Remembering Nagihan Akarsel…Some of the messages from internationalist friends…
For Nagihan…
Nagihan Arkasel, Heval Zilan, this is how we, some of the comrades of the Regional Committee of Jineoloji of Catalunya, knew her. We could see the light and the courage of the years of struggle in her words, in her way of being in the room where we debated for hours. In the Jineoloji Institute in Rojava, those days, we shared life, conversations, analysis, struggle, reflections. Comrade Nagihan accompanied those moments with questions and concerns, she opened the doors to new worlds, new dimensions of the struggle. For us, internationalist comrades, to know and develop Jineoloji in our territories means to be able to take and learn from the message of the Kurdish women, of all those who, for decades, lived in the practice of Jineoloji. The science of women and life, has meant for us an open door, to the depths of feeling more responsibility with history, with the understanding in the research and search of women’s resistances. And it has made us bet even deeper on the path of women’s liberation. Today, the enemy sent us a message again. The cowardice and fear of fascism is clearly exposed in their actions and mentality. The murder of our comrade Nagihan Arkasel shows the dirty war and the arrogance of the fascist regime of Erdogan and the collaboration of the KDP against a women’s movement that is growing and getting stronger. The search for freedom is no longer the dream of women, it became a reality, it became the way of life of so many brave women who from their resistance in prisons, in the streets, in towns and cities, deserts and mountains, made their voice and light reach every corner of this world. As did our beloved Nagihan Arkasel. Today, we felt again that pain, which suddenly turns into anger. We felt again how our heart burns for Marsha Amini, for all the women of Rojhilat and Iran, who at this very moment, are taking action and filling the words Jin, Jiyan, Azadi with meaning, history and resistance. Anger shows the whole world that our will becomes stronger when we take back Nagihan’s words, when we remember her tireless work and when we promise revenge. These are many years of effort, of research, of love, of collective work and of hard steps forward. We walk with the Kurdish Women’s Movement, paths with the Women’s revolt and the vanguard that they lead in the struggle for life in Rojava, in Rojhilat, in Iran, in Basur, in Bakur. We condemn the attack that killed Nagihan Arkasel, we condemn this patriarchal system perpetuated by the mentality of the miserable regimens of this world. We, we love life, that is why, our first step in revenge will be to expand even more Jineoloji, it will be to make these steps more seeds, which will sprout anger, courage and light. Revolutionary greetings to all the comrades. Sehid namirin. Jin, Jiyan, Azadi
Comite of Jineoloji from Catalunya
Nagihan Akarsel – She Embodied the Spirit of the Democratic Nation
When a friend is murdered by the violence of a brutal system, it is indescribable and unsustainable. It happens almost every day and each time it is a loss that is irreparable. Today Nagihan Akarsel was murdered in Suleymaniya. She was shot dead in the street. We knew her and know from our own experience what a valuable person she was. At different times we met her and saw her work. She worked as part of the Jineolojî in Basûr, built a library, gave seminars and worked much much further beyond.
How to write about a friend who was deliberately murdered this morning on her way to that library? By those fascist perpetrators who are part of the very system that murders and organises women who stand up for a self-determined and free life. Murderers who also commit feminicide.
Today, however, we do not want to talk about the murderers, but about Nagihan Akarsel. Because it is her that we owe our respect and love. She is the one we will never forget and whose struggle we carry on here in Germany and in many other places in the world, just as many friends do in Kurdistan.
Nagihan Akarsel was a woman who was and will always be part of the Kurdish women’s movement. She embodied the spirit of the Democratic Nation by making the ideas and proposals for organising a free society feel and graspable for many people. She did this through her being, through her approach to us and so many others, through how people saw and felt what she thought and felt – the community of the people of the world. She embodied what we also fight for here every day with ourselves and with our friends against the system, against the state. She embodied friendship with one another. The warmth that is needed to let beautiful things grow. The clarity it takes to see what we want and what we don’t want. The determination to hold on to what promises beauty and will prevent evil. The joy with which she approached people to embark together on the path of liberation. The patience to know that changing the world takes a long time. The openness that expressed her curiosity about the world, about us, about women from all over the world, about what is to come. It hurts immensely to know that this curiosity cannot now continue to discover the world.
What made her special was her deep trust in other women. She approached us with an attitude that came from a deep conviction that we will contribute our part to the revolution, each of us individually and all of us together, and that we are already contributing, that each of us has our own place in the big and whole. With her, it became palpable that the slogan of wanting to create a world in which many worlds fit is a real basis for encounters among people.
She sometimes gave us more confidence than we gave ourselves. In a fascinatingly light way, at the same time not frivolous but meaningful, she thereby pushed us towards our responsibility towards the world. In a quiet way, you could feel her joy at the fact that we are fighting a common battle in different places.
As part of Jineolojî, the science of women and life, she worked in several parts of Kurdistan to make the history of women, their knowledge and their spirit of resistance visible and tangible, and in this way also brought Kurdish society closer together. She had internalised the importance of a revolutionary science, a science around and for life, especially women’s lives and struggles. Nagihan put a lot of emphasis on making life beautiful and worth living, on taking time to go out together or to welcome a new born human being. She knew about the importance of the supposedly small things in life and about valuing and respecting them. The love and deep interest in life in all its facets was unmistakable.
It is friends like her who attack this brutal and inhuman system with their kind, their life and their whole being and thus become its greatest danger. This brutal system knows the importance of these very people who carry a free society within them, who cannot be defeated, who fight, who bring people together and who are already in the process of overcoming this system every day and creating a different world with their love, dedication and determination. The rulers think they can destroy all this with weapons, but we continue to fight together with her and all the other friends. We see her in every step of our struggle.
It is friends like them who attack this brutal and inhuman system with their kind, their life and their whole being and thus become its greatest danger. This brutal system knows the importance of these very people who carry a free society within them, who cannot be defeated, who fight, who bring people together and who are already overcoming this system every day and creating a different world with their love, devotion and determination. The rulers think they can destroy all this with weapons, but we continue to fight together with her and all the other friend:ins. We see her in every step of our struggles and especially the struggles of the women friends in Kurdistan, the Jineolojî and all the parts of the revolution to build a free society. We carry her in our hearts.
The bond we feel with her – and all the other murdered women in struggle – cannot be destroyed by the shots of a gun. Not today. Not tomorrow. Never.
Shehîd Namirin! The fallen show us the way, their determination and their being give us the strength to continue this way every day.
Some German internationalists
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A French friend:
I will not more than friends already told. When I remember heval Zilan, something very specific comes to my mind. Before 3 years, our mothers were on the way to Rojava, as a delegation of mothers for peace, to see us and to meet mothers of Afrin. But, PDK (the ruling party in the south kurdistan) hadn’t let them to pass the border for ten days. They were so angry and sad, so heval zilan was always visiting the mothers. We knew heval Zilan with her charmness and bigheart, for this we never got stressed with the situation. We were sure that heval Zilan will take care with them.
A Friend
I am really, really sorry for everyone and for the revolution. I can’t think in a sweetest, commitment and loveable heval in Jineolojî. She was always there with a smile, motivation and impressive reflexions. My deepest condolence for all her closest hevals that work with her for many years.
Friends from Ecuador
Heval, we have just learned of the assasination of heval Nagihan Akarsel. From Ecuador we send a lot of strength to the Kurdîsh women and to all the revolutionary Kurdish people. From Ecuador to Kurdistan Jin Jiyan Azadî! Mujer vida y libertad!
Friends From Switzerland
For the dear big zilan. We grieve, we are vulnerable because we depend on each other. Our responsibility for each other is based in this vulnerability. We are angry and sad. But in the moment of this public, common mourning, we feel this responsibility for each other and that gives us strength. Shehîd namirin. Jin jiyan, azadî
Remembering with anger and hope Şehîd Nagihan Akarsel.
“Jin-Jiyan-Azadî” will never be silenced- with Jineolojî to women’s revolution
“I have used learning to express anger for growth. “Audre Lorde has written about the importance of anger in the face of racist attacks against her as a lesbian, Black, woman. It is important to give expression to anger, to grow in the process, and to take action. Grief also needs expression and we must not dig it in.
We are angry and saddened by the murder of Nagihan Akarsel. She was a fighter in the construction of free life and the collectively developed scientific basis for it with the Jineolojî. For us she was like a flower, she was a Kurdish woman and a freedom fighter.
With her person, a pioneer of the organization of women and the intellectual basis of the movement for radical freedom thinking and research from a women’s perspective was targeted. Nagihan Akarsel was a pioneer of Jineolojî science and the women’s revolution.
In times of upheaval, the comprehensive global crisis that we all feel and that sometimes makes us feel crushed and hopeless, those people, especially those women, who work with clarity and determination to build the way to a liberated form of society, are a threat to the existing system. The woman who puts life and caring social as well as ecological relationships at the center, who liberates all genders from patriarchy, who does without the state, without militarism, and without divisions and hierarchies between people in their diversities or between people and all other forms of life. Nagihan Akarsel has done research and established research centers for these social changes, she has done educational work. She helped establish the Jineolojî Journal and served on its editorial board. She has spent many years in Turkish prisons for her critical research and reporting as a journalist and women’s fighter. Most recently, she established a women’s library with an archive and research center in Silêmanî, where she was murdered in the morning on her doorstep, and continued to build the Jineolojî. She was on her way to the women’s library on foot when she was deliberately shot.
Nagihan Akarsel was – together with many and with the Kurdish Freedom Movement – in search of another science for a free, just life and has developed and spread it concretely with the Jineolojî in the last more than 10 years. The profound global crisis – of militarism, imperial wars, of climate, of hunger and poverty, of loneliness, of the destruction of nature and the social basis of life, also of hatred of women and other oppressed genders, of feminicides and of increasing fascism – is, with the inevitable upheavals, also a chance for free, democratic and gender liberating alternatives. This requires to develop the power for it very strongly with knowledge and organizing, because the dictatorial, imperialist side is prepared. Science is also in crisis. The entanglements of science with colonialism, male domination, capitalist growth dogma, subjugation of nature, military and state are extensive and deep. The problem is already in the foundations for finding truth, in the epistemologies and methods, in the divisions, claims of control and universality, in the model of thinking that makes the world, nature, society an object. On this basis, no good solutions can be found for a dignified, just life and the preservation of life, yet most research contributes to the perpetuation of the existing disaster. Therefore, Nagihan Akarsel was convinced, science on new foundations is needed. There is a need for a paradigm shift and for research that, together with democratic society, reveals again and recreates the knowledge that strengthens and supports self-determination as social coexistence in a community of diversity and in ethical-political self-responsibility. A science that seeks knowledge in relationships, in complex connections and on an ethical basis, rather than in divisions and objectifications – not with distance, control, distant from life, emptied of life and destructive. Nagihan Akarsel has lived connections on many levels and has been a pioneer in laying the foundations for a science of relationships for free, political-moral, democratic society.
The project of building a science from the experiences of the Kurdish Freedom Movement and against the background of the history of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, this project Jineolojî, which became central in the life of Nagihan Akarsel, has also reached and inspired us in Europe. For some years now, the scientific approach of Jineolojî, its methods, concepts, theories and analyses, has become an important point of reference or even basis of their own way of working for many leftists, democrats, internationalists and feminists in Europe and other parts of the world, also for the Feminist Organizing “Fighting Together”. At a large international conference in 2014 and at many events since then, Jineolojî has been made known and discussed in Europe. Since 2017, numerous multi-day educational camps with a total of many hundreds of participants have taken place in various countries and regions of Europe, including five in Germany so far, with more to come. Two conferences “Gender Studies meets Jineolojî” have been held with about 100 participants each, the next one will follow in 2023. Jineolojî is integrated in many other educational programs, also at German universities. The Emden/Leer University of Applied Sciences has maintained a university partnership with the Jineolojî department of the Rojava University in the self-governing region of Northern and Eastern Syria for more than four years, the University of Bremen has made Jineolojî part of a transnational summer university, and other universities have had guest lecturers from the Jineolojî. Some of those who today in Europe refer to, work with and carry forward the Jineolojî have also become acquainted with it in direct contact with Nagihan Akarsel, among other occasions at the Jineolojî Academy in Northern and Eastern Syria, at a meeting with the international peace delegation to Başur/Southern Kurdistan in June 2021 or in connection with the building-up of the women’s library in Silêmanî.
The murder of Nagihan Akarsel continues the series of murders of pioneers of women’s liberation from the Kurdish movement and other movements worldwide. The Community of Women of Kurdistan (KJK) stated, “This shows that we are facing a global counterattack of capitalist misogyny that seeks to prevent our century from becoming an era of women’s liberation.” (10/4/2022) Against these femicides of women’s revolution activists, as against all femicides and practices of misogyny and anti-feminist efforts to maintain dominant male power, we must put our anger, solidarity and strong organizing for women’s revolution. On the occasion of the femicide of Jina Mahsa Amini in Iran, the Kurdish Women’s Office for Peace Cenî writes: “Today, when [the shout of] ‘Jin Jiyan Azadî’ makes the streets tremble and women all over the world gather in the streets in solidarity, it is another common step of the revolution. By transforming the pain and anger from mere emotions into a revolutionary force that drives us forward, we ensure that these uprisings live on and on.” (9/29/2022) With the deadly attack on women’s rights activist Nagihan Akarsel in Silêmanî, all those who have been on the streets worldwide for weeks with the slogan ‘Jin-Jiyan-Azadî’ are also under attack. This slogan comes from the Kurdish Women’s Movement and expresses the women’s freedom thinking that Nagihan Akarsel has helped to shape and put into living practice. The uproar that has not subsided since the femicide of Jina Mahsa Amini is now intensified by the protests against the femicide of Nagihan Akarsel.
In Southern Kurdistan, where Nagihan Akarsel was murdered, the Turkish military and the Turkish secret service, in the interests of NATO, are waging an imperialist war of extermination against Kurds and their hopes for liberation, the PKK guerrillas. In the mountains, deadly chemical weapons, forbidden by international law, are used en masse against guerrilla positions. Forests are destroyed and people are forced to leave their villages. Targeted drone killings are carried out against leaders of the Kurdish movement. Bombings are directed against places of self-organization such as the Ezidis in Şengal and the Mexmur refugee camp. In the city of Silêmanî, the murder of Nagihan Akarsel is the fifth killing of Kurdish activists in just one year. Most recently, a historian who worked with the Kurdish grassroots movement Tevgera Azadî was also shot on his doorstep at the end of August. The Turkish intelligence service MIT is suspected of being behind all of these murders. The fact that the MIT can monitor, investigate and murder with impunity in the territory of the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, that at least 60 Turkish military bases exist there and that bombings, drone assassinations and poison gas attacks can take place continuously, is made possible by the cooperation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which is dominated by the KDP and de facto controlled by the Barzani family, but also by the USA, without whose approval nothing can happen in northern Iraq. The KDP sides with the anti- Kurdish, anti-democratic, anti-women and imperialist policies of the Turkish state and strengthens its war by supporting military measures such as military intelligence, road building, but also ambushes. Murders like the one in Silêmanî are possible because the MIT can act freely everywhere. Even the second KRG ruling party, the PUK, which governs Silêmanî, apparently no longer opposes this. After the femicide of Nagihan Akarsel, the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) declared that, in addition to the PUK, the Iraqi central government, NATO, the EU and the Council of Europe are also called upon to stop the extrajudicial executions of Turkey, with which a partnership is being conducted. A “feminist foreign policy” as claimed by the Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, among others, becomes more than a farce in the face of such a partnership with this state, which has withdrawn from the Istanbul Convention on Violence against Women, which motivates murderers of women in its own country with impunity, and which is most likely responsible for the secret service execution of Nagihan Akarsel.
Let us never again silence the uprising with the cry of “Jin-Jiyan-Azadî” and come to rest.
Let us make Jineolojî and women’s liberation the basis of our research, thinking, practice, future society and world of democratic confederalism.
Nagihan Akarsel lives on in us. Şehîd namirin!
“Fighting Together” Feminist Organizing for Self-Determination and Democratic Autonomy
Jineolojî Committee Germany
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For Sehîd Nagihan Akarsel
I don’t know you
I have never touched your hands
I’ve never even greeted you
You don’t know my face
You haven’t kissed me
You couldn’t say goodbye
Yet
For so many things read For so many stories lived
You have offered me so much
You lifted the dam
You opened the river
To let the knowledge flow In cascades
Within us
Watering the sand
To deposit the stories of others
In common strength
In crazy ferns
That blossom
In all of us
The same gifts
You planted
I have never seen you
I have never touched your hands
But our hearts know each other.
Friends from South French
