Tribute paid in Berlin to internationalist Sarah Handelmann
A commemoration of the internationalist Sarah Handelmann, who fell in the Medya Defense Areas in 2019, took place in Berlin. Friends and comrades commemorated her with poems and songs.
On 7 April 2019, internationalist and fighter of the women's guerrilla YJA Star, Sara Dorşîn (Sarah Handelmann), was killed in a Turkish airstrike in the southern Kurdish region of Gare. In Berlin activists paid tribute to Sara Dorşîn at her memorial in Kreuzberg's Böcklerpark.
The commemoration began with a minute's silence for those who died. Friends and comrades of Sara Dorşîn remembered her life and struggle, how she left for North Kurdistan as a filmmaker and finally made the decision to use her life in the freedom struggle in the YJA Star. With the poem "To those born after" by Bertolt Brecht, which says:
"Let's go, changing countries more often than we change shoes
Through the class wars, desperate
If only there was injustice and no outrage.”
The comrades of Dorşîn described the struggle of internationalists against capitalist modernity.
The activists then sang a song together for the fallen. The ceremony ended with the slogans "Şehîd namirin - the fallen are immortal" and "Jin Jiyan Azadî - women, life, freedom".
Sara Dorşîn – from cinema school to the mountains
Sarah Almuth Handelmann was born in Germany on 25 November 1985 and grew up in a small village in East Germany. After school, she studied literature for three years in Tübingen, where she got to know radical left-wing ideas and felt part of the anarchist movement. She then studied at the film school in Berlin and later worked as a camerawoman. She got to know the Kurdish movement while shooting the film Xwebûn 2016 in Amed (tr. Diyarbakir) in North Kurdistan and was touched and inspired by the resistance of the women and the entire population. As a feminist, it was above all the strong organization of women that gave her hope for her own perspective.
In 2017, she went to Rojava, where, after a short time, she made the decision to join the women's guerrilla YJA-Star in the mountains of South Kurdistan. She took the name of Sara (from Sakine Cansız) to continue her fight. On 7 April 7, she and other friends fell in the mountains following an air raid by the Turkish army.
