Şehriban Aslan / JINHA

AMED – Zerya, forced into marriage while still a child, is just one of millions of women around the world struggling against all odds. Zerya, who never lost her hope for life, says her greatest wish is for women’s empowerment.

Women in Kurdistan live under the repression both of the state and of a feudal patriarchal system. One of these women is Zerya Y., from the district of Dicle in Diyarbakır. Zerya rejected both the repression of the family and the oppression of the state to take part in political struggle.

Zerya was just 15 when she was forcibly married to a boy her age in the practice known as “bridge exchange.” She said she didn’t understand what marriage was at the time.

“They never asked me about the marriage or about the person I married. The families just took the decision and did it. If I had the awareness I have now, I’d have gone to the mountains,” said Zerya, referring to the guerrilla. However, anyone who travelled was at risk of being killed by state forces in “unsolved” killings, common in Zerya’s village. Zerya, trapped in the marriage, considered suicide. She called those the worst days of her life.

“After I got married, my husband’s family didn’t want me. They acted as if it was me who wanted to be exchanged as a bride, and they wouldn’t even feed me,” she said. Every day throughout the hot summer, she woke up at 5 a.m. to pick wheat and bale hay with her brothers in law. “I’d work all day, and on top of it they’d leave me hungry and thirsty. Usually my younger brother-in-law would make himself some eggs, then secretly call me to eat. Living in that house was like torture for me.”

After the family rejected Zerya and told the boy she was married to that he must divorce her, the two fled the house. They fled in the middle of the night—the hours when state agents were known to travel to the villages, killing and abducting villagers and burning houses.

“We prayed that we’d run into the guerrillas. We’d be lucky if we saw the guerrillas, but we’d be dead if we saw the soldiers, killed in an ‘unknown perpetrator’ murder,” said Zerya. “We got a ways down the village road when we realized there were soldiers ahead. We waited all night beneath a rock there until the soldiers went away.”

Eventually, the two reached the provincial capital of Diyarbakır. They rented a house and started from scratch. There, Zerya converted her struggle against the family into the organized political struggle. The political party HADEP (People’s Democratic Party) had recently been founded, and Zerya took what small effects in the house they had and donated them to the party.

“We saw that place as our own home, after all. When me and my husband got off work, we’d go there and join in the work,” said Zerya. The two were subject to state repression for taking part in the party activities, but they never gave up.

Zerya concluded by stressing that women should never give up hope of overcoming their difficulties.

“Despite all the difficulties I went through, I never gave up hope,” said Zerya. “And women should never give up hope, either.”

(ck/mg/cm)