Party’s powerful women’s organization cooperated
with the Union of Kurdish Women, and lobbied for
legal reform, which brought marriage under civil
control, and abolished the tribal custom of honor
killing. The Ba≠th regime, which came to power in
1968, used military might to crush the Kurdish
autonomist movement, and in 1988 perpetrated a
genocide officially named Anfàl, “spoils of war”
(Ismael and Ismael 2000). The coercive organs of
the state institutionalized rape as a method of pun-
ishment, which violated the honor of both women
and the (Kurdish) nation. The entire adult male
population of the Barzani tribe was eliminated and
women were kept in concentration camps and sub-
jected to rape and terror (Makiya 1993, 135–50,
289–98).
After the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991,
much of Kurdistan came under the rule of two
Kurdish organizations, the KDP and Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which created the
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Six of the
105 members of the parliament were women (5.7
percent). However, in the course of parliamentary
elections, male and female voters were segregated at
the voting centers. Although virtually independent
from Baghdad, the KRG, especially its KDP faction,
refused to repeal the Ba≠th regime’s personal status
codes and other laws that were lenient on honor
killing. In 1994, women marched from Sulayma-
niyya to Arbil in protest at the civil war between the
KDP and the PUK, which lasted, intermittently,
until 1996, and led to the formation of two Kurdish
governments. The genocide and the 1991 Gulf War
disrupted the fabric of Kurdish society, and un-
leashed extensive male violence including honor
killing; suicide through self-immolation, previously
a rare phenomenon, occurred regularly. In the wake
of continuing protest, the PUK-led government
issued resolutions aimed at criminalizing honor
killing, although they remained on paper. The KDP,
however, justified patriarchal violence as part of
Islamic and Kurdish traditions (Çingiyanî 1993).
The Ba≠th regime’s policy of creating a “new Iraqi
woman,” one who is totally devoted to the ideol-
ogy and politics of the party, failed largely due to
Kurdish nationalist resistance. However, the expe-
rience of self-rule from 1991 revealed that Kurdish
nationalism in power, as in other cases, Western
and non-Western, ensures women’s loyalty to the
state. By the late 1990s, feminist knowledge and
critique was gaining ground, and women were
already resisting indigenous national patriarchy.
Several women’s groups and magazines ranging
from secular to Islamic, and communist to nation-
alist, engaged in debates on issues such as legal364 kurdish women
reform, violence against women, and especially
honor killing.syria
Built largely under French rule (1920–46), the
Syrian state was, like Iraq under British rule, with-
out a “state feminist” project. The majority of the
Kurds lived in rural areas of the northeast, although
there were sizeable Kurdish settlements in Damas-
cus, Aleppo, and other cities. A nationalist move-
ment emerged in the 1920s among the urban
notables and intelligentsia, but there was no
Kurdish women’s movement. However, individual
women of the aristocratic families were active in
education and culture in the 1930s and 1940s. The
ruling Ba≠th party has eliminated all opposition
movements since it came to power in the mid-
1960s, and revoked the citizenship of thousands of
Kurds.the soviet union (1921–91)
Women were granted suffrage rights once Soviet
power was established, in 1921, over the Caucasian
regions of Armenia and Azerbaijan, where most
Kurds lived in rural areas. Tribal-feudal socioeco-
nomic relations, considered the engine of patri-
archy, were promptly dismantled; women were
expected to be active in the building of socialist
society and economy (Abdal 1960). In sharp con-
trast to other parts of Kurdistan, where female illit-
eracy rates in the villages are still as high as 50
percent, illiteracy was eliminated in the Soviet
Union by the early 1930s. The reform of gender
relations entailed extensive educational and ideo-
logical work in the newly established Kurdish print
media, film, and schools. By the mid-1950s, a gen-
eration of professional women were active in areas
such as teaching, journalism, broadcasting, medi-
cine, agriculture, and music. Also sharply different
from the case in Turkey and Iran, Kurds enjoyed the
freedom to use their language and maintain their
culture. None of the states in the region allowed
any contact with the Kurdish women of the Soviet
Union. After the fall of the Soviet regime, the size of
the Kurdish population was reduced and displaced
due to the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan,
and Kurdish linguistic, cultural, and human rights
were restricted (McDowall 2000, 490–4, Russo
2000).The diasporas
The Kurdish diasporas that emerged since the
1960s, in the West and elsewhere, consist of around
one million “guest workers” (mostly in Germany),
refugees, and immigrants. Gender relations among