CENI – Kurdish Women’s Office for Peace are organising the 8th International Zilan Women’s Festival, which will take place in Gelsenkirchen in Germany. This year, the festival will be focused around attacks on the social, cultural and political life of Kurdish women.
“We, at Ceni, Kurdish Women’s Office for Peace, organise the 8th International Zilan Women’s festival, which takes place this year on 16th June 2012 in the amphitheatre in Gelsenkirchen. The International Zilan Women’s Festival is an event at which women living in Europe and those from Kurdistan meet culturally, socially, ideologically, artistically and politically.
The different aspects and colours as well as the cultural similarities of freedom-loving women from Kurdistan and other nations are here shown to their advantage. The festival has a different theme every year. This year, the focus is on the attacks on the social, cultural and political life of women in Kurdistan, as well as the resistance and alternatives that women have developed in these areas.
This year, the women of Kurdistan, wherever they live, say “NO” to political, social and cultural femicide and genocide. Another theme of our festival this year is the demand for the recognition of the political will of the Kurdish people and Kurdish women: “Freedom for Abdullah Ocalan!” We say: “THAT’S ENOUGH! The intensified solitary confinement of Abdullah Ocalan and his 13-year imprisonment must be ended immediately!”
The recognition of Kurdish identity and of a status for Kurdistan is the guarantee of peace in the Middle East. We say: “THAT’S ENOUGH!” to the murder of women, to femicide, to the loss of identity, to policies of denial and destruction, to displacement, to poverty, to sexual violence and rape, to the torture of children in prisons, to the interference in the self-determination of one’s own body. All of this is the result of these massacres, of sexism, and of the war that we have experienced for decades in our land. We resist against it when we declare at our festival: We want our freedom! An Azadi, an azadi! Freedom for Abdullah Ocalan – “NO” to political, social and cultural femicide and genocide!”