Kurdish Human Rights Advocate, Poet, Nazand Begikhani Fights For Gender Equality

“They have subjected girls and women in my environment to female genital mutilation, early forced marriages, confinement, battering and honor killing,” says award-winning poet and gender-based violence researcher, Dr. Nazand Begikhani who has devoted a lifetime studying and addressing inequality, injustice and human rights violations against women. “My early awareness of community violence rooted in patriarchy–combined with structural state oppression against the Kurds–was the reason I explored gender inequality from an intersectional perspective.”

As the former and first woman editor of Le Monde Diplomatique’s Kurdish edition, Begikhani is instrumental in integrating gender studies across the education system in her native Iraqi Kurdistan where she is a senior advisor on higher education and gender to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). While examining gender-based violence (GBV) and intersectionality is a new field, using poetry to express inequality and injustice, she explored the women’s role in the Kurdish resistance movement as partners of Peshmerga (those who face death) Kurdish freedom fighters.

“Women have played an essential role in Kurdistan’s post-war reconstruction. Addressing women’s rights in the war-torn Middle East is challenging and requires strong will and a concerted effort. This cradle of civilization has, since WWI, become a battlefield for deadly ethnic and religious conflicts, including several genocides. The Kurds, like the Armenians, have been victims of the region’s genocidal operations,” Begikhani says after experiencing political and community violence she embarked on her own journey to achieve wholeness and restore her shattered identity and fragmented community.

Begikhani’s family strongly defended Kurdish human rights against Saddam Hussein’s state violence. Three of her brothers were killed by the Iraqi Ba’ath regime. She learned of gender inequality at age 11, when the local Mullah cautioned her widowed mother to prevent her “attractive daughter” from running across his Mosque’s garden– “inviting male attention.” This “intrinsic rape–faulting girls for attracting men” she says, stripped her of childhood. She also learned how her mother, forced into marrying an older man at age 12, became a widow at 13 and was married off again to a man 32 years her senior.

In 2010, after conducting field research in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), Begikhani, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol (UK), raised funds from the British Council to strengthen KRG’s academic institutions by focusing on gender equality principles. The KRG matched the funds, establishing the Region’s first gender-studies center at the University of Sulaimaniya. With help from her Bristol colleagues and progressive political leaders and academics, they integrated the concept of gender into the regional curriculum, establishing 30 gender studies centers in public and privately owned universities–despite deficient resources and resistance from the region’s conservatives most of the centers operate under international standards.

Who Are The Kurds?

The 45 million Kurdish people are native to Western Asia’s mountainous region known as Kurdistan–stretching across southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq and Syria. Subjected to different forms of state violence, Kurds suffered persecution and forced displacement in Iraq–and in 1988 some 180,000 Kurds were massacred in the Anfal (spoils of war) Campaign.

Imprisoned for defending her Kurdish mother tongue, Begikhani was forced into exile during the Anfal genocide, and lived as a refugee in Denmark, the UK and France. Her resistance poems earned her a French Foreign Ministry scholarship to continue her studies in comparative literature, focusing on gender issues. After earning a PhD from Sorbonne, she was awarded the Vincent Wright Chair and visiting professorship at the University of Sciences Po in Paris.

Kurdish women’s advocacy has, since early 1990s, resulted in legal reforms and new policies to prevent GBV, protect survivors, and establish gender studies centers at local universities. Iraqi government’s recent counter-Kurdish strategy has reduced KRG’s budget, splintered vulnerable Kurdish groups, while the pandemic brought “another layer of economic vulnerability,” says Begikhani. Increased GBV during lockdown compounded with lacking infrastructure and social, health-care facilities have further displaced poor and isolated women in Kurdistan.

To promote gender equality and uproot GBV, Begikhani trains civil servants, government officials and media representatives, bridging academia, women’s rights and civil society organizations in collaboration with progressive government officials. Denounced, threatened, and bullied with cyber violence, she blames the Islamists and conservative groups who “mistakenly equate the concept of gender with homosexuality.” This has not stopped her from developing social policy and integrating gender equality into the Region’s curriculum with proactive political support. With no political party affiliation, Begikhani’s is accepted based on her knowledge and critical spirit, not powerful family or tribal links which traditionally influence the Kurdish community. She continues to work with progressive members of KRI institutions wanting to address gender inequality.

Like many feminists, her ethos is “the Personal is Political”. She uses creative storytelling, visual arts, music and dance to prevent future GBV incidents, protect and empower survivors, provide psychological healing, rehabilitation, and support justice. Legislative implementation, she says, remains as the “most challenging.’’

Poetry Of Resistance Interwoven With Feminism

“Poetry is one of the most popular literary genres among Kurds,” Begikhani believes poetry explores the human condition and existentialist questions interwoven with experiences of injustice and violence.

“Poetry helps to lift that narrow self to a more inclusive and higher self, helping to better relate to others and to the outside world. In loneliness and pain, poetry helps express intimate feelings; through poetic imagery and language, you dig deep into your intuition and emotion and produce something truthfully human.”

This poetic relationship, Begikhani says, is enchanting and transcends while it challenges. “In projecting the inner being, you expose your intimacy, vulnerability and humanity to a merciless world which is not always safe,” she says.

With six published poetry collections, Begikhani is the 2012 winner of the French Simone Landrey’s Feminine Poetry Prize. Forward Book of Poetry Prize selected her poem “An Ordinary Day” from Bells of Speech (Ambit Books, London, 2006) as one of UK’s best 40 poems of the year. Exploring patriarchal state oppressions, it describes an ordinary husband and father, who at the same time is a ruthless security officer issuing execution orders. It questions our deformed humanity and the difference “between the killer and the killed.”

“This poem is based on my mother’s experience who lost her sons under the Ba’ath regime and had to pay for the price of the bullets which killed them. The security officer is an integral part of any totalitarian regime–stripped off of his humanity. He kills your children as ordinary daily task and appears at your doorstep asking you to pay for the cost of the bullets as a routine duty,” Begikhani says. “It reflects Kurdish mothers’ lives under dictatorship.’’

The East and the West collide in harsh realities of different planets as she reveals in her “At A Happiness Symposium in Wales” poem.

A psychologist said

Graveyards may help you feel happier,

visit a graveyard when you are depressed,

There is a thin line between life and death, my friend

and I am a graveyard.

“East and West are not only two different geographical spaces they embody historical and cultural specificities that form our identities. As a genocide survivor, coming from a spiritual Kurdish family with an old non-monotheist faith dating back to ancient times, I am sensitive to the suffering of people around me,” Begikhani says sensitivity has long been considered a sign of weakness in the West. “Rationality obscures human sentiment. The two are not only not contradictory but also not separate if we seek wholeness beyond boundaries between Orient and Occident.”

In a tribute to her mother, “My Mother Pictured Amongst Tobacco Leaves” Begikhani reflects on her mother’s tears, wrinkled skin, the suffering, resistance and resilience of Kurdish women.

Your wrinkled hands

talk to me

tell the story of a stolen childhood

the loneliness of women in my homeland.

In “The War Was Over” she reveals generational exiled identities as photos of displaced families come to life when Begikhani’s mother meets her four-year-old grandson for the first time.

My mother was struggling to hide her tears

No-one will know

if they were tears of joy

or of grief for the loss of my brother

who carried the same name.

As all children of war-torn, exiled populations, Begikhani and her son live between two cultures. Her son she says is “robbed of his history, mother tongue and culture”, condemned to an exilic life, balancing two cultural, geographical locations, experiencing life in “disenchantment and alienation.”

“It is as if we are positioned outside time and space, in a perpetual search for a missing part of ourselves. However, beyond lamentation and victimhood, we can transform the experience into an essential element of wholeness,” Begikhani says. “This is a painful, but yet enriching process, similar to that experienced by descendants of the Armenian and other survivors of genocide and forced exile.”