KURDISTAN: Kurdish Women in Southeast Turkey Grow Strong Support Networks

Date: 
Friday, December 10, 2010
Source: 
Hurriyet Daily News
Countries: 
Asia
Western Asia
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Long-term activism in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır has empowered women to protect themselves through support networks, according to an official for a local municipality.

“A woman in Istanbul does not know where to go when she faces a problem. But women in this town know where to go,” said Mukaddes Alataş, who has been the director of the Diyarbakır Women's House for the past four years. “It is an unbelievably politicized city. If a woman faces violence from her husband, she knows the institutions where she can find support. There is some kind of an action, a demonstration every day. She becomes part of that action. She gains a new identity. She knows that if she belongs to the [Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP] she will be accepted more in the society. That's why everyone has a political standing.”

Alataş worked for the Istanbul Human Rights Association for 15 years before deciding to come to Diyarbakır.

“When you come to Diyarbakır, what you think is not what I could do but what I could choose to do. There are so many things to do here,” she said.

Alataş now works for the province's Bağlar Municipality, who mayor and deputy are women. When she first came, Alataş said she was surprised to see that while the majority of the municipality's employees are male, the administrators are female.

“The aim of my project is to determine the needs of poor families and to observe the consequences of [rural-to-urban] migration and the effects of the war,” she said. “For the past year we have had a ‘clothes bank' in which we gather used clothes. There are so many problems. The families live with problems like incest, drug habits and violence.”

One of the first questions while interacting with people in the city is to ask when they arrived in the urban center.

Alataş said she invariably finds that most of the people arrived in Diyarbakır in the 1990s, during the worst of the conflict between the military and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.

“While they were preoccupied with agriculture and animal growth where they came from, they are trying to survive in an environment where they can't do either. Two generations have been lost,” she said, adding that economic reasons also drove many to the city.

The war has had a profound effect on women, she said, adding that if a woman is involved in politics, she has either been taken into custody several times or has a relative in prison. “Nearly all live post traumatic stress. We can not overcome this stress simply by providing them with something to wear.”

Struggle to maintain Kurdish

Alataş said there was an effort to maintain the use of Kurdish but added that promoting the use of the language was somewhat difficult.

“There is too much speaking in Turkish. There are campaigns to encourage people to speak in Kurdish. The return to Kurdish is easy – after all it is the native language of everyone here. Women and children know Kurdish since they are more at home and don't go out too much. But nearly all the men know Turkish,” she said.

Alataş said she believed women have two areas of struggle, namely the state and the mentality produced by male-dominated society.

“They are aware of it. When they receive a course on gender equality, they can take a stance when they are faced by an event at home or outside. But obviously they do not ask their husbands to wash the dishes like the radical feminists,” she said.

25-year-old mayor

Meanwhile, 25-year-old woman Gülbahar Örnek became one of the youngest mayors in the country when she became mayor of Sur Municipality during the first half of 2010.

Örnek became a member of the municipal council during after the March 2007 elections. According to the BDP's women's quota, if a party mayor is male, his deputy must be female.

As such, when Mayor Abdullah Demirbaş was arrested and imprisoned at the end of 2009, Örnek automatically became mayor of the municipality.

A woman born in one of the poorer neighborhoods of the city, she was an agricultural engineering student.

When she was first thrust into the job, she was hesitant, at times visitors would be brought before her where they would begin waiting, not believing that Örnek was the mayor, she said.

“The fact that I became deputy mayor strengthens the feeling among the people that ‘someone from us has been elected,'” she said.

Demirbaş has since been released from prison.