NewrozDijwar-SinemAkgül/JINHA

HEWLER– With the Second World Women's Conference called for 2016 in Kathmandu, Nepal, Kurdish women say they are preparing to work for the attendance of all women in the Middle East at the conference. The conference is expected to draw radical women's organizations from around the world.

The First World Women's Conference took place in Caracas, Venezuela in 2011. The conference brought together diverse radical women's movements on the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. Women have called a second conference, to take place from March 13-18, 2016 in Kathmandu, with the slogan "women of the world climbing the highest mountains."Women's organizations from 40 countries, most of them anticapitalist, are expected to attend the conference.

MeralÇiçek is a member of the executive board of REPAK (Kurdish Women's Relations Center), one of two Kurdish women's organizations working alongside women's organizations representing women of Palestine, Tunisia and Turkey to coordinate Middle East attendance at the conference.

According to Meral, one of the reasons they pushed for the conference in Nepal was to secure the attendance of women from Asia—including India, China, the Phillipines, and Bangladesh. She said the Kurdish women's movement previously based much of its international activity out of Europe, where many Kurdish women were exiled, due to violence in Kurdistan.

Now, says Meral, she sees this as an opportunity for women from Kurdistan to build bonds of solidarity with women from Asia. She said that when she traveled to Kathmandu to coordinate the meeting, women in Nepal, which has a history of women's guerrilla struggle against the monarchy, wanted to know the reality behind women's armed resistance in Kurdistan. The Kurdish women's movement will be putting together panels on the ideology of women's liberation in Kurdistan.

The conference will involve specifically Middle East-focused panels as well, with women from Kurdistan joining other Middle Eastern women to discuss women's role in democratizing the Middle East.

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