Dear women!
On this 8 March, we are left under the debris created by Erdoğan’s regime and we refuse to let go of each other’s hands.
We have seen how the unbridled, unrestrained, profit-seeking free-market economy of neoliberalism destroys human lives.
Those who have no reservation against giving orphaned children to cults, those who issue fatwas declaring it licit to marry one’s adopted children, those opening Quran schools in the earthquake zone before even distributing tents, those calling prayers for the dead while our people were still waiting to be rescued from the debris: THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE OF THIS DISASTER! THE REAL DISASTER OF THE CENTURY IS THE REGIME THAT THEY HAVE BUILT!
We are filled with sorrow and anger.
Even in the midst of the desperation, grief, and freezing weather following the disaster, the burdens of life from washing clothes to cooking, to caring for elderly and children remain on women’s shoulders.
Not being able to access vital hygienic products, women suffer from women’s diseases. We are capable of reproducing life, yet pregnancy and puerperium have now become a source of worry rather than joy.
They have created the disaster of the century, and we, with our sisterhood, have built the solidarity of the century!
It is no one else but us who have sent sanitary pads, underwear, baby formula, and convenience food to the survivors. It is us who have cried together and who have found solutions hand in hand. We may be all over the world but we are one with those in the earthquake-hit region.
Today is March 8!
It is the patriarchy that has forced us to bury our children, our partners, and our loved ones. It is the patriarchy that has disregarded our labour, our lives, and our homes. We have the obligation to smash it!
We see that millions of women are more willing than ever to build life over again and to create a humane system. We will strengthen this will and carry it to the power.
We will turn this 8 March into a declaration of the collapse of the corrupt system!
We will hold those murderers accountable!
We will do away with their ruthless free market and fatalistic mentality and build a system for women and for labour on the bases of equality and freedom!
We will demolish the rule of those who have adopted leaving women unemployed, impoverished, and unsafe as their utmost policy: Their authority is gone! They are doomed to collapse!
The time of those who have turned our country into a hell of femicides is now over! They will lose! Their reign will end!
Hand in hand, women will save themselves from the wreck that Erdoğan’s regime has created!
Long live 8 March!
Long live women’s solidarity!
Women’s Organisation of Workers’ Party of Turkey
