CENTRAL NEWS
When I was little I always wanted to explore the planet, to know every single inch of it. I would ask myself what different languages sound like, what clothes other people wear, what their houses look like and so on… When you grow up you see the world with bigger eyes. You dream and you imagine.
Then, we all reached a certain age where we saw an ugly face of this world – and everything stopped. Our internal worlds lost their warm yellows and rich greens. Feelings of loneliness started to seep through and rot every feeling of aliveness. You never fully understood what happened, and even on the days you couldn’t find the strength to sit up, you knew something was wrong. You filed down some of your traits and exaggerated some characteristics to finally belong, but whatever you do you will never belong. Because no one ever fully does.
Is it our family, religion, the society, the system, school, the state, the boyfriend? The naked reality of the system which we live in is capitalism and patriarchy – a brutal and unforgiving system which we were never meant to fit into. This becomes hard to understand when we see only ourselves, but if we took a step back to see the bigger picture, we would see that everyone is suffering the same.
But it is this exactly which should make us dream even bigger dreams of a better world. We can not let the system take away our trust and hope that the ideas and utopias in our heads will one day become reality. And one thing that we can be assured of is that there are people who took serious and successful steps on the way to realize their dreams. It is our choice.
What kind of life do we want to live? Before we can ask ourselves a question of this weight, we have to start to relook at our own lives. For example, is it normal or a coincidence that women are sexualised in every photo or video we see -whether she thought she took the photo with her freewill, or not. Is it normal, or acceptable, that women are photographed naked for even the most basic tools such as calenders?
In history, we can see that many women have come to the realization that the things we think we want, are actually the things that are wanted from us. We are trained to think we want things which serve the purpose of God. Realising the extent to which we are being controlled becomes scary, but the problem can only be solved if we take our lives into our own hands. Whatever that is.
Even if society would never believe that the woman has the strength or the will to take a weapon and fight, or have enough brains to be involved in politics, to develop the ability to organize or to speak in front of a mass of people: an unwritten history has proved them wrong. Women have fought unforgettable wars of resistance against powers that enslaved and repressed. The role of the woman was always a special one in the different struggles because she made them the most revolutionary ones in history.
Union de Femmes
The Commune of Paris represents one of those struggles. As we know, the Commune of Paris only existed for 72 days (from 18th March until 28th May 1971). A short duration, one might say, but for 72 days the will and uprising of the woman became the centre of the world.
In the commune, women had no right to vote or to take part in the combat against the fascist enemies. Even if the participation of women in politics of the self-governed commune was high, they were excluded by the men. Women therefore decided to organize themselves autonomously. Marguerite Tinagre organized the first communes. Andre Leo, Sophie Poirier, Anna Jaciard, Beatrix Excoffen, and the known Louise Michel (the commander of the commune of Montmartre) were women who worked and fought for this revolution. They created the ‘’Union de Femmes’’ because they as well saw themselves as woman of serious obligation and responsibility.
The creation of the women’s union was a reaction to their male comrades, brothers, husbands or fathers who did not accept them in the struggle. In the beginning, the women were not given weapons. They protested this. All the women had shown a clear and radical position -some even more radical than their male comrades. They saw their own power and made clear that they as well are able to sacrifice themselves for the struggle. While many men surrendered, women held their loyalty to the cause at the forefront of their worlds. They had understood that surrender means betrayal.
One woman said that if her husband would flee and surrender in combat, she would have to kill him. This clear and radical statement shows the woman’s commitment. But the women of the commune had to fight against the ideology of the man both inside the commune, and outside on the battlegrounds.
Self-sacrifice
This attitude by women is seen in many struggles women have fought for their land and freedom. In the Revolution of France (1789), Olymp de Gouches had written flyers in which she declared women’s rights. There are women like Anne Josephe the Roigne de Mericourt (1785) and Pauline Leon (1792) who were fighting for the woman’s right to self-defence and to take arms.
Mary Wollstonecraft (in 1892) also fought in Britain as one of the many Suffragettes for these rights. Marion Wallace Dunlop was the first women to go on hunger strike in prison (in 1909) much before Bobby Sands from the IRA. She was also a Suffragette.
The Suffragettes were organized. It was an organization of 500,000 women (the biggest women’s movement in Britain) who carried out sabotage and self scarifying actions.
In Afghanistan there is Mina Kişrar Kemal (1956-1987). At only 21, she became the founder of the country’s most radical women’s organization, RAWA (1977), but was murdered by the state at the age of 31 to liquidate the organization.
In Palestine, there is Leyla Muğrabi. In 1975, she fought as a commandant against Syrian forces. She is the first woman in the FETI organization to fight as commandant, when in reality the organization originally wanted her to take place in diplomatic works of the FKÖ organization. Instead, Leyla insisted on taking part in the armed struggle.
After a military education, she went into the mountains of Lebanon to fight. In ’78, she falls a martyr while doing an action to free her comrades from prison. Until today the state of Israel is hiding her and her comrade’s corpse, so that they should be forgotten. That is how important she was.
In the mountains of Xakurke in Kurdistan, in 1992, Gülnaz Karataş, with the codename Bêrîtan, was fighting against the Peşmerga forces of the YNK (Union of Kurdistan). Because the soldiers encircled her, she chose to jump from the cliff which she was standing on so that none of her would fall into the hands of the enemy.
Bêrîtan was clear about her decision. She created a line of principles and standards, she taught that if there is a life then it must be free and that if life is not free it must not exist. She not only jumped from the cliff, she destroyed her weapon before doing so. Bêrîtan became a symbol and set a clear line for the Kurdish Women’s Liberation Movement. Her attitude was the attitude of a great commandant, and she created the fundament of the Women’s Army of the movement (YJA-Star).
Taking those fighting women as an example, we can only become much stronger personalities and develop more trust in our selves. Because we, as women, are under the suffocating pressure of sexual violence and verbal and psychological attacks. We live with the fear that we may one day be raped, killed and murdered by our fathers, husbands, boyfriends etc., that we might humiliate and despised. Or that we may be seen as stupid and worthless, that we could be treated unequally and be discriminated against because of our gender. Some may be married off at young age and sold off like a possession.
We have no choice other than to continue the fight started by the woman before us and complete what they were fighting for. We should abandon the crying, classical woman inside us who has no belief for herself or the world.
Our aim has to be to fight like Bêrîtan and Louise. We are more than our clothes, we are not unable, stupid or weak. Let us refuse to be a possession, to be told what to wear, what to eat, what to think, what to say, where to go, with whom to speak. Let us recognise how much power we have, how important we are and how valuable we are to this world. Let us taste true freedom.
