Sarya Gözüoğlu-Medya Cebe/JINHA


AMED – The Kurdish women’s organization Congress of Free Women (KJA) explains that they have been engaged in a project of setting up women’s election bureaus to help women autonomously organize for Turkey’s upcoming June election.

The KJA, like many women’s and feminist organizations in Turkey, has in the past announced support for the opposition party Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which is running the highest percentage of women candidates (48%) of any party in the election. Gender parity has long been a key cornerstone that Kurdish women have pushed for in the Kurdish movement and now in national politics. The KJA is now working to set up autonomous women’s election offices to organize women’s campaigning.

“We are saying that this is a women’s party and we’re doing everything necessary for a women’s party,” said Bermal Birtek, who works with the KJA and the Kurdish civil society group Democratic Societies Congress (DTK). The group is working to set up autonomous women’s election headquarters in every province in the region, including in small towns, to push for women to take an active role in the election campaign.

Chief on Kurdish women’s agenda is the end of the war between the Turkish state and the PKK and the freedom of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. Recently, a spate of racist attacks on HDP offices and provocative military operations from the Turkish military have raised concern that the ruling party will resort to violence to sabotage the HDP’s rising support and the public demand for a peace process.

“If we don’t work as women in this process, blood will be spilled,” said Zeynep. “We have to know that if we want the war to come to an end, if we want the peace process to go well, if we want there to be equality and peace, this will happen through women’s labor.”

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