Family laws and women's rights in Iraq under the Ba'athist regime have often been touted as favorable to women by many Arab and western scholars and journalists. Pre-2003 Iraq is often cited as a model country where women enjoyed legal rights and were equal participants in the society. To back their claims, scholars often cite articles in the Iraqi constitution which guaranteed women's rights and cite statistics and reports produced by the Iraqi government. However, beginning in the early 1980s, the Iraqi regime started introducing new amendments to the constitution that were contradictory to the original articles creating an ambiguous legal atmosphere in which officials applied elements of the law that suited their objectives. In general, the status of women in Iraq suffered many setbacks during this period. Over the past few years a few studies have been published that examine legal issues pertaining to women under the previous regime with much-needed scrutiny. But these studies tend to look at Iraqi women as a homogenous entity and regard the laws applied to them in an equal manner. But Iraq is not a homogenous country and its laws were not applied equally. Kurds and Shi'i Arabs generally suffered harsher treatment in Iraq's legal system than their Sunni Arab counterparts. This paper will examine how legal ambiguity affected Kurdish women in particular, and how Kurdish women were targeted by the regime as a means of diluting Kurdish identity and breaking down Kurdish society and its will to survive. Among the laws that affected Kurdish women in particular, two stand out as most harmful: legalizing honor killings and laws governing ethnically mixed marriages. In the 1970s and 1980s Kurdish women were subjected to gang rape while their families were forced to watch. During this same period, the Iraqi government legalized honor killings. In a society like Iraq, where patriarchy reigns and men's honor is predicated on women's "purity," women found themselves in an extremely vulnerable position and their dependence on kin increased as a result. Journalists often refer to the pervasiveness of ethnically mixed marriages as a sign that sectarian and ethnic strife were somehow non-existent in Iraq under the Ba'athist rule. However, examining the laws and practices of the regime shows that this phenomenon was engineered by the state to encourage mixed marriages in which the ethnic identity of children in such marriages were the preferred identity.

At Toronto's 7th Annual Kurdish Culture and Peace Festival, politician Jim Karygiannis, back from accompanying a Canadian business delegation to Northern Iraq, told the crowd that Southern Kurdistan is "open for business." The audience, ignoring the parliamentarian's evocation of a "united Kurdistan" like he was a child pestering for change to buy ice-cream, chatted and caught up with friends. While Karygiannis addressed his audience as Canadian-Kurds, the festival-goers, mostly Kurds from Northern Kurdistan or Turkey, came to the festival, organized to commemmorate the Kurdistan Worker's Party's (PKK) first attack on the Turkish state, to practice a different hyphenated identity. In other words, Karygiannis may have been correct in assuming that he was addressing a crowd of Kurdish long-distance nationalists but he was incorrect in the scale and scope of this longing. However, the mistaken arrest of the festival's headliner, musical superstar Sivan Perwer, the day after the event further complicates this. Within a few weeks, Kurds protested outside the Canadian embassy in Washington, demanding, on behalf of all Kurds all over the world, an apology from the Canadian prime minister. Instead of expanding or contracting the Kurdish "ethnoscape," I examine the Kurdish festival in order to follow "everyday" fluctuations in Kurdish identity. Since festivals are "sites of social action where identities and relations are continually being reconfigured" (Guss 2000), the Kurdish Festival is an "everyday" site through which we can view consolidations of and contentions over national and diasporic belonging. Furthermore, their temporary nature, the taking down of booths one year and the setting up of displays the next, hint at how identities fluctuate between adaptation and re-articulation, and in the process get tampered with and transformed. And since festivals have "audiences" they expose how ordinary people, as "poet of their own acts" (de Certeau 1984), respond to and evade being "called into being." Following Brubaker's notion of the diaspora as a "stance" (2005) and Warner's idea of a counterpublic as a transformative space of meaning-making (2002), I argue that the Kurdish Diaspora is actually a "counter-diaspora." I "participate" in two multicultural festivals in Toronto, the Kurdish Culture and Peace Festival and the Toronto Turkish Festival, in order to elucidate the idea of a counter-diaspora as a national and transnational network of publics and counter-publics tied to, either momentarily or deeply, the emancipatory remaking of contested geographies through ethnicity, sexuality, and/or gender.

This paper topic has its origins in my childhood experiences in Kiremithane, a Kurdish village on the slopes of Taurus Mountain, twenty miles outside of Adana, the vast sprawling industrial city which became home to a large Kurdish population around the time of World War I in southern Turkey. This paper analyzes the story of a woman whom I encountered while traveling on the dusty road in Kiremithane's countryside. I call the young woman "Cemo". As we walked that day on that hushed dusty road, Cemo told me her story about her struggle with her family because of namus (honor), the central concept in the definition of Kurdish cultural and individual identity. That day on that dusty road, Cemo's final words, which still echo in my memory, were "Benamuse, benamuse (dishonored, dishonored)." The word benamuse is frightening. The Kurdish people of Kiremithane village had fought against this oppressive cultural concept. Many people, young and old have died striving to free themselves from the chains of this tradition, which is the persistent cultural element shaping Kurdish ideology of social values, in which person is considered as nothing other than his or her namus (honor). The relationship between namus and the individual is manifested in the broadest kinship obligations vis-g-vis control of women's sexuality, which ultimately provides men as well as women a sense of identity and status, which they achieve by living by the code of namus. Indeed, Namus is the very standard by which social and political identity is measured and personhood is determined. Threat to namus, which can and often does culminate in violence and death, is how the west came to know of the concept and practice of honor killing. Cemo, on that hot summer afternoon, had no difficulty transforming her experience into a narrative that corresponds to the ways that Kurdish people live their lives in the village. This paper analyzes the central theme of the story of Cemo and the implicit dilemma created by the concept of namus. The story of Cemo embodies change at the expense of tradition. Threat to namus has been, and is, present from the beginning of the seamless oral tradition of the Kurdish people. The response to that threat gives birth to the emergence of heroes and heroines, but is accompanied by a strong sense of dejection inherent in life and death struggles.

European Union and Kurdish Relations and the Transformation of Kurdish Identity within Turkey's Democratization Process The aim of paper is to explore the effect of external political dynamics, Kurdish-European Union relations and the European Union's ongoing criticism of Turkey on the social, political and cultural rights of Kurds in Turkey and the political transformation of Kurdish society. It also examines the construction of a new, vernacular Kurdish identity within the context of Kurdish political movements and everyday life which simultaneously influences Turkey's democratization process. The study will be divided in to two main parts: First, Kurdish and European Union relations, which are based on two different aspects: first Turkey's EU accession process and the lobby movements of Kurdish Diaspora. Second, the Europeanization of Kurdishness process, in which I argue that Kurdish political identity has been influenced by the EU"s liberal and democratic values and also affected the policy of Kurdish movements and Turkish political life. Further, this study will investigate the effect of the relationship between internal dynamics in the Kurdish movement, and an external context, specifically the European Union, on Turkeys" political and legal structures. The modern Kurdish nationalist movement that first emerged with the slogan of "Independent Socialist Kurdistan" has recently begun to take on a different tone, a discourse that has now grown beyond political life to vernacular, everyday life. Concepts heard among Kurds in Europe include the notion of common history, the collaboration of two publics in Turkey's "independence" war, and co-existence of them with human rights, cultural and linguistic rights, "Democratic Republic," and "Constitutional Citizenship." These ideas have become embedded and virtually replaced the idea of a monolithic Kurdishness and Kurdistan in everyday life. In other words, Kurdish political actors, as well as the ordinary Kurdish people, now pursue "equal rights" and "constitutional citizenship" by appealing to a universal birthright of Turkish citizens rather than a marginal and even "old fashioned" nationalist movement in eastern Turkey. This study will analyse the construction of Kurdish identity in terms of a "Turkification" processes carried out by Kemalist elites during several historical periods. It will deconstruct the formation of Kurdishness modern Kurdish identity, revealing it to have been influenced by a variety of ideological stages including Islamist/feudal, Marxist-Leninist, and democratic/Europeanization.