Trade unions have a long, proud history of supporting struggles of workers and oppressed people around the world. The campaign to free Abdullah Öcalan is a continuation of this activism, says Clare Baker.
Kurdistan
The Kurdish community in Australia held a Newroz (Kurdish New Year) celebration in NSW Parliament House, Peter Boyle reports.
The Kurdistan Women’s Liberation Movement sent the following message of solidarity to the Women's March for Justice, which mobilised more than 100,000 women and their allies around Australia on March 15.
Turkey has opened a new front in its ongoing war of annihilation against the Kurdish liberation movement, writes Marcel Cartier.
President elect Joe Biden has been described as a "friend of the Kurds", writes Marcel Cartier, but under his presidency, US attempts to undermine the Rojava Revolution by any means necessary is likely to continue.
Peter Boyle reports that the Turkish military is stepping up its attack on Kurdistan Workers Party guerilla bases and self-governing Yazidi communities in Shengal.
Turkish jets began bombing the Xakurke region of northern Iraq on May 26. The following day Turkish helicopters transported troops into the area. This was the latest step in Turkey’s growing military intervention in the predominantly Kurdish north of Iraq, writes Chris Slee.
Famous British singer Joss Stone performed a concert in the largely-Kurdish region of Rojava in northern Syria after sneaking across the border.
Leyla Guven, a member of Turkey’s parliament for the left-wing, Kurdish-led People’s Democratic party (HDP), launched an indefinite hunger strike on November 7 from Amed Prison, where she was held jailed by Turkey’s regime. Her demand is for an end to the isolation of jailed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Jailed by Turkey since 1999, Ocalan is the recognised leader of the Kurdish liberation movement. Since 2011, his lawyers have been unable to met with him.
The Assad regime and its allies have been building up their forces around the rebel-held Idlib province, in Syria’s north-west, in preparation for a major offensive. Some bombing raids have already been carried out in the south and west of the province.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are carrying out guerrilla resistance against the occupying Turkish army and its militia allies in the Afrin canton, a predominantly Kurdish area of northern Syria.
In common with many other countries, Turkey’s socialist movement has been marked by the dominance of men in positions of leadership and authority.
The patriarchy is a social order that has become dominant globally over the course of millennia and which connects with oppressive conceptions of the family, exploitation and inheritance — in short, with social class. Socialists cannot stand by as it recreates itself in the very structures we claim exist to overturn social stratification and oppression.
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was said to have remarked that there are decades in which nothing happens, and weeks in which decades happen. Muhsin Yorulmaz writes that, in Turkey, there is no escaping this particular truism.
Because of the rapid rate of betrayals, shifting alliances and crises, it becomes difficult to summarise what the Turkish government or state are “thinking” in a given week, even for those of us who speak Turkish.
- Previous page
- Page 2
- Next page
