Bad Housekeeping interviewed Margaret Owen last week to speak about her experiences in Rojava, northern Syria, which she visited at the end of December on the invitation of the PYD.
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Margaret Owen is the octogenarian director of NGO Widows for Peace through Democracy. I went to her house in London where she fed me baklava while showing me photos of her grandchildren & of the impossibly tiny boat on which she had crossed the Iraqi border the week before. For a woman whose organisation has ‘Peace’ in the title she gets a surprising glint in her eye whilst describing attractive women wielding semi-automatic weapons, and speaks at such a pace that I can only include a harshly reduced version of her conversation here – which is a shame because what she has to say gives an intriguing glimpse into international relations and the status of widows across the world.
RB: So, you’ve just come back from Rojava [a Kurdish enclave in Northern Syria] – what did you learn?
MO: They’d really got a new way of promoting, guaranteeing and establishing gender equality in every aspect of life. The PYD– the main Kurdish political party in Syria – have co-chairs, a man and a woman, in every single institution, organisation, association – whether it’s a hospital, medical, educational, military, police, councils, every single body is headed by a man and a woman. And that doesn’t mean that the woman chair only does women-things, she’s just a co-chair with the man. And I never saw anyone writing about Rojava, they were all writing about Syria and the opposition and al-Qaeda, but you never saw anyone really writing about what was happening within Rojava [..]
You can read the interview in full here.