characteristic that attracted the attention of the first group of revolutionaries from the beginning, more than justifying the title that later became the name of her three-volume memoir: “My Whole Life Was A Struggle!”
In the winter of 1976-1977, the first expanded meeting of Kurdistan Revolutionaries was held in Dersim. For the first time, she heard the phrase “Kurdistan is colonized” from Abdullah Öcalan, the group’s leader, at this meeting which initially had 60 participants, in the house they called the “White Palace” in Dersim because it was painted white. For the first time, she became thoroughly familiar with national and class conflicts and embarked on a long journey that, as she says, “My Whole Life Was A Struggle!” She strived to ensure women had a role in the national liberation struggle and participated actively. For this, she was the first woman in the movement who organized women wherever she went.
During this period, Sakine Cansiz felt she could no longer continue living as an ordinary woman and searched for an alternative that would allow her to move more freely in revolutionary struggle. Sakine wanted to become a revolutionary and saw the solution in leaving home, searching for and finding an excuse, which was marriage. This path was an excuse and method for many revolutionaries at that time, as leaving home wasn’t easy for women. Sakine told her mother and family:“I love Baki Polat, my cousin. He asked for me before and you didn’t agree. He’s a revolutionary and I’m going with him; he won’t prevent my revolutionary activities.”
Later, she married Baki and went to Izmir. However, Sakine had already left home and achieved part of her dream – she didn’t commit to married life because her goals were different. She worked at a chocolate factory for her livelihood while organizing women in general, particularly immigrant women workers from Eastern European countries in the factory.
After conflicts with her family, especially her mother, Sakine’s second conflict began with Baki after their marriage. On one hand, Baki was a member of “People’s Liberation” which, like its organization, didn’t see Kurdistan as colonized, and on the other hand, Baki Polat wanted Sakine to be a traditional wife solely committed to family life, which was impossible for Sakine. At the factory where she worked, she organized women and youth, leading to her and several others being fired. The workers began demonstrations and strikes. Sakine was arrested for carrying the banner whiuch read. “Kurdistan is colonized”. For these efforts, Sakine was taken to court, where she shouted “Down with the colonizer.” She wasn’t satisfied with just shouting slogans for “bread, work, and freedom” because she believed that in an occupied country and society where identity, history, and culture were denied, work and bread alone meant nothing. She saw true socialism in ending colonization and the joint struggle of peoples, and for this, she organized workers without discrimination.
Anyone somewhat familiar with Sakine’s life knows that she always took on difficult tasks. When she returned to Kurdistan, she began organizing women in Çewlig (Bingöl), one of the most conservative regions of Northern Kurdistan. In a place where people were afraid to even say they were Kurdish, she established several women’s groups of 3 to 5 people and gave women the courage to organize themselves. Despite family and societal barriers, women gathered around the slogans of the first revolutionary group and found themselves in it. Sakine had a great influence on them.
About this period, Sakine says:“We said women must participate in the national liberation struggle, as this is how they can become free and take steps toward true freedom.”
Her first lessons for women were about the effects of the capitalist system on women, and she always said: “Women are viewed as commodities.” Women were initially uncomfortable with this term, but she patiently explained to them what she meant by the commodification of women. Sakine Cansiz’s struggle among women in Çewlig, Xarpêt (Elazığ), and other regions inspired the Kurdistan revolutionaries. She organized not only among women but in all sections of society. She created trust, belief, and hope in a people who had faced attempted genocide.
The fruits of her work in these later years had reached the level of beginning a new phase of struggle. The phase of moving toward establishing a revolutionary party that would answer the needs of freedom and independence for the phrase “Kurdistan is colonized.”
In the last week of November 1978, in the village of Fis in the Lice district of Amed (Diyarbakır), the movement’s first congress was held. Sakine Cansiz (Sara), along with Kesire Yildirim (Fatma), were the first women to participate in the founding congress of the PKK. She was very happy because they were preparing for a historic phase and filling a great void in Kurdistan.
While the manifesto and program were being drafted, Sakine was preparing for women’s struggle, and they even planned to call it the “Girls’ Group”[5], composed of all cadres and supporters. They researched women’s struggle and even prepared to write a pamphlet. Later, Sakine traveled throughout Kurdistan, following up on and analyzing women’s conditions.
From the movement’s First Manifesto, there was an analysis of women that stated:
“The destiny of women is like the destiny of the Kurdish people. Women must establish their own mass organization. If the goal is to build a democratic Kurdistan, then tribal and comprador pressures must be eliminated. Foreigners wanted to influence different social classes, but women are the segment of society they cannot influence. Women have been enslaved since the class society era.”
In 1979, after the congress, Sakine Cansız was tasked with organizing women in Elazığ (Kharput) and preparing for women’s education. Following organizational guidelines, women began studying Roman law and research on women worldwide. They started this struggle to build a foundation for women’s movement from 1979. Once, eighty women gathered in Dersim. Under normal circumstances, such a meeting would never have happened, especially since women couldn’t discuss their issues when men were present.
The state was aware of these steps and conducted operations against revolutionaries and other leftist and socialist groups. Regarding this time, Sakine said:“It’s wonderful to fight and live with hatred against your enemy. I always told myself if our existence intimidates them, I should always be like a curse to them.”
On May 18, 1979, following a coup, Sakine and many of her comrades were arrested in Elazığ. In prison, she demonstrated strong resistance both against the prevalent tendency to surrender within the movement and against state authorities. The state used various torture methods including hanging, electrocution, solitary confinement in cold dark cells, stripping, force-feeding excrement, etc. Her resistance amazed prison officials. She stood very courageously against her torturers. The notorious Diyarbakır prison, known for torturers like Esat Oktay, was where he particularly enjoyed torturing Sakine and wished to hear her scream just once under torture, but she never did.
Sakine described the prison conditions by comparing them to Nazi camps, saying:
“Humanity in Nazi camps was a silent and shameless corpse, the body naked and exposed. Hope was killed in those meaningless eyes. Those corpses only moved when their turn for death came. If one asks if such a place exists on Earth, we don’t need to look far – there is Amed (Diyarbakır).”
When Esat Oktay confronted her saying “You must accept what is said, many have come and gone, do you know who I am?” Sakine replied, “Do you know who I am? I am a revolutionary, clearly you don’t know revolutionaries” – and when he attacked her, she spat in his face.
Let me translate and adapt this narrative about Kurdish political prisoner Sakine Cansız’s resistance and experiences in Turkish prisons:
The incident of spitting in Asad Oktay’s face became a legendary tale passed down both inside and outside the prison. Sakine’s stance led her to be recognized as a symbol of resistance throughout the women’s ward and the entire prison. The resistance of Sakine and her comrades during their hunger strike in Amed Prison became like a rebirth for Kurdish women and the Kurdish people in particular.
Her courage and bravery in prison impressed all the women inmates, both the political and non-political prisoners. One day, through a hole in their ward’s wall, they discovered that a prison guard was regularly spying on the women through it. When the women prisoners reported this to Sakine, she set up an ambush and stabbed the guard’s eye with a knitting needle. The guard screamed in pain, and Sakine was subsequently taken for torture because of this act of defiance.
Gültan Kışanak, the imprisoned HDP mayor of Amed who was in the same prison at that time, described Sakine:
“She maintained relationships with all prisoners. She would care for those who were tortured, massaging their bruised bodies to prevent blood clots after they were beaten with clubs and cables.”
Due to her acts of resistance against the prison administration and guards, Sakine Cansız was transferred to Amasya Prison. There, she was brought before the prison director named Şükrü. Their confrontation became an open defense of her political identity. When the director tried to establish his authority, saying “I am Şükrü, I have run this prison for so long that nothing happens here without my order,” Sakine responded defiantly:
“I am Sakine Cansız, a founder of the PKK. I am here now and I have my own principles! I recognize nothing else.”
While there, she made several escape attempts, but they were unsuccessful due to informants. Because of these efforts to break free from the cell that imprisoned her body she earned the name “Butterfly” from her fellow inmates.
In response to the September 12, 1982 coup, which aimed to break people’s will, only one window of hope remained: the resistance of revolutionary prisoners. Those who played a role in this resistance brought new life to a society on the brink of death. Kurdish revolutionaries understood two key points: first, that Kurdistan’s freedom as a national question depended partly on changing the mentality of the genocidal and denial-based state system, but even more importantly on the awakening of the Kurdish people themselves; and second, that the resistance and defense of a society’s identity and values in this movement wasn’t limited to men – women’s participation in this resistance opened the way for major social transformation.
Sakine Cansız’s resistance paved the way for both women’s and society’s freedom. From this emerged the slogan “Without women’s freedom, society cannot be free.” What had weakened Kurdish society wasn’t just the effects of colonization, but also the social illness and backwardness that colonization had internalized in Kurdish identity.Sakine was the first woman in Turkey’s history to resist at such a level, becoming an exemplary figure of heroism. Sakine never accepted the conditions of an ordinary life and constantly struggled against such circumstances, never surrendering. She spent much of her youth imprisoned in various prisons (Elazığ, Malatya, Bursa, Amed, and Çanakkale).
In 1991, she was released. After her release, she went to the Mahsum Korkmaz Academy in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and participated in ideological education led by A. Öcalan. There, she participated in the first conference of political prisoners and later carried out organizational work in Palestine, Syria, and Rojava.
After this training period, Sakine requested to go to the mountains of Kurdistan. Öcalan, along with the academy comrades’ votes, agreed to her request to go to the Kurdistan mountains, believing that since she had played a role in the PKK’s founding from the beginning, he couldn’t make this decision for her. When most of the women comrades at the academy supported Sakine’s decision to go, Öcalan told her, “Sara, you won.” Sakine was overjoyed at this…“I was very determined and stubborn – when I set my mind to something, I would definitely achieve it. Everything I wanted happened one by one. I saw the leadership, I saw half of Kurdistan, I saw and felt the love of people’s freedom. I told myself if I go to the mountains and my dream of becoming a guerrilla comes true, then everything will be as I wish.”
Sakine later went to the mountains of Kurdistan with great passion, participating in guerrilla activities and operations. She played an active role in the congresses and conferences of the Kurdistan Women’s Freedom Movement and the movement in general, having a decisive role in all conferences and congresses. She was also a powerful writer, which led Öcalan to suggest that she write her life story and memoirs.
Despite the harsh conditions in Kurdistan’s mountains, she maintained a very clean and disciplined life. Exercise was one of her passions and daily habits. She would wake up early in the morning and exercise in the mountain environment, even during snowfall, and collect spring herbs from the highlands. She loved writing her memoirs, always keeping her notebook in her bag, taking it out to write whenever she had the chance.
Öcalan, in describing Sakine’s character, could not hide his amazement and told her:
“You’re a very resilient girl. We put you through a lot of hardship, but this was certainly meaningless. What can we do? It’s our struggle and fighting that brought you to this level… You can be a well-rounded personality. Your courage and sacrifice, a hundred times more than mine, gave you strength.”
When the first autonomous women’s organization (Union of Patriotic Women of Kurdistan) was established within the movement in Hannover in 1987, Sakine was in prison. In the second congress held in 1989, Sakine played an important role by sending a guidance letter from prison that was read at the congress. The main topic of that congress was women’s autonomy (independent and special practices of organization) and how to develop it. From Kurdistan’s mountains, photos of 50 female guerrillas under the command of Comrade Azime were sent to the congress, creating great enthusiasm among women and presenting a new image for everyone.
The third congress of the Union of Patriotic Women of Kurdistan was held in Europe in August 1991, with approximately 1,500 delegates attending. The congress decided to establish autonomous education for women in the Kurdish language, taking a clear and powerful stance against ethnic cleansing. They also decided to publish “Jina Serbilind” (Proud Woman) magazine, which became the first women’s magazine.
After returning to Kurdistan’s mountains, Sakine Cansız stayed in Botan in 1994. That year saw intense fighting, and she was part of the mobile unit, which was the most combative unit and faced the most battles. In 1995, it was decided to hold a women’s congress in Kurdistan’s mountains. Sakine played a key role in the preparatory committee for the first congress of the Kurdistan Women’s Freedom Union (YAJK). They prepared the movement’s bylaws, program, and reports in Metina, in Beshiri village, in a large historic cave symbolically called the “Women’s Temple.” The congress included representatives from all regions, with 350 female delegates participating. It was the first historical experience and step of the Kurdish women’s freedom movement in Kurdistan’s mountains.
This monumental step came after Kurdish women’s militarization. It was an army that would break through all inequalities, shatter the wall of fear, bring women out of their homes, and lead them to struggle. Beyond its military aspect, this army fundamentally uprooted the prevalent conservative mentality in Kurdistan and showed men the standards by which women wanted to live. In all these steps, Sakine was a collective pioneer. She deeply understood that Öcalan had addressed history’s deepest contradiction and that democratic change was impossible without this radical revolutionary approach.
Regarding this step, Sakine said:“Women’s militarization wasn’t limited to just being an armed force. The creation of the freedom army meant ideological and political development, action, will, and the creation of power and morale. It also meant creating grounds for unity with the people. It meant addressing people’s main demands, organizing collectively according to people’s needs, creating an organization that would encompass all of these.”
After gaining extensive practical experience in Kurdistan’s mountains, Sakine returned to the cadre training academy with a wealth of experience and theoretical foundation, where new perspectives and analyses were needed. At the exact time when Turkey and international forces were preparing a conspiracy network to expel Öcalan from Syria, during a Media TV panel with Abdullah Öcalan, Sakine, and several female comrades, the project of women’s liberation was announced. This is considered one of the most fundamental and important stages in the Kurdish women’s freedom movement’s struggle, occurring precisely when the movement’s ideology was being rendered increasingly meaningless by neoliberal propaganda waves globally.
This stage had been formulated in both theory and practice over many years to answer the question “how to live?” and required historically redefining the relationship between men and women in Kurdish society and beyond. Turkish journalist Maher Sayan, in an interview with Öcalan, described this relationship as “fire and gasoline,” referring to the transformation from a traditional master-slave relationship between a dominant man and a traditional woman to a free relationship. According to the women’s liberation ideology, this new relationship was based on principles of patriotism, struggle, organization, free will and thought, and ethics-aesthetics. This step would change not only Kurdish society’s destiny but the entire region’s, now having global reverberations. This was the historical, philosophical, and practical dialogue between Abdullah Öcalan and Sakine Cansız.
After the cadre academy training, Sakine (Comrade Sara) returned to the academy in 1998. Following new dialogue and sociological analysis with Öcalan, she moved her struggle to Europe, where she continued organizational work and opened a broader front in lobby work. She made significant steps both among Kurdish people’s friends and in diplomatic struggle. In 2018, during our first Jineolojî camp in Bilbao, Basque Country, we discovered that Sakine was the first Kurdish woman to visit Bilbao upon arriving in Europe in 1998, meeting with Basque women. Basque activist women and academics noted Sakine’s strong personality and broad intellectual horizon.Whenever Sakine visited a home, she left a powerful memory and greatly influenced the development of patriotic spirit. She built comradely relationships not only with Kurdish homes but also with leftist, socialist, and internationalist figures, opening broad avenues for struggle, resistance, and collaboration. She introduced them to Kurdistan and the freedom movement, finding support for the freedom struggle.
Especially after the international conspiracy against Öcalan and his imprisonment in İmralı‘s solitary confinement, Sakine conducted lobby work country by country while explaining the difficult post-conspiracy period within the movement and society. Particularly regarding the paradigm shift to Democratic Modernity, which was both a strategic step and carried its own risks. Sakine worked day and night to maintain organizational unity and fulfill the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement’s strategic role in resolving historical issues, providing genuine leadership for women within the movement, whilst also protecting the movement and leading the process of socializing Kurdistan’s revolution. For this, alongside other leading cadres, she maintained a decisive position in all subsequent congresses and at the movement’s turning points.
Sakine was very confident that a crucial phase in Kurdistan’s freedom struggle was approaching. Speaking confidently on Roj TV on October 27, 2008, she said:
“There is an ongoing struggle that’s advancing. A struggle that has now become the Kurdish people’s own. It has opened the path to freedom for our people, paved the way for Kurdish people’s organization and unity, and has become the foundation for people’s self-determination.”
In a 2011 interview, published in Nawaya Jin magazine, and responding to a question about women’s responsibilities, Sakine said:
“We struggle so that we don’t become the women who can do nothing but cry, we struggle so we don’t become the women who wear black and lament their pain, that’s why we’re in the mountains… The pain and oppression that society and women have lived through in history and continue to experience today is about awareness, creating consciousness, thought and perspective, and means of struggle. We can only overcome this situation through broad organization.”
When discussions were held in Europe about establishing a Women’s Foundation and its name, it was suggested to name it after Sakine, just as many institutions were named after Rosa Luxemburg. At that time, Sakine said: “Why are they planning to kill me?” Evidently, she sensed that those who couldn’t eliminate her in prison or in Kurdistan’s mountains had pursued her to Europe. In the center known for ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, they succeeded in their conspiracy against her.
On January 9, 2013, at the Kurdistan Information Center on Paris’s busiest street, Sakine Cansız (Sara), Kurdistan National Congress member Fidan Doğan (Rojbin), and youth movement member Leyla Şaylemez (Ronahî) were assassinated by a member of the Turkish intelligence agency MIT. Later, the killer died in a French prison under mysterious circumstances, leading to the case’s closure.
The occupiers attempted to silence the voice of Kurdish women and the Kurdish people through the assassination of Sakine and other pioneering women. Their goal: to strike a deadly blow against the inspiring mind of this movement. However, Sakine, just as she had learned to succeed, became the voice and spirit of millions in the face of both death and her killers, as people poured into the streets to express their feelings about this massacre. She dreamed of being showered with flowers when received in Kurdistan as a guerrilla fighter. She carried the pain, suffering, and tragedy of her people in her bag, transforming it into hope, energy, awareness, and organization as she traveled from city to city, mountain to mountain, country to country. Yet she also understood that the path to peace is a long one.
Öcalan assessed this massacre and said:“In reality, they wanted to use this massacre to prevent my peace efforts. That is, those within the state who don’t want the issue resolved through democratic means wanted to disrupt the process. Sakine’s life is an example. Women’s freedom is Sakine’s struggle. I will ask for accountability for Sakine, and I will reveal this…”
Source: Tawar Magazine
[1] – Sarah’s documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLiq0p6T1x4
[2] – Ibid.
[3] – A. Ocalan, Beyond the state and violance.
[4] The word apogee is an abbreviation for who belives in Abdullah Ocalan’s philosophy, the leader of the first group of Kurdistan revolutionaries.
[5] Dalal Amed, “Women’s History Lessons in the Kurdistan Freedom Movement”.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Sarah’s documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLiq0p6T1x4.
[8] Butterfly is a 1973 film about the life of a prisoner, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr. and tells the story of a French prisoner named Henri Charier
[9] Abdullah Ocalan, Volume 1 of “How to Live”
[10] – (Dalal Amed), book “Lessons of Women’s History in the Kurdistan Freedom Movement”.
[11] – Ibidsource: Jineology
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=13733
#feminism #guerrilla #hpg #kurdistan #pkk #SakineCansız #turkey
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«Soy Sakine Cansız, una de las fundadoras del PKK. Estoy aquí ahora y tengo mis propios principios. No reconozco nada más».
🔖ARTÍCULO EN LA WEB DE JINEOLOJÎ
¡Soy Sakine Cansiz!, artículo de Necibe Qeredaxi de la Academia de #Jineolojî sobre la vida y la lucha de #SakineCansiz, miembro fundador del #PKK asesinada el 9 de enero de 2013 junto con Fidan Dogan y Leyla Şaylemez en Paris a manos de los servicios turcos.
«Luchamos para no convertirnos en las mujeres que no pueden hacer otra cosa que llorar, luchamos para no convertirnos en las mujeres que visten de negro y lamentan su dolor, por eso estamos en las montañas… El dolor y la opresión que la sociedad y las mujeres han vivido a lo largo de la historia y siguen viviendo hoy en día tiene que ver con la concienciación, con la creación de conciencia, de pensamiento y perspectiva, y de medios de lucha. Sólo podremos superar esta situación mediante una amplia organización».
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Originally published on the website of Kurdistán América Latina, an article by Alberto Colin Huizar depicts the struggle and legacy of Sakine Cansız and her contributions to “revolution within the revolution”.
January 9, 2024 marked the eleventh anniversary of the cowardly assassination of the three Kurdish activists, Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan and Leyla Saylemez by a Turkish intelligence agent, who fired his gun inside a Kurdistan Information Center located in the center of Paris, France. Since that terrible episode, the names of the struggle of the three comrades massacred are inscribed as an act of memory in a slogan that the internationalists usually shout when they march through the streets: Sarah, Rojbin, Ronahi, Jin, Jiyan, Azadi. This murder, still unpunished, has a historical relevance for the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, but particularly for the Women’s Movement for being a specific attack against women who integrated structures in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), mainly Sakine, who was one of the founders of the party and a pioneer in women’s organization in the Kurdish revolution.
During her lifetime, Sakine wrote a three-volume autobiographical work published in Turkish entitled Hep Kavgaydı Yaşamım (All My Life Was a Struggle, Descontrol Editorial, Barcelona, 2018). In the first volume of just over 400 pages entitled “Born in Winter,” Sakine narrates various stages of her militant trajectory, from her childhood in the village of Dersim where she was born in 1958, to her imprisonment in Amed by Turkish repression in 1979. The book stands out for showing in extreme detail a complex story of the emergence of a revolution: that of the Kurdish people. The accounts of Sakine’s life are set out with superb discursive skill. She describes in words the social and political context in which the family and militant relationships unfold, crossed by reflections and critical assessments of the author herself. In this sense, it is a memoir of the Kurdish struggle. The level of description and the fidelity of the memories is also impressive, given that the book was written with the notes that Sakine wrote in the 1990s, which she carried in her backpack when she traveled through the mountains of Northern Iraq with her military unit, in the midst of the guerrilla war.
To the eyes of an anthropologist, the work constitutes a valuable ethnographic record of the emancipatory process of a people, narrated from the very codes of Kurdish culture. In the first part, Sakine introduces us to three key dimensions of her formation: Dersim, the family and women. To understand her locus of enunciation, the author introduces us to each of the people who marked stages of her life: her father and mother who were survivors of the genocide by the Turkish fascist state[1], community life, and her understanding through the Zaza language she acquired in the family. Sakine learned Turkish and German at school, but accepts that it was “just torture”. As in many countries where colonialism was installed in the social structures, Kurdish children were also punished for speaking their mother tongue at school. Just as in the case of Latin America, nationalism entered the classroom with force through writing and linguistic homogeneity, and teachers, many of them fascists, were the vehicles for its transmission.
Sakine narrates that her mother, coming from a well-to-do traditional family, had a crucial influence in her identity recognition as a Kurdish woman, in the defense of her own identity in spite of the assimilation of the Turkish state that deepened in those years in the province of Dersim. Her father, on the other hand, was part of the Alevi community[2] and worked as a civil servant for the local government, which resulted in a certain family economic solvency, but also in a certain adaptability to socialization with Turkish people. This religious influence and the discipline of her mother, were lessons in Sakine’s life that showed her both panoramas: the customs of the cultural context in the city and the reaffirmation of the Kurdish by its territorial roots.
When Sakine was still a child, two processes were formative for her political consciousness: the early migration of Kurdish families to Germany and the systematic police repression in Kurdistan. In detail, the book describes the first repressions Sakine witnessed in her village, with systematic police presence and bans on cultural events, but also recalls those young men who opposed the state. The concepts of revolution, leftism, communism resonated in her mind, but without yet finding a concrete meaning. In general, in Dersim there was a shared sense of opposition to the Turkish state, which had been historically violent towards the Kurdish population of this region. Such was the domination that, for example, the name of the city (Dersim) was changed by the government to Tunceli, which means Iron Hand in Turkish. Since the 1960s there were already signs of insurgent actions and radical political groups as well. Sakine learned early on about these processes from her teachers with whom she talked at school and from interactions in the neighborhood that she came to understand as she observed how young people were organizing politically against the fascists. In this sense, Sakine notes that:
Rebellion was sown in the midst of our childhood. The events unfolding in front of our eyes messed up our emotional and mental world. We learned new things. Already in the early days of middle school, more precisely in the first days, I found myself, without expecting it, in the middle of a strike. (p. 57)
These experiences are narrated by Sakine in a way that allows us to understand the historical context and the political actors that were developing at that time. There were armed cells and clandestine organizations that confronted Turkish politics, marked by coups d’état and national ideologies such as Kemalism. While this was happening outside, inside the family, Sakine learned many attitudes from her mother, among them, rebellion and struggle every day, taking care and working with discipline. Some time later, Sakine had to migrate for a while with her older brother and her father to Germany for work reasons. This experience was also significant for the formation of her revolutionary consciousness. The influence of her older brother and his leftist friends who visited the house and talked politics, together with the plays, demonstrations and public meetings she observed in Berlin with the Kurdish community, were seeds for forging her own consciousness of her ethnic identity in a foreign country, where intercultural relations were more latent and otherness was perceptible.
For Sakine, this was the beginning of her rebirth as a Kurdish woman with a maturing political perspective. When she returned to Dersim the following year, the critical and leftist youth, among whom Sakine was included, bet on turning the classrooms into an arena of struggle to fight the fascists. Several demonstrations, student strikes and repressions took place, of which almost the whole town became aware. However, at the community level Sakine had to deal with traditional marriage customs through agreements and compromises, as one could not freely choose a courtship. During youth, it was common in Dersim for families to generate marriage agreements between daughters and sons without their consent. This situation sparked a long-lasting dispute between Sakine and her mother who wanted to control her and often reminded her: “now you are engaged”, to stop her political activity. This was a struggle that Sakine had to face for most of her youth, as her mother did not see her involvement in the resistance as appropriate. This process resulted in Sakine thinking about leaving Dersim at some point to become involved in political participation elsewhere. There was no turning back, Sakine would be a revolutionary, as she states in her early approach to the resistance:
It is not easy to describe all this, and it is difficult to understand it without having lived it in the flesh. It is not enough to write it down to express the simplicity and beauty of those days and my feelings of yesteryear. As I write it, I feel again wholeheartedly and with full consciousness these feelings that I experienced back then. It was beautiful to arrive without hesitation and authentically to a conviction, to an ideal, going through contradictions and struggles. I lived it as a great joy and I repeat it again out loud: I am the happiest person on earth to be participating in this struggle (p. 120).
Ideological training became a principle of the struggle since other Kurdish militants told young Sakine about the importance of Kurdistan and the national liberation struggle. Understanding the situation of the Kurds became almost an obsession in Sakine’s life. She talked about it at school, formed study circles with friends, discussed it with her uncles and neighbors. “Training was for us the most important part of our work,” Sakine writes about these early years of militancy. Gradually the group grew in numbers. The youth were joining together in Dersim and there was talk of the existence of “Kurdish revolutionaries”, while the state repression was deepening. From this time on, the social values surrounding women’s participation in these political groups changed as the presence of women comrades like Sakine was noticed. Her involvement was an issue that caught the attention of other women, even from other villages, who saw in Sakine an exceptional commitment.
As organized Kurdish groups grew in the region, the situation was increasingly complicated in Sakine’s family: “families, at that time, had more influence than state institutions”. Her mother’s vigilance increased, Sakine was repressed for attending training groups and was forbidden to visit her at home. The only solution she found to this problem was to leave. Meeting family expectations to accept marriage was a burden for Sakine. She did not know her suitor well, nor did she have a political connection to him, as he was a supporter of the Turkish left. For her, marriage represented an obstacle in revolutionary work. In a way, political training and conviction played a major role in her worldview: “our ideology questioned the prevailing system with all its ways of living and relating to each other”. Therefore, Sakine assumed with fortitude that ideological struggle makes revolutionary struggle inevitable and decided to follow her path by leaving Dersim against her family’s decision. Sakine traveled to Ankara with the support of her comrades who never ordered her what decision to make, but always supported her. Her stratagem was to marry Baki, a fellow member of the group, to avoid being harassed with the insistence of marriage. In Ankara she continued her revolutionary work in the organization, met people linked to Kurdistan and was ready to face the challenges of the future.
Due to the precarious conditions of the group with whom Sakine came to live, it was necessary to get a job. With that salary they could raise money to pay the rent of a space that would function as housing and organizational space for political tasks. Sakine admired the proletarian class; for this reason, she decided to look for a job in a factory on the outskirts of the city. She wanted to live like a worker. Soon she found an opening in a chocolate factory. She quickly got her first job. The idea was to get to know the work culture and to do political work with the women. There she met a couple of Kurdish women who were hiding their ethnicity in a city where they were usually stigmatized because Kurdish identity was full of prejudices spread by Turkish society. Sakine then engaged in sloganeering, propaganda and agitation work inside the factory to forge a political consciousness among the workers that would also result in the defense of rights and rebellion against the boss.
In the book, Sakine constantly discusses the personal dimension because it is eminently political. Thus, she intersperses between accounts of her public militancy and her daily life with her comrades in the private sphere. For example, she relates that the political positions of the members of the group with whom she lived were diverse and this bothered her, particularly Baki, who also felt a certain authority over her because of her marriage. Her relationship with him was uncomfortable because she had fled a forced marriage in Dersim and this man who had been her exit option now wanted to force her into a traditional relationship. This accentuated the differences in the household. It should be noted that at that time in Turkey there were a number of radical leftist groupings with different aims, but the national question of Kurdistan was in doubt for many militants. On several occasions, they debated with Sakine whether Kurdistan was a colony or not, what were the objectives of the struggle as Kurds, etc., aspects that triggered inconclusive discussions among the members of the group. Sakine always remained firm in his criticism of colonialism and to dedicate the struggle to the Kurdish question. This ideological break was decisive because Sakine thought that “the revolutionaries of an oppressor nation had other tasks than those of an oppressed nation”, therefore, the ideals of the struggle had to arise from the historical necessity of their own people.
Some time later, Sakine found the companionship she was looking for when she attended a meeting of UKO, the national liberation army that was formed in 1973 around Abdullah Öcalan, at the invitation of a fellow Dersim member. Sakine recalls that at the entrance of the meeting place there was a sign that read: “only Kurds accepted”. Sakine knew this was a good sign. Coming with a female companion and being the only two Zaza-speaking women in Dersim, they listened to the discussions and agreed with the analyses. Soon they participated in an assembly and the companions noticed Sakine’s speaking and critical arguments, which left a good impression on the group. This was the first approach with a radical Kurdish association, which claimed the armed struggle. At the same time, these meetings allowed her to observe the contradictions of the Turkish leftist groups that tried to co-opt her, mainly Baki, who was a member of a group called HK (people’s liberation). This problematic relationship with Baki lasted for several months and occupied a good part of Sakine’s youth, among dilemmas, discussions, fights and sadness that transited throughout her stay in Ankara and Izmir. Nevertheless, her goal remained firm: to work for the revolution in Kurdistan.
After working in a couple of factories from which she was fired for her active work as a workers’ agitator, she found a place in a textile company. Sakine was aware of the importance of organizing the working class against the powerful, but also of bringing the Kurdish question into the discussions, seeking solidarity and raising awareness of colonialism. This was what she could contribute to the workers’ struggle. In a few weeks she managed to form a group. In addition, she was quite critical of the textile union that did not contribute to improving the working conditions of the employees and when she was elected as a representative of the women workers, the employer tried to terminate her contract, which is why they organized a strike. “We will break the chains, we will defeat the fascists,” they chanted as they sat on top of the factory machines. The resistance had begun, but repression soon followed. The next day the protest was repressed and the police took several workers prisoner, among them Sakine, who was beaten and imprisoned for one night. When she was released the next day, they returned to the factory and launched a hunger strike to demand the reinstatement of 75 workers who had been fired without severance pay. The protest began and almost immediately Sakine was arrested again by the police along with eleven other people. Sakine was taken to prison along with another fellow worker. This was the first prison experience in Sakine’s life, although she was pleased that news of her arrest and hunger strike had spread throughout Izmir.
The prison could not stop Sakine’s political work. The other prisoners in Bacu prison knew about the story of Sakine and her companion, whom they called “the politicians”. Inside the prison, they forged a routine of exercise, study and ideological work that surprised the other prisoners. On May 1 they organized a hunger strike in solidarity with the protest actions carried out by the workers in Istanbul and on May 8 they held a tribute to Leyla Qasim, a Kurdish activist who was killed in Iraq. This woman was a source of inspiration for Sakine for her courage and persistence in her struggle. In her cell she had a picture of Leyla carrying a gun and a canana. “Women and guns, women and war, women and the struggle for national liberation, women and death; all of that had a very special meaning,” Sakine reflects. After three trials and a few months of imprisonment, Sakine was released and learned the news of the murder of Haki, one of the most prominent comrades within the organization of revolutionaries for Kurdistan. Apparently, his murder was at the hands of HK militants, an organization in which Baki participated. This betrayal was the key for Sakine to break all ties with Baki. Without much thought, Sakine took her suitcase and traveled with another comrade to Ankara. The divorce proceedings would take place much later during one of her visits to Dersim when she told her mother the truth.
At this moment of Sakine’s life she started her integral involvement in the Kurdish revolution. In Ankara she lived with Kesire, another of the fundamental comrades of the first circle of the organization with whom she lived unforgettable moments. One of those moments was when she met Abdullah Öcalan in the garden of the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University. Sakine recalls in detail that Öcalan “was an individual who stood for principles, revolution, internationalism, love for the homeland and relentless struggle.” During his stay in Ankara, Sakine occupied the time for her training, so she took advantage of the conversations where Öcalan was in the different spaces of the organization and at the Faculty of Law. According to the tasks assigned to her, she returned to Kurdistan to fulfill her role in the organization. She started political work with Kurdish families in the Elaziğ region. They welcomed her and showed her how they were organized in the neighborhood. The atmosphere was much more empathetic to the Kurdish revolutionaries because there was already a history of anti-fascist struggle in the area. Her task was to establish training groups or committees for the generation of cadres to act at the local level in the company of the families. The need for “mental awareness” was the purpose of establishing these relations; that is, to strengthen the ideological work and support bases.
Some time later, Sakine was sent to Bingöl to carry out this same type of work, but with the delimited mission of emphasizing work with women, although there was still no specific concept to support this task and it was conceived as part of the general objectives. From this moment on, the emphasis on work with women took on greater presence, because “since women were the most oppressed, they also had the best conditions to become revolutionaries”. The program of organizational work was thought out by Sakine with a certain autonomy, as it depended on a collective assessment of what was best to do, given the context analysis they carried out in the field. In Bingöl they tried to carry out actions in a sense of community support and ideological formation with women, but they also used revolutionary violence to fight the fascists in the village. After a few weeks there were already about 25 women in two training groups who were willing to carry the ideals of the struggle both in the families and in the schools and neighborhoods. When Öcalan went to visit them in Bingöl, they called a large meeting where he was happy to hear about their work.
It is very interesting how these works in the territory, directly linked to the families and their daily life, allowed cadres like Sakine to have a deeper understanding of the daily problems of the people and to look for strategies to boost revolutionary consciousness. Also notable is the level of criticism and self-criticism Sakine exercised on her own foray into the communities and neighborhoods to spread the need to struggle in an organized way as Kurdish people. Nevertheless, touring the villages of Kurdistan and talking to the people created a new sense of belonging for Sakine and strengthened her conviction: “it filled me with pride and happiness to be part of the struggle for this country, whose remarkable poverty sometimes brought tears to my eyes.” This gave Sakine a broader view on cultural forms and religion, but also on how inequality operated in the villages and in what ways organizing for liberation could be empowered. Although notions such as gender equity and women’s liberation were not yet common, Sakine’s work with women, especially those of a certain intellectual level, had enormous effects.
Between 1977 and 1978 Sakine was dedicated to work in these regions of Kurdistan. They formed a good number of cadres in the neighborhoods and regional committees in each of the cities, with more and more popular acceptance. So much so that on different occasions Öcalan went directly to these places to hold mass meetings with the organized groups and motivate them to join the struggle. They talked about the history of Kurdistan and the heterogeneous composition of its society. They read texts on the history of communist parties in the world and various writings of Lenin. Although on several occasions the police were stalking such clandestine meetings, most of the time Sakine and her comrades managed to dodge any suspicion. They applied a myriad of strategies to evade surveillance and state operations. They would sometimes change addresses to live or meet, burn physical evidence of pamphlets and communiqués, circulate weapons and ammunition in different locations, and regularly posed as students when they arrived in a new neighborhood.
For Sakine, the covert political work worked well in the schools, from those specializing in the arts to the health colleges. Many young women students joined the movement during these years and counterbalanced the propaganda carried out by the fascists. On one occasion, the group in charge of the organization’s military actions carried out an operation against the fascist mayor of Bingöl. During the escape, some comrades were wounded. When they managed to reach the apartment and hide, Sakine had to heal one of them from a bullet wound. Feeling the pain of the colleague was very hard for Sakine who started to cry. Other colleagues reproached her that she was too sensitive, that she had to be “strong”. During this event, Sakine also reflected on the emotional dimension as something that is also part of the revolutionary struggle and therefore had to be accepted, because “when you love, strong emotions are inevitable”. She criticized her comrades for their comments against her, but accepted that in the revolutionary struggle there are certain costs to be considered.
With this social base established, it was decided to create a body with a certain democratic centrality. Sakine was present at the Founding Congress. It was attended by all the most important cadres of the movement, the “brains” of the revolutionary process. Sakine and Kesire were the only two women at this historic event for the Kurdish people. In a first long and profound speech, Abdullah Öcalan spoke about the conditions of the national liberation struggle and what kind of strategies had to be forged for a Leninist organization. A draft political program and a statute were drawn up. Afterwards, the reports of the work that each one coordinated in each region were poured out, which allowed for a more accurate diagnosis of how the struggle was being approached in all of Kurdistan. From that moment, Sakine took the floor and spoke of what they had done in Elaziğ, placed the emphasis on the work with women and was critical that this objective had not been enhanced in any place where the males did not even involve their wives or sisters in the revolutionary work. Once the meeting progressed a minimal party structure was established. Öcalan was elected as Secretary General and committee representatives were elected by region, as well as the name: Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Some ideas for the flag were sketched out and a commission was charged with drafting a communiqué. With this event the PKK was born, although it remained a secret for some time until it was made public through the dissemination of the text.
After the founding of the party and in high spirits, Sakine traveled to various parts of Kurdistan with the firm idea of strengthening the organizational spaces through local cadres and committees in the face of the growing climate of repression by the Turkish state, which was concerned about the emergence of the Kurdish movement. However, “the struggle for national liberation took root and continued to develop […] the people of Kurdistan had found the path of resurrection. The fire of freedom spread”. In particular, Sakine had the idea to ask her colleagues in each village where she worked to write something about the women of their village, their particularities and ways of life. This input was very relevant to be able to have an information base with which to start the organizational work of women as a particular objective of the party, as she had the support of Öcalan and the Central Committee for this task. This was the beginning of the Women’s Committee that was coordinated by Sakine, which represented the first formation of a particular structure of Kurdish women: “That was very welcome news. I was nervous and happy. To raise the women’s movement!” she recounts with emotion in the book.
The first task Sakine had was to start a research to gather knowledge about theory and practice of women’s movements around the world, from the past to the present, in order to draw conclusions for the case of Kurdistan. The revolutionary organization of women already had certain concrete elements in Dersim, Bingöl and Elaziğ. This was the beginning of the women’s movement that today, more than forty years later, is an example of dignity worldwide. In 1979 Sakine was arrested in her apartment during a police raid. One of her companions had been arrested earlier and had given away the group’s operations. She was tortured and sent to prison in the city of Amed, but her unbreakable spirit could not be stopped by bars.
Reading this autobiographical work is an apprenticeship for the internationalists of the 21st century in at least three ways. First, because it presents very profound aspects of the revolutionary struggle, in this case of the Kurdish people, that can only be explained from an endogenous point of view. This is an example of the relevance of the actors themselves systematizing or producing a story about their militant experiences in order to give a collective meaning to the contributions of each personal trajectory in the construction of other worlds. For several decades, Latin America has had several records of this type, especially in processes of armed struggle. For example, the book by Omar Cabezas on his guerrilla experience in Nicaragua with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (“La montaña es algo más que una estepa verde”) or the work of Roger Blandino in El Salvador with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (“Y seguimos de frente”). There are also several texts that are not exactly autobiographical, written by the protagonists of the struggles themselves, but which include a broad political analysis with the background of the experience. This is the exemplary case of the writings of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on the Cuban revolution or the books of the Quechua peasant leader Hugo Blanco in Peru (“We the Indians”). In tune, the texts of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico use diverse narrative tools such as story, metaphor and sense of humor. We must return to writing as a way of analyzing our times and the challenges we face.
A second sense that is striking in the case of “All My Life Was a Struggle” is that Sakine offers concrete evidence of the value of criticism and self-criticism (Tekmil) as the essence of a radical political practice. Throughout the book we can insert ourselves into the author’s subjectivity because she constantly reflects on her praxis, in a way that positions us with respect to her own questioning of the revolution and its contradictions. In this way, the episodes Sakine narrates, which deal with the personal, family, community and political organization dimensions, are crossed by a systematic ideological exercise of criticism that accounts for the daily struggle against the inertias of the dominant system itself in social relations. This is one of the great contributions of the Kurdish liberation movement to the anti-capitalist world, which was raised with exceptional lucidity by Abdullah Öcalan in several writings. Being one of the founders of the PKK, Sakine assumed this exercise as part of her daily life and it served her as a method to discover the traps of capitalist modernity and at the same time to rethink herself as a product of democratic modernity.
Another of the meanings that the book contributes has to do with the exercise of memory about historical events that changed the future of an entire oppressed nation. In Sakine’s work it is very clear that the central point is how women emerged in the Kurdish liberation movement. Sakine’s book is the beginning of a long process of reflection on the vanguard place of women in the path of emancipatory movements. The book shows an initial fragment of the history of the autonomous struggle of Kurdish women that patriarchy has tried to erase. In this sense, knowing from the inside this cultural change, how the women’s movement developed, the challenges they had to face and the positions of men regarding this process are essential elements for understanding the current struggles of women in the Middle East, as well as the dialogues with other feminist or diverse women’s struggles in the world. Since that time they have built their own structures parallel to the PKK starting in 1987 with the founding of the Patriotic Union of Women of Kurdistan and the decision in 1993 to form an all-female army. Since 2008 the Kurdish Women’s Movement has been working on the formation of Jineology, a women’s science that explores from its own perspective patriarchal domination, capitalism and the state to find the foundations of power and oppression. With this exercise, Jineology attempts to offer an alternative point of view to the dominant analyses, considering the oppression of women as the starting point of patriarchy, but also showing with evidence the workings of matriarchal society to tell “the story of freedom,” as Öcalan noted. Sakine’s legacy moves in this direction and we still have much to learn. Her struggle contributed a lot to this “revolution within the revolution”, which was written in the heart of every Kurdish woman who dreams of freedom and of all of us who were somehow infected by the dream of changing everything.
[1] Dersim was the last city to be subdued after the founding of the new Turkish republic. After several attempts to assimilate the region into the new state, Turkey carried out the bloodiest military campaign up to that time. Between 1937 and 1938, a Kurdish-Alevi uprising took place there. The Turkish state reacted with the genocide of more than 60,000 people. Thousands were displaced. Turkey practiced a scorched earth policy. It drowned mothers with their children in rivers and locked the rural population in caves by burning them alive. Atatürk’s (Mustafa Kemal) government was aligned with Italian fascism and German Nazism.
[2] Belief or religion that some consider part of Islam. They recognize Ali as a prophet, hence the name Alevism. In the Dersim region, 90% of its inhabitants are considered to be Alevis, as opposed to the Sunni majority in Turkey and neighboring countries.
Source:
https://www.kurdistanamericalatina.org/el-legado-internacionalista-de-la-kurda-sakine-canzis/Translation: ANF English
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/02/29/the-internationalist-legacy-of-sakine-cansiz/
#feminism #internationalism #kurdistan #pkk #SakineCansız #westAsia
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Kurdish revolutionary Sakine Cansız (Sara), co-founder of the PKK and a leading figure in women’s struggle, was murdered on 9 January 2013, along with Fidan Doğan (Rojbîn) and Leyla Şaylemez (Ronahî) in Paris by a hitman from the Turkish Secret Service MIT. Yet, martyrs live on in the memories of millions of people.
Salîm Omer shared his memories of Sakine Cansız in this ANF interview. Salîm Omer lived in Damascus between 1977 and the Rojava Revolution. He got to know the PKK in 1980. At this time, the PKK had retreated to Syria to reorganize and prepare for the liberation struggle. This triggered a process of awareness among many Kurds, including Salîm Omer.
“Heval Sara changed the path my life”
Omer said: “The discussions about returning to North Kurdistan took place in 1982-1983 because the resistance in the prisons was under huge pressure. It was decided that a new way of fighting was necessary. It was in such an environment that I saw Heval Sara’s photo in a magazine. Of course, I didn’t know who she was at the time. But the photo caught my attention. It was a photo of two women. When I asked, I was told that she was Sakine Cansız, one of the founders of the PKK. With Sakine Cansız I realized that there were women in the PKK. There were no women in the parties in Rojavayê Kurdistanê. The reason for my association with the PKK was that it was different from other Kurdish movements. Heval Sara was both a woman and a leading figure. I was particularly impressed when I heard about their resistance to torture in the Amed prison. That changed the path of my life.”
“She changed people”
In 1992, the PKK leadership was in Lebanon. There, Omer Abdullah visited Öcalan and met Sakine Cansız for the first time. Omer said: “I had the opportunity to visit Rêber Apo [Abdullah Öcalan] in 1992. I also met Heval Sara there. A friend pointed to Heval Sara and said that she had just been released from prison and had just arrived there. The first thing that came to mind was the photo published in this magazine. That photo is burned into my memory. She was just as impressive as in the photo. I walked up to her and told her that I wanted to take a photo together. She was happy and we took a photo together. I still have the photo with me. The enthusiasm of the people, the presence of such a large crowd made Heval Sara happy. People’s joy gave her morale and enthusiasm. She was as happy as the people.
Everyone wanted to see Sakine Cansız. At that time, no woman had ever been seen to put up so much resistance. People who knew the freedom struggle closely had heard that she did not submit to the Turkish state’s torture and spoke of it with pride. The knowledge that she was one of the founding figures of the PKK increased people’s solidarity. Heval Sara was a role model.”
“We are indebted to her”
Omer continued: “The resistance of Heval Sara went down in history and became legendary. She was a determined, great and resilient leading figure and revolutionary. She was a hard-to-find symbol and role model for society. She showed us the way. Her death was a great loss and we are still in mourning to this day. The fact that she fell affected us deeply, but it also made our people stronger. She had a fearless and free spirit and was a comrade of Rêber Apo. As long as we breathe, we are indebted to revolutionary figures like Heval Sara and will follow them.”
https://anfenglishmobile.com/rojava-syria/omer-sakine-cansiz-continues-to-live-in-the-minds-of-millions-of-people-71189
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🌄Ce Samedi 6 janvier nous étions à Paris avec l' #unioncommunistelibertaire et #DiePlattform dans le cortège internationaliste de #serhildan , au coté de nos camarades kurdes pour exiger vérité et justice pour #fidandogan #leylasaylemez #sakinecansiz #EmîneKara #mirperwer et #abdurrahmankizil militant•es Kurdes assassiné•es à Paris en 2013 et 2022.
L'implication des services secrets Turc est démontrée mais l'État français continue à se rendre complice de l'État fasciste Turc, notamment en refusant de lever le secret défense entourant les assassinats de 2013 ou en considérant les meurtres politiques de 2022 simplement comme l'oeuvre d'un raciste isolé.
S'était aussi un moment important pour rappeler notre soutien à la révolution en cours au #rojava , plus que jamais attaquée sous la forme d'une guerre de "basse intensité" par la Turquie (entre autres exemples des attaques de drones détruisant les infrastructures civiles ou ciblant des militant•es révolutionnaires).
JUSTICE POUR TOUS•TES LES CAMARADES ASSASSINÉ•ES❗
SEHÎD NEMIRIN, LES MARTYRS NE MEURENT PAS❗ -
Einige von waren gestern zusammen mit Genoss*innen der anderen Plattform Lokalgruppen aus Dortmund, Köln, Trier (...) auch am Start in #Paris im Block der Union Communiste Libertare
bei der Demo zur Erinnerungen an die ermordeten kurdischen Genossinnen (#SakineCansiz
#FidanDogan #LeylaSaylemez ) und für die Freiheit der Völker #Kurdistan|s!Denn #Anarchismus heißt #Internationalismus!
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[on partage]
🌄Rassemblement vérité et justice pour les camarades kurdes assassiné•es✌️
🗓️ Samedi 23 décembre
⏰ 11h
➡️ Brest, place libertéLe 9 janvier 2013 #SakineCansiz, #FidanDogan et #LeylaSaylemez, 3 militantes kurdes du mouvement des femmes, sont assassinées à Paris sous ordre des services secrets Turc.
Le 23 décembre 2022, trois autres militant•es kurdes, #EvînGoyî #MirPerwer #AbdurrahmanKizil sont, de nouveau, tué•es en plein Paris dans les locaux du centre démocratique Kurde de France.
l'État français n'a toujours pas fait la lumière sur ces deux attaques sur son sol alors que l'implication de l'État turc ne fait pas le moindre doute.
Réclamons vérité et justice pour tous les camarades kurdes assassiné•es✌️
Communiqué du Centre Démocratique Kurde de France ici 👇
https://cdkf.fr/deux-attentats-terroristes-6-kurdes-tues-a-paris-toujours-pas-de-justice/ -
✨Metîn Arslan über Şehîd Sara: Ein Dutzend Frauen wie Sara könnten die Welt verändern
Metîn Arslan hat mit unserer Nachrichtenagentur über seine Begegnungen mit Heval Sara gesprochen, ihre revolutionären Eigenschaften als freie Frau hervorgehoben und sich mit uns, im Zuge des 10. Jahrestages ihrer Ermordung in Paris, an sie erinnert.
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Şehîd namırın! In memory of Sakine Cansız (Sara), Fidan Doğan (Rojbîn) & Leyla Şaylemez (Ronahî), 09.1.2013 killed by Turkish MİT in #Paris.
#Antifa #NeverForget #SaraRojbinRonahi #JusticePourSakineFidanLeyla #Justice4KurdishWomen #JinJiyanAzadi #SakineCansız #FidanDoğan #LeylaŞaylemez #ParisMassacreOfKurds #ParisAntifa #KeinVergessen
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Včera vyšlo do ulic #Paříž 25000 Kurdů a internacionalistů, aby si připomněli 10. výročí vraždy spoluzakladatelky Kurdslé strany pracujících (PKK) #SakineCansiz a dalších 2 aktivistek, #FidanDogan a #LeylaSaylemez, kterou ve městě spáchal 9. 1. 2013 agent turecké tajné služby MIT.
Vzpomínat znamená bojovat! No justice, no peace!
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Cemil Kara: “Das was wir von Heval Sara gelernt haben machen wir zu unserer Lebensgrundlage”
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Colloque : Devoir de vérité et justice, 10 ans après le féminicide à Paris des militantes kurdes Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan et Leyla Saylemez
jeudi 12 à 9h, Salle Victor Hugo, Paris
https://www.agendamilitant.org/Colloque-Devoir-de-verite-et-justice-10-ans-apres-le-feminicide-a-Paris-des.html #Kurdes #SakineCansiz #FidanDogan #LeylaSaylemez #impunité -
10 ans après, la Turquie a commis un nouvel attentat terroriste contre les Kurdes à Paris - Appel à une grande marche
demain à 10h, Gare du Nord - Denain, Paris
https://www.agendamilitant.org/10-ans-apres-la-Turquie-a-commis-un-nouvel-attentat-terroriste-contre-les.html #Kurdes #SakineCansiz #FidanDogan #LeylaSaylemez #impunité #VéritéEtJustice #CrimesPolitiques -
Il y avait ce matin une réunion pour la commémoration de l'attentat qui avait tué trois militantes kurdes, #SakineCansiz, #FidanDogan et #LeylaSaylemez, le 9 janvier 2013.
Que ce soit lié ou non, il s'agit encore une fois d'un attentat politique, raciste.---
RT @Le_CDKF
COLLOQUE:
"Triple assassinat des militantes kurdes #SakineCansiz, #FidanDogan et #LeylaSaylemez
10 ANS APRÈS, où en est le devoir de Justice et de Vérité?"
Jeudi 12/01, 1…
https://twitter.com/Le_CDKF/status/1606187064013094912 -
V centru #Paříž dnes došlo k útoku na kurdské kulturní centrum. Po střelbě zústali na místě 3 mrtví a několik zraněných. Policie zadržela 69letého Francouze. Ten byl v minulosti stíhán kvůli útoku na uprchlický tábor.
K útoku na kurdské kulturní centrum došlo nedlouho před 10. výročím vraždy spoluzakladatelky Kurdské strany pracujících (PKK) #SakineCansiz, a dalších dvou aktivistek, #FidanDogan a #LeylaSaylemez agentem turecké tajné služby MIT, ke které došlo 9. 1. 2013 také v Paříži.
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I quiet remember the incident and as today I am convinced it was a scheme organized by Erdogan or its alike.
I live in Paris, not far from Gare du Nord. I also remember the cold blooded murder of 3 kurdish women activists, #fidandoğan #SakineCansiz and #leylaşaylemez, in the center of the city.
Their name shall not be forgotten.It is now acknowledged it was a turkish gunman manipulated by #MIT, the turkish secret service, who perpetrated the terrorist attack.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_murder_of_Kurdish_activists_in_Paris
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#AssassineesParLeMIT
#TripleMeurtre2013 #KurdistanDemain, cela fera 8 ans que, le 9 janvier 2013, #SakineCansiz, #FidanDoğan et #LeylaŞaylemez, trois femmes kurdes, responsables au #PKK et au #PNK, ont été assassinées en plein jour, avec calme et détermination par les #ServicesSecretsTurcs.
Selon la "justice" française, un tueur à gage, arrêté et décédé en prison aurait été l'unique responsable de l'attentat, tout seul, comme un grand.
Difficile à croire tant l'action avait été longuement planifiée et parfaitement exécutée.
Mais la justice française, en toute impartialité certainement, à décidé de renoncer à instruire le procès.Rien à voir, sans doute, avec une volonté française et européenne de ménager la #Turquie.
#Erdovan le nationaliste, qui considére les kurdes comme "des cafards" négocie habilement et fait payer très cher à nos #RepubliquesBananieres, l'aide d'Istanbul, dans la lutte contre l'immigration par voie terrestre.Aujourd'hui, à Paris, une manifestation réunissant plusieurs centaines de personnes à marché pour réclamer la tenue d'un procès.
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Sara's Traces in Rojava: Free Kurdistan and Free Women
https://www.amwenglish.com/articles/-sara-s-traces-in-rojava-free-kurdistan-and-free-woman-/