Successful Conference Held Under the Theme “Anti-Imperialist Struggle and the Social Emancipation of Women“
On July 5, the 2nd International Anti-imperialist Conferenceof the World Anti-imperialist Women’s Platform, the women’s wing of the World Anti-imperialist Platform, was successfully held online under the theme “Anti-Imperialist Struggle and the Social Emancipation of Women.“
Following the opening address by the World Anti-imperialist Women’s Platform, a representative of Labour Women (EKA) of Türkiye and Rosa Esther Santos Valencia of the Communist Party of Ecuador delivered presentations. The European branch of Labour Women (EKA) presented a video statement.
A prison letter written by an imprisoned woman member of Türkiye’s Struggle Unity was read during the conference. A woman member of Struggle Unity who had previously spent 32 years in prison also addressed the conference.
Lázara Lizette Vila Espina, director of the Palomas Project, a Cuban social documentary production organization, delivered a video presentation. This was followed by presentations from women members of Struggle Unity in Türkiye.
Written presentations were then delivered by Ayelen Correa of the Network of Media and Communication Organizations of Argentina, Shuruk Duqqa, spokesperson for the Palestinian Women’s Movement Al Karama Venezuela, Daria Kadkina of the DPRK International Solidarity Group of Russia, and Yannick Vanonckelen, Political Bureau member of the Communist Party of Belgium.
A video presentation was delivered by Charlotte Buimpe Diombelayi, national representative of the Women’s League of the Union of Democratic Socialists (LIFUDS) of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Written presentations followed from Materi Panagiota of the Revolutionary Theory Group of Greece and Anti-Imperialist Women’s Action of the ‘Republic of Korea.’
Finally, the Istanbul Declaration of the 2nd International Anti-imperialist Conference of the World Anti-Imperialist Women’s Platform was adopted and released.
The full text of the Declaration follows.
[Declaration of the World Anti-imperialist Women’s Platform]
Strengthen the Anti-Imperialist and Anti-NATO Struggle and Advance the Social Emancipation of Women!
The flames of the World War 3 unleashed by imperialism are gravely threatening the dignity and lives of women. Women throughout the world are witnessing, day by day, the ugly anti-woman reality of the imperialist aggressors who have long invoked “women’s rights” as a propaganda instrument for overthrowing anti-imperialist governments. On February 28, 2026, US imperialism and the Israeli Zionists invaded Iran in West Asia. Along with the assassination of Iranian leaders, they bombed a girls’ school in the Minab region, brutally killing 168 young schoolgirls. This vivid example of the massacre of women is confirmed once again by the large-scale massacres in Palestine and Lebanon, where women and children account for more than half of all victims.
Women’s rights are also being ruthlessly trampled under the hybrid wars waged by imperialism to recolonize Latin America. The violations of the rights to life and health caused by economic blockades and campaigns of isolation and suffocation imposed on the anti-imperialist governments of Latin America are reflected in the rising maternal mortality rates among women of childbearing age and the sharp increase in infant mortality. US imperialism slanders countries such as Venezuela and Colombia, which combat drug trafficking, by branding them as “drug cartels,” while protecting the real drug cartels linked to the far-right forces in Miami and training pro-US far-right armed groups. As always, the primary victims of the conflicts and terrorist violence these forces unleash throughout Latin America are women.
Most of the terrorists currently operating in the Sahel are mercenaries who gathered after NATO and the imperialist powers invaded Libya in 2011, overthrew the anti-imperialist government of Gaddafi, and opened the country’s weapons depots. The imperialist occupation forces, including the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), manipulate these terrorists from behind the scenes, fomenting conflict and war within the anti-imperialist countries of the Sahel while seeking to use such instability as a pretext for renewed military intervention. This is precisely why Mali remains engulfed in civil war. As a result of armed conflicts and terrorist attacks, which claimed nearly 10,000 lives in the Sahel in 2025 alone, women have been exposed to the most extreme dangers of abduction, forced marriage, and sexual slavery.
The brutality of the pro-US fascist regimes and far-right armed groups in Africa is further revealed by their systematic use of gender-based violence as “a weapon of war.” As a vicious method of controlling the African people, spreading terror, and crushing their determination to wage anti-imperialist resistance, they constantly commit horrific crimes against women and children, including abduction, sexual torture, and bodily mutilation.
Women in the Western imperialist countries suffer from low wages resulting from the dual structure of the labor market and from the burden of unpaid domestic labor caused by cuts in social welfare. Structural inequality is pervasive: if the wages of white men are set at 100, white women receive 80, while women of color receive only 60. The reality behind the “welfare” and “freedom” proclaimed by Western imperialist societies—where the fundamental principle of “equal pay for equal work” has been completely violated—is exploitation and illegality.
Migrant women, who make up a large share of the low-wage workforce, are exposed to long working hours, wage theft, and sexual violence. Yet, living in constant fear of deportation, they are unable even to report these abuses, becoming “ghost labor” within the capitalist system.
Imperialism is the enemy of women. At its center stands NATO—the military command of the World War 3, the machine of war, and the machine of massacre. Based on its long-standing strategy of aggression against the Soviet Union, NATO continues to pursue the prolongation of the war in Ukraine and the expansion of war into Eastern Europe. Following the course set at the 2025 Hague Summit, NATO will use the 2026 Ankara Summit to advance discussions on increasing military spending to five percent of GDP and expanding military support for Ukraine. Under the framework of the “Istanbul Cooperation Initiative”, four Gulf states—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait—have been invited to Ankara. At a time when major NATO member states such as Britain and France are exerting pressure on Iran under the banner of “freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz,” the participation of these pro-US Arab states in the summit signifies that NATO is preparing to intensify its military intervention against Iran. Having transformed artificial intelligence into an instrument of killing and reduced Eastern Europe and West Asia to testing grounds for advanced weapons, the military-industrial monopolies will, during the summit, discuss at the NATO Defence Industry Forum the conversion of civilian manufacturing industries into military production. At the same time, work is underway to standardize and integrate, according to NATO standards, the weapons produced by pro-US subordinate states operating under the guise of “allies,” including the ‘Republic of Korea (ROK)’ and Japan. NATO intends to place these weapons in the hands of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi forces while drawing pro-imperialist states in the Indo-Pacific into its subordinate military system, thereby turning the region into yet another battlefield of the World War 3.
The orientation and social foundation of the women’s movement must be made clear. A women’s liberation struggle stripped of the goal of anti-imperialist liberation and deprived of its popular and working-class foundation is nothing more than another expression of imperialist domination, division, and reformism. It is a bourgeois ideology that leads women to view men as their primary enemies, falsely presents social inequality as biological inequality, and reduces women to objects that need to be “saved.” It forms part of a vicious hegemonic strategy that exploits the condition of women in order to reinforce imperialist domination. Such imperialist practices constitute one of the concrete manifestations of the colonial strategy of “divide and rule,” which has continued from the era of old colonialism to the present day. In reality, imperialism preserves and actively exploits feudal customs in order to strengthen its colonial domination and plunder.
At the present stage, the foremost enemy of women’s struggle for emancipation is imperialism and NATO. In the face of NATO’s expanding aggression and its ever-deepening threat, women of the people must strengthen the anti-NATO struggle by intensifying the worldwide movement to dismantle US and NATO military bases. Around these bases, hundreds of thousands of crimes against women occur every year. Yet, because of extraterritorial privileges and other unequal agreements that place foreign troops above the law, not a single member of the US or NATO forces has been properly held accountable. The problem of the sexual exploitation of women by foreign troops differs little in substance from what it was a century ago; only its forms have changed, while the systematic violation of women’s rights continues unabated. Today, the military exercises for aggressive war conducted from US and NATO bases constitute an objective condition and an ever-present threat that women throughout the world can, at any moment, be turned into victims of war. Nor can it be overlooked that the enormous financial resources devoted to the US military and NATO come directly at the expense of public healthcare and social welfare, thereby seriously undermining women’s rights to work and to a decent standard of living.
Anti-imperialism and independence are the road to life and peace, while imperialism and subordination are the road to death and war. The women of West Asia are waging a determined struggle to defend anti-imperialist liberation and the dignity of women against the overlapping oppression and violence of imperialism, Zionism, and pro-US Islamic forces. Women throughout the Third World refuse to bow before the brutal threats of pro-imperialist fascist regimes and pro-US neoliberal governments, rising instead in anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist struggle.
Women living within the imperialist countries are likewise moving forward, resisting labor inequality and rejecting the anti-women indoctrination disguised as “feminism.”
From the past to the present, women have proudly formed one of the principal forces of the anti-imperialist struggle and one of the central pillars of the revolutionary movement. Since the twentieth century, women have independently shaped their own destiny in the struggles for national liberation against imperialism, in the construction of a new society, and today on every front of struggle. Under the acute conditions of the World War 3 being driven forward by NATO—the machinery of war—women will strengthen international unity and solidarity and fight resolutely to the very end against every trial and obstacle created by imperialism and its fascist servants. Along the magnificent historical path toward the realization of anti-imperialist liberation, class liberation, and human liberation, women will always advance as the masters of liberation and the masters of their own destiny, powerfully driving forward the wheel of revolution.
Jin, Jiyan, Azadî! (Woman, Life, Freedom!)
Down with Imperialism!
Dismantle NATO Forces Stationed Throughout the World!
Women of the World, Unite and Fight for Your True Freedom!
July 5, 2026
World Anti-imperialist Women’s Platform
