CHIAPAS – Last weekend, the International meeting “El Sur Resiste 2023” was held at CIDECI, Universidad de la Tierra Chiapas, where more than 700 people met in order to make visible the dispossession of territories nationally and globally by capitalist and extractivist companies and projects; the violence experienced by the Original Peoples, women, and children as a result of wars and the violence of organized crime; and the imposition of mega-projects that destroy the environment throughout the world.
The meeting was attended by Dilda Roj, representative in Latin America of the Kurdistan Women’s Movement, and the Kurdish economist Azize Aslan.
Below we publish the complete intervention of Dilda Roj:
Dear colleagues:
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who organized this international meeting, which is very significant for all of us. As the Kurdish woman from the original people of the Kurdistan-Zagros mountains, I am proud to know the original people of the Selva Lacandona.
I want to take advantage of this precious meeting to commemorate all the freedom martyrs who gave their lives from Kurdistan to Abya Yala for freedom who opened the doors of love of freedom for us and eliminated the sense of borders. They will live forever in the souls of our lands.
I am here with the resistance of the people of Kurdistan, with the voice and spirit of our mountains, waters and trees. I hear your cry, we hear you! When a tree is cut down in Abya Yala, our souls hurt too. Although we are thousands of kilometers away, we are not that far at all. Our culture, our spirit, our existence complement each other. The natives of the earth are interconnected like trees, whose ancient roots are interconnected in a forest.
This is one of the meanings of our meeting. Our nature is our culture, our belief, our language, our morals, our love. It is our land that makes us exist. An aborigine said: “Our nature is our archive”. In fact, it is!
Not only us, but also the capitalist patriarchal system knows it. It knows it and that is why he wants to uproot us from our roots, from our memory, from our history, it wants to appropriate our rebellious souls. It considers our culture, beliefs, languages and colors as a threat to itself. To overcome its own crisis, the Capitalist System wants to further consolidate its dominance over native peoples, women, and nature. It wants to destroy our hopes for the future, our dreams of another life are possible. It attacks our nature, our being, our spirit. They prevent us from advancing on our path to freedom.
To ensure its permanence, the capitalist system considers communities where community life is strong, such as Kurdistan, to be enemies. Indigenous peoples with strong communalism pose a threat to the system that the capitalist patriarchal mentality wants to create based on individualism and materialism. For this reason, it systematically attacks these peoples with the policies of assimilation, denial and genocide. In order to succeed in the policies of denial and annihilation that the capitalist system carries out in Kurdistan today, it systematically increases the policies of ecocide.
The capitalist system, with the face of the Turkish state, is burning Kurdistan forests and deforesting our territory, thus taking the breath away not only from the peoples living in Kurdistan, but also from all humanity. Like they do here in the jungle, like in the Amazon. Once again, by destroying millennial historical sites with hydroelectric dams, military dams, and industrial projects for their short-term interests, like megaprojects that you talked about along the way of the caravan. In this way they also destroy history and memory, both of the peoples of the territory and of humanity.
Because who does not have a past cannot imagine the future. So the Interoceanic Corridor or the badly named Maya train are mirrors of these policies of destruction of us. We know what they want to do with these projects, it’s obvious. Faced with this, we are also in the caravan of El Sur Resiste, which raises the voice of the local peoples.
The South resists, resists for the memory and history of the original peoples of Abya Yala. It resists by its nature harboring the truth of the indigenous people. You fight to protect your souls. Abya Yala, has been resisting against all kinds of colonial occupation for more than 500 years. We will not let The Capitalist system destroy our values for your love of money interest. You are not alone, because we are with you against the attacks of the dominant system.
So we see that we are not alone too. We are with you because we fight against the wounds that the 5,000-year-old colonial system opened in our bodies, memories and souls. We are with you because this is our fight too. Human history is on the verge of a turning point and has a strong potential for transformation.
This change, on the other hand, is taking place under the leadership of women in all aspects. Because the dominant-patriarchal mind is the source of all the world’s problems! Let’s not expect him to change, on the contrary, we are going to destroy and transform him, like the indigenous peoples, the women who listen to the spirit of Mother Earth.
The Kurdistan Liberation Movement does not only fight against the states that colonize and exploit their land, but also wants to change the system that destroys the land, tries to invade the human spirit and attacks the coexistence of peoples and the colors of life.
We, as members of this movement, believe that another way of life, a new way of life, is possible. And to build this life we are resisting the light of the truth of the natives of the Earth and of women. This is why the Kurdistan liberation movement puts women’s freedom at the center of its paradigm. We believe that society will not be liberated until women are liberated. Because for us, the woman was the first colony in history and she has to be the first to be released. We will conquer this freedom with all the women of the peoples of the world.
Therefore, it is not only the colonizing states that attack us, but also the local and international powers that lead the patriarchal capitalist system. They want to close the paths of resistance that open from Kurdistan to the world.
Sisters and brothers,
Our rebel guide Abdullah Öcalan is at the center of these attacks. He spent the last 24 years of his 50-year struggle in the Imrali island prison. Because the democratic, ecological and libertarian paradigm of women, that is, the model of Democratic Confederalism, presents hope not only for the Kurdish people, but also for all the peoples of the world.
Because this paradigm and its practice is a way to preserve the existence and culture of both the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia and all the ancient peoples of the earth. Democratic confederalism is creating life in Rojava. The practice of autonomy in Rojava shows the whole world that the nation-state is not the only solution, and that a new life is possible in which the society-people can govern itself.
This is a model in which peoples, colors and beliefs that nation-states have torn apart and ignored, can coexist. This is the main reason why they are afraid of us and constantly attack us. As daughters and sons of where the Neolithic revolution of our continent took place, we believed that a communal, democratic life, woven around the mother-woman, with a strong relationship with the earth and nature, is possible.
Therefore, we are not only fighting against the colonialist states. We also reflect and question to decolonize our minds from the effects of the dominant male mentality. That is, to achieve freedom. We need, first of all, to fight with ourselves to transform ourselves. For all this, we said we will fight until we die.
We are the announcement of free life, which is woven around the slogan of “Jin Jiyan Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom). We are proud of the present. That is why there are attacks on our freedom movement that are unprecedented in the world. These attacks are carried out with the common agreement of the NATO powers. But the magnificence of the resistance against them is so great that neither words nor minutes would be enough to describe it. We are also accompanied by the solidarity of the unsubmissive peoples of the world who defend the values of humanity. Our strength does not come from the states, but from the honorable network of resistance and solidarity of the peoples.
Your presence in and for our struggle strengthens us. Our fellow guerilla-fighters from the mountains of Kurdistan are generating great resistance for all of us despite very limited conditions. Every day, it demonstrates to the entire world the superiority of the human will in the face of the latest technological and chemical weapons. Systems of domination did not exist alone in the world. All over the world, peoples rise up for the rights to freedom, equality, self-determination. They fight against misogyny, sexism, patriarchy and natural destruction.
From the high mountains of the Zagros to the deep tropical jungles of Latin America, the people’s struggle for freedom continues. What we have to do is establish a global resistance network that comes together on the denominator of a free life. Let us strengthen the common struggle against the patriarchal capitalist system to turn the 21st century into a century of freedom for the peoples, under the leadership of the women’s revolution. We have to fight together, neither separate nor parallel, together.
We need to move forward by strengthening our local organizations and uniting in the commons of freedom on a universal level. If capitalism is organized universally and infects our minds in all areas of society, why not become accomplices? Why don’t we fight together? Our reasons for uniting are more than yours.
For that we need to bring together all the different colors and shades of thought and spirit, wisdom and consciousness, experiences, hopes, dreams of all peoples, women, dissidences that resist capitalism. Realizing this is possible by expanding, perpetuating and spreading meetings like this one. The spirit of our trees, mountains and rivers are here with us. No power can surrender us from the path to free life.
To defend the Kurdistan revolution is to defend the women’s revolution!
We protect our existence and our future, protecting mother earth!
The South exists because it resists!
Jin Jiyan Azadi!
Antsetik, Kuxlejal, Kajlel!
