“I encountered patriarchy and male dominance presiding over women and life, all in conjunction with the occupation of my homeland. We all knew that the state was the root cause,” says Peyman Viyan, the female coleader of PJAK, the most prominent Kurdish revolutionary group in Iran.
I am reading her responses, which have been sent to me and translated by intermediaries from a PJAK base in the mountainous border region of eastern Iraqi Kurdistan, on the border with Iran.
Kurdistan, divided and occupied by the regional powers of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, is a nation without a state. But its various political groups have carved out a semblance of autonomy for themselves, especially in Iraq and Syria, where centralized government control has receded as both states crumbled into internal conflict.
Peyman Viyan is her nom de guerre, inspired by her comrade Viyan Peyman, a singer and sniper who died fighting ISIS at Kobane in 2015. She tells me she comes from the “small but strategic” city of Maku in northwest Iran, near the Turkish border.
“We were children when the influence of the Apoist movement and its members spread. When we became teenagers, that influence became stronger. At one point, they distributed CDs with teachings about the struggle for a life of freedom,” Viyan says. “Apo” is the affectionate name that supporters use for Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who has been in jail on a small island near Istanbul since being captured by Turkey in 1999.
Despite his confinement, Öcalan’s influence among his Kurdish supporters and his importance to Turkish and Syrian politics have never been greater. He has become a key figure in the disarmament negotiations between Turkey and the PKK, and between the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who have controlled the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) since the start of Syria’s civil war.
After Öcalan’s…
Auteur: John Lubbock
