Amineh Kakabaveh
Amineh Kakabaveh grew up in a poor Muslim family in Iranian Kurdistan and lived through the Islamic Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979. As a girl, she was forced to leave school after less than two years. Soon after, the new Islamist regime invaded the mountainous regions of Kurdistan, attacking and occupying her home village. Her brother and uncle joined the Kurdish Peshmerga. Faced with increasing repression, she tried to continue her education in secret by listening to the radio broadcasts of the banned socialist Komala Party. At the age of thirteen, the religious militia gave her a choice: forced marriage or execution. Defiant, she chose the third option - a dramatic escape to join the Peshmerga in the mountains. Her boldness was not without consequences; her father and brothers were severely beaten and tortured as a result.
Life as a guerrilla fighter, constantly moving between Iran and Iraq, was hard, but it proved to be a true oasis for a young Kurdish girl who longed to discover the freedom and opportunities denied her by the strictures of theocracy and poverty. As part of her education, she learned to ride a bike and swim - after first making her own swimsuit. She was even able to have a boyfriend. For more than five years, she fought with the Komala Peshmerga and rose to become the personal bodyguard of the Kurdish socialist leadership. Eventually, she left Kurdistan and moved to Turkey as a UNHCR refugee before finally managing to settle in Sweden. When she was examined by a doctor upon her arrival, a mysterious defect in her blood was discovered. These were traces of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons, to which she was exposed when she arrived in a Kurdish village in Iraq shortly after one of his regime's poison gas attacks.
After only ten years in Sweden, Amineh graduated from university and trained as a social worker. Working with immigrants, she again encountered the problem of honor culture and the crimes associated with it, only this time in the culturally diverse suburbs of Stockholm. As a school counselor in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood, she noticed that several ninth-grade students were married—at the age of fourteen—and some of them were pregnant. Faced with the growing influence of religious fundamentalism and cultural oppression, she publicly warned about these problems. Some members of the Left Party tried to silence her, accusing her of discrimination. She took matters into her own hands and founded the Swedish section of Ni Poutes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissives), a grassroots organization that campaigns for women's rights and against honor culture.
This pattern was to repeat itself when she campaigned for the “balcony girls”: women killed by members of their own families, who were pushed from their balconies to protect the family’s “honour”. And also when she protested against the disappearance of young migrant women from Sweden who were forced to travel to the Middle East or Africa during the summer holidays to get married.
Amineh has paid a high price for staying true to her principles. She has been ostracized, accused of racism and lives under constant death threats from religious extremists and right-wing nationalists, both in Sweden and abroad. She has often been attacked by her political opponents, but just as often she has been encouraged in her views. In recognition of her achievements, the Swedish news magazine Focus named her “Årets Svensk” (Swede of the Year) in 2016. Her gripping and deeply moving biography traces the odyssey of a young Kurdish woman from poverty and war to the highest levels of politics, taking on the most difficult challenges facing women today in both traditional and modern cultures. These include the problem of integration, exclusion, honor killings, child marriage, gender mutilation and other forms of cultural, religious and patriarchal oppression that affect millions of young children and women in many countries. She shares this struggle with thousands of Kurdish women fighting against Daesh/ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
