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Women “do not have the luxury not to listen and no to act” in Kurdistan
Catalan-Kurdish project TitulArts brings together activists and Syrian refugees in Amed · Rights of women and children are fostered through art, psychosocial support · Nationalia talks to participants
The project is being implemented by four organisations. Two of them are Kurdish: the Middle East Cinema Academy Organisation (OSAD) and the Mesopotamia Migration Monitoring and Research Association (Göç-Der), while the other two are Catalan: CIEMEN and Creart.
The project started in late 2020 with a launching activity based on a training process for Amed-based trainers linked to the cultural and artistic associative fabric of the city. Through a socio-affective and artistic methodology, they were offered practical and methodological resources, as well as a theoretical basis on socio-emotional learning and psychosocial support.
In early 2021, several groups of refugee women and children have started taking part in artistic, cinema and rights-oriented workshops, under the guidance of the aforementioned Amed trainers, both from OSAD (mostly focused in cinema and arts) and Göç-Der (paying attention to women’s rights including their health rights).
During this process, a documentary on the lives of Syrian refugee women taking part in the project is being shot. The film will likely be screened in Amed and Barcelona in a few months time.
The final goal of these actions is to transform the creative and accompanying processes currently under way into material tools to make visible, communicate, exchange and internationalize the participants’ voices and artistic expressions outside the borders imposed by their status of refugees.
The project is expected to last until 2022, with more groups of refugees taking part. When it ends, it will have dealt with an estimated 200 women and children.
To have a better insight on the reasons why some participants engaged in TitulArts, Nationalia has spoken to Camilia (not her real name), a Kurdish Syrian refugee taking part in the project, and to OSAD members Zinar Karabaş and Metin Ewr Bulut.
Camilia’s move from Hesekê to Amed
22-year-old Camilia’s family story is no different from many others in Kurdish-majority regions of Rojava, a self-declared autonomous area in north-eastern Syria. She hails from Hesekê (Al-Hasakah in Arabic), but her ancestors are from Mêrdîn (Mardin, in Turkish), some 30 kilometres north of the Turkish-Syrian border. Throughout the 20th century, thousands and thousands of Kurds left Turkey for Syria, thus creating strong bonds across the border as families had members on both sides.
“40 or 50 years ago, food was scarce in Mêrdîn,” Camilia recalls. Her family needed to earn a living and decided to emigrate. They settled in Hesekê. Her mother was born in Hesekê too, but some family members have been officially registered in Turkey for a long time.
“We had our house, shop, and vehicle in Hesekê,” Camilia says. “We had no intention to move. Until 2013, the [Syrian] conflict was not so harsh in the city, although it was already ongoing in other places. We were not planning to come to Amed, even if relatives of us were living here.”
Things got worse in 2013. Camilia’s neighbours were hit by an unmanned plane, only two of them surviving. “When that happened, many people fled to the north.” As a consequence of the panic following the attack, her 11-year-old brother suffered from hyper blood pressure, as well as a crisis. “My father then decided that we could not stay. He had a Turkish ID, so he was able to cross through Dirbêsiyê to Kızıltepe, even if the border was closed. Still, we needed to run for one hour.”
“After that, we came to Amed. And since then we have been here, now for 8 years.”
Camilia speaking at OSAD's headquarters in Amed, during the interview. / Photo: Maria CampsCamilia had become a refugee; even so, she says she did not feel motivated to take part in refugee-oriented activities. “Either I was scared or doubtful,” she argues. Furthermore, as the TitulArts project regards, “its motto on ‘refugees’ and ‘women’ did not even appeal to me in the first place.”
Then, why did she finally engage in TitulArts? “For me, it ended up becoming an opportunity to help other people who are in refugee situation. I mean that I did not decided to participate because I am a refugee woman, but to act and help other people.”
She asks to tell a story to help us understand this.
A refugee woman giving voice to another one
“A woman came to me 2 months ago,” Camilia starts. “She, and her 8-month old daughter, were my neighbours in Amed, even if only for 2 weeks. They then left for Mêrdîn.”
The neighbour —let’s call her by fictional name Noor— was an Arab woman from Idlib, a city in western Syria. During the war, Noor had fled from Idlib to Lebanon. She was married to a man with whom she had three kids. “The man hit her a lot. He got imprisoned; meanwhile she worked as a house cleaner to earn money to look after the kids. She left her husband, but after he was released from prison, he managed to keep the three kids,” Camilia recalls.
Still in Lebanon, Noor married another man. Her second husband then moved to Izmir, a coastal city in western Turkey. After several months, Noor sought to join him. “The man asked her to send him some money in order to arrange an illegal way to make her way —together with another four women— from Lebanon to Turkey.”
“But,” Camilia goes on, “somewhere in transit, the women were captured by an armed group, who kept them for about 3 months. Any sort of sexual violence that you can imagine was inflicted on them. Besides being raped, they were tortured with electric shocks, their hair was torn... They used a shish kebab stick to perforate her ear, causing her to go deaf.”
The women were finally released. “At that moment of the story, my neighbour told me: ‘It had been better if they had killed me.’”
Noor then phoned her husband and told him about her suffering. In astonishingly emotional coldness, her husband replied to her: “Not a big deal. This is normal, it is happening to everybody.”
The captors, on their part, cynically admitted to the women that they were only being released because, shortly after, they would be able to kidnap a new group.
“After having met again with her husband,” the young Kurdish TitulArts participant goes on, “my neighbour got pregnant. Unluckily, her husband also started to hit her. For some reason, after the baby was born, the three of them moved to Kızıltepe.” Kızıltepe, or Qoser in Kurdish, is a town south to Mêrdîn, a stone throw away from the Turkish-Syrian border.
“The woman then wanted to part ways, but the man did not wish to,” Camilia says. Somehow, Noor managed to hide from him. “But he wanted to keep the baby girl, only to sell her to another family. At any moment that he found her on the street, he hit her and tried to take the baby with him.”
Qoser-based NGO Lider Kadın Derneği, which specialises in gender violence, helped Noor to finally escape from the man and helped her to reach Amed with her daughter. “This is how she ended up living close to my home. She then moved to Mêrdîn, as more Arabic speakers could be found there.”
According to Camilia’s informations, Noor’s second husband has again settled in Izmir. “Anyway, she still wants to flee Turkey, as she continues to feel threatened.”
“This was my motivation to take part in the TitulArts project,” Camilia argues. “I wanted to somehow be her voice. She is a survivor. A resistor. Others would have committed suicide. She is not even begging; she just wants to leave the country for the well being of herself and her baby.”
Camilia volunteered to get interviewed when Zinar Karabaş told the women participating in the project that a Catalan journalist would be visiting Amed in order to get records on it and release them in this Nationalia article.
“Never such stories had been close to me,” Camilia says. “My neighbour came to me because I can speak Arabic; that is why she decided to talk to me. This story must be told. This story must reach many people. I feel the responsibility to tell this story.”
Cinema as a tool for memories and social change
OSAD’s Zinar Karabaş has been now working for a while with Camilia and the other women participating in TitulArts. Karabaş is used to hear many of such stories, not only because of the project, but also because of the general framework of refuge and displacement that Kurds have been enduring for decades, both in Turkey and abroad.
“It is hard, off course, to handle these stories,” says Karabaş. “We feel evolving, contradictory emotions. As a woman, after I hear such stories, I feel that we women die earlier if we do not explain them. Every minute counts. We do not have the luxury not to listen and no to act.”
That is one of OSAD’s goals, for sure. The association seeks to provide cinema education and to deliver cultural and artistic products in order to disseminate such artworks to all segments of Kurdish society. Raising awareness of social injustice —including against women, refugees, displaced people, and minorities— is one of the motivations to do so, and permeates most of OSAD’s work. This is also the framework for the TitulArts’ documentary.
“The power of art —cinema specifically— to transform situations and, at some point, to recover a story, motivates me to react,” Karabaş argues. “I believe in the power of changing realities, and cinema is a tool for it. Ours is, furthermore, a female point of view of cinema, and I believe in this too.”
“As a cinema association, the tools that we have is to shoot these kind of situations, and to show them,” says OSAD’s Metin Ewr Bulut. “Refugees are not far away —they are living in our homeland, and they are separated by artificial borders as well. We feel them as our own. It is as if we were there, in the same conflict as they are.”
When Syrian refugees —Kurds and Arabs alike— flocked to Amed and other Kurdish cities in Turkey, “we listened to their stories, and immediately we saw ourselves in their stories,” Bulut says. “This is why we at OSAD decided to engage in the project: you want to do something, you want to take action.”
“As a nation, we Kurds are familiar with these hard stories,” Bulut recalls. “Through this project we are seeking to help recover them for their well being. That is our motivation —to get them back to life and health. This is what gives us the power to resist, too. And, at the end of the day, it is our responsibility as human beings for humankind.”
With support from:
Agència Catalana de Cooperació al Desenvolupament · Generalitat de Catalunya