JINHA

ŞIRNEX – The People’s Assembly in Cizre, Turkey has held an extraordinary meeting to announce their plans to rebuild the town, which was devastated by a Turkish state siege. The Assembly has called for playgrounds and parks, communal resources and an end to the practices of bride price and bride exchange in Cizre.

For nine days, Turkish state forces assaulted the largely Kurdish town of Cizre. During the 24-hour curfew, 21 civilians died either at the hands of security forces or because they were denied medical care. Residents survived by supporting one another and organizing communally. With the lifting of the siege, the Cizre People’s Assembly has sped up their efforts to organize the town into commmunes and local assemblies.

On September 28, the group held a closed meeting to debate the rebuilding of the town. The group gathered at the funeral home in the heavily-damaged Cudi Neighborhood yesterday to announce the plans they have developed for a new, gender-equal and communal Cizre.
Assembly co-chair Mehmet Tunç explained that the group debated the Cizre resistance, critiqued their own failures and emerged determined to find solutions to the town’s social, urban, economic and environmental problems. Mehmet evaluated the violence in Cizre and across the Middle East as a result of colonial forces and regional dictators’ plans to redesign the region. He noted that the “third way” of Abdullah Öcalan’s theory of democratic autonomy had already proven itself successful in Rojava. The Assembly announced their plans to rebuild their town in an environmental, gender-equal and egalitarian way after the devastation of the siege.

Assembly volunteers will ensure that every neighborhood has a playground and will initiate a tree-planting project to help ensure that “children’s social-psychological development occurs in an environment one with nature.” The Assembly will also build communal ovens for baking tandır bread.
“Our assembly, which works based on the idea that ‘society can’t be liberated without the liberation of women,’ sees it as an urgent need to struggle against the mindset that views women as objects,” said Mehmet. As a result, the Assembly will begin work to stop the practices of polygyny, bride price and bride exchange in Cizre.

The Assembly will organize a damage assessment committee and legal committee to evaluate the damages to citizens’ homes and violations of their rights during the state’s siege. Mehmet noted that the committees aim to wage a struggle not based on violations of individual rights, but on a “social search for justice.”

The sand factories on the Tigris River that passes through Cizre are known for disrupting the habitats of river creatures and creating a dangerous river bottom environment that has led to the drowning of many children in the town. The Assembly announced a plan to work for the immediate closure of the sand factories in order to restore the environmental balance in the river.

The Assembly will also take action against gambling and work to provide a healthcare center that provides free medical service in Kurdish. The Assembly called on all Cizre families not to send their sons to Turkey’s mandatory military service.
The announcement ended with Assembly volunteers chanting the slogan: “resisting, resisting, we will win.”

(dk-ma/fk/cm)