Events

We invite you to a Public Conference, organized by citizens in action and featuring an Internationally Renowned Human Rights’ Activist, Author & Feminist Dr. Nawal El Saadawi

the topic is :

The Paradox of our Post Modern World
Politics, Religion, Sexuality & Creative Dissidence

Date: July 6, 2009.

Place: Atwater Library, a National Historic Site

1200 Atwater Ave. (corner Tupper), right across from Metro Atwater , auditorium upstairs,

Time: from 7:00 sharp to 10.00 p.m.

photo by Mansour Nasiri

photo by Mansour Nasiri

Dr. Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian medical doctor, a prolific writer, philosopher, international speaker, university professor and outspoken critic of blind fundamentalism. Her novels & books have been translated to thirty languages. Her most famous novel is “The Hidden Face of Eve,” published in 1980. She has received several literary prizes and honorary doctoral degrees, from various universities around the world. On account of her writing on political & sexual taboos, she lost her position at the Ministry of Health in Egypt . She was exposed to different types of oppression, including prison, exile and the banning of her books. She was accused of heresy by Al Azhar University but she won all the court cases brought against her. In 2008/9, she taught at Spelman College , in Atlanta . She continues to write and struggle for justice and freedom locally and globally.

Now, as for the regular part of the Truth and Treason blog, here we go!

Women’s involvement in the Kurdish struggle. It is the title of the chapter I finished reading in my book.

On tuesday, we met with a friend of mine who’s from Iran and her friend who’s from Syria; she is Kurdish, she’s an artist and she deals with topics such as war, identity, stories/memory preservation. She is strong and dares to face what she finds difficult. She wishes to use art as a mean to engage, communicate and preserve life, in a peaceful way. Thank you for talking to me, for your commitment and care.

In my book is written:

As Kurdish peshmerga had been receiving military and financial support from Iran, the Iraqi government retaliated brutally. The most known element of this systematic killing of Kurds was the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, nominally a counterinsurgency operation but in reality a carefully planned and executed program of ethnic cleansing in which fifty thoulsand to two hundred thoulsand people are estimated to have been killed, most of them men and adolescent boys. Thousands of Kurdish villages were systematically destroyed, and over a million and a half of their inhabitants were deported to camps with no water, electricity, or sewage. Others were executed as they were leaving their villages.

It is hard to imagine, it is very crushing, and yet it happened.

So what did they do?

A couple pages further, that same book states :

Hedi F., a member of the Women’s Union of Kurdistan who fled Kurdistan in 1990 and returned in 2005 to help rebuild her country, told Nicola in the spring of 2007 : ‘At the end of the eighties, Kurdish people fled to the mountains and to Iran. A group of us women thought, ‘We can’t just sit here, we have to be included in the Kurdish revolution’. So the Women’s Union of Kurdistan was founded with two aims : to support the national struggle and to support women. ‘We were under attack by the government. Men were fighting and women were sitting and crying. We thought, we could provide nursing and support, to show that we can do something. Women needed education, health, and political awareness. So we provided this.‘

And what can we do now?!

It is up to you. You can come to this conference and participate in what’s going on right now. You can write, sing, dance or organize something called ‘MonthlyMess‘ :

www.teesriduniya.com