JINHA

NEWS CENTER - A group called the Women's Freedom Force has declared its existence in Turkey with a statement.

"This text is the declaration of the Women's Freedom Force, the fighting force of women who for thousands of years have raised the flag of rebellion against the exploitative order," the statement began.

"The fundamental goal of the Women's Freedom Force is to eliminate patriarchal terror," wrote the group. "Our age is the darkest age in human history. We women, who make up half the world, are in a struggle for existence, under attack by the most well developed instruments of the patriarchal system. Just as capitalism is at the most developed level of its power, so is patriarchy, now intertwined with capitalism, at its most contemptible stage."

"Our age is one in which women's labor, bodies and identities have been exploited to their absolute limit--the age of imperialism," the statement continued. "Whatever women's class, ethnic origin, ideology, age and belief, the patriarchy positions them as the second sex and unites them under the identity of women. On whatever basis women are exploited, this is how they are described: all the adjectives of a good slave are consecrated, while all the qualities of a free woman are marginalized.

"In this system, where everything is commodified, women are being sold in bazaars, raped and harassed before the eyes of the world," wrote the KÖG, calling attention to the physical, sexual, economic and psychological violence aimed at women. "The number of women whose right to life is taken from them by male and state violence is rising day by day. Today, women's bodies are under the private possession of husbands, fathers, the state and the modern army. The rulers of the world have enslaved women as a sex under men's possession."

The statement described the exploitation of labor as most intensively effecting women through flexible and precarious work, neoliberal policies, crises and war.

"The burden of reproducing labor power, the main artery of capitalism, has fallen on the shoulders of the women of the world through invisible labor," the statement continued. "From China to Pakistan, Tunisia to Nigeria, Greece to Brazil and all over the world, armies of working women are trying to live and make life under conditions of poverty, misery and hunger. This is precisely the reason why the road to women's liberation passes through the liberation of the working class and the peoples of the world.

"And this is again, precisely the reason why in the Middle East, which war, imperialist occupation and exploitation have turned into a sea of blood, women find no other tool to take up against male domination other than armed organization and women's revolutionary might. In Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kurdistan, our bodies have been declared a battlefield. Our dignity has been trampled under the feet of colonial armies. Our identities, our languages were ignored; our killers were 'necessary,'" wrote the statement.

The women stated that in Turkey, the AKP and Erdoğan were responsible for the war on women through the legal system, the police, the government and capital.

"To those who let the killers of women go free, who raise rapists in the prisons, who torture revolutionary women: know that the rage of women, like the rage of the working class and the peoples, will take historic retribution," wrote the women. "Just like the reactionary fascist gang Daesh that has been a disaster for the peoples of the Middle East, you are one of the enemies against whom we are waging active war."

The statement called attention to the AKP's support for Daesh's attacks on thousands of Arab, Êzidî, Assyrian, Kurdish and Turkmen women. They noted that the practices of rape, massacre and selling women in bazaars took place with the ideological and military support of Turkey and other collaborating states in the region. They also called attention to the presence of thousands of Daesh supporters in Turkey, living undisturbed.

"Our current task is to strike the targets of the enemy, focused on the AKP-Daesh, with the organized struggle of women," said the statement. "The military targets of our war in this country and region are the AKP, Daesh and reactionary-fascist forces, and all their institutions, subcontractors and partisans. Let the killers of women, the harassers and rapists know: even if they have the state on their side, they won't be sleeping well at night."

The women promised to fight in the name of women murdered with impunity by their husbands and families, naming femicide victims Güldünya, Ayşe Paşalı and Gülay Armağan.

"This is why, in the name of our liberation, we have left behind the cities, homes and schools that imprisoned us," said the women. "Our flag is that of the Paris women who built the Commune barricades; the Bolshevik women workers who opened war on the palaces. We take our confidence from Krupskaya, Kollontai, Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg. The women who stood tall against Nazi armies, Zionists, imperialists, torture devices and the barrels of fascist guns have left us their great history of resistance and their weapons.

"We have taken up the burden of forming a freedom force worthy of Tanya, Ulrike, Aynur, Zilan, Beritan, Arin, Sibel and the hundreds and thousands of other women fighters whose names we could not list here, especially those who fell in Rojava," said the women. "We get this strength from our mothers resisting in their homes and in the streets, from the women workers, from our sisters in the universities and from all organized women, especially on the front." The KÖG called on all women to escalate the struggle for their own freedom and declared "war on male domination."

(şg/fk/cm)