Women’s solidarity work crosses national, ethnic, religious and tribal boundaries and demonstrates what solidarity is.
An article by Alexandra Lort Phillips, member of Roj Women’s Association
Women’s networks show us that solidarity means understanding, sharing information, developing understandings and agendas, meeting together, communicating, supporting each other’s work, raising awareness, taking action and working in unity. Lessons from women’s solidarity work inform all solidarity movements; indeed equality rights are inseparable from gender rights. In this article it is shown how women’s networks can cooperate effectively to complete work, in this instance a piece of research into gendered violations of women human rights defenders in South East Turkey in a context of political and violent conflict, framed by the long-standing feminist concerns about the legitimisation of surveillance, militarization and war.
In March 2011 four researchers representing a London-based women’s association, Roj Women, travelled to South East Turkey in order to interview women human rights defenders.
Speakers raised their concern about gross violations of women’s rights under Islamic Sharia Law and the politicization of religion. They explained that the immense sufferings women face are not limited to one country or a particular culture although they do differ from one place to another, in different contexts.
Nearly 4,000 cases of violence were recorded in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2011 including 720 cases of systematic torture, the government reported last week, but women’s activists say the numbers are severely under-reported.
When I first met Yanar Mohammed in 2003, she was holding a megaphone and leading a women’s rally in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, standing in the shadow of a pedestal where a statue of Saddam Hussein had stood until U.S. tanks dragged it to the ground a few weeks earlier. With a head of uncovered dark curls and a raised fist, she led chants demanding improved security and equal civil rights for women.
Thirty-one percent of the 400 women respondents in Cizre, a Kurdish city in southeast of Turkey, were married at the age of 15 or younger while 38 percent were married between the ages of 16 and 20. The survey was carried out by Zin Women’s Center.
