Are we standing by as spectators as a revolution is being strangled? Condemn Turkey's attack on Afrin and support Rojava's revolution!---Part 1

Are we standing by as spectators as a revolution is being strangled? Turkey is violating international law by crossing borders and attacking the Afrin region, a canton associated with revolutionary Rojava.

An optimistic map of the region

I thought that people in the U.S. might be forgiven for not paying more attention to events in Turkey, North Kurdistan, Western Kurdistan, and northern Syria. In fact, when we name these regions and when we say “Rojava”---the name of the most advanced center of the Kurdish revolution in the region---we get blank stares. The U.S. media is complicit in confusing people, partnering with the Trump administration, Turkey’s supporters, the German government, and others to make Turkey’s most recent violations of borders and attacks on the revolutionary enclaves about terrorism and not human rights and simple justice. People in the U.S. enjoy the privilege of not having to understand world geography, regional histories which are not our own, and the real human costs of imperialism and intervention. We look away, we resist learning and knowing because knowledge compels us to act and that means confronting the system here. The crises we live with often prevent us from understanding the dimensions of crises elsewhere, but if we are not about the business of understanding how oppression and exploitation here connect in systemic and deliberate ways with an international picture then we will forever be waist deep in quicksand, or we will go under.

So let’s start with some basics. Rojava is a revolutionary enclave located in what is often called northern Syria. More properly, Rojava should be understood as being made up of three cantons: Afrin Canton in the west, Kobane Canton in the center, and Cizre Canton in the east. These cantons comprise much of what should be understood as being Western Kurdistan. They border Turkey but they are not themselves contiguous.

Rojava has been attempting to build a revolutionary and democratic society for almost six years. In this sense “revolutionary and democratic” means decentralized, women-led and women-inspired, socialistic, based on regional cooperative models, and fluid. Popular organizations carry out the tasks normally performed by governments. Women have their own institutions, including a military structure. The turning point for Rojava’s advanced revolution came in 2014 and 2015 with the desperate Battle for Kobane. The poorly armed and isolated militias defeated ISIS and retook control of the region. From there, the peoples’ armed forces attacked other ISIS-held regions where Kurds formed majorities and, with varying success, established some forms of popular or revolutionary power. The Democratic Union Party (PYD) provided political leadership while the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) provided the needed military force.

The ideology and inspiration for Rojava’s revolution came in part from the writings of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). Öcalan has been held as a political prisoner in Turkey since 1999. He was captured through the cooperation of the United States and Israel and, perhaps, the German and other governments. He has been held incommunicado for several years now, perhaps because he is one of the few people who could broker and help negotiate peace in the region. The Turkish government understands that Öcalan is a powerful symbol and uses his isolation and imprisonment as a means of humiliating the Kurds and prolonging war conditions.

Abdullah Öcalan

When last heard from, Öcalan was advocating views which are closer to forms of cooperative and ecological anarchism than they are to national liberation, Marxism, or historic socialism. He has worked out a sophisticated theory of Jineology (a “science of women”) and Democratic Confederalism, both of which are made real in Rojava and in the revolutionary Kurdish movements. The possibility that these ideas might spread through the Middle East and into other regions terrifies the ruling classes. Öcalan and his movement remain revolutionary despite their ideological proximity to anarchism. Murat Karayılan, Çiğdem Doğu, Kasım Engin, Besê Hozat, and Cemil Bayık are among the capable revolutionary leaders associated with the PKK and the Kurdistan Communities Union. We get the sense that in the last three years an ideological search has been underway which again centers feminism, socialism, self-reliance, and military preparedness. More attention is being given to conditions in Iran (Rojhilat, Eastern Kurdistan), particularly to the conditions of women and political prisoners there. The movements in Turkey and North Kurdistan must, on the other hand, center on democratic struggles at the municipal and regional levels, on protecting political activists and leadership, on labor and women’s and youth struggles, and on opposition to the war.

The Kurdish movement marks particular forms of revolutionary progress. First, it is inspired by, and inspires, a women’s liberation movement. It has created the space for all minorities to step forward. It has at times united Kurds who are divided by religion, politics, language, region, and class (peasantry, working-class, small capitalists, or professionals). It has spoken well for the Kurdish people, who really are tired of wartime conditions in Turkey, Iran, and in Syria. Through the People’s Democratic Party (HDP, see below) in Turkey the movement has united with labor, women, youth, LGBTQIA+ people, other national minorities, much of the left, and citizen’s movements and won representation for them and with them. The Kurdish people have paid for this progress with their lives.

There is no doubt that the Turkish government oppresses and exploits the Kurdish minority and others. The PKK was formed as a liberation movement in the late 1970s. It is unfairly and unreasonably described as “terrorist” by western powers, although these governments have frequently used Kurds for their own ends and have at times sought cooperation with people close to the PKK. In fairness, the PKK is today more of a social system than a party, and its fighters are centered in the Qandil Mountains near the Iraq-Iran border. Progressive and Kurdish interests in Turkey and North Kurdistan are best represented by the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and by the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey and the Confederation of Public Employees' Trade Unions and associated peoples’ organizations. HDP has made great progress since its founding in 2012, but today its leadership and activists are facing violence and terrible repression as the Turkish government militarizes the country, enables the increasing exploitation and oppression of workers and national minorities, supports the armed religious fanatics in the region, and launches interventions in Syria. For a time the Turkish government actively supported ISIS. The Turkish government is trying to recreate something from the Ottoman past by creating a “security zone” which would take Kurdish, Syrian, and Iraqi land and resources and provoke additional conflicts.