The Amazon rainforest stretches over a huge area of Abya Yala. This ancient forest is often called the “lungs of the earth”, as a large part of the planet's air is produced and cleaned in the Amazon. Hundreds of indigenous peoples still live in it today, it is home to countless animal and plant species and has perhaps the most diverse ecosystem in the world. Today, it is also threatened by mass deforestation and systematic fires produced by rabid capitalism. In this year alone, 2024, 17% of the entire Amazon rainforest was cleared. This is not an isolated case; all over the world, the exploitation of nature is quickening sharply: burnings, deforestation, pesticides, the destruction of nature through monoculture, the use of chemical weapons prohibited in war, as the Turkish army is doing in Kurdistan. Globally, the ecosystem is heading towards an unprecedented, man-made crisis. At the same time, the rates of murders of women are rising. Most recently in August 2024, a young woman and doctor was raped and murdered in West Bengal in India. Mass protests by young women and students erupted. The number of unreported femicides worldwide probably exceeds the official figures a hundredfold. We know this because capitalism needs these murders, especially in current times, to keep itself alive during its existential crisis. Why is this the case? What do we mean when we talk about 'femicide'? Why is femicide linked to ecocide?
In the fertile land of Mesopotamia, the first femicide in history appeared in its mythology around 5,000 years ago. Mardûk, a male god, shoots the goddess, Tîamat, who is at the same time his mother, with three arrows in the heart, brain and womb. This murder marks the first femicide in history, the beginning of the extermination campaign and the 5,000-years-long war against women. The femicide of Tîamat shows the nature of the enslavement of women. For the first time in history, the woman lost the battle against the man striving for power, this marks a rupture for the entire society. While previously society mainly gathered around women, it now increasingly strives for male power. The tribes, with the establishment of the Neolithic revolution and agrarian culture, ensured their survival through a deep understanding of nature. Those societies that could read the signs of nature and share this knowledge with others by passing it on to the next generation, lived organized around the woman. The three arrows of Mardûk symbolize the break with this role of women. In the person of Tîamat, these arrows struck all women, marking the deepest and most dramatic rupture in human history.
The term femicide comes from the Mexican-born Marcela Lagarde, who used it to describe the murder of a woman by a man because she is a woman. Honor killings, the murder of pregnant women, murder through sexual violence, enslavement of women, e.g. in the form of prostitution, and the murder of these women and other types of murder can be described as femicide. The first femicide, committed against Tîamat, is the beginning of the largest organized femicide in history, which took place 4500 years later. It heralded a campaign of extermination against women. Like a final blow from the dominant man, he attempted to destroy women and their knowledge, which was dangerous for the system, with all the power and violence at his disposal. Man burned thousands of years of knowledge about nature, health, philosophy, spirituality and the wisdom of women in the fires of witch-burning. The Inquisition, the torture chambers of the patriarchy in which hundreds of thousands of women were tortured to unconsciousness, even to death, are the patriarchy's attempt to subjugate nature. A society that feels its connection to nature and is organized around women would never accept oppression, enslavement, poverty, hunger and conquest through kingdoms, empires, armies and crusades. It was only through this greatest femicide in history that it was possible to prepare the ground for capitalism.
Capitalism is based on exploiting natural resources. Gold and lithium mines, necessary metals for weapons production, timber extraction, are all resources without which the market could not survive a day. Standing between these resources and the market are societies, indigenous peoples and, above all, women and young people. The Brazilian state and the murderous mafia structures are world-renowned examples of forces that murder women and indigenous land protectors on a weekly basis in the name of profit and in order to pave the way for the bleeding of their country. However, the currently raging Third World War is not only materially based on the exploitation of resources. It would be a fatal mistake to break femicide and ecocide down to individuals, individual states or corporations. Physical femicide and ecocide are primarily based on mental enslavement. The arrows that were shot at Tîamat 5000 years ago have become part of everyday life for women worldwide. The enslavement of women in the home, family, work, the state, as wives and mothers, lovers, prostitutes, beggars or even as those who feel free in the liberal middle class; women are, as Rêber Apo (Abdullah Öcalan) says, the oldest colony in the world and their forms of enslavement are the massive iceberg that hides beneath the ocean surface of physical femicide.
Today, one in three women worldwide lives below the hunger line. Millions of women and children die of starvation every year. Yet the entire food requirement of mankind could be met if the area of England used for cattle, pigs and chickens alone, was converted into land for agriculture. What better way to rip the mask off this system of femicide than this fact? Patriarchy can exist without capitalism, but capitalism, this system of death, cannot exist without patriarchy. Just as it is destroying the planet, it is trying to break women and society, to enslave them and put them at its service. This system has brought society to a point where women are completely at odds with nature. On the one hand, there is the line of the woman who defends her earth, her environment, society and her own nature; on the other hand, there is the line of the woman who, in the name of the 'authoritarian' and 'dominant' woman, the 'emancipated' woman, brings the planet to its knees, brings war into the world and betrays her own gender and destroys every basis of life. Femicides are not isolated cases, not individual murders of women. Capitalism itself is a system of femicide; the destruction of nature cannot take place without the destruction of the woman associated with it. A look at the revolutionary histories and the resistant peoples of the present day shows this clearly. The Women's Freedom Movement of Kurdistan, which has defined “wêlatparêzî”, the connection to one's own earth, as the first principle of the ideology of women's liberation, is aware of this. A tree that is not deeply rooted in the earth cannot bear beautiful fruit. Femicide destroys the tree, ecocide even destroys the earth in which the tree thrives.
Colonialism, land theft, the burning of villages and nature as well as the Third World War, which has brought the earth to the brink of the abyss, are the strongest expressions of this deadly system. Since the beginning of the Third World War in the 1990s, which is centered in the Middle East, the destruction of nature has increased significantly and femicide rates are rising steadily. More femicide means more broken resistance, more broken resistance means more war, more war means more destruction of the environment, which in turn means more femicide. This wheel of death rolls and rolls faster and faster. Direct intervention is the only way to stop and smash it.
As long as water flows, life sprouts. Without water, it spoils. With women, society and life flourish. Without the woman, it spoils. To poison the water, to enslave the woman, is to systematically murder the earth and society. The system of capitalist modernity has proven its hostility to society countless times. Instead of total genocide, the system today concentrates on long-term femicide and ecocide, the long war against women and nature. The earth has been turned into an endless source of profit and women into an object of desire.
Only holistic self-defense can counter this. The task of the 21st century is to uplift women, to break their slavery and, as a society, to join forces to protect the earth, the mother of all life, from greedy capitalism. The Kurdish word for nature 'xweza' means 'to give birth to oneself', expressing how nature recreates itself forever and is constantly evolving. Likewise, every woman who rises up against 5000 years of femicide is an avenger and defender of women's wisdom. Abdullah Öcalan calls the 21st century the century of women's revolution. The revolution of women, their struggle for freedom, is the rebirth of the millions of fallen goddesses, fairies, young women, mothers, witches, widows and women revolutionaries.
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