Urgent Call from Women in Turkey: Help Us Prevent Massacre!

[Map showing Silopi, a district of Sirnak Province in Turkey`s southeastern Anatolia region] [Map showing Silopi, a district of Sirnak Province in Turkey`s southeastern Anatolia region]

Urgent Call from Women in Turkey: Help Us Prevent Massacre!

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the Women`s Freedom Assembly in Turkey]

Urgent Call From Women in Turkey: Help Us Prevent Massacre!

Last week Silopi, a city close to the Iraqi and Syrian borders of Turkey, was placed under siege by the Turkish military. Many civilians were wounded and killed with no accountability whatsoever, neighbourhoods were set on fire by the police and military. A delegation organized by the Women`s Freedom Assembly was on its way to Silopi in order to investigate what happened there last week and stand with the women and peoples of Silopi who are under attack. Upon hearing the troublesome news coming from Silvan - a town in the Diyarbakır province, however, this delegation changed its route, deciding to go to Silvan instead, and to stay in Silvan if necessary. This decision was made because we have seen what happens when entry into a town is forbidden by the military. We witnessed the results of this kind of isolation in Silopi last week, in Varto on Sunday, and today the same is happening in Silvan. Whenever towns are closed down, the Kurdish people living there are left face to face with the threat of massacre. The 15-person delegation of the Women`s Freedom Assembly is in Silvan today in order to prevent this from happening again. This delegation includes activists from various parts of the women`s movement, journalists and members of parliament.

According to the information we receive from our friends, the town is completely shut off. Nobody is allowed to enter or exit. Internet and phone lines are cut off. It is impossible to communicate. There are people gathering at the entrance of Silvan in hopes to prevent a massacre from taking place in secret, but these people are not being allowed in. Members of parliament from the HDP (Peoples` Democratic Party) were also initially denied entry, but after negotiations conducted by MP İdris Baluken they were finally let in. These MPs entered the town in order to survey and monitor the events as well as look for solutions to alleviate the situation people are in, while heavy clashes continue in three separate neighbourhoods. However, it has become impossible to hear from these members of parliament for the past couple of hours as well, since phone lines are down. A barrage of all kinds of explosions and gun-fire are heard coming from the town center. It is said that there is intense military build-up taking place in Silvan, as many tanks, various forms of armoured cars, military vehicles, and special operations units are being dispatched to the area.

The sub-governor of the district and the governor of Diyarbakır have been contacted by members of parliament. The response has been that these operations are being directed by Ankara itself. The governor said that this issue is therefore above them, and that any intervention must be made directly through Ankara. A group of MPs are now carrying out the necessary communications in Ankara.

We call all women to raise their voices against this massacre attempt, in the most urgent manner possible!

Women`s Freedom Assembly

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Hatem Bazian addresses the historical trajectory of Islamophobia and its significance in understanding geopolitical transformation in the post-Cold War world. As Western ideologues shifted from their focus on the Soviet Union after the Cold War, and increasingly adopted the Clash of Civilizations paradigm to undergird their maintenance of global hegemony, Islam and Muslims replaced communism as the chief bogeyman. Bazian explains how and why this came about, and the centrality Palestine played in its development and operation, both in the West and for Israel. He also addresses US government disciplining of universities and particularly student activists.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412