Some of the most respected feminist intellectuals across India have come together to demand justice for women activists who have been targeted for protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). They released a statement of condemnation against the targeting of the activists as well as the wider move to spin a false narrative that links the anti-CAA protests with the violence in Delhi.

The statement has been endorsed by several prominent women activists and intellectuals including Annie Raja, Medha Patkar, Farah Naqvi, Aruna Roy, Teesta Setalvad, Aparna Sen, Shabnam Hashmi, Lalita Ramdas, Maimoona Moolah, Ruth Manorama, Soni Sori, Hasina Khan, Jagmati Sangwan, Mariam Dhawale, Sadaf Jafar, Sabika Abbas Naqvi, Anjali Bharadwaj, Kamla Bhasin, Gabriele Dietrich, Jayati Ghosh, Meena Kandasamy, Gita Hariharan, and many others.

The statement says, “We, the undersigned, strongly condemn the brazenly malicious attacks, arrests and intimidation by the Delhi Police of Muslim women, students and activists, as well as other citizens who have spoken up against the unconstitutional moves of the present ruling dispensation.”

It adds, “As feminists we decry this systematic crackdown on, and mis-representation of, the peaceful and constitutional anti-CAA-NRC-NPR movement. Led so powerfully by Muslim women across the country, these protests witnessed a new wave of women stepping out in their own neighbourhoods in huge numbers, defying social structures and asserting their rights as citizens of a secular, democratic republic—one of the most historic moments and movements, since independence.”

Siting the significance of the movement the statement says, “We must remember that inspired by Shaheen Bagh, sit-in protests led by Muslim women were held in 200+ locations across the country. Holding up images of Savitri Bai, Fatima Sheikh, Babasaheb Ambedkar, painting protest graffiti and reading the Preamble, reciting poetry and slogans upholding constitutional values and communal harmony, this was a tremendously powerful assertion of rights and resistance, of historically marginalized women creating the possibility of a new nation of emancipation, justice, equality and dignity.” It adds, “The government, unwilling to dialogue with the women, chose the masculinist response of trying to crush them. Its message is clear—those who dare challenge its fascist, patriarchal, communal, classist and casteist nature will be meted the harshest State sanctions.”

The statement names Gulfisha, Safoora Zargar and Ishrat Jahan as the women who were at the forefront of the peaceful protests but are now paying a price for exercising their democratic rights. They also mention others scholars and student activists arrested and slapped with draconian charges and sent to judicial custody such as Meeran Haider (President, RJD Youth Wing, Delhi), Sharjeel Imam (JNU scholar) and Shifa-Ur-Rehman (President, Jamia Alumni Association). Dr Umar Khalid has also been slapped with charges under UAPA and is under investigation.

The statement ends with the following list of demands:

•             Delhi Police must immediately make public all FIRs, arrests and detentions with their legal status and conduct a free and fair investigation into all the incidents of violence.

•             False cases against peaceful anti-CAA protesters must be dropped, and all those arrested on trumped-up charges must be released immediately.

•             Real culprits of the violence in Delhi must be booked, including the likes of Kapil Mishra, Anurag Thakur, Parvesh Verma and others who instigated hate, sparked and perpetuated the violence.

•             Detentions, intimidation & harassment of those who assert the democratic right to protest must stop.

•             Prisons must be de-congested as per orders of the Apex Court and all political prisoners released.

•             UAPA and the Sedition law must be repealed.

The entire statement may be read here:

The entire list of signatories may be viewed here:

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A silent protest by women in Nairobi about women’s representation in politics. Photo: Jerry Riley. All rights reserved.

Many years ago, just before I became a teenager, my mother and my aunt rescued an 11-year old relative who was being forced into “marriage.” I don’t remember the full details of what happened but there were many conversations in my family about it.

The girl’s mother was my mother’s cousin. My relatives talked a lot about what her father’s relatives were planning to do. Her parents had died when she was a baby and she had lived with them since then.

My mother and my aunt decided to intervene. They made the journey from Nairobi to Lamu and literally stole her during the night. She was then delivered to her older sister’s house, where she lived until adulthood.

When I think about my feminism, and try to identify when I became a feminist, I remember this incident. I remember looking at my mother, in awe of her boldness. She was like a fierce warrior, ensuring that a young girl was not forced into marriage. I remember feeling that that’s who I wanted to be too.

I remember looking at my mother, in awe of her boldness.

This feeling stayed with me and grew when, years later, in high school, our english teacher Mrs. Ondiek wrote a poem called “Equality, change the slogan” for us to perform at a drama festival of schools in Nairobi.

The poem, and our dramatised performance of it, was so good that we became high school drama champions of Nairobi, and third nationally. It challenged us to go beyond women’s equality slogans to policy-making and system-changing, and noted that the goal is not a reversal of gender roles.

Feminism came slowly to me, through years of experiences which led to questions about the state of the world around me and my place in it. As a young woman, reading and talking about these issues helped me to stitch together the language I needed to understand and explain what feminism is and what it meant to me.

Finally, I chose to consciously identify as a feminist, which has since been a journey of re-discovery, unlearning, and learning that has now rooted my feminism in actions and interactions with other people and with the systems I exist and move in.
‘Feminism came slowly to me, through years of experiences and questions about the state of the world and my place in it.’

This is not uncommon; feminism has come to many African women over periods of time, through similar moments with their mothers and grandmothers, teachers, neighbours and other women they observed growing up.

Many of these women, despite performing socially-prescribed gender norms, still found small and big ways to resist them and to build small stepping stones that led to the boulders we stand on now. Sometimes, grandfathers also helped imagine what it meant to be a full human as an African woman on the continent.

While not always identified as such, feminism is as much a part of who we are as being African is. The only difference is that being African was considered an innate thing, something you are from the moment you’re born.

African history is a complex tapestry of events that over days, years, and centuries have connected to bring us to the Africa of today. The diversity of the continent’s peoples, cultures and histories make it difficult to pinpoint just one specific thing and say “yes, this black spot here is what makes you an African.”

Likewise it would be unfair and disingenuous to try and pinpoint just one thing, or just one moment, to define African Feminism. This revolution is a multi-generational and multi-layered movement. It’s also single moments, words and actions that, even on their own, are complete, complicated and valid expressions of this movement.

We are the accumulation of past words and actions. We are also how we define ourselves. We cannot dictate the authenticity of a movement which by its very nature is ever-evolving and changing to accommodate the new and discard the no longer useful.
It is impossible to say that feminism is un-African when African women right now are feminists.

In numerous debates, articles and conversations on social media I have heard the mistaken idea that ‘feminism is un-African’. But in order to claim something as ‘un-African,’ I believe that you must have to prove, beyond a doubt, that there is no history of Africans doing that thing and that there are no Africans doing it right now.

It is easy to claim that something has never been done by Africans. We know that history is distorted and has been shaped to suit its narrators’ interests. As women know intimately, it is easy to erase the memory of our existence, contribution and participation in history. Relying on such distorted historical accounts is difficult.  

However, it is impossible to claim something is non-existent when there are people, in the right here and now, doing that thing. It is impossible to say that feminism is un-African when African women right now are feminists. And African Feminism right now does not exist in a vacuum – it was borne by African Feminism in the past.

It is impossible to disconnect us from African women of the past; the mothers who rescued girls, the teachers who taught us about equality, and many others. To do so is to erase them and to also erase us.

We African women, right now, are carriers of culture, in our own right. And culture is dynamic. If every African, on the continent and in the diaspora, can ‘claim’ Africa in some way, then African women have a right to redefine and recreate African cultures.
Our validity does not rest on a connection to the past. We exist right now, as those single moments of the movement that do not require explanation or justification. African Feminism exists because African feminists exist. It is impossible to separate one from the other without violently separating African women from Africa. 

Aisha Ali Haji is a Kenyan writer and feminist activist. Her writing has been published in publications including This Is Africa and The Journalist, South Africa.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net

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What is more disturbing however, is the mobilization of the anti-caste charge to the cause of this aangala-insecurity by some male commentators who seek to trivialize Rima’s observation of how the most savoured items of food, like fish, was always offered first and most to men and boys in her family, and how her perception of gender injustice began from the day she protested against that, as a child. The condescension with which such men address Rima and her female supporters is breathtaking. Quite reminiscent of CPM intellectuals of the late 1980s who insisted that (1) gender injustice can only be subordinate to class; (2) patriarchal relations were a bourgeois issue, (3) that it was not even a sociological feature of the working classes, (4) patriarchs are always bourgeois or feudal, (5) the only ‘real feminists’ were working class heroines of class struggle, these men now tell us that (1) gendered inequalities in families is an elite, not lower caste, issue,(2) it cannot be but subordinate to caste injustice, (3) patriarchy wasn’t a sociological feature of lower caste life, (4) patriarchy is always upper caste, (5) the only ‘real feminists’ are those who fight caste injustice or patriarchy perpetrated by caste injustice (which, according to them, is the only patriarchy in existence). For all our talk of intersectionality, we fail to avoid setting up caste, class, and gender and other axes of social power as mutually competing vectors that run parallel to each other and insist that all other vectors must necessarily be subordinate to what we think is the dominant one.
Even more egregiously, these anti-caste champions assume the aangala-tone in their advice that feminists better focus on minority and dalit women heroes instead of highlighting what in their view, is a trivial complaint, mere resentment, about the way food is distributed in families. It is an insult, really, because very many feminists have indeed been active in the campaigns raised by dalit and minority women and don’t need their sanctimonious advice. Through this disgusting gesture, these men try to erase feminists from these campaigns. More strikingly, the tactic is to point to distributional inequalities elsewhere, to draw attention away from the patriarchal family. That works in the case of one of the dalit women they mention, Chithralekha, the dalit working class heroine whose protests called out the immense anti-dalit orientation of the CPM in their strongholds, but also the gendered nature of that hostility. Her protests were about the distribution of resources by the state – of its casteist and gendered nature.

But the idea that one can sidestep the question of the distribution of power in families is belied by the other hero mentioned, Hadiya: but her struggle too was against the distribution of power within her family. As a daughter, she was denied the freedom to choose her faith and her partner. Hadiya had repeatedly told her father that she did not wish to severe relations with her family; she wanted acceptance of her faith in her family of birth. It was only her father’s refusal to accommodate her that prompted her to seek other spaces and relationships. She exited her natal family precisely when denied equal voice and space there.
The denial of voice and space comes in different ways, big and small – through discriminatory treatment, and not just through outright denial. In any case, there is no way one can avoid talking of gendered distributional inequalities. And to claim, like these aangala-males do, that they exist only in families or in families of particular communities/classes and so on, is to play the ostrich when it comes to the injustices of gender. Of course, those with a stake in the entrenched order will not consider evidence that goes contrary to their treasured beliefs. And so none of these men will take seriously the data on nutritional disparities readily available in large-scale datasets on Kerala.
 
II
However, what really rattled me was how a certain aangala, tried to use the myth of Nangeli  and her resistance against the oppressive caste elite order in the kingdom of Travancore, through the gesture of offering her cut breast to the tax-collectors who demanded the ‘breast-tax’ against ‘trivial feminists’. Rima Kallingal did not invent feminism, Nangeli did, he claims. Now there can be little dispute about the first part of this claim: it is his insecurity that makes him think so. About the second part too, there can be little dispute that the Nangeli is a foremother of all anti-patriarchal struggles in contemporary Kerala. But the irony of this being thrust in our faces by someone who would deny that patriarchal families deny women equal resources is truly intriguing. Also, if it were a feminist who tried to trace an unbroken legacy for feminism to the early 19^th century in this simplistic fashion, these men would have immediately cried foul, accusing feminists of appropriating anti-caste myth and history.

I want, therefore, to make an attempt to reflect on the Nangeli myth in a way that does not reduce it to the terms of contemporary politics and subordinate it to immediate ends, and yet tells us about the specificity and complexity of social hierarchies, power and resistance to it in pre-modern Malayali society. Also, I want to see if an intersectional understanding that does not project modern frameworks of sex/gender into the past is possible, of the significance of  Nangeli’s resistance. Attempts to reclaim it have too often projected present-day hierarchies and forms of power into the past. My attempt is of course utterly preliminary and what I want to present is just a set of hypotheses — but we all have to start somewhere and bear the risks of refutation – which can only lead to richer discussions.

The first step in this, I feel, is to turn critical towards the celebration of the claims about the seemingly-timeless presence of cosmopolitanism in Kerala, propagated, for instance, by scholars who see a non-western model of cosmopolitanism in the strategies of accommodation practiced by the Brahminical rulers of Kerala of the precolonial times. My scepticism about projecting Malayali society’s cosmopolitanism into the far past stems from the feeling that we would be making rather too much of the social contract between three internally-hierarchical social orders – the brahmanical, the elite christian, and the elite muslim.
Of these, the first held political power and created the political space expressed in the language of varna in which the other two were granted space. All three have settler myths, focused on leaders close to the respective master-figures in each faith — Parashurama, St Thomas and Malik Dinar – and they lay out the terms of association between the three. Correct me if I am wrong, the origin myth of the Jews was different. I am not sure if this is cosmopolitanism at all.

If we look at the periphery of this society, we may find three kinds of oppressed people. One, groups that are abjected for the most, but permitted occasional inclusion, such as the Arayas of the Coast and the Theyyam-performing communities. Secondly, the large section of Avarna labouring classes especially the Ezhava and Tiyya who were made to pay ‘body taxes’,  named after body parts — thala (head), mula (breast), and meesha (moustache). These groups were offered a ‘conditional recognition’ of their bodiliness, i.e. on the condition that they pay these taxes. Thirdly, there were the communities completely denied any such recognition, treated as infinitely usable and utterly disposable labour, in theory at least. This ordering was undergirded by the projection of the brahmanical order as the brahmanical swargam on earth, with brahmins as bhudevas and the sudras as their servants, essentially occupying the position of the say, the minions of heaven (thus sudra women sexually available to Brahmins were assigned the dharma of the apsaras in the brahminical terms). This is the social imagination of Brahmanical political power that assigned trading communities distinct and delimited spaces in the Brahmanical order and rendered abject those who sustained it by their labour.

Secondly, we need to ask new questions about sex/gender and power in the premodern order of Malayali brahminism. It appears that for the upper-most strata of Kshatriyas, women, particularly women senior by virtue of age and/or their position in the kinship order, could take over the same power as senior males and had the same designation that we now read as exclusively male (Tampuraan, for example, was a designation fully available to women in Kshatriya ruling households) and indeed, in the turmoil of the seventeenth century do see several women rulers asserting their right to rule like men – in the swaroopams in southern Kerala, in Kochi, and the north as well. It appears that reduced versions of such access could have been a feature of the more powerful sudra elite families as well. In the early records of disputes in tarawads in Malabar, several senior women appear as litigants claiming equal position and space, indicating that the modern division of labour in families – men in charge of material sustenance, and women in charge of moral and emotional labour – cannot be projected in it. In other words, women of the elite could, under certain circumstances, access power over the bodies placed lower in the order. Marthanda Varma’s subordination of Attingal in the mid-18^th century puts an end to these privileges and gradually, the very memory of these waned.

In other words, maybe one can hypothesize that in the premodern brahmanical order of Janma-bhedam while full power over the bodies of the oppressed was available to senior women in ruling houses, and lesser versions of such power were available to senior women in powerful sudra houses, for the most oppressed groups, the avarnas, bodiliness was either ‘conditional’ (through body-tax, and it is perhaps not coincidental that precisely those parts — the head, the moustache, and the breasts — that were less relevant to the labour that the oppressed performed for the elites figured in the tax-names) or actually denied. Those groups reduced to slavery were probably not even granted this: their bodies were abjected even more, regarded as mere generators of labour, of different kinds of labour for the reproduction of the elites (productive, sexual, reproductive – all equally extracted). The casual ease with which the slave people could be murdered and sacrificed by the elite – all such stories and myths we have heard of such killings –seem to confirm this. Of course this does not mean there was no resistance to this, rather the contrary: that resistance comes alive and is alive and well in myth and stories which the dalit and other anti-caste assertions in Kerala are reclaiming.

This reading also means that this society which was modeled on the Brahmanical swargam was perhaps one of the most oppressive social orders ever in human history, in which the laboring classes and slaves were not simply oppressed but actually abjected and denied even bodiliness.
Nangeli’s act of cutting off her breast rather than pay the breast tax that could have assured her conditional acceptance within the order is, therefore, not to be reduced to resistance to merely the objectification of the female body – since it is probable that even unconditional bodiliness was not conceded to the oppressed at that time . Rather, it could be read as the very founding moment of a history in and through which the abjected refused abjection and rose up to reclaim their bodiliness and full humanity. I do not need to pay tax to affirm my breasts, she seems to declare. Paradoxically, through cutting off her breasts, she affirms herself as a bodily being, not requiring confirmation of the brahmanical order. That act, then, could be revered as the founding moment of the rising up the abjected whose labour sustained the brahmanical swarga-on-earth.

Thanks to Nangeli and countless others after her who fought against the worst-known order of human oppression, that of Janma-bhedam (yes, it indeed has a local name, and so the argument that the oppression that came to be called ‘caste oppression’ was not a figment of anyone’s imagination as some are apt to claim nowadays), today we can debate hierarchy and power, demand their dismantling, claim voice, and protest injustice without such spectacular acts. Indeed, when feminists joined the campaigns for justice around questions raised by Chithralekha and Hadiya, the demand was precisely that they must not be forced to pay the huge price that those who revolted against the feudal order had to, to gain a voice. In other words, we were certain they must not be made to suffer like Nangeli to secure their rights, constitutional and natural.

Rima however already has a voice which she employs against deep-rooted family patriarchy, and how is that such a crime? Or is it these men’s case that the only women worth listening to are those who suffer and die resisting power and so can be considered ‘truly resistant’? If that is so, then one can only tell them to go fuck themselves.Nangeli’s legacy can be claimed by anyone who lays bare the workings of power and hierarchies, who takes the risk and the pain of doing so. That risk and pain may not be as big as Nangeli’s but still. It cannot be claimed by those who use her as a shield to deflect attention from hierarchies and power, and who use her name to silence inconvenient voices. So these men can all go to hell as far as I care, and frankly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see both pro- and ant- Hadiya fellows swelling the ranks of the Dickhead Brigade.

Courtesy: https://kafila.online/
 

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Credit: Illustration by Carol Rossetti / courtesy of AWID.

Every year, too many women’s rights activists are murdered or disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Some activists live long and full lives, and die of natural causes. Others, exhausted by often thankless work, die of preventable illnesses.

For the last five years, the organisation I work for, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, (AWID) has honoured the memories of activists who have fought for women, girls, and communities that have been denied their human rights for far too long.

Documenting the lives of departed feminists is important work. They are the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Here are five inspirational feminist activists, from South Africa to the Philippines, that you should know, and honour in this period and beyond:
 

Prudence Nobantu Mabele, South Africa

Prudence burst into the limelight as the first Black woman in South Africa to publicly disclose her HIV status. She founded the Positive Women’s Network, criticised the government for failing to support people living with HIV, and demanded the provision of antiretroviral medicines. She also organised for the rights of LGBT people including lesbians living with HIV.

She was the kind of leader who stood shoulder to shoulder with people who faced and challenged the tyranny of the powerful. She supported Fezekile ‘Khwezi’ Kuzwayo, who bravely named South African President Jacob Zuma as her rapist. She spoke out against the systematic rape and murder of Black lesbians. She was a fighter, and also a Sangoma, a healer who brought her spirituality into her activism.
 

Edith ‘Edie’ Wilson, United States

Credit: Illustration by Carol Rossetti / courtesy of AWID.

Four years ago, Edith Wilson successfully sued the United States federal government, arguing that the 1966 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was a contributing factor to ongoing discrimination faced by gay Americans. Her case helped lead to the 2015 legalisation of same-sex marriage across the country.
 

Emilsen Manyoma, Colombia

Credit: Illustration by Carol Rossetti / courtesy of AWID.

Afro-Colombian activists have struggled for decades to reclaim ancestral land as communal property. Too many have been attacked or threatened by organised armed groups hired by wealthy landowners and corporations opposed to land reform.

Emilsen Manyoma was an Afro-Colombian leader of the Comunidades Construyendo Paz en los Territorios (CONPAZ) group which supports peaceful protection strategies and communities’ access justice including via international humanitarian law. Emilsen documented killings and forced disappearances in her community. In January, she and her partner were brutally murdered. They were decapitated, and their bodies showed evidence of torture.
 

Miriam Rodríguez Martínez, Mexico

Credit: Illustration by Carol Rossetti / courtesy of AWID.

In 2012, Miriam’s 14-year-old daughter Karen disappeared. Amid official inaction, Miriam launched her own investigation, found the remains of her daughter’s body, and uncovered evidence that implicated members of the violent drug cartel Los Zetas in her murder. Subsequently, the principal suspect in Karen’s murder was arrested and imprisoned.

Miriam became an activist leader, founding ‘The Movement for Our Disappeared’ which brought hundreds of families together to search for loved ones who went missing under suspicious circumstances in a region where rival drug cartels frequently clash. Miriam was shot 12 times and murdered on 10 May, Mother’s Day in Mexico, when people take to the streets to protest disappearances.
 

Mia Manuelita Mascariñas-Green, the Philippines

Credit: Illustration by Carol Rossetti / courtesy of AWID.

Environmentalist and lawyer Mia Manuelita Mascariñas-Green took on legal cases challenging the destruction of land and natural resources in the Philippines. She was also a volunteer lawyer for the Environmental Legal Assistance Center network, often working pro bono.

In February, Mia’s van was attacked by armed men on motorcycles. Her three children and their nanny witnessed the attack.  The Philippines is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental defenders, according to Global Witness, an environmental monitoring group.

Deaths of activists like these represent huge losses to communities around the world. Intimidation, harassment and killings are often deliberately designed to end the resistance movements these activists lead.

Some activists have organised to share strategies on peaceful protection methods. Every year, AWID honours departed activists by publishing tributes to them during the 16 Days of Activism to End Gender Based Violence campaign.

It is crucial that we hold the memories of these activists in our collective consciousness. They are the giants on whose shoulders we stand, and the foundation on which we build the future of our movements and struggles.

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is a feminist activist, writer and blogger. She is the co-founder of the Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women award-winning blog that focuses on African women, sex and sexualities. She works with the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) as a Communications Manager.

Courtesy: Open Democracy

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Six Nobel peace laureates meet in Belfast in 2013. Credit: John Murphy Aurora PA.

“We want all the barriers down,” declared Nobel peace prize winner Mairead Maguire yesterday, opening the 10th anniversary of the Nobel Women’s Initiative gathering in Dusseldorf, Germany. She was, incidentally, joking, referring to the fact that – due to variations in height and levels of jet leg –  some of the five Nobel peace prize winners at the summit would be standing to deliver their opening address, while others would be sitting. But as the laureates spoke, the room moved from laugher to respectful silence as each laid out her vision for what a world without barriers to feminist solidarity might look like. 

The laureates have gathered from across the globe – Guatemala, Ireland, USA, Iran and Yemen – and they have assembled an international team of activists here to plan the future of the global feminist resistance.

Tawakkol Karman, who won the peace prize in 2011 for her work fighting for democracy in Yemen, explains why they have chosen Germany as the site for this year’s meeting. “Germany is ruled by a strong woman. She has a lot of commitment and promise for refugees. We wanted to go to Germany to give support for her policies on supporting and hosting refugees.” Yet disappointingly, as Karman goes on to explain, in a Europe of closing borders, the culture of welcome the Nobel laureates sought to celebrate has not been extended to its own delegation.

All four other participants to the conference from Yemen have been denied visas, as were three other participants from Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. ”Why?” Tawakkol asked. “There is no good reason.”

All of those denied visas are high profile human rights activists in their home countries. Among them is Aswan Mohammed from Women Journalists Without Chains and Misk Al-Junai, a TV producer who works with Karman’s own foundation. “Perhaps”, Karman opined, “Europe is imposing its own unwritten travel ban? Perhaps Trump just announced it, and other countries didn’t?”

Iranian Nobel peace prize laureate and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi was similarly indignant: “there are countries that are in crisis and at war, and the people are suffering in these countries, their lives are at risk and they are hungry. Some Western countries, instead of helping these people are making limitations for them. It’s time for Europe, and for us who are gathered here, to help these people in war-torn areas; not to build walls and to not even permit them to participate in a simple peace seminar. This is not good behaviour with countries that are at war. And we protest this.”

The true cost of erecting such barriers at borders – and the fundamental need to protest them – is also stressed by American Nobel peace prize laureate Jody Williams. She speaks of the work of Northern Americans assisting Muslim families to reunite following the fallout from Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ earlier this year. “In such resistance,” she stresses, “we’re rediscovering what citizenship is.” For the fifty plus activist women in the room here in Germany, it’s clear that citizenship is a duty – and it’s one that transcends barriers and borders.

Citizenship without borders

It is her citizen duty, Shirin explains to me, that leads her to approach Majed Sharbajy, a Syrian activist in exile who is currently working in Lebanon near the Syrian border. Breaching the rules of the ‘ice breaker exercise’ carefully crafted by the conference organisers, Shirin makes Majed’s acquaintance by looking her directly in the eyes with a piercing sincerity, and saying the words “I’m sorry.”

Majed has just recounted to a small group of us how she was detained by the Assad regime for seven months. Her husband was also detained, and murdered. She has been temporarily separated from her children – aged 4, 11 and 3 –  who have sought sanctuary in Sweden with their grandmother. Her work is simply too dangerous and puts them at risk. But her work is also too important to leave.

In prison, Majed educated other women detainees. Now in exile in Lebanon, the activists have four training centres for Syrian women to give them skills to enter the labour market and participate in society. In her experience, 60% of women Syrian refugees have lost their male partners and must support themselves.

“The Syrian regime is the biggest dictatorship of all the regimes,” Majed explains to a small group of us who are leaning in intently, to listen. “They don’t just torture people, really, they take pleasure in it.”

It’s at this point that Shirin apologises.

“As an Iranian, I’m sorry,” she says. “My government has trained Syrians how to torture people.”

A respectful silence momentarily reigns while each of us takes in these words and crafts our own apologies, weighing the responsibility. Letting it sink in. Then the discussion continues. Time is short and information must be gathered and shared.

Syria is strategically important to Iran: “they need it to get arms to Hezbollah” explains Ebadi – arms, it has been pointed out several times already, that travel more easily across borders than people.

Women from Guatemala, Germany, UK and Lebanon hastily scribble on notepads, desperate to listen, and to record every word so that they might take it back to their communities, like smuggled goods. Because the international community has been clear – we are not meant to be here, meeting like this.

Majed reflects that she once met Michelle Obama and gave her a letter to pass on to her husband. “It was all there,” she explains. “I told him, ‘you know what is happening. And now history will judge you. You can be remembered as a man of peace, or you can be remembered as a man of war.’” But the USA has its interests. “No”, she tells us, “he never replied.” It is up to women like this, and gatherings like, this to share the truth.

An interlude. Majed has given us a huge duty: to ‘be our voice’. For, she explains, “the media is mediating everything. Everyone is focusing on ISIS, eyes are off the regime.” Children are drowning, they are choking to death on the fumes of illegal weapons. No one is stopping this. Treaties must be redrafted and implemented. “We cannot fall into negative history where history repeats itself,” Tawakkol reminded us in her opening speech. “Behind every great revolution there are bold women, courageous women. We need to be leaders of change. We need development, rule of law, democracy. We need to fight extremism, corruption, hatred, racism and war."

Taking down barriers means taking back power from the states that claim to represent us. “Turkey, Iran and Russia are meeting for peace negotiations on Syria and there isn’t a single person from Syria,” Majed warns our smaller group. “The media keep saying that it’s a civil war, but it’s a war between other countries in Syria”. Shirin gives a knowing nod: “a proxy war”.

The beginning of justice?

The act of apologising in itself will not start a revolution but it is, to me, the core of the feminist resistance that this conference seeks to strengthen. It is the beginning of justice. It says: I am a human, and I see you as a human. I see your injustice and your pain and I accept responsibility as a global citizen and I will use my power to try and help you. It is the antithesis to impunity. It is opposite to the Guatemalan courts that, until women seized justice and won, as Nobel peace laureate Rigoberta Menchù Tum explained in her speech, “never gave victims the chance to tell the true story.”

It’s up to us to reclaim citizenship, with barriers down, Shirin reminds us. Because “governments don’t like peace. The arms manufacturers of the UK, Europe and the US have to sell their arms. It’s us, the people, who have to resist our governments. This is my duty as an Iranian, to tell the government of Iran not to help Bashir Al Assad and to stay away from Syria. It’s your duty as European citizens to tell the EU, to protest at the fact they refrain from issuing visas. It’s the duty of people of the UK to tell them to stop selling arms so that they can throw them on innocent people.”

I look around at the women I am with. It’s the first night and the sixth edition of the Nobel Women’s Initiative biennial gatherings and 50.50 has been here from the start. Many of the women have become close friends, ‘sisters’ across borders. As they steal off to bed, tired from their travels (and for some, long interrogations at the border) I notice that some are wearing jewelry, brought in luggage across continents as gifts to one another. Like arms and capital, gifts and words fly across the same continents as the women meet, plot and share information in the global feminist resistance. 

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This article was first published on openDemocracy.net.

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