women in london

We would like to invite you to a seminar organized by Roj Women Association

Anti-militarism and action against male dominated societies in Kurdish regions

Public seminars held by Roj Women Association and KSSO (Kurdish Studies and Students Organisation)

Patriarchal values and militarism permeate societies in Kurdish regions of the world, particularly in the South East Turkey where a conflict has been on-going for decades. In the context of an armed-struggle, politically active women have become a target for Turkish security forces. State actors target women human rights defenders who voice political beliefs unacceptable for the government (see attached summary report).

Roj Women Association would like to invite you to hear the experiences of feminist activists at the forefront of the struggle in Kurdish regions of the world. Sevim Salioglu is the Chair of the Human Rights Association in Ankara, Sawsan Salim is the Director of the Kurdish and Middle Eastern Women’s Rights Organisation in London and Ayse Butumlu is a lawyer human rights defender based in Bursa.

Friday 4th March, from 6pm to 8pm
School of Oriental and African Studies
Room VG06, Vernon Square, Penton Rise, City of London WC1X 9EW
Please note: Not Russell Square Campus

Saturday 5th March, from 3pm to 5pm
Kurdish Community Centre
Fairfax Hall, 11 Portland Gardens, London N4 1HU

We are looking forward to seeing you all.

In the crossroad of militarism and patriarchy:

State violence against women activists in Turkey

The Southeast of Turkey is mainly populated by Kurdish people, who are still not recognised as a national, racial or ethnic minority by the Turkish Constitution and thus fight for a fair treatment by the Turkish state and for self determination. There is an ongoing conflict between the Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK) and the Turkish military forces in the region; in the context of an armed-struggle violence has also a gendered dimension, particularly given the prevalence of patriarchal systems of values in the region and the country.

Women activists are not absent from the national struggle, and the violence they experience as a result is in many occasions a result of their activism in a context of conflict and of their gender. This type of violence is perpetrated by Turkish security forces.

Violence by Turkish security forces, including Army and police forces as well as gendarmes and village guards, against politically active women, particularly targets those whose activism is related to very taboo issues such as Kurdish self-determination. Torture and mistreatment by the police and the military are particularly common in the provinces of Hakkari, Sirnak, Dersim, Agri and Siirt. Journalists, human rights activists and individuals active in politics are particularly affected by these practices. This is a major problem in small towns.

Violence reported by the women detainees interviewed by the International Freedom Women Foundation includes sexual abuse such as vaginal, oral, or anal rape using penis, batons, water hoses or other materials; mass rapes; urinating into the victim’s mouth; electroshocks to breast nipples and sexual organs; forced virginity-tests; strip-searching, and stripping during questioning. Threats of rape in the presence of their husbands or other close relatives are also used. Inventive methods are deployed so that signs of torture and degrading sexual harassment, sexual threats and psychological abuse are not evident.

But many women activists are also harassed not in detention. Female members of Kurdish parties, such as the closed Democratic Society Party and the Peace and Democracy Party are exposed to verbal abuse, threatened and followed, and sexually harassed by policemen and gendarmes.

Despite the difficulties to gather and publicize information and statistics around the scale of the abuse the Legal Aid Project against Sexual Assault and Rape in Custody (LAPASAR) and The Human Rights Association (IHD) work to document it. LAPASAR has received 1,400 applications of women victims of sexual abuse while in custody within the last 10 years. Nearly 90% of these women cited political or war related reason as causes for their arrest. IHD estimates that only

10% of women abused by security forces actually come forward to complain.

In the majority of the cases the State turns a blind eye to the harassment and there is extremely poor legal support for the victims. Acts of torture and ill treatment of women are hardly ever properly investigated by the Turkish Government, thus not prosecuted and punished.

Incidences such as a criminal court in Diyarbakir allowing for the confiscation of a Kurdish newspaper, Azadiya Welat, after a complaint from the Diyarbakir police department and demands by the Diyarbakir Public Prosecutor because it reported a woman‘s claims that she had been raped by four plainclothes Diyarbakir police officers are of grave concern.

Most recently, for example, following eight years of investigation, police authorities have concluded that the charges brought by women prisoners that were raped by guards and other authorities while in prison were imagined. Eight years ago LAPASAR appealed to the Interior Ministry to investigate charges of sexual harassment.

Sükran Esen was tortured and raped by gendarmes who unofficially detained her. In the trial, the Prosecutor indicted 405 gendarmes for this crime, which significantly lessened the probability of the guilty one to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt for physical and sexual violence. The victim’s attorney requested that the court order the indicted gendarmes to be arrested for fear that the guilty ones would flee; instead, the court allowed the indictment of forty additional gendarmes, which further reduced the victim’s ability to assert her rights.

This hearing, the Kurdish Human Rights Project explains, was illustrative of the vulnerability of Kurdish women to torture and rape through unofficial arrests and detention, and the difficulties they have in pursuing their complaints through the Turkish courts. The outcome of this trial has had significant implications for all other similar cases of women abused by State agents: the case has been dismissed and no one charged.

The Ministry asked the Security General Directorate to present a detailed report about the allegations. The Directorate responded that prisoners had been perverted by pornography and films and simply imagined the mass cases of rape and abuse. The local court and high court both refused to accept the lawyers’ attempt to open a file against the Directorate.

Militarism, understood both as a state ideology and as the preferred method to resolve conflict, is prevalent in Turkey. Militarism and patriarchy are inextricably linked to each other; the latter constitutes in fact a root of the former, as the oppression of women is a fundamental part of the militarist ideology while patriarchy deems “feminity” as a synonym of weakness, passiveness and inferiority as opposed to the concept of “masculinity”. Therefore their interplay is a fundamental part of an analysis of the abuse that this article examines.

What can be done?

1. Relevant EU bodies, such as the EU Parliament delegation to the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee or the Commissioner for Enlargement should include violence against women perpetrated by State actors in their dialogue with Turkey in addition to other forms of violence against women already being discussed.
2. The UN Committee against Torture has already acknowledged ‘gender-based acts of torture and ill-treatment committed by security agencies, detention officials and law enforcement officers’ as a form of VAW different from domestic violence or honor crimes. The Turkish Government should fulfill the committee’s recommendation that measures are to be taken ‘to ensure accountability of perpetrators, including investigations, prosecutions and convictions of the perpetrators, as well as information on reparation and compensation, including rehabilitation, for victims’ (see paragraph 19).
3. Civil society organizations should unite their voices to denounce this abuse and to demand change.

Roj Women’s Association campaigns to improve the lives of women in Kurdish regions and communities of the world. In Turkey, Kurdish women are subject to double discrimination as a result of their gender and of their ethnicity. Our aim is to further their rights and to expand the opportunities available to them by means of drawing attention to the factors that shape their struggle and of advocating for the necessary changes to overcome them.