![]() Iraqi Kurdistan has two main political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), both clan-based and patriarchal. In 2005, after a long struggle with Baghdad, the Iraqi Kurds won constitutional recognition of their autonomous region, and the Kurdistan Regional Government has since signed oil contracts with a number of Western oil companies as well as with Turkey. In 2003, the Kurdish peshmerga sided with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein. After the first Gulf War, the UN sought to establish a safe haven in parts of Kurdistan, and the United States and UK set up a no-fly zone. Iraq: In 1986–89, Saddam Hussein conducted a genocidal campaign in which tens of thousands were murdered and thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed, including by bombing and chemical warfare. The situation is worse in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where the Kurds are a minority people subjected to ethnically targeted violations of human rights. ![]() In Iran, though there have been small separatist movements, Kurds are mostly subjected to the same repressive treatment as everyone else (though they also face Persian and Shi’ite chauvinism, and a number of Kurdish political prisoners were recently executed). After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. But the truth is, ideologically and politically these are very, very different systems. right now, yes, the people are facing the Islamic State threat, so it’s very important to have a unified focus. Hen we refer to all Kurdish fighters synonymously, we simply blur the fact that they have very different politics. Besides, we were generational sectarians we didn’t trust anybody over thirty. We wanted to build a just society, not get a bigger slice of the pie. We were movement girls, not career women NOW’s demands and organizational style weren’t radical enough for us. My friends and I thought of it as an organization for people our mothers’ age, who lived in places like Brookline, where we never went. NOW had been around since 1966, but nobody I knew belonged to it. I am not talking about the National Organization for Women (NOW). ![]() I fell in love with the voice of women’s liberation, and for all its occasional stridency love it still. #One hand clapping full#Its voice was angry, raw, and full of pain, combined with a kind of bitter triumph at seeing the situation for what it was. No More Fun and Games had a message that was entirely new to me, though it resonated through my subconscious like a bell to which I was already tuned. ![]() I first made contact with the women’s liberation movement twenty years ago, in the fall of 1968, when Linda Gordon showed me a copy of a magazine called No More Fun and Games, put out by an organization called Cell 16. The Sound of One Hand Clapping Meredith Tax ▪ Fall 1988 ![]()
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