THE WOMEN OF THE PKK, 2

"Any part of society will enjoy freedom and equality to the same degree that women achieve freedom and equality. Women's participation in society will be decisive in establishing a permanent democracy."
~ Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings.

Misto left a little calling card in the comments of a recent post, which led to this post, so thanks to Heval Misto for that.

What follows are a series of videos that comprise an entire film, and it's a bit of a multilingual affair. The film is about the women of the PKK, who properly belong to the women's gerîla organization, YJA-STAR (Yekîtiyên Jinên Azad STAR). However, at the time of the making of the film, the women's organization was called PJA (Partiya Jina Azad).

It is generally taken for granted that once one leaves for the mountains there is no return, and while this is true for the male gerîlas of HPG, it is doubly so for the women of the PKK. They are not able to return to their homes and families in the same sense as the males, because they are regarded as "terrorists" by the "civilized" world. In the case of the women gerîlas, they have been liberated by the mountains and by virtue of the fact that they carry weapons for the sake of the Kurdish people. For them to return to a regular Kurdish woman's life in villages, towns, and even cities where they would be considered as less than second-class citizens would be an unthinkable act for them.

For the free women of Kurdistan, returning to an intensely patriarchal, restrictive society would be like trying to force the genie back into the bottle, or recapturing everything Pandora let loose from her box.

Such would be the case even if these free women returned to homes and family in Diaspora--in the Western, "civilized" world, for even there, there is little real freedom for women.

Having breathed free in the mountains of Kurdistan, anything less would be suffocation.

Now--thanks to Heval Misto--more on the women of the PKK:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6