World Women's Conference of grassroot women

• About the Kurdistan Women’s Liberation Movement: Having a history of 40 years in total, the women within the Kurdish National Liberation Struggle are organising themselves autonomously since the early 1990’s. This process that started first within the guerrilla ranks by establishing a women’s guerrilla army today has reached a level of equal participation and representation in all parts of the struggle. Inside the women are organised autonomously and are the ones that take all decisions on women. But the ideological and practical struggle for true liberation continues as it aims to liberate both women and men from the patriarchal and capitalist-modernist mind of state. The women’s struggle within the Kurdish liberation movement marks a revolution within a revolution. It is based on the idea that true revolutions must be female; that liberation theories and ideologies need to take the issue of women’s liberation in it’s centre. The one who started first analysis on women’s status within the society and the liberation of women was the founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah O He was abducted through a NATO-operation in 1999 and since then kept in solitary confinement on a prison island in Turkey. Sakine Cansiz, nom de guerre ‘Sara’, was one of the first female revolutionaries in Kurdistan. Cansiz was founding member of the PKK. She was imprisoned in 1980 and brutally tortured. By leading the resistance in the prisons against the colonialist Turkish state she became a living legend. She was at the same time a living history of the Kurdish women’s liberation struggle. On January 9, 2013 Sakine Cansiz, together with her comrades Fidan Dogan and Leyla Saylemez, was assassinated by the Turkish intelligence service in Paris/France.

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