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Title: Understanding the Kurdish Resistance Author: CrimethInc. Date: 23rd September 2015 Language: en Topics: kurdistan, Turkey, history, reportback, PKK, resistance Source: Retrieved on 12th October 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2015/09/23/feature-understanding-the-kurdish-resistance-historical-overview-eyewitness-report
Until recently, few in the Western world had heard of the Kurds, let
alone their revolutionary history. Brought into the spotlight by their
fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), they have
received a great deal of attention both from the mainstream mass media
and from radicals and revolutionaries around the world.
Romanticized and often summarized superficially as a population fighting
Islamists, the Kurds have a tradition of self-defense extending across
several national borders. They have been fighting for their liberation
since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, if not prior; the religious
revolts led by Sheikh Said in 1925 and the uprising against assimilation
in Dersim in 1937 are only two examples out of a long legacy of Kurdish
resistance. But without a doubt, the most long-lasting and effective
Kurdish rebellion has been the one launched by the PKK (Partiye KarkerĂŞn
Kurdistanê—Kurdish Workers Party) 40 years ago. The resistance to ISIS
in Northern Syria (western Kurdistan—Rojava)[1] and the fight for the
autonomy of Kurds in Turkey (northern Kurdistan—Bakur) are the
culmination of the PKK’s decades-long struggle. Yet the PKK looks very
different today than it did during its formation, and its aspirations
have evolved alongside its political context.
What follows is my attempt to share what I have learned and observed
during my visits to Kurdistan, in both Bakur and Rojava. It is a long
and complex story filled with difficult contradictions, some of which
will be presented below. In the face of incredible odds, the resilient
Kurds have been able to put theory into practice alongside a
well-crafted strategy. To understand their movement today, lets start by
looking at how it emerged.
The PKK is the product of two different historical processes. The first
and more fundamental one is the formation of the Turkish nation-state, a
project based upon the elimination of all non-Muslims and the
assimilation of all non-Turkish ethnicities. The second and more
immediate accelerant is the powerful youth and student movement of the
late 1960s and ’70s in Turkey.
To understand contemporary Turkish politics, be it the official denial
of the Armenian Genocide or the repression of the Kurdish movement, we
must recognize how deeply ultra-nationalism is woven into the fabric of
society. It is analogous to the Baathist regimes elsewhere in the
region, which are now meeting their expiration dates. All the
ingredients are there: a formidable and charismatic leader, Mustafa
Kemal;[2] the creation of a national identity, Turkishness; and
assimilation into a hegemonic yet constructed culture. In Turkey, the
formal creation of the nation-state in 1923 was a modernizing project in
its own right. Various vernacular languages (e.g., Kurdish, Arabic,
Armenian, Greek) as well as the Arabic alphabet (modified and used in
written Ottoman, Kurdish, and Persian in addition to Arabic) were
scrapped in favor of the Latin alphabet; a language called Turkish was
re-invented, by modernizing vernacular Turkish with a heavy dose of
European influence. Forms of religious expression, from public
gatherings to clothing, were repressed in the name of modern secularism.
At the same time, Islam became regulated by the state, kept in reserve
to mobilize against leftists or minorities. As a nation-building
project, Kemalism essentially sowed the seeds of its own destruction;
ironically, it is responsible for both the neoliberal Islam of Recep
Tayyip ErdoÄźan and the AKP, and the Democratic Confederalism of Ă–calan
and the PKK.
The degree to which this ultra-nationalism is hammered into those who
live within the borders of Turkey is difficult for a Western audience to
grasp. Every morning of her official schooling, a Kurdish schoolchild
has to take an oath that begins “I am Turkish, I am right, I work hard,”
only to file into a classroom with a portrait of AtatĂĽrk staring down
from the wall, where she will hear teachers present the history of the
Ottoman Empire and emphasize that Turkey is surrounded by enemies on all
sides. She must go through the motions of patriotic holidays several
times a year: the anniversary of the declaration of the republic (OK),
the anniversary of the death of Atatürk (well … fine), the Youth and
Sports holiday (seriously?), the Sovereignty and Children’s Holiday
(give me a break). For men, compulsory military service[3] is a rite of
passage into manhood and a precondition of employment. It’s common to
see rowdy street rituals in which young men are sent off to do their
military service by crowds of their closest male friends.
Nationalism comes not only from the Right but also from the Left, and
the 1968 generation was no exception. In contrast to their counterparts
in other countries, this generation resembled the old Left more than the
new. Many of the most revered veterans and martyrs of the leftist
student movement saw themselves as continuing Atatürk’s project of
national liberation from imperialist powers. It’s telling that the most
promising move on the part of the leftist student movement involved
launching a failed coup of their own with dissident members of the
military. This powerful youth movement occupied many universities and
organized large marches, including an infamous march in which members of
the US Navy’s 6^(th) Fleet were “dumped in the sea”—playing on the
mythical imagery of Atatürk’s national liberation army dumping the
Greeks into the Aegean Sea, a fairytale often repeated to Turkish
schoolchildren. Though it was eventually crushed by the military coup of
March 12, 1971, this student movement left a legacy of armed groups,
including Deniz Gezmiş’s THKO (Turkish People’s Liberation Army) and
Mahir Çayan’s THKP (Turkish People’s Liberation Party).[4]
One of the students active in the post-coup second wave of the student
movement in Turkey was Abdullah Ă–calan. Born in 1949 in the Kurdish
territories of southeastern Turkey, Ă–calan came to the Turkish capital
of Ankara in 1971 to study. He was impressed by the student movement,
which had gone as far as torching the vehicle of the American
ambassador. Alongside the Turkish student movement, which left little
space to talk about the Kurds, there was a new incarnation of Kurdish
socialism on the rise, especially in the form of the Eastern
Revolutionary Cultural Houses (DDKO). Other Kurdish groups had even
started to organize guerillas in Kurdistan. Ă–calan entered this milieu
and advanced his idea of Kurdistan as an internal colony of Turkey,
quickly gaining adherents. Comprising a nucleus of political militants,
this dozen or so people came to be known as Apocular (Apoers), a term
used for the followers of Öcalan’s thought to this day. Not all the
members of this initial cadre were Kurds, but they all believed in
Kurdish liberation from the Turkish state.
This core group left Ankara to foment revolution in Kurdistan. The
ideological flavor of the day, especially with Turkey in NATO, was
Marxism-Leninism; founded in 1978 at a meeting in the village of Fis,
the PKK (Partiye Karkerên Kurdistanê—Kurdish Workers Party) modeled
itself on those principles. The first manifesto written by Ă–calan that
year closes by professing that the Kurdish Revolution was a part of the
global proletarian revolution that started with the Russian October
Revolution and was growing stronger through national liberation
movements. The group acquired its first AK–47 from Syria and started
carrying out small actions and agitating in towns in Northern Kurdistan.
Ă–calan traveled constantly, presenting lengthy lectures, sometimes
day-long sessions, which were a major component of these initial
efforts. This form is still seen in the political education sessions
that all participants in the Kurdish movement are expected to complete,
guerrillas and politicians alike.
This initial phase was cut short by another military coup only ten years
later, in 1980—much bloodier in its consequences, with at least 650,000
arrested, more than 10,000 tortured, and fifty people hanged by the
state. Ă–calan had fled the country shortly before, and many of the
initial cadre followed in his footsteps. Their destination: Syria. In
fact, Öcalan crossed from Suruç in Turkey into Kobanê in Syria—two towns
that have become symbols of the Kurdish resistance, and a crossing
hundreds if not thousands of Kurds have made this past year to join the
fight against ISIS. From Syria, Ă–calan started his project in earnest
and began to make contact with the Kurdish leadership in the region,
arranging meetings with Barzani and Talabani, tribal leaders with a
bourgeois nationalist line. He arranged for the first trainings of
Kurdish guerrillas in Palestinian camps, and later in more independently
run camps in Lebanon. The trained members of the PKK crossed back into
Turkey to begin the armed struggle announced by their first large-scale
action in August of 1984, the raids on the towns of Eruh and Ĺžemdinli.
The PKK entered the 1990s with a guerrilla army of more than 10,000 and
started launching attacks on Turkish military positions and other state
interests such as government buildings and large-scale engineering
projects. At the same time, what had begun as a concentrated effort by a
core group of militants began to take hold within the entire Kurdish
population in the region. Newroz 1992 was a turning point in
popularizing the Kurdish liberation struggle.
Newroz, celebrated until recently mostly across Iran and Northern Iraq,
represents the new year and the welcoming of spring. Although this
celebration was even observed in central Asian Turkic communities,
Turkey rejected it; the PKK advanced the idea of Newroz as a national
holiday of resistance for Northern Kurdistan. Since the late ’80s, March
21 has been a day of mass gatherings, often culminating in epic clashes
with the police. Newroz of 1992 was especially brutal, as the ruthless
police state that was to devastate Northern Kurdistan began to show its
face; the killing of fifty people during Newroz 1992 in the town of
Cizre was the opening act. The ’90s in Kurdistan saw the dirtiest of
civil wars, with the state employing paramilitary groups culled from
both ultra-nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists. To dry out “the sea
in which the guerrilla swam,” 4500 villages were evacuated or burned to
the ground. Most of the 40,000 who have died in the war in Northern
Kurdistan perished in the 1990s.
Öcalan’s eventual capture on February 15, 1999 is a tale to be told,
referred to by the Kurdish movement as “The Great Conspiracy.”
Threatened by Turkish military action, the Syrian government finally
told Ă–calan that his welcome was over and he had to leave. The
international cadre of the PKK scrambled to find him a new refuge, but
no country would touch him. Shuttled between Greece and Russia, Ă–calan
finally found himself under house arrest in Italy. Since members of the
European Union are not allowed to extradite prisoners to countries where
capital punishment exists, one early morning Ă–calan was shuttled to
Kenya, where he was picked up by Turkish commandos. Drugged and tied up,
Ă–calan was flown back to Turkey; the video of this had a chilling effect
across Kurdistan.
A new phase of the Kurdish Struggle was at the door. The PKK had to
reinvent itself with its leader behind bars and sentenced to death, the
only prisoner in an island prison about 50 miles from Istanbul. In the
end, Turkey abolished capital punishment in its quest to join the
European Union, and Öcalan’s sentence was commuted to life in prison;
this also meant that the Turkish state could utilize him in the future.
Between 1999 and 2004, the PKK declared a ceasefire, although the
Turkish state massacred closed to 800 fighters as they were attempting
to leave the country to reach their main base in Iraq. This was the
closest the PKK ever came to decomposition, and Öcalan’s supreme
authority was challenged. But as he himself has pointed out, “The
history of the PKK is a history of purges”—the PKK cadre centered around
Ă–calan survived its challengers, including his own brother.
In prison, Ă–calan found time to read and write as he immersed himself in
a panoply of thinkers and subjects. Many have referenced how he studied
Murray Bookchin;[5] he also studied Immanuel Wallerstein and his World
Systems Analysis, as well as texts on the history of civilization and
Mesopotamia. Under the guise of formulating his defense for the Turkish
courts as well as to the European Human Rights Court and providing a
roadmap for peace in Turkey, he penned several manifestos in which he
broke with his traditional views on national liberation, with all its
historical Marxist-Leninist baggage, and formulated more palatable ideas
under his conditions of imprisonment. These ideas were Democratic
Autonomy and Confederalism.
A further development shifted the context of the Kurdish question. In
late 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), headed to this day
by the despotic Recep Tayyip ErdoÄźan, won the general elections and came
to power, ending more than a decade of dysfunctional coalition
governments. Modeling itself as what can be termed Islamic
neoliberalism, the AKP set about integrating Turkey further into the
global financial system by means of privatization, enclosure, and
incurring debt. In effect, the debt once owed to the IMF is now held by
the private sector. At the same time, Turkey was subjected to
desecularization by a creeping fundamentalist morality[6] and the
authoritarian rule of ErdoÄźan. ErdoÄźan presented this project as
returning Turkey to its rightful historical place by reincarnating its
Ottoman heritage and emphasizing economic growth for the nation.
In May 2004, the PKK once again began a phase of armed struggle, ending
the ceasefire that had held since 1999. Kurds endured increasing
repression by the Turkish State and cross-border operations into PKK
positions in Northern Iraq. As he consolidated power, Erdogan came to
realize that peace with the Kurds would facilitate his plans for
regional domination that included petroleum reserves in Northern Iraq
and a number of oil pipelines running through the region. By allying
himself with the large Kurdish population, he hoped to pass a number of
constitutional changes cementing his power. To put the plans into place,
in 2009, the Turkish Intelligence Agency started to act as an
intermediary in negotiations between the AKP and PKK representatives in
a meeting in Oslo.
Despite the renewed dialogue and various other overtures, the Turkish
State continued its repression against Kurds. Starting in April 2009,
the KCK (Group of Communities in Kurdistan) trials sent thousands of
people to jail. Militarily, one of the most horrific attacks was the
bombing of 34 Kurdısh peasants on December 28, 2011 in Roboski, Şırnak.
The Turkish state claimed they were members of the PKK crossing the
border, but then had to admit that they were common villagers involved
in cross-border commerce. To this day, no one has been brought in front
of a judge for those murders, and the victims of Roboski remain fresh in
many people’s minds.
The ceasefires came and went with increasing frequency through those
years; by the summer of 2012, the PKK had gained considerable
territorial power. In this situation, compelled by his territorial
ambitions, ErdoÄźan announced that meetings had been taking place with
Öcalan. Three months later, during 2013’s Newroz, a letter from Öcalan
was read in which he announced another ceasefire. This ceasefire was
relatively long-lasting, remaining in place until July 24, 2015. But
just when it seemed like stability was returning to Turkey, a chasm
opened in Turkish reality on May 31, 2013. This was the Gezi Resistance.
The Gezi Resistance was the largest and fiercest social movement the
Turkish Republic has seen enacted by its non-Kurdish population. A
movement sparked by a struggle against the development of a park in
central Istanbul grew to an all-out national revolt against ErdoÄźan and
his neoliberal policies. Kurds were present in the Gezi Resistance, too,
especially after it matured into a non-nationalist and pro-revolutionary
event. But for the first time in Turkish history, the Kurds were not the
main protagonists of an insurrection.
The participation of the Kurdish movement in the Gezi Resistance is
still a controversial topic. A subtle bitterness can be felt on both
ends. Many in western Turkey felt like the Kurds were at best too late
to join the uprising and at worst did not even want to, for fear of
jeopardizing their negotiations and peace process. In response, Kurds in
the region pointed to the lack of meaningful solidarity from ethnic
Turks during massacre after massacre committed against them over the
preceding decades. In reality, both of these positions are caricatures.
Many Kurds participated in the clashes around Gezi from day one; shortly
after the park was taken from the police, the Kurdish political party of
that time (BDP) set up a large encampment at its entrance and flew flags
with Öcalan’s face over Taksim Square—a surreal sight. Additionally,
Kurds were already engaged in their own civil disobedience campaign
against the construction of fortress-like military bases in their
region.
In the run-up to the Gezi rebellion, the aboveground wing of the Kurdish
movement was in the process of forming the HDP (Peoples’ Democracy
Party) after more than a year of consultations as the HDK (Peoples’
Democratic Congress). One of their MPs stood in front of a bulldozer
along with only a dozen or so people to block the uprooting of the trees
during the first protests in Gezi, well before it became a massive
uprising. It is no coincidence then that when it was time to select a
logo for the HDP, they chose an image of a tree.
Regardless of grudges, Gezi forever transformed Turkey—and with it the
Kurdish liberation movement’s relationship to Turkish society in general
and towards the AKP and the peace process in particular. Many Turks who
were on the receiving end of police brutality had the veil lifted from
their eyes and were finally able to imagine the suffering taking place
in southeastern Turkey. The media blackout of the Gezi Resistance made
it clear to the participants that they must have been kept in the dark
about what was actually transpiring in Kurdistan. At the tail end of the
Gezi resistance, when a Kurdish youth named Medeni Yıldırım was killed
protesting the construction of a fortress-like police station in
Kurdistan, the movement saw him as one of its own and organized
solidarity demonstrations with the Kurds.
This furious yet joyous rebellion, initiated by a generation that came
of age under successive unstable coalition governments only to become
adults under Erdoğan’s decade-long iron rule, served to consolidate
hatred against ErdoÄźan. This generation had been defined as apolitical
or even anti-political, but in reality they were what Şükrü Argın has
identified as counter-political.
Cizre is the epicenter of a region in Northern Kurdistan called Botan.
The towering mountains in this region are the location of many PKK
camps, and the towns at their base are some of the most rebellious.
Cizre in particular continues to play an important role to this day.
Cizre is where the 4^(th) Strategic Struggle Period of the PKK
materialized, shifting the point of conflict from mountainous landscapes
dotted with guerrilla camps to urban epicenters in which cells of
Kurdish militants organized.
In June 2013, in the town of Cizre, a group of 100 youth standing
ceremonially in formation announced the beginning of the Revolutionary
Patriotic Youth Movement (YDG-H).[7] With members ranging from their
early teens to well into their twenties, this new organization
coordinated urban guerrilla activity within every major metropolitan
center inside Turkish borders. Kurdish youth began to employ Molotov
cocktails instead of stones. The recent spike of urban combat in Kurdish
towns and neighborhoods can be attributed to this new organization.
Rebellious Kurdish youth were especially effective October 6–8, 2014,
when it appeared that the city of KobanĂŞ in Rojava was about to fall to
ISIS. With the sanction of the official Kurdish leadership, Kurdish
youth went on the offensive, devastating state forces. The implicit
demand in the riots was for Turkey to stop providing logistical and
material support to ISIS, and to allow Kurdish forces passage across its
borders—for example, by allowing some heavier artillery to cross Turkey
to reach KobanĂŞ from Iraq. After the deaths of fifty people and the
imposition of curfews in six different cities and martial law in the
Kurdish capital of Amed, the Turkish government finally permitted the
Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga of the KDP to reach KobanĂŞ with their weapons.
There are great political differences between the PYD and by extension
the PKK and the KDP, the current regime of Kurds in Northern Iraq who
have had autonomy since the first Gulf War in 1991. The PKK/PYD are
fighting for a social revolution based on self-governance, self-defense,
autonomy, and women’s liberation, with an emphasis on ecology and a
critique of all hierarchies, most notably state power. The KDP, on the
other hand, is cultivating a national Kurdish bourgeoisie and acts as a
close ally of ErdoÄźan. In the 1990s, the KDP fought together with Turkey
against the PKK. Tensions remain high.
The YDG-H is perhaps strongest in Cizre. After the uprising in defense
of KobanĂŞ, Cizre entered the national discourse again when youth rose up
following the funeral of Ăśmit Kurt, taking control of the three
neighborhoods of Sur, Cudi, and Nur. They were able to create an
autonomous zone within these neighborhoods for two months by digging a
total of 184 ditches around their neighborhoods. The Turkish state
effectively lost control of this area as the youth took over, burning
down at least five buildings belonging to the state or its associated
interests—including a school where many of them were also students.
On a tour of Cizre, I asked some of the members of YDG-H why they dug
ditches rather than building barricades, the traditional revolutionary
method of asserting autonomy since time immemorial. My host, Hapo,
explained that since the youth are armed with AK–47s, rocket-propelled
grenades, and small arms, the police cannot exit their armored vehicles,
but they can still plow through barricades. But again, since they cannot
exit their vehicles, they also cannot traverse the ditches. Hapo
described how at first they used pickaxes and shovels to excavate these
ditches, but then they commandeered construction vehicles. The
construction vehicles of the municipal government, he said, sneaking a
subtle smile. I realized he meant the municipal government belonging to
the aboveground political party of the Kurdish Movement, the HDP.
The wild youth of Cizre are organized into “teams” of around ten
individuals. Hapo told me that once the number of a team grows to more
than thirty, they split into smaller groups. The teams take their names
form Kurdish martyrs, often recent ones and sometimes from Cizre
itself—an eerie reproduction of martyrdom and militancy. Teams claim
their territory by tagging their names on walls, much as graffiti crews
do elsewhere around the world. During the high point of clashes, each
neighborhood establishes a base where explosives, Molotov cocktails, and
weapons are stockpiled during the day in preparation for the
confrontations that occur at night. The younger children are sometimes
on the front lines throwing rocks at armored police vehicles, but they
are always the ones who sound the alarm by running through the
neighborhood shouting: “The system is coming! The enemy is coming!”
The division is clear for the Kurdish militants both in the personal and
the political. There is the system, and there is struggle. Students
leave the system (universities) in order to join the struggle. The
system and capitalist social relations inevitably corrupt all forms of
romantic love; hence, real love is love for your people, for whom you
struggle. Young militants twenty years of age are not allowed to succumb
to their carnal desires or fall in love. If they do, and they are honest
about it, they will have to provide a self-criticism and hopefully get
away with a punishment only involving a further, perhaps collective,
self-criticism session on the platform, as they say in the PKK.
It is clear that the PKK is at a turning point: a new generation of
militants is hitting the streets, transforming the character of the
movement. Perhaps the formation of the YDG-H was a way for the old guard
to assert more control over the rebellious youth of the Kurdish slums.
Even if such a strategy was at play, the youth are proving hard to
control; the official leadership is acknowledging that there are groups
acting outside of their directives. Only Ă–calan himself could reign them
in. The future of the PKK and the Kurdish movement will be determined by
this rebellious youth: will they will follow the party line lockstep, or
come up with their own ideas?
Ultimately, Ă–calan had to intervene for the ditches to be closed on
March 2, 2015. When I brought this up to Hapo, who consistently
expressed skepticism about the official leadership of the HDP and the
peace process, he said that Apo is the line they don’t cross, and that
their insurrection in Cizre has strengthened his negotiating hand within
prison. I was left wondering how much of the leadership cult around
Ă–calan has to do with his imprisonment, and whether the democratic
structures being put in place constitute an attempt to abolish himself
as the leader.
On September 4, the Turkish military and police invaded Cizre and
declared a curfew which would last for nine days. They enforced this
curfew by placing snipers on the minarettes of mosques to shoot anyone
out on the streets. The siege was only broken under the pressure of a
march organized by Kurds from surrounding towns, which was joined by the
HDP’s parliament members. When people finally entered the town, they
found 21 civillians dead, 15 of whom died on the spot after being shot;
the others died from their wounds or other illnesses because they could
not get to the hospital. Among them was a 35-day-old baby and a
71-year-old man who had attempted to get bread during the curfew. The
three rebellious neighborhoods of Nur, Sur and Cudi were riddled with
bullets and larger ammunition. The state blamed the PKK for the deaths,
although not one member of the state forces was injured—giving the lie
to the pretense that the neighborhoods were filled with “terrorists.”
This latest massacre in Cizre will be remembered for a long time and
fuel the Kurdish movement.
Like the movements that preceded it, Gezi took great inspiration from
the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and the Arab Spring that were able to
topple dictators swiftly. Although ErdoÄźan still sits on his throne in
the palace he built for himself for over a billion dollars, Gezi was not
a complete failure, as it opened a new space for joyful revolt in
Turkey’s future. Syria, another country that rose up during the Arab
Spring, seems to have experienced a similarly bittersweet outcome.
Bashar Al Assad crushed the rebellion in the central cities of Syria,
while the periphery was thrown into a brutal civil war that opened up
the stage for jihadist groups from Iraq and elsewhere to arrive and
eventually converge under the banner of ISIS.
The silver lining in Syria was supplied by the Kurds in Rojava, who had
been organizing clandestinely for decades to support the PKK in the
north and to establish their own political and military structures. As
in Turkey, the Assad regime did not permit the expression of the Kurdish
identity or education in the mother tongue, underscoring the similarity
between Kemalism and Baathism. A massacre in the city of Qamishlo, in
which the Syrian regime killed 52 people after a soccer riot on March
12, 2004, is often cited as the forebear of the Rojava revolution. The
main Kurdish political party, the PYD, is for all intents and purposes
the sister organization of the PKK; Öcalan’s portrait is ubiquitous in
Rojava.
The PYD and others organized under the banner of Tev-Dem (Movement for a
Democratic Society) took advantage of the approaching instability in
Syria to declare autonomy on July 19, 2012. It was a relatively smooth
operation, as preparatory meetings had already taken place in mosques
throughout the region: more of a takeover than a battle. They organized
themselves into three cantons running along the Turkish border,
separated from each other by primarily Arab regions. These cantons are
Afrin in the west, KobanĂŞ in the center, and Cizire in the East. It was
almost unbelievable that after decades of fighting, the Kurds—now in
pursuit of Democratic Confederalism—had claimed their own territory.
Öcalan’s Democratic Autonomy and Confederalism is the vision being
implemented in Rojava. Autonomy, ecology, and women’s liberation are the
three central points of emphasis. The most basic unit of this new
society is the commune. Communes exist from the neighborhood level to
workplaces including small petroleum refineries and agricultural
cooperatives. There are communes specific to women, such as the Women’s
Houses. All these communes are organized into assemblies that go up to
the cantonal level. The current economic model in Rojava is mixed: there
are private, state, and communal properties. In the Rojava Social
Contract (something akin to their constitution), private property is not
fully disqualified, but it is said that there will be limits imposed
upon it. It is a society still in transition; so far, it is much more
anti-state than anti-capitalist, but it is undeniable that there is a
strong anti-capitalist push from within. Time will show how far the
revolutionaries of Rojava are willing to take it.
The revolution in Rojava is a women’s revolution; the Kurdish movement
for liberation places women’s liberation above anything else. In
addition to having their own army and autonomous women-only
organizations, almost every organizational structure from the municipal
governments to the armed PKK formations is run by co-chairmanship of a
man and a woman. Quotas are imposed for memberships and other positions,
so that equal participation from both genders is ensured. March 8,
International Women’s Day, is taken very seriously by Kurdish women, and
even more so now with the women’s resistance exemplified by the YPJ
(Women’s division of the People’s Defense Units—the YPG). In his
writings, Ă–calan recognizes patriarchy and the separation of genders as
the first social problem in history. Perhaps paradoxically, many Kurdish
women militants attribute their liberation to Ă–calan and his thought.
Even though the Kurdish seizure of power in Rojava went smoothly, the
honeymoon was brief. After capturing a large amount of military
machinery from Mosul on June 10, 2014, ISIS pushed north in Iraq and in
Syria. With its advance came stories of massacres, enslavement,
displacement, and rape. A month and a half later, in August, ISIS
reached the Yazidi population, a non-Muslim Kurdish speaking community
near the Sinjar Mountains, where they killed thousands and displaced
near 290,000 people, 50,000 of whom were stranded on mountains without
food or water. ISIS fighters seemed especially keen on wiping out this
population belonging to a pre-Islamic faith with many animistic aspects,
who had been persecuted for centuries as devil worshipers, withstanding
more than seventy massacres in their history. The Iraqi Kurdish Regional
Government lacked the agility to intervene with its peshmerga forces—in
contrast to the PKK, who mobilized rapidly, traveling across the country
from its main base on the Iraqi-Iranian border in Qandil. In coming to
the rescue of the Yazidi and arming and training this population for
self-defense, the PKK gained credibility in the region run by Barzani
and his KDP. Despite the tensions between regional Kurdish forces, all
the stories and images ISIS circulated through social media had the
effect of unifying the once disparate Kurds, as the PKK/YPG joined with
the KDP in an uneasy alliance.
Of all of the Kurdish armed forces, the YPG is the newest. The people’s
defense forces were formed shortly after the revolution, and their
numbers quickly swelled with volunteers joining to defend Kurdish
territories from ISIS. This wartime mobilization is also supported by
conscription, which has started to create tension among young people who
are not interested in fighting or who say they have already done their
military service with the Assad Regime. But beyond this simmering point,
in places such as KobanĂŞ, the YPG and the YPJ are comprised of people
defending their own towns and cities.
KobanĂŞ became ground zero in the resistance as ISIS closed in little by
little, taking villages on the outskirts of the city thanks to their
recently obtained military superiority. ISIS was especially keen to
capture KobanĂŞ, as it occupies the most direct route between the Turkish
border and the de facto ISIS capital of Raqqa. In addition, KobanĂŞ was
also the launching point of the revolution in Rojava. The YPG and YPJ
offered a heroic resistance with the little firepower they had, mostly
small arms supported by rocket-propelled grenades and the higher-caliber
Russian Dushkas mounted on the backs of pickup trucks. As they retreated
further and further into the city proper of KobanĂŞ, the YPG and YPJ
reached near-celebrity status, thanks in part to the West’s
romanticization and objectification of YPJ women fighting the bearded
hordes of ISIS. Everyone from prominent leftist academics to Marie
Claire magazine, who featured the YPJ (to the snickering of YPJ members
in KobanĂŞ), started singing the praises of the Kurdish fighters.
One has to admit the neatness of the contrast on the Rojava battlefield:
a feminist army courageously resisting misogynist bands of
fundamentalists. Apparently, many fighters within ISIS believe that if a
woman kills them, they will not enter heaven as glorious martyrs. This
belief is known by the members of the YPJ and used in a form of
psychological warfare on the front lines. The women of the YPJ make it a
point to sound their shrill battle cry, a well-known Kurdish exclamation
of rage or suffering called zılgıt, before they enter into battle with
ISIS. They are making sure the jihadists know they are about to be sent
to hell.
Hundreds of Kurds from Turkey crossed the border to join the YPG forces
defending KobanĂŞ alongside PKK guerrilla units that moved into the
region. Turkish leftists also started making the journey, becoming
martyrs themselves. In one case, Suphi Nejat Ağırnaslı, a sociology
student at one of the most prestigious universities in Istanbul,
influenced in his own writings by the French journal Tiqqun, went to
Rojava only to be martyred after a few weeks. The nom de guerre he had
chosen was Paramaz Kızılbaş, a synthesis of the name of a well-known
Armenian socialist revolutionary executed by the Ottomons and the Alevi
faith, historically repressed in Turkey. This exemplifies the character
of solidarity in the region: a Turkish revolutionary, assuming the name
of an Armenian one, going to defend the Kurdish revolution.
As reported in the Western media, many Americans and Europeans also made
the journey to join the ranks of fighters in Rojava. Some integrated
into the YPG or YPJ; others joined other units, such as the United
Freedom Forces (BĂ–G), comprised of communists and anarchists. Apart from
international revolutionaries arriving in solidarity with the Kurdish
struggle for liberation, there are also ex-military or military wannabes
from the UK or the US who believe that the war against Islamic
extremists that they were tricked out of by corrupt British and American
governments has finally arrived. Some of these internationals have
started to warm to the political philosophy of Democratic Autonomy as
practiced by their comrades-in-arms; others quickly got out, realizing
they were among “a bunch of reds.”
The international revolutionaries fighting alongside their Kurdish
comrades will return to their homelands with strategic experience in the
battlefield and a renewed sense of inspiration and perspective on what
is possible when people commit themselves to liberation.
In the middle of fall 2014, it appeared that KobanĂŞ was about to fall.
Solidarity demonstrations were held globally. Riots shook Turkey to
pressure ErdoÄźan to stop supporting ISIS. In the meantime, meetings were
held between the regional powers to figure out a response. YPG members
in KobanĂŞ recount that it appeared to be a matter of hours before the
city would fall; they retreated to a central part of the city, gathering
their ammunition to be destroyed rather than captured by ISIS. It was at
that moment, rather than a month earlier when ISIS had not even entered
the city, that the much-promised US and French airstrikes finally began
in earnest.
Beyond a doubt, without that aerial support, the minimally-armed YPG
forces would not have emerged victorious. The fact that the bombardment
came at the very last possible minute shows that, aside from whatever
backroom negotiations and deals were taking place, NATO countries did
not want an ISIS victory; but at the same time, they apparently wanted
the Kurds to inherit a completely destroyed city.
NATO assistance in the Kurdish self-defense is a touchy subject, to say
the least—especially considering that the capture of Öcalan was
understood as a NATO operation. When this reality is brought up among
YPG members in Kobanê, they first joke about “Comrade Obama.” Pushed
further, they point out that while the US and Israel are bad, they
aren’t nearly as bad as the Arab Regimes. But really, at the end of the
day, it is simply a matter of survival. Ideally, the YPG would be able
to obtain the necessary weaponry to mount their own defense; but lacking
that, if the question is between ideological purity and survival, the
choice seems clear.
Immediately after its liberation from ISIS, KobanĂŞ was a war-torn ruin
in which most buildings had lost their upper floors to artillery fire.
Aerial bombardment by coalition forces also did significant damage.
Mahmud, a friend and comrade from KobanĂŞ, showed me around the city he
had never left in his life; his eyes filled with tears as he remembered
all his friends who died in those streets. We were walking in a ghost
town where the only people we saw were fighters or the small number of
holdouts who had stayed behind or just returned from refugee camps in
Turkey. They could be seen digging through the rubble, trying to salvage
anything from the wreckage. Unexploded munitions and booby traps left
behind by ISIS continued to kill even after their departure, with at
least ten dead in the first two weeks following the city’s liberation.
Despite the high toll paid by the Kurds—the number of fighters killed
was above 2000—there was a sense of excitement and victory in the air,
as news came in daily of ISIS units being pushed back further and
further.
Mahmud is one of three brothers, all of whom are members of the YPG in
one role or another. Like practically all of the YPG who have been
through the conflict, they have shrapnel in their bodies and hearing
loss from explosions and gunfire. An experienced machinist by training,
he found a role in the ranks as a gunsmith—not only fixing weapons, but
also manufacturing new designs, especially long-range sniper rifles. Yet
he was only able to play this part until ISIS entered the city limits of
KobanĂŞ. After that, everyone took up arms to fight, including his
13-year-old shop assistant.
Stories of heroism are everywhere, from the sniper who blew up an ISIS
tank by shooting his round into its muzzle to others who gallantly
climbed on top of another tank to throw a grenade down its hatch.
Stories pile upon stories as Mahmud takes me through the city streets,
narrating the months-long battle of KobanĂŞ. During one stretch, he
didn’t sleep for five days straight—not only because they were under
consistent attack, but also because he was so afraid. He said that at
one point he wanted to die just so it would be over. From his platoon of
about a hundred people, only four are still alive; we spend many hours
looking at pictures of his fallen comrades on his phone. Many of the YPG
have smartphones, including Mahmud and his brother Arif, who would be
reprimanded by their commander for checking Facebook while they were
engaged in trench warfare. His brother Arif was a sniper. But he left
the YPG after the trauma of shooting a comrade by mistake.
The stench of death was strong in some neighborhoods, with bodies still
under the wreckage and the corpses of ISIS fighters rotting alongside
roads littered with abandoned tanks destroyed by the YPG. To prevent the
spread of disease, the bodies of ISIS fighters were usually burned; but
the sheer number of corpses made it impossible to deal with all of them.
Even surrounded by all this death and carnage, joyful moments were
common, perhaps due to the news of advances arriving from the front. We
spent our evenings hunting chickens with M16s for dinner, then smoking
nargile after nargile, singing around a fire, waiting for the sun to
rise over the Turkish border in the distance.
Surreal as it was for US planes to assist radical leftist fighters, the
aerial bombardment started to shift the tide towards the YPG as they
took back territory from ISIS bit by bit, eventually pushing them to the
western bank of the Euphrates and coming within 40 km of Raqqa. On July
1, 2015, joint operations between the Free Syrian Army and the YPG
liberated Tell Abyad from ISIS. The significance of this was multifold.
First, this was the most coordination to occur yet between the FSA and
the YPG, perhaps appeasing some of the concerns of Syrian
revolutionaries who regard the Kurds as pro-Assad. Second, an important
ISIS border access point into Turkey was captured, closing a corridor
they had been maintaining into Syria and Raqqa. But perhaps most
significantly of all, the taking of Tell Abyad connected the Eastern
canton of Cizire with KobanĂŞ, creating an uninterrupted stretch of
Rojava and breaking the isolation of KobanĂŞ for the first time.
The Kurds are one of the many casualties of borders crossing the peoples
of the world—in their case, the borders drawn by Sykes-Picot at the end
of the First World War. These borders between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and
Iran are the ones the Kurds are attempting to remove, and it is this
experience that informs their critique of borders everywhere. The Kurds
are often mentioned as a people without a nation-state; the PKK led a
national liberation struggle for decades, and the Kurdish liberation
struggle can still be classified as such—but not in the classical sense.
It is almost like national liberation updated for the 21^(st) century.
Both in Turkey and in Syria, the Kurdish movement is trying to provide a
common fighting platform for all oppressed peoples, leftist
revolutionaries, and others—a collective of peoples they often refer to
as “the forces of democracy.” This platform resembles the
intercommunalism of Huey Newton in that it promotes solidarity and
common action while preserving the autonomy of each constituent.
This is evident in the politics of the HDP and, more significantly, in
the self-governance structures in Rojava—especially in the eastern
canton of Cizire, where Kurds, Arabs, and Assyrians live together,
participate in communal-self governance, and mobilize fighting forces
within the YPG. For a region plagued by ethnic division, the Kurdish
proposition is a third way. This is how they refer to their project to
contrast it with the choice between ISIS and the Assad regime on one
side of the border, and between the AKP and Turkish nationalism on the
other.
This proposition presents democratic modernity as an alternative to
capitalist modernity and self-governance via confederalism as an
alternative to the nation-state. The Kurds are not the only ones
attempting to break the borders of the Middle East. In addition to ISIS
who has successfully redrawn the map, ErdoÄźan also has his own ambitions
under the rubric of the “Great Middle East Project,” in which Turkey
would assume its rightful role (neo-Ottomanism) as the dominant regional
power. Already today, most of the foreign business in Barzani’s Kurdish
Region in Northern Iraq is Turkish capital. A strong PYD and PKK in the
region would be an obstacle to this project.
For thirteen years, the AKP has won overwhelming victories in Turkish
national elections, holding power as a single party. The HDP was able to
harness anti-ErdoÄźan sentiment with a clever political strategy during
the run-up to the historic elections of June 7, 2015. The Turkish
electoral system has a 10% threshold: unless a party receives 10% of the
national vote or above, it cannot enter parliament, and votes cast for
it are effectively void. To sidestep this, the Kurdish movement has
usually run independent candidates who, after winning a seat, would
become party members. While this run-around strategy helped to get about
thirty-five representatives into parliament, receiving more than 10% of
the vote would secure at least twice as many positions.
The election of June 7 presented the possibility to displace the AKP and
sabotage Erdoğan’s ambitions of increasing his powers by means of
constitutional changes that would make him the ultimate patriarch of
Turkey. Selahattin DemirtaĹź, the youthful and charismatic co-chairperson
of the HDP, made “We won’t let him become president!” one of his main
campaign slogans. The hatred of ErdoÄźan that had culminated in the Gezi
uprising intersected with discontent over Erdoğan’s support of ISIS and
enthusiasm inspired by the resistance of KobanĂŞ. Consequently, the HDP
secured 13% of the national vote and 80 MPs, creating a situation in
which no single party could form a government by itself and
necessitating that a coalition form to assume power.
The relationship between the armed PKK and the electoral HDP is delicate
yet complementary. The HDP must strike a difficult balance: they receive
their legitimacy in the eyes of the Kurdish population as the
aboveground wing of the armed struggle, but they also need to distance
themselves occasionally in order to play the political game successfully
on the national scale. ErdoÄźan and his cronies, who are shrewd and aware
of this, stoke the fires wherever they can by pitting the HDP against
the PKK and both of them against Ă–calan, whom they portray as more
levelheaded—an easy task, when communication with him is controlled by
the state and no one has heard from him in five months. The HDP is in a
precarious position as a legal and unarmed political party often subject
to the same repression as PKK members.
Following the election, no one could work out how to create a coalition
government. As everyone’s attention was focused on the electoral
stalemate, ErdoÄźan made it clear that he would push for early elections
to give the population another opportunity to bring the AKP to power.
Then came the massacre in Suruç.
It was just another delegation of young leftists from Istanbul to
Kurdistan. This one was organized by the Socialist Youth Associations
Federation with the goal of giving a hand in the rebuilding of KobanĂŞ,
bringing toys to refugee children, and planting trees in the region. On
the morning of July 20, 2015, SGDF organized a press conference at the
Amara Cultural Center, the de facto convergence center for volunteers
traveling to assist with the refugee camps. In the midst of this, a
suicide bomber killed 34 people. This massacre shocked the whole
country, setting in motion a downward spiral of events. Two days later,
ErdoÄźan cut a deal with the US to allow them use of the Turkish Incirlik
Air Base against ISIS in exchange for their tacit support of a new
campaign of annihilation against the PKK. Seizing upon the murder of two
police officers the day after the bombing for justification (a
retaliation later explicitly disowned by the official channels of the
PKK), the Turkish government began a massive air campaign against PKK
positions in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. In addition, raids
took place across the country, resulting in more than 2000 arrests and
continuing to this day. So belligerent were the actions of the AKP that
they even arrested one of the injured from the socialist delegation
bombed in Suruç.
The AKP claimed that it was going after all the extremist terrorists in
the country: the PKK, ISIS, and the Marxist-Leninist group DHKP-C (The
Revolutionary Peoples Liberation Party — Front). Of these three, the
DHKP-C does not hold a candle to the others in terms of numbers or
effectiveness; it seems they were thrown in for good measure. While the
AKP and ErdoÄźan claim in the media that they are also going after ISIS,
in reality this is nothing but window dressing. Of the 2544 arrested by
the end of August, less than 5% were arrested on allegations of
belonging to ISIS, and many of those were later released. Of the bombing
campaign totaling approximately 400 airstrikes, only three targeted
ISIS. These airstrikes are targeting PKK camps, especially the central
one of Qandil—but civilians have also been killed, such as ten in the
nearby Iraqi village of Zelgele.
Although the Suruç bombing targeted the Kurdish movement, it is being
used as an excuse to decimate it. As of this writing at the beginning of
September, according to the Turkish Human Rights Association more than
47 civilians and 47 PKK guerrillas have been killed. The PKK is hitting
back hard wherever it can: as of now, at least 92 policemen or soldiers
have been killed, and 24 officials of the state or security forces
kidnapped.
In response to this repression, Kurdish towns and cities rose up with
demonstrations and riots in every single town for many nights in a row.
The response by the state was brutal; media pundits observed that the
country had regressed to the bloody 1990s. While this was certainly the
case from the standpoint of the state, the Kurdish movement has evolved:
Kurds in more than sixteen towns took the initiative of declaring
autonomy from the state and began to emphasize their right to
self-defense. These declarations were met with more brutality and
arrests. Especially in the towns of Silopi and Cizre, the state
responded by using snipers to go after children and citizens who weren’t
even directly involved in the conflicts. House raids and extrajudicial
executions soon followed. Bombings of the countryside have resulted in
catastrophic forest fires, inflicting yet another form of anguish on the
region. Many towns in the region are still declared special security
zones, a designation akin to martial law; curfews and operations by
special forces are widespread.
A new early election has been called for November 1, 2015. It is already
clear that the run-up to the next election will result in escalations
from the AKP and ErdoÄźan, who has shown that he is willing to do
anything to hold on to power, even thrust the country into civil war. It
is possible that he will use his executive powers to postpone the
election for a year on the grounds that there is a security risk for
elections to take place. The successes of the Kurds on both sides of the
Turkish-Syrian border, their smart political choices and heroic fighting
maneuvers have pushed the AKP and ErdoÄźan to a breaking point. If the
current drive for a truly fascist police state is any indication, his
fall from power will be as brutal as his reign.
I am inspired by the perseverance of the Kurds who are attempting to
break out of stale leftist dogmas while still insisting on revolution.
The transformation of a social movement of millions does not occur
overnight, but they have begun to implement new social relations and
structures that aim at abolishing the state and other hierarchies, such
as men over women or humans over non-humans. From my observations, I
believe that this stubborn multigenerational struggle has the potential
to transform the world’s most sectarian region into autonomous zones of
cooperation and solidarity. As long as they are able to survive ISIS and
the Turkish State and continue constructing their revolution from below,
they will have much more to teach those of us fighting for liberation
elsewhere.
[1] Geographically, Kurdistan is defined by cardinal directions. So
western Kurdistan, which is in northern Syria, is called Rojava (West);
northern Kurdistan, which is in southeastern Turkey, is Bakur (North);
southern Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, is Bashur (South); and eastern
Kurdistan, in southwestern Iran, is Rojhelat (East).
[2] Known as Atatürk—the great Turk—after 1934.
[3] Although Turkey has universal conscription, it also has laws which
permit one to pay nearly $10,000 to be exempt from it. In addition,
those with higher-level education are often able to land safer
positions. Thus those who actually fight the wars are predominantly
poor.
[4] Mahir was killed in a military raid during the kidnapping of NATO
technicians with the demand of freeing Deniz and two others who would
also be executed, HĂĽseyin Inan and Yusuf KĂĽpeli. Deniz was hung by
military rule.
[5] Although Western leftists are fascinated by the Bookchin-Ă–calan
connection, it is not as if Kurdish militants are walking around with
Bookchin under their arms in the region. Sure, Democratic Confederalism
resembles libertarian municipalities, but pointing to Bookchin as the
ideological forefather reeks of Eurocentrism.
[6] There is no question that Muslims were subjected to a conservative
secularism in Turkey prior to the AKP. Erdogan’s electoral successes
capitalized on the resulting frustration.
[7] The word for “Patriotic” in YDG-H is yurtsever, which means more
accurately “one who loves his or her homeland.”