Dr. Jeff Miley interviewed Meral Çiçek about the recent Turkish bombing of the Maxmur Refugee Camp and Sinjar (Shengal).

This interview is part of a series of conversations on People-Centred Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously reveals and exacerbates the systemic contradictions, indeed, the catastrophic failures, of global capitalism.  It has served to expose the manifold injustices and collective irrationalities embedded in dominant patterns of social-property relations.

Meral Çiçek was born in 1983 in a Kurdish guest-worker family in Germany. She started political and women's activism at the age of 16 within the Kurdish Women’s Peace Office in Dusseldorf. While studying Political Science, Sociology and History at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt she started to work as reporter and editor for the only daily Kurdish newspaper in Europe, Yeni Ozgur Politika, for which she still writes a weekly column. In 2014 she co-founded the Kurdish Women’s Relations Office (REPAK) in Southern Kurdistan (Northern Iraq). She is also editorial board member of the Jineoloji journal. 

Jeff Miley is a Lecturer of Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the Board of the EU Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC) and a Patron of Peace in Kurdistan. He is co-editor, with Federico Venturini, of Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan's Turkey (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018).