WUNRN
Rojava or Western Kurdistan is a de facto autonomous region in northern and north-eastern Syria.
Also Via Other Worlds
“Some resistance movements are creating new gender relations as a
primary part of their struggle and process for building a better world.”
Women Up in Arms: Zapatistas in Mexico & Rojava Kurds in Syria
Embrace a New Gender Politics
Written
by Charlotte Maria Sáenz - 18 March 2015 Resistance
and strength manifest like weeds through cracks in Chiapas, Mexico and
transnational Kurdistan where the respective Zapatista and Kurdish resistance
movements are creating new gender relations as a primary part of their
struggle and process for building a better world. In both places, women’s
participation in the armed forces has been an entry-point for a new social
construction of gender relations based on equity. While the
Kurds have been fighting for their survival against ISIS in the Syrian/Turkish
border town of Kobane, the Zapatistas put down their arms over 20 years ago
and have maintained a non-violent struggle since. In both cases, women have
fought alongside men against their own collective obliteration while making
radical changes in their gender relations. Working towards more equity makes
possible more direct democracy in building greater autonomy from the
state.[1] In both efforts, there is also a deep connection to the land[2]
that regards the value of women and the environment as essential to life
itself. In both
resistances, women took up arms to fight alongside their male counterparts,
showing both willingness and capacity to fight as soldiers.
However, their principal objective in the mountains is not military.
Rather, their most important task is to form new persons: men and women in a
more equitable relationship to each other--a relationship that is also
anti-capitalist. “Above everything, we want for our militancy to create a new
personality, one that is in complete contradiction to Capitalism,” says a
representative of the Kurdish Committee of Jineology (a committee of and for
women founded by the transnational PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), the
Kurdish Workers Party.[3] Theirs is a commitment to building democracy,
socialism, ecology and feminism. The
Zapatistas made a similar commitment to more equitable gender relations. One
of the first things to come out of their armed uprising in 1994 was the
Revolutionary Law of Women. This law spelled out 10 new rules giving women
unprecedented power over their lives, including choosing whether and whom to
marry, the right to serve on governing councils, and the right to bear arms
as milicianas, militia fighters, in the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN in Spanish). Zapatista women also asked for the law to
include a prohibition of drugs and alcohol, in order to address one of the
main causes of domestic violence. After the ceasefire only twelve days after
the uprising, many women soldiers transitioned to a non-military political
life taking unprecedented positions of governance, education, administration,
and decision-making—another ways of taking up in arms, this time with each
other and with men. For the last 21 years, both men and women have been in a
process of unlearning old gender norms, relearning how to be and relate to
each other anew, sharing both domestic and public duties. Although the
construction of gender equity is still in progress, these new relations
between men and women have been a fundamental component of the construction
of Zapatista autonomy itself. These
radical changes in gender relations are occurring in contexts of tremendous
violence and war of both high and low intensity. In Kobane, near the Turkish
border, Kurds have been upholding a heroic resistance to the ravages of ISIS
on the one hand, and the racist and repressive manipulations of the Turkish
State on the other. In Chiapas, the Zapatistas have been building their
autonomy within the increasing violence of a narco-state that dominates much
of the nation, where it is hard to discern the difference between government
and drug traffickers. In nearby Guerrero--a southwestern state in Mexico also
known for its rich natural resources, intense drug trafficking, resistance
movements and community policing--women have also joined the armed ranks of
the policia comunitaria. These armed patrols have risen to fill the vacuum
left by corrupt police on the narco-payroll, and are on the rise in various
other communities across the country. Men and women are fighting together on
these different frontlines, sometimes crossing state and national borders to
join in combat, like the many young anarchist women from Turkey who crossed
in busses into Syria to help the Kurds in Kobane resist ISIS in the past
months. Certain
parts of the 30 year-old Kurdish resistance have also taken on the project of
forging more equal relations between men and women as a crucial part of their
political project. With Kurds spread across Turkey, Syria and Iraq, the
geopolitical concept of Kurdistan has been expanded trans-nationally into
what some are describing as a “Democratic Confederalism” that transcends
nation-state borders. This is an aspiration as of yet, not a fully developed
reality, nor one embraced by all Kurds. These ideas are mainly derived from
the evolving writings of the leader of the Kurdish Workers Party, (PKK)
Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999. His
“Democratic Confederalism” aims to build a new system that works towards the
just distribution of resources as well as the conservation of the
environment. It seeks to create a society free of sexism, replacing
traditional patriarchal societies, religious interpretations, and capitalist
merchandising of women. The movement has undertaken an intense societal and
educational labor to combat the patriarchal mentalities implanted in women,
as a form of submission, and in men, in form of domination.[4] Zapatista
and Kurdish resistances have taken on a radical paradigm shift that changes
everything. In the Zapatista autonomous municipal administration center
called “Caracol de Oventic”, there is an “Office for Women’s Dignity” where
women gather to discuss the successes and failures of the Revolutionary Law
of Women. Similarly, the PKK’s “Jineology Committee” studies women’s
histories to understand the construction of hierarchies and nation-states
that erode women’s power in society. Both communities come from intense
patriarchal histories and contexts, so there is still a long way to go in
both movements. Yet in a short time they have made extraordinary gains. Women
are increasingly represented on governing councils and active in their armed
ranks, but the real revolution is seen within the domestic sphere, where
caring for children, health and home are shared labor between men and women.
Both Kurds and Zapatistas offer a living example of what is not only
possible, but of what is already being practiced and grown.[5] Working
towards what the Zapatistas would call an “Other” way of relating to each
other, men and women traverse spaces of war as well as of pastoral,
agricultural and domestic care--learning with and from each other whether in
the battlefields or making food. It is in these everyday practices of
building autonomy that we begin to unearth the possibility of another kind of
life, of another way of knowing, being with and relating to each other that
can create and nourish better ways of living. It starts with making
patriarchal habits visible. Constructing more equitable relations means a
daily practice of better, kinder ways of relating between men and women. This
is the learning for all of us to put into practice within our own places and
with our own people, not only up in arms, but also arm in arm…abrazándonos,
embracing each other. Notes: [1] For
example, Mesoamerican asambleas or the first Sumerians and the decentralized
organizations of clan and tribal configurations as described in “El
confederalismo democrático: propuesta libertaria del pueblo kurdo.” ALB
Noticias en Mar, 17 septiembre 2013. [2] “Land
and Liberty” has been the rallying cry of the Zapatistas, both then and now,
while “Land or Death” the slogan heard in the Botan district today as
reported by Heysam Mislim in “Kobane Diary: 4 Days Inside the City Fighting
an Unprecedented Resistance Against ISIS,” Newsweek, October 15, 2014. [3]
Committee of Jineology as quoted by Jorge Ricardo Ottino, writing for Resumen
Latinoamericano from mountains of Xinêre, areas of media defense, South
Kurdistan, Republic of Iraq, 3rd July 2014. [4] “El
confederalismo democrático: propuesta libertaria del pueblo kurdo.” ALB
Noticias en Mar, 17 septiembre 2013. [5] For a
more in-depth description of the Kurdish Women’s movement see https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/necla-acik/kobane-struggle-....
Charlotte
Maria Sáenz is Media and Education Coordinator for Other Worlds
and teaches at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San
Francisco, where she is a founding member of the Center for Art and Social
Justice. She has 20 years experience working globally in schools,
streets, universities, refugee camps, autonomous zones and traveling programs
in her native Mexico, throughout Lebanon, and the United States. She returns
yearly to work with Universidad de la Tierra Chiapas, Al-Jana in Beirut, and
taught on World Learning’s global traveling program “Beyond Globalization.”
She is a member of the global Learning Societies and the International
Organization for a Participatory Society. |
Women Up in Arms – Zapatistas in Mexico & Rojava Kurds in Turkey Embrace a New Gender Politics