JINHA

NEWS CENTER – The women's central coordinating body of the opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) released a March 8 International Women's Day statement calling for the rebellion against femicide and patriarchal violence to widen and denouncing AKP programs designed to push women into the home and exploited labor.

The HDP is the only party in Turkey with a 100% gender parity policy for all positions. The HDP's co-chair system ensures that a man and woman share all positions. Women are encouraged to take part in the party, from small policies to the reduced entrance fee for women political candidates to the role of leading woman politicians like PervinBuldan, FigenYüksekdağ and SebahatTüncel in the party.

The HDPstatement condemned the fact that this March 8, violence and murders of women have become nearly naturalized. The sexist legal implementation of the AKP had helped bring the country to this point, said the statement.

The statement mentioned all the changes the AKP had made to attack women: from major changes like restrictions on the right to divorce and the practical restriction of the right to abortion to the discursive attacks of changing of the name of the "Ministry for Women and Families" to the "Family and Social Policies Ministry" and the name of the "Male-Female Equality Committee" to the "Equal Opportunity for Women and Men Committee."

The statement said that Prime MinisterAhmetDavutoğlu's aggressively pursued "Program for the Protection of the Family and Dynamic Population" was working to force women into marriage and motherhood and to turn women into a source of cheap and menial labor.

"This program, by recognizing women only as mothers, pushes women out of the public sphere and compensated labor except insofar as they are fulfilling 'the role of motherhood.' It embodies attempts to widen flexible and precarious labor for women, justified by a supposed need for birth and motherhood," said the statement.

The statement noted that the masculinist justice system did nothing to discourage the fact that every day three women are killed in the country by relatives, boyfriends and husbands.

"The AKP government has not taken a single concrete step to stop male violence yet it claims to be able to stop violence by confining women in both the public and private spheres," said the statement. "In fact, the AKP has overseen and encouraged marriage at a young age and even for children; a single sectarian education system from primary schools on; and attempts to create 'acceptable women' through family repression. Law enforcement officers are not shy in meting out violence to women in the streets or prisons of this country who express democratic demands.

"Without any real confrontation with the period in the 1990s when women wearing headscarves saw rights violations and repression, without any justice for [murdered Muslimfeminist writer] KoncaKuriş, the AKP's legitimation of pressure on 10-year-old girls to wear headscarves demonstrates an insincere attitude," said the statement.

It touched on a number of AKP members' notoriously blasé anti-woman remarks. "State employees make statements like 'women shouldn't laugh,' 'police should intervene in houses where boys and girls live together,' and 'it's illegitimate for men and women to hold hands if they're not engaged.' Statements like this contribute to social pressure and polarization."

Still, said the statement, the resistance in Kobanê has showed the Kurdish women's movement and the feminist and socialist movements in Turkey that another way is possible. HDP women from different political positions, ethnic backgrounds, belief systems and sexual orientations would continue working together to end all nationalist, sexist and conservative repressions that attempted to divide women, said the statement.

As the HDP heads towards the June election, the party is working on overcoming Turkey's extremely high 10% election threshold, which blocks almost all opposition parties from winning seats in the Parliament. "This time, there must be at least 275 women in Parliament," said the statement. The statement mentioned the HDP's ongoing projects to stop the murders of women and trans people in Turkey and attacks on women and LGBTQ people's bodies, labor and sexuality.

(ns/mg/cm)