A Road Unforeseen
Page 15
“As it became clearer . . . I left my family and secretly went to Ankara. Maybe it was just our weakness to fail to convince the family and to provide proper conditions so that I could stay and join the fight there. However, as a woman, I couldn’t display a strong resistance against all those pressures and approaches. As I developed a strong will to absolutely take part in the movement and to dedicate my everything to it, I objected to the pressures and insisted on revolutionism.”2
In Ankara, she went to the university neighborhood to look for people she knew and saw a group sitting under a tree around Ocalan. She listened to their discussion with great excitement, and soon became part of the study group around him that engaged in debate and ideological struggle, held meetings, and went on marches. She was arrested in Izmir, but after her release came back and, with the group, “conducted training activities,” then went to Elazig to engage in popular education, speaking at high schools around the area. Gultan Kisanak, another Alevi Kurd, who later became a mayor of Diyarbakir, remembered hearing Cansiz speak “during my senior high school years at an all-girls teachers training school. Sakine Cansiz . . . came to us and began telling us about the Kurdish cause and how we needed to organize. The PKK had not yet been officially formed but Abdullah Ocalan . . . had started to plan a strategy for the Kurdish nationalist movement. The PKK’s co-founders included like-minded Turkish revolutionaries as well. . . . She was incredibly practical and dynamic. She left a big impression.”3
In 1978 the Ocalan study group moved toward forming a party and Cansiz was appointed a delegate to the First Party Congress. The Congress assigned Cansiz to “propaganda-agitation works predominantly in Antep and then in Elaziğ in time. We were producing our notice papers, leaflets and other means of propaganda and agitation and sending them to other regions. I stayed in Elazig and took an active part in works until I was arrested.”4
That was in 1979, when, in the leadup to the military coup, activists were being picked up and sent to Diyarbakir prison, noted for its brutality. Gultan Kisanak was there also. She later described the treatment the women suffered: insults, curses, and harassment; sexual abuse; torture with bandoliers, police clubs, planks, sticks, bayonets, electric cables, and hosepipes. Kisanak told an interviewer: “The whole world now knows what went on there. The abuse was of barbaric proportions. People died, killed themselves. It was an inferno. There was torture around the clock. But I don’t see any merit in debating Diyarbakir prison in these terms. The worst thing they did was to try to steal our honor. And if one talks about the sexual abuse then they will have succeeded. This is what they want. There is no need to go into details. It’s obvious. All the prison staff from the wardens up were male and part of the military. They tried to beat us down, to rob us of our dignity, to stamp out our Kurdishness, to crush our feminine identity. The torture was unrelenting. But we resisted.”5
Kisanek says morale building by Sakine Cansiz was the main reason the women held up so well under torture. “The key is that we stuck together. There was a unique sense of solidarity among us. If a physically frail woman was singled out for punishment, say for speaking Kurdish, a stronger one would step forward and bear the punishment instead. We used to help each other bathe. There was no hot water. We would wash secretly in the toilet by using a small bowl that we would fill with water from the kettle. The winters were freezing cold. The summers could be unbearable because at times there were as many as 85 of us in a single cell. . . . The proof of our resilience is that unlike some of the male prisoners not a single woman broke down and became an informer. And Sakine’s contribution was paramount in this regard.”6
Cansiz spent ten years in prison. After her release, she went through the required cadre training course at the Mahsum Korkmaz Academy, then insisted on going to the mountains to fight. Using the code name Sara, she served under Osman Ocalan in northern Iraq and became the leading voice of women in the PKK. Mehmet Ali Ertas of the pro-Kurdish DIHA news agency called Cansiz “the most prominent and most important female Kurdish activist. She did not shy away from speaking her mind, especially when it came to women’s issues.”7
She spoke her mind in 1991 about the murder of Mehmet Sener, her comrade from prison. She did not think he was a traitor and said it was wrong to execute him.8 After this, she was removed from active military duty but, unlike Sener, she was not sentenced to death and unlike Kesire Yildirim, she did not feel she had to leave the PKK. She was probably protected by her immense prestige and Ocalan’s respect for her. In an interrogation after his capture, he said, “I started the women’s movement to free [women] from the feudalism of men and to create a strong type of woman. I wanted lively discussions. In relation to that I do remember the name of Sakine Polat [Cansiz].” He added: “In mind and emotions she is loyal to the party.”9
After leaving the army, she was sent to Europe in 1992. After a stint in Germany, she settled in France and continued to work for the PKK as an organizer and fund-raiser—according to Wikileaks, the US Embassy in Ankara identified her as one of the PKK’s “most notorious financiers” and sought her capture.10 She is also credited with recruiting a number of women who became suicide bombers in the nineties.11
“She was always plainspoken and was not afraid of an argument, even with her own organisation. Sakine Cansiz was a fighter,” said Eren Keskin, a lawyer who first met Cansiz in 1991 while defending members of the PKK. “Sakine was a feminist before everything else. She possessed a woman’s perspective, even on war.”12
Because the PKK was first and foremost a guerrilla organization, the strength of women’s voices was intimately related to their military strength. Aliza Marcus estimated that, by 1993, one-third of the new PKK recruits were women.13 This influx prompted the formation of the first separate women’s guerrilla units that year. A PKK essay on the subject quoted Ocalan as saying, “a woman’s army is not only a requirement for the war against the patriarchal system, but is also a requirement in opposition to sexist mindsets within the freedom movement. Instead of traditional lifestyles and relationships, relationships based on freedom must be adopted; the synthetic dependence of women to men must be overcome by free choice.”14
But despite the growing number of women in guerrilla units, patriarchal ideas lingered. A 1997 German analysis of the PKK, signed by Andreas (Marburg), pointed at some of the contradictions that arose from traditional gender relations, such as “Men who want to hinder an independent development of women and hold onto their positions of power and don’t want to accept women as commanders,” and “Women who hang onto men and can’t get rid of their dependence and have no self-confidence, have avoided leadership positions, and don’t want to accept other women in those positions.” The author reported that PKK leadership recognized that “in order to destroy the roles that have been around for centuries, the strengthening of women became a necessity. Independent women’s militias had to be established.”15
These women-only units were key in giving women the confidence and leadership experience to make the leap to a fully separate women’s army. At the Fifth Congress, the PKK resolved to form such an army, which was named the Free Women of Kurdistan Troops (YJAK), and later became YJA-Star. According to an article on the Kurdistan women’s liberation movement in a PKK online journal, its purpose was to enable members “to develop their own social and political perspective instead of copying male-like characteristics or assuming themselves as a back-up force.”16 The Fifth Congress’s resolution in January 1995 made it clear that the PKK saw this initiative as one of long-term strategic importance and a first step in forming autonomous women’s organizations that would parallel all the other structures of the PKK:
“This army seeks to destroy all the characteristics and modes of conduct created by the status quo of class society. Therefore, it’s not only of military significance that a women’s army be created, but rather it is significant for all aspects of our movement. In all sectors of the economy, all social institutions, and even in the
realm of culture, organizations will be created and modeled after this army. It will be largely the responsibility of women militants in leadership positions to realize the potential of women to organize, become educated, and join the struggle. . . . The goal of this is not simply to achieve independence for women, to make them reliant on their own strengths and not be dependent on men, and to achieve their full resistance and struggle potential, but this will also play an important role in the development of men. In this sense, work and living together will be characterized by freedom, equality, and comradery.”17
An interview at the time with “a representative of the Free Women’s Movement of Kurdistan (TAJK), who has herself taken part in the guerrilla struggle” further described the importance of a women’s army: “In order to gain full recognition in Kurdish society and among the guerrillas, a military mode of organisation has to be introduced alongside the political one. In this way women have the possibility of developing independently, freely and to stand on their own feet, without feeling themselves to be mere shadows of the men. Each free practical step taken on her own accustoms the woman to build confidence in herself. The achievement of the ‘revolution’ can only come to fruition via a women’s army.”18
Prior to the development of the single-sex units, “Female commanders rarely found that the role they played was an acceptable one in the eyes of either men or women,” according to the woman ex-guerrilla leader being interviewed. “Some men still found it difficult to take orders from women commanders. Equally, at first they did not receive respect from women either. The inferiority complex of women resulting from social conditioning was the decisive reason for this failure to accept women commanders. At the same time the fact that a woman could become a commander could be a source of self-confidence for women.”
Mixed-sex units in other revolutionary groups have had similar problems. In the 1930s, three thousand women participated in the Long March of China’s Red Army, fighting the Kuomintang and warlords as they went. Two thousand were in its Women’s Independence Brigade, but rather than engage in actual combat, they mainly provided supply and logistical support, and built roads and bridges. After the Long March, all the special women’s units were disbanded; women were integrated into the regular military and, during the anti-Japanese war, they were sent away from the front lines into support functions.19
After World War II, women guerrillas were more common in mixed units in liberation struggles. They were active in Asia in China, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Nepal; in Africa in Angola, Eritrea, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe; and in Latin America in Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the battles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico—and this is far from an exhaustive list. In the sixties, their images were everywhere: a Vietnamese women shooting down an American fighter plane; an African woman with a baby on her back and a rifle in her arms; Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled wearing a keffiyeh and holding a gun. But they rarely achieved leadership roles or led male troops. In the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, female peshmerga members were no longer allowed on the front lines after 2013.20
Many national liberation struggles sought to enlist women in combat mainly because they needed more soldiers, not because the men running things saw a battle for women’s rights and autonomy as essential to the struggle. In addition, male soldiers, or at least the commanders, sometimes assumed women fighters were sexually available, whether by choice or not.21
In her work on the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, Maxine Molyneux discussed the reasoning behind many woman friendly policies: “The policies from which women derived some benefit were pursued principally because they fulfilled some wider goal or goals, whether these were social welfare, development, social equality, or political mobilization in defense of the revolution. . . . This kind of qualified support for women’s emancipation is found in most of the states that have pursued socialist development policies.”22
After victory, such movements have often passed laws that improved women’s lives economically, but their male leaders have seldom wanted to change their own behavior or share the sources of real power. They may have women loyal to them run parts of government they don’t think are very important, like education or social services, while keeping a firm grip on finances, patronage, and the military.
Because the empowerment of women has so seldom been a priority for movements engaged in armed struggle, the PKK’s emphasis on building an autonomous women’s army was remarkable. Their explicit intention was not merely to increase the number of fighters but to actually strengthen women cadre and change the consciousness of both sexes.
By 1997, five thousand women were fighting in the separate women’s militias and eleven thousand more were in mixed units. The women’s militias had their own commanders and planned their own actions. At the time, some mixed units had women commanders as well. In 1999, the PKK formed a parallel women’s party structure for the same reasons it had organized the women’s militias and army. After several name changes, it became the Party of Free Women of Kurdistan (PAJK). With some pressure by women in the PAJK, PKK military camps at Qandil even began to share housework between the sexes.23
In a traditional rural culture where women were subordinated to men, not having to wash men’s socks must have felt revolutionary; it certainly did to one young woman interviewed by The Guardian in August 2015: “Hejîn, a young woman who left home over four years ago, comes from a poor family in a neighbouring province where she was herding sheep instead of going to school. She jokes about her broken Turkish, but says she learned to read and write in the mountain camps of the PKK. ‘I learned about many things there,’ she recalls. ‘For the first time I experienced an egalitarian lifestyle. Back at home I never dared to speak up with anyone, especially not with men. In our organisation, we share all the tasks equally. It is considered deeply shameful to wash another man’s socks, for example, and we all cook together.’”24
Or, as Nesrin Abdullah, a commander in the Rojava women’s army, the YPJ, put it, in implicit contrast with the women who joined the Iraqi peshmerga, which was a paid job, and where they were expected to go home at night to take care of homes and families, “We are not soldiers, we are militants; we are not paid to make war, we are partisans of revolution. We live with our people, follow a philosophy and have a political project. At the same time we are carrying out a gender struggle against the patriarchal system.”25
Although not all militant Kurdish women took up arms, the women’s militias and the idea of women’s self-defense deeply affected consciousness. Newroz Seroxan, who worked in the Cizire canton’s committee for work and social projects, said that at first many of the local women had a “patriarchal mindset” and were reluctant to get involved in work or political activity outside their homes. But they were inspired by interacting with women guerrillas. At the time she was interviewed in 2015, 60 percent of the local workforce was female. “If women can fight and carry a gun, that means they can do anything—this is the approach that has developed in society.”26
The PKK’s emphasis on building a women’s army contrasts with the more common feminist approach of protesting militarism and imperialism and trying to develop a women’s peace movement. As described by sociologist Cynthia Cockburn, this focused on gender relations in war, critiquing “the persistence of male dominance, accompanied (and indeed achieved) by the insistent shaping of masculinity, the ideal, preferred, form of manhood, as mentally competitive and combative; psychologically ready to use coercion; and physically equipped to prevail through force.”27
The signal achievement of the women’s peace movement was the adoption of Resolution 1325 by the UN Security Council in 2000, spearheaded by the work of WILPF, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization which dates back to World War I. Resolution 1325 notes the particular kinds of impact war has on women and girls and calls for a gender perspective in peace negotiations and postwar programs, including the presence of women at the negotiating table.
While 1325 was a significant breakthrough, the daily life problems of making peace require additional measures. A major issue is the way people at the negotiating table are selected, since such negotiations are usually structured by the UN and regional powers rather than those on the ground. The Kurds, for example, have been repeatedly excluded from negotiations on Syria because of pressure by Turkey.28 And more attention is needed to practical means and programs beyond the negotiating table, as outlined in the Nairobi Declaration of 2007, which addressed the need for special reparations and restorative practices for women.29
Many of the actions of the women’s peace movement can be seen as a form of street theater, dramatizing a claim to power by people who do not have the capacity to actually get it. Because there never was a peace treaty at the end of the Korean War in 1953, for instance, prominent international feminists, including Gloria Steinem and Nobel peace prizewinners Leymah Gbowee and Maire McGuire, made a six-day trip to North Korea in 2015. Dressed in white with colored sashes, they then held a peace march in a nearby city of South Korea.
Steinem said there was an analogy between victims of domestic violence and the citizens of the divided Koreas. She called on women to use their experience of life as mothers and nurturers to give Koreans “proof of a humane alternative” to the status quo. Unburdened by male needs to show aggressive masculinity, she said that women had a “special ability to make connections between people.”30
Iraqi Kurdish activist Houzan Mahmoud took issue with such claims: “To those who wish to see women return to their stereotypical roles as peace brokers and peace makers, I would ask exactly who are they supposed to be making peace with? With ISIS, who are one of the most brutal terrorist organisations on the face of the planet; who have as their main mission to drag society back into the dark ages; who force female children and women into Jihad Alnikah [sexual jihad], who rape and sell them in slave markets under their own control? . . . In the case of Kurdish women, taking up arms and fighting on the front line is perhaps their best option. To refuse to become slaves, to be raped, killed or ruled by Islamic Sharia Law under ISIS is only viable through armed resistance.”31