It is our women in the resistance
who are showing us the way

We working women from Anatolia have more reason than before to go out into the city squares. Our problems as women grow with the increase in exploitation and oppression. The frequently heard talk of “modernisation and equal rights of men and women“ changes nothing in our double exploitation, the violence and harassment we undergo and the way our identity and personality are offered as marketable commodities under capitalism. But our problems do not cease even with that. There are other problems which we perhaps do not recognise as our own which aggravate all these other problems and which play a decisive role in our lives.
We are among those who feel the worst of the pain of hunger and poverty caused by the IMF. The burden of losing dignity, because of being complicit in the murder of Iraqi babies since our land has been turned into an American base and is occupied by the Yankees, is a burden that presses down heavily on our hearts. We can best understand the Iraqi women whose life partners and children have been murdered! The women of our people carried ammunition on our backs during the Liberation War and are aware of the honour that comes from being independent. And while our people have been put in isolation in the F-Type prisons and are dying on hunger strike, body cell by body cell, we are dying with them.

The current affairs of our own country should also be on our agenda
It is not enough to go out into the streets on March 8 and shout out, “We women exist“, without making concrete demands connected to the struggle of working women and the struggle going on in our country.
Failure to do that cannot make the slightest contribution to freeing our women. Our country is occupied, it has been turned into a military base which is to serve the massacre of a people, corpses are removed from our prisons one after the other, people are put in isolation cells, imprisoned women are tortured and humiliated and our lives are dominated by hunger and oppression.
The agenda of working women should be that of the weak and the oppressed in society. The agenda of our women on March 8 should be events and the struggle in our country, the struggle for independence and democracy. Our anger against oppression and double exploitation and against being commodities in the capitalist market should be expressed by participating in our struggle. The squares of our cities should be turned into places where all of us, women, men, young and old, shout out our anger against American aggression and against isolation in the F-Type prisons.

It is our women in the resistance who show us the way
Our fallen comrades in the Death Fast, the Gulsumans, the Senays, the Fidans, the Zehras, all sealed with their lives the identity that women of all ages and professions should defend. They were women who were part of the struggle. They demonstrated in the factories, the fields, the schools and the shantytowns that the liberation of women is derived from the joint struggle of women and men. They dedicated themselves to the struggle and created the identity of the woman in the resistance.
Gulsuman, a “housewife and cleaning woman“, has become a model for all working women. Zehra, who resisted the system’s degenerative effects on youth and young women, said that she had “found an answer to all questions “, when she continued her struggle in the Death Fast.
A “woman who liberates herself“ is one who fights. If we fight in the right place it will then be possible to free ourselves of the chains of capitalism that confine our bodies and souls. The identity of the “woman who liberates herself“ is formed in this way. We would like to repeat this truth: “The revolution is impossible without women, the liberation of women is impossible without revolution.“ The final liberation of women means breaking the chains of capitalist exploitation. That means revolution.
In our country, Turkey, revolutionary prisoners have been involved in a Death Fast resistance for over two years, opposing isolation torture in the F-Type prisons. Starting on December 19, 2000, 61 days after the resistance started, 28 prisoners were murdered in the course of a three-day military operation carried out in order to break up the collective dormitories which had been customary in Turkey’s prisons and to lock up political prisoners in isolation conditions in the so-called F-Type prisons. The aim of this policy which originated in Europe and the USA and has been used all over the world, is to destroy opposition thoughts and destroy prisoners both physically and psychologically.
At present the Death Fast resistance is being continued by 16 prisoners. So far 105 people, of whom 42 were women revolutionaries, have fallen in the fight against isolation torture. The women, who have become immortal in this great resistance and who are still continuing to resist in the isolation cells and hospitals where they are subjected to the torture of force-feeding, have become a monument to invincibility and willpower that cannot be broken.

Long live March 8! And long live the revolutionary resistance of our women in the prisons, factories, shantytowns and schools!
NO TO ISOLATION AND WAR!

DHKC Vienna Information Bureau
____________________________________________________________
Gaertnergasse 1/6
1030 Vienna,Austria
Tel/Fax: ++43 (0)1 971 83 72
e-mail:  dhkc@chello.at