HDP launches slate of candidates determined to stop patriarchal state
12:27
JINHA
NEWS CENTER – With the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) introducing its 550 candidates in Ankara on Friday, voters in Turkey and Northern Kurdistan are beginning to meet the faces of an election campaign that aims to sweep the Parliament on a slate of gender equality and "new life."
In Ankara on Friday, the party introduced their 550 candidates for Turkey's Parliament. The famous slogan "women, life, freedom" was the major one chanted during the party meeting on Friday. The party co-chairs, Figen Yüksekdağ and Selahattin Demirtaş, introduced the candidates, who come from a range of ethnic, religious, linguistic and sexual identities and are nearly half women.
One of the party's leading woman candidates is Hüda Kaya, the Islamic writer running in the city's first district to "be the voice of others." Hüda, the child of a working-class Istanbul family, became well known in Turkey for her role in the struggle for the right for women to wear headscarves in public buildings in the 1990s.
Hüda has had a long political journey. Before the 1980 coup in Turkey, she had been part of the youth wing of the extremist nationalist movement. When she read the Qur'an, she came to critique the nationalist variety of Islam aggressively preached by the Turkish state—including the reigning AKP government. When she divorced her husband and he began to harass and threaten her family, she fled the threats and moved for the first time to Malatya, in the Kurdish region, where she found that Kurds did not "live in caves" as state propaganda represented.
Her arrival in Malatya coincided with the wave of repression against the elected government known as the "postmodern coup" of February 28, 1997. Hüda was arrested for a piece she wrote critiquing Islamic men in the movement. Around 500others were arrested at the same time, including Hüda's high-school-age daughters, who were arrested for reading a prayer. In the Malatya jail, Hüda met Kurdish activists; the state's repression in the Kurdish region was intense at the time, when the war in the region was ongoing.
"I said to [the state], 'You, with your cruelty, have brought all the oppressed together. They're not separatists and I'm not a reactionary. But you've brought all the oppressed together,'" she said.
"I'm a Muslim, I'm a woman, I'm a Turk, but the people I am addressing are not just Turks and not just Muslims," she said. "I'm addressing all the oppressed, because I have also experienced every kind of violence at the hands of this state." She mentioned the "modern slavery" of the Roma people, who are forced to work under extremely poor working conditions in the worst jobs in Turkey. Hüda has also met in the past with Kurdish guerrilla women, who she said she found "extremely impressive."
Women active in the Kurdish struggle during the 1990s are also taking an active role in the HDP campaign. Big names in the Kurdish movement and the Kurdish women's movement, like Selma Irmak (leader of the civil society group the Democratic Society Congress [DTK]) running in the province of Hakkari, have also thrown their hats into the ring.
Even in smaller Kurdish provinces, women with long histories in local struggles for women's rights and human rights are playing a prominent role. In Kurdish regions like the province of Batman, where half the candidates are women, and Siirt, where a longtime exile from her homeland is now returning to run a Parliamentary campaign, women with a background in the struggle for Kurdish and women's rights are hoping to change life for women in the region.
In contrast with the HDP, founded under the slogan "a women's party," the mainstream parties in Turkey are severely lacking on the issue of gender parity. The Republican People’s Party (CHP) has only 103 women candidates on its Parliamentary list. The ruling AKP is running only 99 female candidates.
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