Rien will never be the same in Iran since the arrest, on September 13, of Mahsa Amini by the morality police in Tehran, for not having worn her veil strictly enough, imposed by the Islamic Republic on all women in the country. . Beaten up at the police station, she was transported into a deep coma to the hospital where she died three days later. The martyrdom of this 22-year-old woman, instead of remaining a sinister news story, raised a wave of protest that soon spread to the whole country. The slogan “Woman, life, freedom” resounded in unprecedented demonstrations, which government repression, despite its bloody brutality, was unable to stifle. Abroad, it is this same slogan, declined in all local languages, which is chanted in solidarity rallies. This rallying cry, however, already has a long history, inseparable from a certain Kurdish militancy.
A feminist triptyche
It was probably in April 2013, in Ankara, that the slogan “Woman, life, freedom” resounded for the first time, during the congress of the women’s branch of the BDP (Peace and Democracy Party), a predominantly Kurdish and historically linked to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). The founder of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned in Turkey since 1999, has just called for a suspension of hostilities between the separatist guerrillas and the Erdogan government. The ceasefire thus concluded is accompanied by the transfer to Syria of Kurdish fighters, the famous peshmergas, who are leaving the Bakurthe Turkish “North” of their dream Kurdistan, to settle in Rojava, the west of this Kurdistan to come (in the same spirit, Iranian Kurdistan is called by independence activists “Rohjelat”, meaning the East, and Iraqi Kurdistan “Bashur”, meaning the South). This peace process allows the BDP to develop its activities in Turkey and to put forward its feminist program, with in particular quotas for equal representation.
Öcalan, whose writings are methodically studied throughout the PKK movement, considers, in fact, that “women’s liberation is the liberation of Kurdistan”. The dismantling of the patriarchal system is in his eyes inseparable from the social and national emancipation of the Kurdish people. In July 2014, the BDP dissolved into the HDP (People’s Democratic Party), which achieved an unprecedented score of 13% of the vote in the June 2015 legislative elections.
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