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Title: The Kurdistan Shoras Resistance Author: Anarchist Federation Date: 24th April 2003 Language: en Topics: kurdistan, workers councils, Iraq Source: Retrieved on 3rd August from https://web.archive.org/web/20030515040132/http://nefac.northernhacking.org/newswire/display/372/index.php Notes: from Resistance #22
Outbreaks of resistance spread rapidly across the north of the Iraq,
towards the end of the Gulf War I, and were completely spontaneous,
popular insurrections free from, and in spite of, the influence of
Kurdish nationalism and leftist splinter-politics. What they would have
achieved if they had been joined by returning Iraqi soldiers massacred
along the now infamous road to Basra in the south of the country, and if
the too short-lived revolt there had lasted long enough to link up the
struggle, is another question.
The main centres of the northern revolt were in the regions of
Sulaimania, Kirkuk and Hawlia. As Iraqi soldiers deserted the front in
their thousands (30,000 in Sulaimania!), thousands more took to the
streets, organising themselves into committees (shoras) across the
region. Demonstrations took place everywhere. Over 50 shoras sprung up
in Sulaimania and Ba’athist centres (Ba’ath being the ruling party in
Iraq), army bases and security headquarters were attacked. Listed below
are examples of some of the activites in which the shoras participated.
1) Every Shora had its own radio station.
2) Every shora set up medical posts.
3) Each shora had a number of committees dealing with the media, the
militia, medical matters, administration, finance and general assistance
and the law, as well as a committee for relations between the shoras and
a foreign relations committee.
4) The building up of a militia for resistance purposes.
5) On the 16^(th) of March, 1991, the anniversary of the massacre of
Halabja, the shoras incited the entire city even threatening the
Kurdistan Front (KF).
6) On the 17^(th), a general meeting of all the shoras took place at the
Majid Bug shora to elect a supreme shora covering the city.
(Abridged from ‘The Kurdish Uprising...’)
It was at this point, on March 17^(th), that the shoras came under
attack, not from the Baathist regime, but from the Kurdistan Front (KF).
So frightened were the nationalists by the Shoras that by March 18^(th)
they were openly calling for them to be disbanded. Through a concerted
campaign of misinformation regarding a government backlash and other
lies, but mainly because of their large stocks of food supplies, the
nationalist parties were able to undermine the Shoras. After years of
hunger and conflict, people were, naturally enough, desperate enough for
security.
Given time the shoras could have created the building blocks for a
society organised along libertarian lines. The ‘organised left’ and the
nationalist parties preferred, however, to pursue their own narrow
agendas and set out to destroy them with the twin tactics of propaganda
and food. Sufficient confidence had yet to be built up in the shoras for
the people not to be hoodwinked by the duplicity of these methods.
If the shoras had spread, this confidence, the confidence which, after
all, had destroyed in the space of a few days the institutions of
Ba’athist terror that had stood for decades, could have manifested
itself into a completely new system of social organisation.