Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement by Stephen E. Hunt;

Author:Stephen E. Hunt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781793633859
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing

Part III

Social Movements and Environmental Activism

Chapter 11

Environmental Activism in Rojhelat

Emergence and Objectives

Allan Hassaniyan

This study argues that environmental activism in Rojhelat (Iranian/Eastern Kurdistan) is a platform for protesting the Iranian government’s sociopolitical and economic policies toward its Kurdish population. For this reason, Rojhelat has quickly turned into a securitized area, with severe consequences for environmentalists. Popularizing a platform of “culturalization of environmentalism” (CoE), and attempting to alter the approach of state institutions to the natural environment and natural resources in Kurdistan, are among the key objectives of environmental activism in Rojhelat. While environmental education and campaigns are the tools used in persuading Kurdish society to adopt environmentally friendly behavior, the movement’s approach to the state has taken a more confrontational path. The diversified focus of environmental activism in Rojhelat allows its conceptualization through a theoretical framework of “environmental humanities,” a category which encompasses “a wide ranging response to the environmental challenges of our time, [and] engages with fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility, and purpose in a time of rapid, and escalating, change (Rose et al. 2012, 1).”

This study’s main sources of primary data are written materials available online. For instance, to analyze the discourse, development, and activities of the NGO Chya Green Association (Anjomen-e Sabz-e Chya/Çiya-i Sawzi Mariwan, hereafter Chya), the over seventy biweekly and twenty-seven monthly editions of the magazine Chya, published by the NGO from 2008 to 2018, have been invaluable for this study.1 In addition, twenty journalists, environmental activists, and individuals with links to the environmental movement, from within and outside Rojhelat, have been interviewed.

Environmental activism has been generally defined as “organized participation in environmental issues, comprising an example of environmentally friendly behavior rooted in the political realm,” being “expressed in specific activities reflecting a commitment to the environment channeled in formal settings and realized through institutional structures” (Marquart-Pyatt 2012, 684). Some conceptualizations of environmentalism and environmental activism have argued that this kind of activism is as much a social as a political movement, existing to change people’s outlook on the world, their beliefs, and behavior. For instance, Timothy O’Riordan writes that environmentalism “interacts with the social, economic and political conditions in which it finds itself, changing current paradigms of thought and action and at the same time resonating to its own successes and failures” (O’Riordan 1981, 3).

Environmental Activism in Rojhelat

The emergence of environmental activism in Rojhelat dates to the late 1980s. From the beginning of the movement, it was inextricably linked to Kurdish identity. A group of environmental activists, mainly university students, held a memorial for the victims of Saddam Hussain’s chemical attack on the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabje in 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988); they highlighted the destructive impact of chemical weapons on the environment of Kurdistan. Across all the nation-states which occupy Kurdish land in the region, both natural and human environments in Kurdistan have suffered from severe attacks from governments. Not only Halabje but also Sardasht, a city in Iran’s West Azerbaijan Province in Rojhelat, suffered from Saddam’s chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War.

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