Meredith Tax - The Revolution in Rojava - A liberated area in the Middle East led by socialist-feminists is fulfilling the dreams of Arab Spring
Since last August, when I first heard about the fight
against ISIS in Kobani, I have been wondering why so few people in the United
States are talking about the Rojava cantons. You’d think it would be big news
that there’s a liberated area in the Middle East led by kickass
socialist-feminists, where people make decisions through local councils and
women hold 40 percent of leadership positions at all levels. You’d think it
would be even bigger news that their militias are tough enough to beat ISIS.
You’d think analyses of what made this victory possible would be all over the
left-wing press.
YPJ (Women’s Defense Forces)in Kobani, December 8, 2014 (Biji Kurdistan / Flickr)
But many on the U.S. left have yet to hear the story of the
Rojava cantons—Afrin, Cizîre, and Kobani—in northern Syria, or western
Kurdistan. Rojava—the Kurdish word for “west”—consists of three leftist
enclaves making up an area slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut, in
territory dominated by ISIS. In mid-2012, Assad’s forces largely withdrew from
the area, and the battle was left to the Kurdish militias: the YPG (People’s
Protection Units) and the YPJ (Women’s Defense Forces), the autonomous women’s
militias. These militias are not the same as the Iraqi peshmerga, though the
U.S. press uses that name for both.
The YPG and YPJ have, for the better part of the last three
years, been focused on defeating the jihadis, even as they continue to clash
with the Assad regime (particularly in and around the city of Hasakah).
On January 27, 2015, they achieved a major victory when they defeated ISIS in
Kobane. They have since won the strategic towns of Tel Hamis and Tel Tamr (on
the edges of Cizîre canton), but are, as of late April, gearing up for a renewed ISIS attack on the area.
While the Syrian opposition is understandably bitter that
the YPG and YPJ withdrew most of their energy from the war with Assad,
leftists worldwide should be watching the remarkable efforts being made by
Syrian Kurds and their allies to build a liberated area where they can develop their
ideas about socialism, democracy, women, and ecology in practice.
They have been working on these ideas since 2003, when the
PYD (Democratic Union Party) was founded by Syrian members of Turkey’s banned
Kurdish party, the PKK. By January 2014, they had established a bottom-up
system of government in each canton, with political decisions made by local
councils and social service and legal questions administered by local civil
society structures under the umbrella of TEV-DEM (Democratic Society Movement).
TEV-DEM includes people from all the ethnic groups in the cantons, who are
represented by more than one political party, but most of its ideological
leadership comes from the PYD.
According to Janet Biehl, who was part of an academic delegation to the
Cizîre canton in December 2014, the district commune is the building block of
the whole structure. Each commune has 300 members and two elected
co-presidents, one male, one female. Eighteen communes make up a district, and
the co-presidents of all of them are on the district people’s council, which
also has directly elected members. The district people’s councils decide on matters of
administration and economics like garbage collection, heating-oil distribution,
land ownership, and cooperative enterprises. While all the communes and
councils are at least 40 percent women, the PYD—in its determination to
revolutionize traditional gender relations—has also set up parallel autonomous
women’s bodies at each level. These determine policy on matters of particular
concern to women, like forced marriages, honor killings, polygamy, sexual
violence, and discrimination. Since domestic violence is a continuing problem,
they have also set up a system of shelters. If there is conflict on an issue concerning women, the
women’s councils are able to overrule the mixed councils.
In short, the Rojava revolution is fulfilling the dreams of
Arab Spring—and then some. If its ideas can be sustained and can prevail
against ISIS, Kurdish nationalism, and the hostile states surrounding the
cantons, Rojava will affect the possibilities available to the whole region. So
why isn’t it getting more international support?
In October, David Graeber wrote a Guardian op-ed comparing Rojava’s fight against ISIS
to the Spanish Civil War and asking why the international left was so showing
so little solidarity this time around. The answer lies partly in how one
defines international solidarity—which these days often seems to be limited to
opposing whatever the United States does. In December 2014, an In These Times panel on what to do about Kobani
framed the question purely in terms of U.S. military intervention. Richard Falk
responded:
The plight of the Kurds in Kobani and their courage in
resisting ISIS poses a tragic predicament that does challenge the kind of
anti-interventionism that I feel is justified overall, particularly in the
Middle East. But to overcome the presumption against military intervention,
especially from the air, one needs very powerful evidence. . . . [T]he ISIS
intervention doesn’t seem designed to actually deal with the problem. Rather,
it looks like a projection of U.S. power in the region.
Falk immediately turns the question toward U.S. motives
rather than whether Kobani needs help or has asked for it and what other kinds
of help besides bombing might be available. To Graeber, this way of framing the question is sadly
one-sided; anti-imperialist critique is insufficient without solidarity. He
visited Rojava as part of the academic delegation, and on his return, described it as “a genuine revolution”:
But in a way that’s exactly the problem. The major powers
have committed themselves to an ideology that say[s] real revolutions can no
longer happen. Meanwhile, many on the left, even the radical left, seem to have
tacitly adopted a politics which assumes the same, even though they still make
superficially revolutionary noises. They take a kind of puritanical
“anti-imperialist” framework that assumes the significant players are
governments and capitalists and that’s the only game worth talking about.
What is the problem here? Are we in the United States
too cynical or depressed to believe anything new can happen? Are we able to
recognize revolutionary ideas when they come from Greece, Spain, or Latin
America but not from the Middle East? Are we so sexist we can’t take the idea
of a feminist revolution seriously? Or is the problem simply ignorance? If so,
knowing the story might help. Let’s start with the Yazidis.
Saving the Yazidis
Until August 2014, few Americans had ever heard of the
Yazidis, an Iraqi Kurdish minority practicing an ancient religion close to
Zoroastrianism. Then ISIS (also known as Daesh, ISIL, or the Islamic State)
entered Sinjar, and the Yazidis—abandoned by both the Iraqi army and the much-hyped Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga—fled north into the
mountains. Soon stories began to appear of genocidal attacks that wiped out the
entire male population of villages and of hundreds of Yazidi women and children being raped,
sold into slavery, or forced to marry ISIS fighters.
On August 6, Reuters reported that 50,000 Yazidis were trapped in
the mountains above Sinjar in danger of imminent starvation. The next day,
Obama authorizedlimited air strikes against ISIS in Iraq and air drops
of supplies to the Yazidis. But this was hardly enough to remedy the growing
humanitarian disaster. As the United States continued to “weigh its options,”
the UK and Germany talked about sending aid, and the Pope condemned ISIS, the
Yazidis remained trapped.
Then came a rescue so dramatic it was worthy of a Hollywood
movie: the YPG and YPJ militias, without heavy weapons or air cover, crossed
from Syria into the mountains of Iraq and cut a corridor to evacuate the
Yazidis. Suddenly the Western press was full of pictures of attractive young
women in uniform—there has been more than a touch of Orientalist fantasy in Western coverage of the women’s militias. This
coverage has barely touched upon their politics, beyond ominous references to
the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and Turkey.
Turkey, for its part, played a lamentable role in the battle of Kobani. Observers
including David
L. Phillips of Columbia University’s Institute for Human Rights assert
that “Turkey is providing military, logistical, financial and medical support
for Daesh [ISIS] and other jihadists.”
Kurdish spokespeople say the same. And President
Erdogan did not allay their suspicions when he told the press that, for Turkey, the Kurds and ISIS
were six of one, half dozen of the other. Erdogan also predicted in October that Kobani would fall any
minute. But, despite Turkey’s aid to ISIS and the Kurds’ lack of heavy weapons
and supplies, the YPG and YPJ militias fought on against very heavy odds, and
after months of battle, were able to drive
ISIS out of Kobani in January. Along the way, they began attracting Western volunteers, several of whom have been
killed.
While the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds are theoretically allies
against ISIS, the Iraqi Kurds are also allied with Turkey and this has led to
significant tensions between the two Kurdish factions. There are enormous
political differences between them on questions of governance, women’s rights,
ecology, and nationalism. The political parties that lead the Iraqi Kurds,
longtime favorites of the United States, are in the process of establishing
their own petro-state, and, while women may be better off in Kirkuk than in the
rest of Iraq, as Houzan Mahmoud of the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq points out, they
still suffer from “honour killings, FGM, forced marriages, early marriages, stoning,
rape, marital rape and many other forms of violence.” The Barzani government
has done little to address these problems. As Kurdish feminist Dilar Dirik
writes in “What Kind of
Kurdistan for Women”:
It is interesting that the Kurdish entity that is most
state-like, most integrated into the capitalist system, and which complies with
the requirements of the local powers such as Turkey and Iran, as well as the
international system, displays the least interest in women’s rights and the
challenge of patriarchy.
Dirik notes Iraqi Kurdistan’s “lack of truly independent,
non-partisan women’s organisations,” the dominance of “tribalist, feudalist
politics . . . encourag[ing] patriarchal attitudes,” and a crowning irony:
“Many women’s organisations in South Kurdistan are even chaired by men!” She
contrasts this to the feminism of the Rojava cantons, where “Men with a history
of domestic violence or polygamy are excluded from organizations” and “Violence
against women and child marriage are outlawed and criminalised.” This is a
reflection of the socialist-feminist praxis of the PKK, which has evolved
significantly since its inception as a Marxist-Leninist party in the 1970s.
Who are the PKK?
The PKK, founded in 1978, grew out of the Turkish leftwing
student movement and initially had much in common with other radical movements
inspired by China and Vietnam. Its goal was to establish an independent and
socialist Kurdish state by waging people’s war. Its cadres settled in the
countryside to build a peasant movement; their first targets were feudal
landlords who oppressed the people and acted as local enforcers for the Turkish
military.
Two years after the PKK was founded, Turkey had a military
coup followed by a period of extreme repression and a war on the Kurds. As in
other guerilla wars, the government met the slightest provocation with
overwhelming force, and villagers were caught in the middle, forced to choose
between the PKK and the Turkish military. In a 1993 report, Helsinki Watch (the original committee of Human Rights
Watch) cited atrocities including the assassinations of more than 450
people—among them journalists, teachers, doctors, and human rights activists—by
“assailants using death squad tactics.” The Turkish government never
investigated the killings and was widely suspected of being complicit in them.
Helsinki Watch also noted that, during this campaign, Turkey remained the third
largest recipient of American aid, after Israel and Egypt, and that the George
H.W. Bush administration expressed vocal support for violence against the
Kurds.
The PKK, too, committed human rights abuses: they tried and
hanged informers, were reported to have killed civilians (for example, by
bombing an Istanbul shopping mall in 1991 and shooting worshippers in a mosque
in Diyarbakir in 1992), kidnapped Western tourists (who were later released),
and coordinated attacks on Turkish offices in six West European countries,
among other acts of terrorism. But the scale of their violence pales in
comparison to the mass killings of Kurds by the Turkish state.
Since its founding, the
PKK has been led by Abdullah Ocalan (pronounced “uh-djah-lan”). Though his
critics say that Ocalan did not rethink the people’s war strategy until he was
captured in 1999, insiders like Cemil Bayik,another PKK founder, and Havin Guneser, Ocalan’s translator, say that during the
1990s, he and others began to examine the need to find a political rather than
a military solution to the conflict; he also put increasing emphasis on
democracy and women’s rights. This was, in part, a reflection of the evolution
of the organization. By the eighties, PKK membership was largely made up of
rural Kurds whose villages had been attacked; in order to deal with the feudal
and nationalistic ideas of these new recruits, women cadre realized they needed
autonomous women’s organizations. According to Necla Acik, Ocalan himself was becoming more feminist
because “it was women who supported him most during the turbulent years
following his arrest and the declaration of his new political, and at that time
controversial, line. In return Öcalan became more radical in his promotion of
gender liberation and urged women within the party to question male dominance
within their own ranks.”
The Birth of Democratic Confederalism
Kept in almost total isolation after 1999, when he was
captured in a combined Greece-Kenya-Turkey-CIA operation, Ocalan did a
lot of reading. He was particularly influenced by anarchist theorist Murray
Bookchin, world systems theorists Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel, and
theorist of nationalism Benedict Anderson. He publicly disowned his previous
beliefs in democratic centralism and armed struggle, writing in 2008 that a state-like hierarchical party
structure was a contradiction to “principles of democracy, freedom and
equality;” he also distanced himself from the PKK culture in which “War was
understood as the continuation of politics by different means and romanticized
as a strategic instrument.”
Ocalan was similarly critical of nationalism and
the goal of a Kurdish state, arguing that nation-states were intrinsically
hierarchical and that the goal instead should be a confederation of Kurds and
other peoples living in the region. The idea was that Kurds should withdraw
their energies from their respective states and develop their own democratic
economies and methods of self-governance—anti-capitalist, anti-statist, and
environmentally sound. In short, they should work towards dual power.
Since his arrest, Ocalan has written several volumes of
prison essays, selections of which have since been translated and released as
downloadable pamphlets. The two most recent—Democratic Confederalism (2012) and Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution (2014)—relate
directly to the emergence of the socialist-feminist cantons in Rojava.
Ocalan calls his political philosophy democratic
confederalism. While this philosophy has much in common with anarchism,
participatory democracy, and libertarian socialism, no other major left-wing
movement, with the possible exception of the Zapatistas, has put women’s liberation so squarely at the
center of its revolutionary project. In fact, despite slogans like Mao’s “women
hold up half the sky,”
Marxist revolutions have—at best—seen women as support
troops or a stripe in the rainbow, not as a historically submerged and dominated
majority whose liberation is fundamental to everyone else’s. National
liberation movements have been similar: women are encouraged to be politically
active and even to serve as soldiers during the struggle, but, once the battle
is won, patriarchal norms are reasserted in the name of religion or indigenous
tradition. In contrast, here’s Ocalan in Liberating Life: “The solutions for all social problems
in the Middle East should have woman’s position as focus. . . . The role the
working class have once played, must now be taken over by the sisterhood of
women.” This is an amazing statement for a former Marxist guerilla; only the
most radical of Western feminists would even dare to propose it.
How much of this for real?
In the months I have been studying this revolution, I have
frequently asked myself, “How much of this is for real?” I have known a lot of
male leftists who talk a good line about women’s liberation but fall woefully
short in practice. I also get nervous about the “stereotyped party writing”
that comes out of the PKK. And I have seen more than one Potemkin Village. But
revolutions are driven by contradictions; PKK style may resemble that of China
in the 1970s but the content is different. And, though I have problems with
what seems like a cult of personality, Ocalan’s main message for women has been
that they should organize themselves.
The ten members of the academic delegation who visited
Rojava in December went with questions similar to mine: “Do its practices
really constitute a revolution? Do they live up to its democratic ideals? What
role do women actually play?” Upon their return, they made this public statement:
In Rojava, we believe, genuinely democratic structures have
indeed been established. Not only is the system of government accountable to
the people, but it springs out of new structures that make direct democracy
possible: popular assemblies and democratic councils. Women participate on an
equal footing with men at every level and also organize in autonomous councils,
assemblies, and committees to address their specific concerns. . . . Rojava, we
believe, points to an alternative future for Syria and the Middle East, a
future where the peoples of different ethnic backgrounds and religions can live
together, united by mutual tolerance and common institutions. Kurdish
organizations have led the way, but they increasingly gain support from Arabs,
Assyrians, and Chechens, who participate in their common system of
self-government and organize autonomously.
I went on a similar trip to China in 1973, during the last
years of the Cultural Revolution, and remember the way I tried to disregard my
own misgivings and failed to recognize that much of what one hears from party
activists may be more aspiration than achievement. But even if only half of
what the academic delegation saw is real, Rojava is a game changer. Imagine
what a liberated area with a secular, egalitarian approach to women,
governance, economics, land usage, and ecological sustainability could mean for
the Middle East. Kurdistan has borders in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; if Rojava
can survive, dissidents from the whole region will have a place they can run to
escape forced marriages and get a secular education—for Rojava has started its
own university, the Mesopotamian Academy of Social Sciences, which is now
holding a book
drive.
But to be a game changer, it has to survive. Kobani has been
liberated, but the city was destroyed and needs to be rebuilt—after the land
mines are cleared. And the YPG and YPJ are still fighting ISIS in the rural areas, hampered by a
complete Turkish embargo that prevents them from getting weapons and keeps UN
supplies and food from reaching refugees. These refugees include Yazidis,
Arabs, Turkmen, and others from both Syria and Iraq, including Mosul. There is
one flour mill for the whole area and not a lot of other food. The KRG
(Kurdistan Regional Government—the Iraqi Kurds, led by Barzani) are not letting
very much through on their side of the border because of their alliance with
Turkey, and the UN has not pushed either Turkey or the KRG to let in supplies
or move refugees to a safer place. The cantons have no money and a tiny
economy, and because the PKK is listed as a terrorist organization, Rojava has
no access to international aid.
Under these circumstances, international solidarity is not
only an obligation; it is a necessity. I recently spoke to someone from the Kurdish women’s
movement in Rojava and asked what they need most. She said they need a massive
international solidarity campaign, beginning with political education about the
evolution of the PKK and its politics, including its emphasis on democratic
governance, anti-sectarianism, secularism, ecology, and women’s liberation. In
practical terms, they need all possible international pressure to be put on
Turkey and the KRG to end the embargo and let supplies through. They need the
terrorist designation to be lifted so they can travel and raise money and do
public speaking. Their representatives should be allowed into the United States
and other Western countries; though neither the PYD nor other Rojava groups are
actually on the terrorist list, they are damned because of their relationship
to the PKK; just this January, the United States rejected a visa application by Salih Muslim, co-president
of the PYD.
Some oppose lifting the PKK’s terrorist designation because
of its past violations of human rights. But, while caution is reasonable,
people and movements have to be allowed room to evolve. The leaders of many liberation
movements were once considered terrorists, including Jomo Kenyatta, first
president of Kenya, and two prime ministers of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir and
Menachem Begin. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was jailed as a terrorist and
released after many years so he could negotiate with the Boer government. Like
Mandela, Ocalan should be released from jail to lead negotiations with Turkey.
In 1988, I wrote an article for Dissent called “The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Women’s Liberation and the
Left.” I concluded,
The socialist movement can’t get on without the dream and
language of transformation, applied to job and family as well as international
politics. Socialism needs the ability to dream as much as women’s liberation
needs the ability to think strategically. Only by creating a political culture
that is not split down the middle by gender can any of us find the answers we
need to change the world. Starting from near-feudal circumstances, in the middle of a
devastating war, people in the Rojava cantons are trying to create such a
culture. We need to learn from them - and help.
To learn more about Rojava and how you can support people
there, click here.
Meredith Tax is a writer and activist in New
York and a founder of the Centre for Secular Space. Her most recent book
is Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and
Universal Human Rights.
See also
Book Review: The Left and Political Islam Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights by Meredith Tax; New York 2013. Reviewed by Sumanta Banerjee
