For Real Peace in Turkey, Kurdish Women Must Be at the Table

For Real Peace in Turkey, Kurdish Women Must Be at the Table

Melike Yasar, international representative of the Kurdish Women’s Foreign Relations Office, argues that women’s freedom has to be at the centre of any peace process in Turkey and Syria. Peace, she writes, means more than an end to fighting. It has to bring justice, equality and freedom, and women must set the agenda instead of simply being given a seat at the table.

Yasar writes in the context of Abdullah Öcalan’s call for peace on 27 February 2025 and the March 2025 agreement between Syria’s Kurdish-led administration and the transitional government. She describes femicide as a structural form of war, drawing on the 1993 Vienna Declaration, and uses UN Security Council resolution 1325 to argue that women’s participation must be real, not symbolic. As evidence that women can lead, she points to the Kurdish movement’s women’s assemblies, the co-chair system in local government and the women MPs of the DEM Party who have met Öcalan and reported back to their constituents. She criticises the Turkish government for avoiding meaningful steps.

She concludes that a ceasefire is a starting point, not an end point, and calls for closer alliances between Kurdish and Turkish women’s organisations, grassroots participation and recognition of Kurds and women as equal citizens.

Full article

Read the full article on the Kurdish Peace Institute

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