Jin Jiyan Azadi
I was part of a recent Human Rights delegation to Turkey during International Women’s Day. Our visit was very intense! For me, it was the first time I’d been to Turkey - and I’d never been part of a delegation before, so there was a lot of newness to navigate!
I didn’t have many preconceived ideas about what it would be like. I hadn’t expected Istanbul to be so hip and cool - or to see so many police around the place. I knew that as part of a human rights delegation, I’d be hearing some tough stories about what people had experienced, but I had no real sense of how that would affect me. And I had no idea of what spending time in a country with such a repressive state would be like: I knew that the Turkish government was badly oppressing its Kurdish population and refusing to recognise their claim to a homeland, but I had no real sense of how badly other groups, particularly women, are being affected.
Much of what we heard was devastating. We heard from:
mothers about their murdered and imprisoned children;
from journalists, politicians and lawyers about how their taking any action to try and change things, or to help others, meant taking your freedom and even your life in your hands;
from women about how their rights are being closed down and how there is no safe place to go if your husband has decided he wants to kill you.
from Kurds that if they try to practise their own language or culture - or even to mourn their dead, they are at risk of harassment, arrest or imprisonment
from eyewitnesses that in some places of Kurdistan seeds will no longer germinate because the ground has been so polluted by chemical weapons and other toxins
We heard about so many people, including Abdullah Öcalan, being imprisoned and held in isolation, sometimes for decades, in terrible, dehumanising conditions, without access to adequate healthcare - and all too often dying in prison or very soon after being released
For a while I was caught in a thinking loop - one that I imagine is not uncommon in people with privilege who come from liberal democracies: I’d hear about another person being killed, or held for decades in solitary confinement and there’d be this little voice in my head asking: why are they doing that? It would be so much better for them to just keep their heads down and live their lives… but eventually I understood: they do this because they have made a choice: whatever the cost - they won’t sit by and allow this kind of domination to win.
Fascism is a very likely endgame of the patriarchal, capitalist myth: this is because a small group have been allowed to hoard power and resources, and have become so blinded by unacknowledged social privilege and unconscious emotional damage and so trapped by the logic of the system that has got them where they are, that they can see no other way to behave - than in ways that subjugate others and put them in poverty, landlessness or starvation. This endgame ends with genocide and ecocide.
As its warped internal logic finally comes up against, not just human lives, but the physical limits of the planet, the only play left to it is to try for total domination - which now, as the social and environmental stresses this system has caused have built to critical levels, we know leads to annihilation for all of us.
What I learned in Turkey was chillingly simple: if we really want to stop the system of domination, we may have to be willing to give up our freedom and even our lives. What I saw in the Kurdish People was a whole group who know and live this: who have decided ‘no more’: who are willing to die rather than give in to domination.
For me, there couldn’t be a better way to sum up why it is worth doing that than Jin Jiyan Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom) which has become a rallying cry across the middle east and beyond. Based on the work of Abdullah Öcalan, it is not just a slogan, but a manifesto, a vision of the world we could make together if we refuse domination.
For me, Jin (women) means lifting up not just women, but everyone who is oppressed by patriarchy and the dominating principle - including men, who are also trapped and hurt by its toxic imperatives. It means lifting up a way of being in the world that is kind, connecting, caring, collaborative, supportive and honest - not fooled by games of status or control, but grounded in an embodied sense of love, connection and security that is unshakable.
My sense is that Jiyan (life) roots this movement in life, joy and creativity. We know that we are nothing without the rest of the web of life, and as such Jiyan gives us an ethical guide to our actions. At any point we can ask: does what we are doing serve life - and not just human life, but the whole web of life on this planet? The system that is driving the devastation of lives and ecosystems across the planet is in service to capital, to domination, to fragile egos and collective delusions. Jiyan cuts through this with simplicity, clarity and urgency: if what we are doing isn’t in the service of life, then we are literally finished - and being in service to life connects us with a fundamental power and creativity that is a source of endless inspiration and strength.
Azadi (freedom) calls to a long buried sense of the collective self. For centuries, if not millenia, our basic understanding of who we really are has been suppressed. We’ve been told that we are separate, that we are fundamentally greedy and selfish, we have to watch out for other people, keep our heads down and do what we’re told - or else… Azadi reminds us that when we care for one another and act in service of life, we are so much more powerful than the system of domination tells us we are. It offers the vision of a world where we share power, celebrate our diversity, deal with our disagreements and conflicts by listening, understanding and transforming, where our small selves are experienced as part of a greater, shared whole that we can trust to catch us when we fall. Humans who are living Azadi can and will transform our world.
Jin Jiyan Azadi has been called forth by the desperate times we are facing. It is not just a slogan but a statement of truth and a vision of a new (and ancient) way to live. It is potent and necessary - not just for Kurds, not just in the Middle East, not just for women, but for all of us, all over the world.
Eva Schonveld
February 2024