A revolution is not a dinner party by MEREDITH TAX
I began studying the Kurdish women’s
movement during the siege of Kobane and soon became convinced that their story
is so important that I had an obligation to get it out in English as fast as I
could, even though I couldn’t go there and was limited by my lack of language
skills. As I worked on A Road
Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State, I was constantly
pulled up short by the radical nature of this revolution and the way it
questions the most basic leftwing assumptions, not only about women, or about
the relationship between armed struggle, mass movement, and parliamentary
party, but about the state itself.
In the 20th century,
it was clear what people meant when they used the word “revolution”. Mao
Zedong said it as well as anyone: “A revolution is not a dinner
party...it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind,
courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act
of violence by which one class overthrows another”.
The founders of
Turkey’s PKK (Kurdish
Workers Party) had this definition in mind in 1978 when they laid out a
strategy of people’s war leading to an independent Kurdish state. They
initially focused on “propaganda of the deed” and military training, building
what eventually became an extremely capable force, as ISIS discovered in Syria.
But their vision of revolution expanded enormously during the nineties, when a
civil resistance movement called the Serhildan took
off in the Kurdish areas of Turkey, along with efforts to build a parliamentary
party that could combine electoral and advocacy work.
This wasn’t easy since
every time the Kurds founded a parliamentary party and ran people for office,
the Turkish state made their party illegal—this happened in 1993, 1994, 2003,
and 2009 and is now
happening to the HDP (Peoples
Democratic Party), despite (or because of) the fact that it won 13.1% of the
national vote in the parliamentary election of May 2015. Erdogan’s response to
this election was to call another election, and at the same time begin an all
out military assault on Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey, where civilians
were subjected to bombardment, depopulation, and massive war
crimes, their homes and neighborhoods destroyed. This was in the name
of fighting PKK terrorism.
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