Kurdish Women’s Resistance in Turkish Colonial Prisons

Prisons are a fundamental cog in the colonial machine. This is particularly true in the context of North Kurdistan, under Turkish sovereignty, where thousands of Kurdish activists and nonactivists have been detained for decades. Among them, Kurdish women have often seen their resistance invisibilized, as Berivan Kutlay Sarikaya describes in this text. Through interviews with female prisoners and historical analysis, she constructs a “feminist unsilencing” project centering on their role in the Kurdish struggle from inside the walls.

Historically, political captivity and mass incarceration of Kurdish people have been part and parcel of the Turkish state. The history of the incarceration of the Kurdish people goes back to the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Mass incarceration and the systematic physical, psychological, and sexual violence of Kurds have been employed as a colonial tool to spread intimidation to prevent and suppress the Kurdish anti-colonial struggle.

Although the exact number of Kurds who went to prison due to the Kurdish anti-colonial struggle is unknown, the total is thought to be in the hundreds of thousands, with the majority being imprisoned after the September 12 military coup in 1980. This event was the most transformative among the military interventions in Turkey as it restructured social, cultural, and economic life. Yet, an outstanding characteristic of the coup was the use of prisons as the primary tool of the colonial state to oppress Kurds.

Following the September 12 coup, militarized prisons in Turkey systematically introduced disciplinary control mechanisms. The prisoners were identified as soldiers and subjected to institutionalized training programs whose main aim was to “educate” them as soldiers. Women, too, faced the masculinization and militarization of their bodies in prison despite dominant sexist narratives deeming them unfit for warfare. They experienced systematic inequalities in social life but were suddenly considered equal to men in prisons and thus treated as soldiers. A former Kurdish female political prisoner recounted:

“While we as women do not have equal rights with men in any field of life, we experienced complete equality in the Diyarbakir dungeon—in torture, solitary confinement, military training, crawling, push-ups, and singing military anthems every day, zone cleaning, and three-time roll calls per day—everything! The torture applied in male wards was imposed on us to the same degree, if not more. For instance, women are not required to perform military service according to the Turkish Constitution.”

Sakine Cansız continues:

“Then he told us that we were not prisoners anymore—we were soldiers. Then, the enemy made everyone swear an oath to the Turkish flag and sing the national anthem. Colonel Esat made prisoners sing military songs as they marched through the backyard. Prisoners sometimes had to stand outside barefoot for hours in the heat or lie in the rain and snow on the icy-cold concrete, screaming. Male prisoners had to crawl naked on concrete or wade through sewage up to their necks while singing Turkish marches […] They had to sit in water contaminated with feces, razor blades, and chemicals […] the cruelty of making us recite lines from freedom songs and mixing them with vile insults.” 

Some significant events and figures may illustrate the vital consequences of the military intervention: Following the coup, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey was closed down; the constitution was abolished; political parties, trade unions, student organizations, and cultural institutions were closed down, and their properties were confiscated. About 650,000 people were detained; 230,000 people were tried; 517 people were sentenced to the death penalty, and 50 of that number were executed. Additionally, 14,000 people were deprived of their citizenship, 171 people were documented to have been killed by torture, and a total of 299 people died in prisons.

Kurds were the main “target” of the military coup, and in this period, it is estimated that 81,000 of them were arrested. The Diyarbakir Prison, in which the majority of prisoners and detainees were Kurdish, witnessed the most violent and persistent systematic torture techniques in the first half of the 1980s. Brutal repression and forced Turkification were implemented in and outside of the prison. While it is hard to determine the actual number of people killed in the prison, according to official records, thirty-four prisoners lost their lives due to systematic torture between 1980 and 1984. 

“Welcome to the Diyarbakir Prison” ///

Diyarbakir Prison has a long history as a site where outcasts and Kurdish and Armenian opponents of the Ottoman regime and, later, under the Young Turks’ rule, were abandoned and imprisoned. Under the military junta, however, Diyarbakir Prison—often referred to as “the dungeon” or “number 5” by inmates—became one of the most associated with the Turkish colonial state’s mass incarceration of Kurdish political prisoners. This disciplinary system coexisted with inhumane treatment, torture methods, and unbearable prison conditions. The intent was to create bodies stripped of their sense of safety, dependent on their wishes, instincts, and needs, bound to authority and trapped in dependency, thus ensuring the domination of the authority. In the military prisons of the junta period, corporal instincts and needs became subjects of discipline. Physiological needs and instincts were not only regulated but also weaponized to torment prisoners into submission. Basic physical needs such as hunger, thirst, urination, defecation, and sleep were restricted, transforming prisoners into dependents of the prison administration.

In prison, torture rooms are often given names that call attention to the generous and civilizing impulse normally present in the human shelter. The junta regime created particular terminologies such as hoşgeldin (welcome), banyo (bathroom), tiyatro (theater), and disko (disco). Female prisoners encountered violence tailored to their location, whether it be in bathrooms, detention centers, interrogation rooms, prison cells, women’s wards, visit cabins, and courtrooms or courtrooms, with torture techniques adapted accordingly to the setting. The intended meanings pointed to various forms of torture. All prisoners were met with a hoşgeldin (welcome) session when they first arrived in prison. 

As the prisoners entered the prison, the guards began these sessions by severely beating them with clubs to terrorize them. Şevin recalls her experience as the following:

“When I came to prison, I was filthy, tired and exhausted from being tortured for days. They finished my paperwork and confirmed my ID. After being tortured in the dirt for days, I was very happy to come to prison. At the prison entrance, the guards took me, and I was asked my wish to stay in the shampoo room or TV room. On the other hand, they looked at my congenitally handicapped arm and mocked me for getting a bomb and becoming like this. I thought there was a TV in the TV room, which I did not need, and I said a room with a bathroom. Later, I found myself in the water with shit up to my waist. Turns out it was torture in those bathrooms full of sewage.”

Sakine Cansız’s adds: 

“When we arrived at Diyarbakir, the prison looked like a factory from the outside. It was the first time we had seen an E-type prison in terms of its physical and environmental conditions. As soon as we entered, the outcry and screams welcomed us. Our friends were being slapped from the first door, the external door. We were two women. Soldiers were aligned on both sides of the corridor; they had clubs, batons, and chains in their hands. They were beating [prisoners], and at the same time, we could hear their voices. Everyone who passed through that corridor was beaten by them as far as they could go. Colonel Esat Oktay Yıldıran [he was appointed to the Diyarbakir Prison in 1981 and he was killed on a public bus by a former prisoner in 1988 in İstanbul], a captain whose name we later learned, came and said, ‘Turn your back.’ We did not comply. He slapped and swore at us at that moment. We kept turning our faces and looking at our friends. What we witnessed was truly unbearable. They were naked. Outcries, screams, and beatings on the ground lasted long.”

The Diyarbakir Prison became a site to manifest the Turkish state’s colonial violence, crystallizing in the form of state power that decided who would live or die by forcing prisoners to renounce their political and ethnic identities. The prison aimed to reshape individuals, regulating their life practices; a new identity was offered to prisoners who agreed to relinquish their Kurdish identity. Nazan Üstündağ likens the Diyarbakir Prison to the “womb of the state,” which was intended to reproduce Kurds as Turks. The transformation of the state from a violent masculine agent of torture and destruction of Kurdish men to a feminine agent of reproduction, yielding impaired and traumatized Kurdish masculinities, represents a challenging dichotomy, raising questions about the “gender” of the state.

Death Strikes and Self-Immolation as Resistance in Diyarbakir Prison ///

Under these conditions, Diyarbakir Prison produced for the first time the concept commonly known as zindan direnişi (prison resistance), and the heroic aspects of those involved in such actions have been repeatedly reproduced since then. As nationalist myths were constantly reinvigorated through resistance, approaches to Kurdish anti-colonial struggle historiography among imprisoned militants and sympathizers also evolved around the concept of resistance.

Prisons became an important arena for the contemporary Kurdish Movement, demonstrating its militancy and centralizing its resistance, especially in this specific prison.

Under such conditions, the vast majority of male and female Kurdish activists and militants became a symbol of both colonial violence and resistance through self-immolation protests and death strikes against torture and death in Diyarbakir Prison. 

The extreme brutality of state officials in the prison led to more radical acts of protest than ever before in Turkey. On Newroz day, March 21, 1982, one of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leaders, Mazlum Doğan, hanged himself in his cell, leaving behind three burned matches as a symbol of the Newroz celebration. Two months later, on May 18, 1982, four PKK members self-immolated using paint thinner, plastics, and paint—materials they were forced to use to adorn the walls and windows with Turkish flags and pictures of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This act of resistance, remembered as the Action of the Dörtler (Four), was followed by a hunger strike starting on July 14, 1982, which led to the death of four more leading members in September 1982. They left a letter stating, “This is not a life worth living,” and called for everyone to follow Mazlum Doğan’s approach to resisting the inhumane treatments in prison. These protesters turned to weaponizing their bodies against colonial violence in the form of Turkification. As such, the Diyarbakir Prison became the main site of resistance in Kurdish political history, including hunger or death strikes by PKK members from 1981 through 1984.

Since then, the gender-blind narratives of resistance in prison have been passed down through generations until the assassination of Sakine Cansız on January 9, 2013, in Paris along with other Kurdish activists, Fidan Doğan and Leyla Söylemez. She then became the symbol of the “Diyarbakir Prison’s heroine,” achieving the status of a national martyr. Therefore, the anti-colonial resistance in Diyarbakir Prison is widely known within the Kurdish movement, at least, where the focus is predominantly on male prisoners and their martyrdom. Despite women playing a key role in the prison resistance, their voices have been silenced, and their sacrifices were excluded from the historiography of the Kurdish resistance.

Kurdish women behind the bars ///

Behind prison walls, gender was a dividing line which determined how women and men were incarcerated and under surveillance. Through gendered incarceration practices, 85 women in the Diyarbakir Prison were separated from the nearly 5,000 male prisoners. The women’s wards and cells were distanced from the male prisoners’ wards in the Diyarbakir Prison; therefore, women and men had little to no contact for long periods. Scholarly works on prison and resistance characterize the participation of women in organized resistance initiated by men as “ancillary” or “supplemental.” These studies fail to recognize prison resistance organized by women who acted independently from men. Inside the Diyarbakir Prison, women had no knowledge of men’s resistance due to their physical separation, and for an extended period, they resisted prison authorities independently. While prison authorities in the men’s wards would passively say, “women are being raped,” the women themselves were actively organizing and strategizing against such violence in their wards. They endured sexual humiliation and torture in prison due to their revolutionary stance, Kurdish identity, and gender as Kurdish women. 

Although the violence women experience in prison due to their gender has not been fully articulated to date, in framing this article, I prefer to analyze these experiences not from the perspective of colonial power, but through a lens of decolonial action, focusing on their resistance to colonial sexual violence. While prison authorities sought to control Kurdish women political prisoners’ sexuality and enforce submissiveness through violence inflicted upon their bodies, they dialectically transformed this corporal punishment into a form of resistance.

Turkish military officials employed sexual violence in Diyarbakir Prison to dominate, control, and discipline Kurdish women’s bodies. As I call my work a “feminist unsilencing” project, it is vital to reconceptualize the lived experiences of these Kurdish women and analyze them through a gendered perspective to reveal the power structures that not only rationalize rape and sexualized violence, but also silence the survivors.

My dialogues with Kurdish women reveal that, despite extreme violence and the experience of physical, political, and sexual humiliation, Kurdish women resist, survive, create their own agency, and foster solidarity within and beyond the prison walls.

Furthermore, Kurdish women political prisoners transform “shame” into “political dignity” and reverse the shame that the perpetrators of violence attempted to impose upon survivors through sexual abuse, torture, and humiliation in prison. 

For Kurdish women survivors, the Diyarbakir Prison was not just about torture and barbarism. In recalling the past, female political prisoners repeatedly spoke about their commitment to resistance and solidarity. None of my interviews started with the topics of torture, sexual violence, suffering, and victimization experienced in prison. Nor did the women describe their own acts of resistance as heroic. The common theme of these narratives was their collective resistance, laughter, caring for each other, sharing, and solidarity. 

Necro-resistance of Kurdish women in prison ///

Chanting slogans, refusing to stand up when a guardian came around, refusing to wear the uniform, boycotting canteen meals, and secret communications in prison, such as sending messages by inserting them into bread balls and tossing them off the roof or digging tunnels, were some of the everyday forms of resistance practiced by Kurdish women prisoners. The most effective and publicly prominent forms of protest, however, were hunger strikes. Four Kurdish women prisoners, namely Sakine Cansız, Şilan, Gonul Bulut, and Fatma Celik participated in the “death strikes” that male prisoners initiated in January 1984 against the forced confession practices and torture in the Diyarbakir Prison. Yet their participation was not always welcomed by male prisoners.

Sakine critiqued male prisoners’ attitudes toward women: “We women got news only in bits and pieces. We stayed in the same prison as the men, yet somehow, we were always on the outside looking in. We wanted to act in the interests of all the prisoners, and we needed to be informed so we could do things in the right place and at the right time, but we somehow couldn’t break through the segregation and participate in vital decision-making. Everyone else considered it normal for women prisoners to be peripheral, but whatever we lacked in numbers, we had plenty to say about decisions that were important to us.” All four Kurdish women prisoners refused medical intervention and did not want to end their deaths fast, even as male prisoners announced an agreement with the prison administration. It was also clear that Sakine was committed to being the first Kurdish woman to reach the status of martyr in the 1982 death fast. She said: “If someone had to die, it should be me. ‘Dear God, please let me die first,’ I prayed. The very thought of others dying was unbearable.”

For Sakine and her friends, their deaths were an act of resistance to the just cause of the liberation of Kurdistan. The four Kurdish women political prisoners dictated their last wills to relatives, in which they asked to be buried in Kurdistan. It was obvious from their actions that Kurdish women death strikers were active participants in resistance, and like all other male prisoners, they had political objectives that they wanted to achieve, power structures that they wanted to challenge and alternative ones that they wanted to create. In the case of death fasts in the Diyarbakir Prison, active prison resistance was a way in which Kurdish women prisoners weaponized their bodies through what Banu Bargu called “necro-resistance” in her 2014 book Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons. They placed themselves in a critical political space with only two choices: freedom or death. Necro-resistance transforms prisoners’ bodies from sites of subjection to sites of resistance; however, their role in prison resistance is minimized and constantly judged by Kurdish male comrades.     

The Diyarbakir Prison is a colonial space where Kurdish women faced sexual violence, torture, humiliation, and other forms of extreme violence. However, Kurdish women developed various forms of personal and collective resistance through building solidarity in their wards, using their sense of humor to degrade the violence against their Kurdish and female identities, deploying their bodies as a shield to their dignity by joining death fasts for the first time in the history of Kurdish and Turkish left-wing organizations, as well as burning down their wards to protest the sexual violence against their male comrades.

Kurdish women who were the first women to participate in the prison death strikes, had turned their bodies into weapons and into sites of resistance—a complex and risky choice—to achieve their demands.

Their motives were clear, and they accepted the possibility of death as preferable to that of continued colonial violence in the prison. Their struggle is a dual struggle: the female body is not just a potential weapon against colonial Turkish carceral violence but also against Kurdish leftist patriarchal norms, which frame women as “weak,” “vulnerable,” and paradoxically devalue them as “respectable women.” Therefore, the death strikes in prison are an assertion of the women’s individual and collective feminist power to both resist patriarchal colonial violence and patriarchal injustices of Kurdish society. 

While it is evident that the incarceration of women political prisoners in Kurdistan has been, and remains, violent and harsh, there are clear similarities to the imprisonment of women political activists from the Middle East to North Africa and Latin America. The universality of patriarchy, racism, oppression, and capitalism, as well as silence, resistance, resiliency, hope, and collective struggle, is recognizable even in different regions and contexts. This article seeks to ensure the inclusion of Kurdish women’s experiences in Turkish colonial prisons within the broader discourse of resistance narratives.

Currently, there are thousands of Kurdish women who continue their resistance against similar forms of colonial sexual violence in Turkish prisons. This article carries the hope for a better understanding of women political prisoners’ unique experiences in order not only to challenge the silence of the public across diverse geographies but also to make a call for transnational solidarity with all women political prisoners from across the world. ■