A Dream of Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard
By WES ENZINNA
The New York Times Magazine, November 24, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/a-dream-of-utopia-in-hell.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
A version of this article appears in print on November 29, 2015, on page
MM38 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Rojava Experiment.
One of the safer crossings into Syria is at a small town called Fishkhabour,
in the far northwestern corner of Iraq. In a whitewashed shack on the shore
of the Tigris River, an official from Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government
pointed out the window toward a pontoon bridge that bobbed in the
cola-colored water. A year ago, 30,000 refugees fleeing an Islamic State
massacre in Syria walked for 30 hours before crossing it in the opposite
direction, half-starved, half-dead, terrorized. The official told me and my
interpreter, Mohammed Ismael Rasool, that a few days before we arrived, an
Italian volunteer was arrested by a border patrolman while trying to swim
back toward Iraq. "Don’t change your mind," he said, wagging a finger.
Our destination was a sliver of land in the far north of Syria: Rojava, or
"land where the sun sets." The regime of President Bashar al-Assad doesn’t
officially recognize Rojava’s autonomous status, nor does the United Nations
or NATO--it is, in this way, just as illicit as the Islamic State. But if
the reports I heard from the region were to be believed, within its borders
the rules of the neighboring ISIS caliphate had been inverted. In accordance
with a philosophy laid out by a leftist revolutionary named Abdullah Ocalan,
Rojavan women had been championed as leaders, defense of the environment
enshrined in law and radical direct democracy enacted in the streets.
But much of the information emerging from Rojava seemed contradictory and
almost fantastical. To the Turkish government, the territory, which is now
the size of Connecticut and has an estimated 4.6 million inhabitants, was
nothing more than a front for a Turkish group known as the P.K.K., or
Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Since its founding in 1978, the P.K.K., led by
Ocalan, had been fighting for independence from Turkey, hoping to establish
a homeland for the country’s 14 million Kurds. The effort had caused the
deaths of 40,000 people, thousands of them civilians, and led to the
imprisonment of Ocalan. The American State Department designated the P.K.K.
a terrorist organization in 1997. Having failed in Turkey, officials
claimed, the P.K.K. was trying to create a Kurdish homeland amid the
disruption of war. "We will never allow the establishment of a state in
Syria’s north and our south," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said
in June. "We will continue to fight in this regard no matter what it costs."
But to sympathetic Western visitors, Rojava was something else entirely: a
place where the seeds of the Arab Spring promised to blossom into utopia.
"What you are doing," said Raymond Joliffe, a member of Britain’s House of
Lords, during a trip in May 2015, "is a unique experiment that deserves to
succeed." A Dutch professor named Jan Best de Vries arrived in December 2014
and donated $10,000 to help buy books for Kurdish university students. David
Graeber, a founder of Occupy Wall Street, visited that same month and wrote
before his trip that "the autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today,
is one of few bright spots--albeit a very bright one--to emerge from the
tragedy of the Syrian revolution."
In May, I saw an announcement on Facebook for the Mesopotamian Social
Sciences Academy, a new, coed university in Rojava’s de facto capital,
Qamishli. This in itself was revolutionary. For years, Bashar al-Assad and
his father, Hafez, forbade many Syrian Kurds to study. In ISIS territory
just 15 miles away, Kurdish girls were routinely tortured for being
Westernized heretics--sometimes tied by their ponytails to car bumpers and
dragged to their deaths. In Rojava, they were being educated.
When I sent a message to the academy’s Facebook page, requesting more
information, I received a reply from Yasin Duman, a Kurdish graduate student
living in Turkey. He had taught several courses there, he said, and when he
found out I was a writer and professor in New York, we discussed a
journalism class. Duman explained that Rojava’s youth had little experience
with the idea of free speech. Perhaps I could teach them: "A free people has
to have freedom of speech," he said. It would be a cultural exchange. I
would teach writing, and my students would show me what life was like in
Rojava. We decided that I would spend a week in July giving a crash course
in journalism basics: how to report, how to interview and how to document
the war raging around them.
Now, after three months and at least as many logistical hiccups, I was about
to see this strange political experiment for myself. The official led us out
of the office and onto a ramshackle skiff. We were technically entering a
failed state. Yet when we came ashore on the other side of the river and
passed a brick guard tower staffed with armed men, I saw a red, green and
yellow tricolor banner--the flag of Rojava.
If Rojava succeeds, it will be the second partial homeland for the Kurds
(the first is the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, though the two
administrations are unaffiliated). The modern quest for a homeland began in
part as a response to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, when Britain and
France divvied up the Middle East into spheres of influence. Within years,
millions of Kurds, who previously occupied a wild terrain surrounding the
Tigris and Euphrates Rivers known as Kurdistan, found themselves subjects of
the new nations of Iraq, Syria and Turkey. In Turkey, where Kurds make up
nearly a fifth of the population, the state sought to solve demands for
recognition of Kurdish independence by denying the ethnic group’s existence.
Laws have removed any trace of Kurdish identity from history books, banned
speaking Kurdish in public and punished violators with long prison
sentences. It wasn’t until 2013 that the government repealed a law banning
the use of the letters Q, W and X, which appear in the Kurdish alphabet but
not the Turkish one. In Syria, where roughly 10 percent of the population is
Kurdish, similar policies were enacted by a police chief named Mohammed
Talib Hilal, who in 1963 likened his country’s "Kurdish question" to a
"malignant tumor."
The chaos of war has made Rojava possible but also rendered its survival
tenuous. The territory is governed by a P.K.K. affiliate called the Partiya
Yekita Demokrat, which maintains a military called the Y.P.G., or People’s
Protection Units, and an all-female force called the Y.P.J., or Female
Protection Units. These forces have become key American allies in the
region. Since last September, American airstrikes have supported Y.P.G.
fighters, and in November, President Obama sent 50 elite Special Operations
troops to Rojava to assist and advise the Kurds. Yet the Turkish government,
which has allowed the United States to use Incirlik Air Base on the
Syrian-Turkish border to coordinate airstrikes against ISIS, has
increasingly targeted the Kurds rather than ISIS; since August 2014, Turkey
has bombed Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria 300 times, and ISIS targets
only three.
As I rode down a rutted road accompanied by Agid, my Kalashnikov-toting
escort, we traversed a landscape of parched brown hills and fields of oil
derricks--the region produces 15,000 barrels of oil a day, which is sold to
locals and the Assad administration to fund some of the war effort against
ISIS. Every dozen or so miles, we were stopped at checkpoints by men and
women in green fatigues: members of the Asayis, the police force that the
P.Y.D. established in 2012. They number roughly 6,000 officers, all of them
elected; a women-only force deals with sexual assault and rape. (All
recruits receive their weapons only after "two weeks of feminist
instruction," according to Cengidar Mikail, the director of the Qamishli
police.) In the downtown of a small city called Rmeilan, we found the first
real sign of war: hundreds of martyr flags hung from lampposts. The streets
were absent of young people, who were all at the front lines; the flags
commemorated the soldiers who never returned, several thousand since 2012.
They gave the streets the feel of a dance floor after a prom. Tumbleweeds
skittered across the pavement. The spectral ensigns flapped overhead,
hundreds and hundreds of them blowing as we drove past.
After four hours, we arrived in Qamishli, Rojava’s largest city, in a
district of about 400,000 people. There were few young people here, either,
save for some maimed soldiers crutching their way down crowded sidewalks.
Beyond downtown, where paved roads turned to dirt, an armed guard waved from
behind a six-foot-tall hill of sand, an improvised barricade in front of the
Mesopotamian Social Sciences Academy. Behind him loomed a two-story concrete
fortress horseshoed around a courtyard and a sagging volleyball net.
One of the academy’s teachers, a 23-year-old named Reshan Shaker, ushered us
in and explained one of the many contradictions of the war: The Assad
regime, he said, occupied a high school on the first floor, while the
academy was housed on the second. Sometimes the two sets of students played
each other in volleyball. Downtown, we had passed an intersection where
Assad’s regime still controlled several buildings guarded by armed men in
sunglasses and black muscle T-shirts. A month before, a temporary calm
between the regime and the P.Y.D. collapsed, and gunfire spilled into the
street.
My accommodations for the next week were a spare room on the upper level
with a mat on the tile floor. Shaker turned on the fluorescent overhead
light. "It’s austere," he said, "but we are at war. For us, studying is the
same thing as holding a gun and fighting, so a little discomfort isn’t so
bad, right?"
At 8 that evening, I walked into my classroom. Twenty-three young men and
women sitting in rows of black plastic desks stood at attention when I
entered, stiff as soldiers. On a wall, a poster said, "The society that
doesn’t elevate itself will decay." Should this experiment succeed, some of
these 18-to-29-year-olds would become the future intellectual leaders of
Rojava. No one looked at a cellphone; no one gazed out the window. They were
as attentive as stenographers.
I introduced myself, told them to sit and asked them to do an exercise--a
sort of instructional icebreaker. Interviews, I said, are the building
blocks of journalism. I requested that they interview one another about the
most important thing that happened to them in the past year. They were
confused--the Syrian educational model is lecture-oriented, and Ocalan
himself would infamously lecture his followers for eight or nine hours
without stopping. But once the students understood that I merely wanted them
to talk to one another, I had a hard time quieting them down.
Nariman Hesso, 22 and wearing a green military-surplus coat, presented
first, introducing the student seated beside her: Fidan Ahmed, 20, with a
crown of curly black hair pulled back with a headband. She was in 10th grade
when the Syrian civil war started, Hesso said. "The most significant thing
to happen to her in the last year is that she was not very social and didn’t
have many friends. But in the academy she has made friends and found her
place."
"The most important thing in the past year for Kawa was that he experienced
the revolution in Syria and the revolt against Assad," Mahmood Morad, 21,
said, introducing Kawa Omer, 27. "And now he has gotten to know the
philosophy of Abdullah Ocalan."
"The most important thing that happened to Mohmmad is that he joined the
revolution in Rojava," offered Walid Haj Ali, introducing an 18-year-old
named Mohmmad Dle. Ali placed a hand over his heart. "Here, Mohmmad says, he
is becoming a new person."
After class, the students took me to the cafeteria. It was Ramadan, the
Muslim month of fasting, but I had seen students eating throughout the day,
and now they prepared tea and ate from a plate of soft cheese. Though about
90 percent of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, ISIS considers them to be kafir,
infidels. In May 2014, ISIS fighters kidnapped 186 Kurdish college students
on their way home to Rojava after an exam in Aleppo, then forced them to
attend a jihadist religious school; escapees were threatened with beheading.
"I’m an atheist," said Ramah, an 18-year-old student with a neatly trimmed
goatee. A crowd of students had circled around, curious about who I was,
what music I liked, how I had ended up here. None of them had ever heard of
Bob Dylan or Edward Snowden or Brooklyn, where I lived. They asked if Obama
really was a Muslim. They asked if everyone in America was an atheist, like
Ramah. I told them there were many Christians, Muslims and Jews, though I
said I didn’t believe in God.
"Were you afraid when you discovered that God didn’t exist?" Ramah asked,
imploring me with earnest, walnut-brown eyes.
"Why would I be afraid?" I said.
"In a world where there’s no God," he said, "how do you deal with the
constant fear of dying?"
The next morning, I met with a student named Sami Saeed Mirza. I had barely
slept, kept up by the intermittent swoosh of fighter jets and a series of
loud thuds, whether distant bombs or the innocuous din of street life, I
couldn’t tell. At one point, I went onto the rooftop and looked out at the
horizon, a squiggly line of undulating sand spotted with a few stone huts.
It was beautiful, in its way, a whole world painted with a single brush
stroke of brown. Somewhere out there was the front line.
Mirza, 29, had sad, drowsy eyes and wore thick spectacles perched low on his
nose. He hadn’t noticed the commotion. "I’m used to the sound," he said.
Unlike other students at the academy, Mirza grew up outside Syria in a small
village in western Iraq. He is not a Muslim or an atheist but a Yazidi, part
of an ethnic and religious minority that practices a modern form of
Zoroastrianism. He hadn’t heard of Abdullah Ocalan until recently. In August
2014, ISIS extremists attacked his village, near the city of Sinjar, and
butchered as many as 5,000 of his neighbors. While Mirza and his family were
trapped on a mountain for four days, waiting to die, a battalion of
women--Y.P.J. soldiers--fought through the ISIS lines and created a path for
them to escape. Mirza, severely dehydrated and on the verge of collapse,
fled.
"The battle made me think of women differently," he told me. "Women
fighters--they saved us. My society, Yazidi society, is more, let’s say,
traditional. I’d never thought of women as leaders, as heroes, before."
Mirza heard about the academy at a refugee camp, and here his education in
feminism had continued. He and his fellow students studied a text that
Ocalan wrote on gender equality called "Liberating Life." In it, Ocalan
argues that problems of bad governance, corruption and weak democratic
institutions in Middle Eastern societies can’t be solved without achieving
full equality for women. He once told P.K.K. militants in Turkey, "You don’t
need to be [men] now. You need to think like a woman, for men only fight for
power. But women love nature, trees, the mountains.... That is how you can
become a true patriot."
"I’ve learned the truth," Mirza said. "The leader has shown us the correct
interpretation of society." Rojava’s Constitution--its "social
contract"--was ratified on Jan. 9, 2014, and it enshrines gender equality
and freedom of religion as inviolable rights for all residents. The Sinjar
massacre gave Rojavan authorities an opportunity to show that they were
deadly serious about protecting these rights. Still, I wondered if the
rescue of Yazidis like Mirza wasn’t also strategic, a way to enlist the
minority group in the defense of Rojava.
"Why do you think the Y.P.G. and Y.P.J. saved you?" I asked.
"Maybe I know, maybe I don’t," he said. "But they are the only ones who came
to help us. America didn’t come. The pesh merga"--Iraqi Kurdistan’s
military--"didn’t come." Now he wanted to devote his life to the teachings
of Ocalan. "I was nothing before coming to the academy," he said.
Despite his imprisonment nearly a thousand miles away, Abdullah Ocalan, who
is now 66 or 67 (he has no birth certificate), looms as a Wizard-of-Oz-like
presence in Rojava. His avuncular visage--broad, bushy eyebrows; a
gregarious, toothy grin obscured by a cartoonishly lush mustache--appears
everywhere: in the halls and classrooms of the academy, in government
buildings, in community centers, in police stations and on pins and patches
on the chests of soldiers. This strange founding-fatherhood is the
culmination of an unlikely political career that began in November 1978,
when Ocalan first gathered six Kurdish revolutionaries at a teahouse in the
town of Fis, in southeastern Turkey. His co-conspirators called him Uncle,
or Apo in Kurdish, and called themselves the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or
P.K.K.
Ocalan’s initial impulse wasn’t to fashion himself as a
philosopher-politician. The P.K.K. members were unabashed Maoists, who used
spectacular acts of violence against rival organizations and government
soldiers to destabilize and delegitimize Turkey’s authority in the
predominantly Kurdish southeast. In 1980, Ocalan fled to Syria, where he was
offered shelter by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. For the next 20 years, he
led the struggle remotely--from a seaside villa, from which he issued orders
to his commanders via messenger, letter and telephone. But in 1998, under
pressure from Turkey, Assad kicked Ocalan out of the country. He escaped
through Europe before he was captured in Kenya with the help of the C.I.A.,
which by then considered the P.K.K. a terrorist organization. Ocalan’s
lawyers claimed that he was drugged and tortured by Turkish security forces
while in custody. He was then paraded in front of TV cameras looking frail
and confused, like a grandpa who had just woken from a nap, and he did the
unthinkable: He renounced the P.K.K.’s effort to create an independent
Kurdish homeland.
Ocalan was remanded to Imrali prison, on an island off the coast of
Istanbul. This is when his conversion began--what one academic would
describe as a transition from "Stalinist caterpillar to libertarian
butterfly." He was the island’s only prisoner, surrounded by 1,000 soldiers
there to ensure he could not escape before his execution (a death sentence
was later commuted to life imprisonment). The government allowed him to meet
with senior P.K.K. commanders and lawyers to communicate to his followers
the details of a cease-fire. He was also permitted books, finding
inspiration in Western texts like Michel Foucault’s "Society Must Be
Defended" and Benedict Anderson’s "Imagined Communities." Soon, one of his
supporters gave Ocalan his first book by an obscure Vermont-based
philosopher named Murray Bookchin. After Ocalan read it, he requested
everything Bookchin had ever written. Oliver Kontny, a translator and P.K.K.
sympathizer who was working for Ocalan’s lawyers at the time, told me that
Ocalan let "all of us know that he was working on a paradigm change based on
what he learned from Bookchin."
Bookchin, a mustachioed octogenarian who lived in Burlington, Vt., and
typically wore suspenders and pocket protectors, had no idea Ocalan was
reading his work--in fact, he thought hardly anyone was. Born in 1921 in the
Bronx, Bookchin joined the Communist Party’s Young Pioneers organization at
age 9. But by the 1950s, he had sworn off Marxism-Leninism and pioneered a
radical ideology he called "social ecology," which argued that all
environmental problems stemmed from social issues like racism, sexism and
inequality. While Bookchin enjoyed some notoriety in the 1960s and ’70s (the
academic Russell Jacoby once compared his influence on the American left
with Noam Chomsky’s), by the 1990s Bookchin was little known in America,
save by a faction of prominent environmentalists who ostracized him for his
attacks on those he deemed not revolutionary enough. Gary Snyder, the
Pulitzer-winning poet, said that Bookchin "wrote like a Stalinist thug," and
the writer Edward Abbey called him a "fat old lady." An entire volume was
published to denounce his work ("Beyond Bookchin"), and others lambasted him
as a hypocrite because of, among other things, his love of Twinkies and
Dunkin’ Donuts.
By the time Ocalan was discovering Bookchin’s writing, Bookchin was
depressed and spent his days in a wheelchair, according to his partner and
assistant Janet Biehl’s recently published biography, "Ecology or
Catastrophe." "I feel very much like a stranger in a strange world," Biehl
recounts Bookchin telling her one night. A society without a vibrant
revolutionary leftist movement, he said, "is not a world in which I... want
to live."
In solitary confinement, Ocalan studied Bookchin’s magnum opus, "The Ecology
of Freedom," at once a sweeping account of world history and a reimagining
of Marx’s "Das Kapital." In it, Bookchin argues that hierarchical
relationships, not capitalism, are our original sin. Humankind’s destruction
of the natural world, he argues, is a product of our domination of other
people, and only by doing away with all hierarchies--man over woman, old
over young, white over black, rich over poor--can we solve the global
ecological crisis.
In another work, "Urbanization Without Cities," Bookchin proposed an
alternative to the modern nation-state that he called "libertarian
municipalism." Bookchin believed that the lesson of both Marxist and liberal
governments was that the state was an inevitably corrupting influence and
antithetical to human freedom. Bookchin favored what he called the "Hellenic
model" of democracy, the type of direct, face-to-face government once
practiced in ancient Greece. He argued that only by recovering this system
could humanity address injustice, and only in this way could radical
movements avoid reproducing the same inequalities they had initially set out
to defeat.
It was, needless to say, pretty dreamy stuff. But Ocalan saw in it a path
toward a new type of revolution. Bookchin’s proposal for achieving
independence through "municipal assemblies" suggested to Ocalan a way of
finally achieving the elusive Kurdish dream. Maybe the P.K.K. didn’t have to
take state power. Maybe it could obtain Kurdish rights by creating its own
separate communities inside existing countries, resorting to violence only
if attacked. Maybe all along, Ocalan had been mistaken to think that
liberation could be achieved by creating a Kurdish-run nation-state, Marxist
or otherwise.
Enthralled and seeking guidance, Ocalan had his lawyers send an email to
Bookchin. Biehl was sitting at their computer one morning in April 2004,
spring snow still covering the streets of Burlington outside, when it popped
up in Bookchin’s inbox. Bookchin was lying nearby on a day bed, unable to
sit up because of his joint pain. He and Biehl had watched Ocalan’s arrest
on television, but Bookchin dismissed him as "just another third-world
Leninist." Now, as Biehl read the email aloud, Bookchin discovered that
Ocalan considered himself Bookchin’s "student," and "had acquired a good
understanding of his work, and was eager to make the ideas applicable to
Middle Eastern societies."
A few weeks later, Bookchin replied, expressing reluctance to engage in a
dialogue. "You should know that I am quite an elderly man... who is
virtually incapable of walking because of osteoarthritis and heart
problems," Bookchin wrote. "Much remains to be explored, which my health and
age prohibit me from doing. If you care to write to me further, I ask you to
please be patient with an old radical."
In March 2005, Ocalan issued the "Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in
Kurdistan." By then, Bookchin had cut off communication. ("Bookchin was
heartbroken," Biehl told me. "He was devastated that the revolution had
never happened, and he didn’t trust anybody.") The manifesto called on all
P.K.K. supporters to implement a version of Bookchin’s ideas; Ocalan urged
all guerrilla fighters to read "The Ecology of Freedom." He instructed his
followers to stop attacking the government and instead create municipal
assemblies, which he called "democracy without the state." These assemblies
would form a grand confederation that would extend across all Kurdish
regions of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran and would be united by a common set
of values based on defending the environment; respecting religious,
political and cultural pluralism; and self-defense. He insisted that women
be made equal leaders at all levels of society. "The worldview for which I
stand," Ocalan told his lawyers privately, "is very close to that of
Bookchin."
When news spread throughout the P.K.K. of Ocalan’s conversion, some were
naturally hesitant to abandon the old model of Marxist-Leninist terrorism.
"Who cares about some marginal anarchist with 50 followers?" one P.K.K.
commander supposedly complained. But in the end, they followed orders. The
female leadership, in particular, embraced the new ideology. The P.K.K. set
about forming clandestine assemblies immediately in Syria, Iraq and Turkey,
waiting for the opportunity to expand. Bookchin "was the greatest social
scientist of the 20th century," according to a P.K.K. tribute sent to Biehl
after Bookchin’s death in July 2006. "Bookchin has not died.... We undertake
to make [him] live in our struggle."
If a version of Bookchin’s dream is taking root now, it’s in a context he
never imagined. "Rojava is something beyond the nation-state," said Hediye
Yusuf, co-president of Jazeera canton, the local municipality of which
Qamishli is part. "It’s a place where all people, all minorities and all
genders are equally represented."
I met with Yusuf at her office in Rmeilan, at the former headquarters of the
state-owned Syrian Petroleum Company, where she and her fellow politicians
do business behind rows of blast walls and barricades. Yusuf, a solemn woman
who spent much of her 20s imprisoned by the Assad regime, sat at her desk
and explained the policy of "co-governance." Every position at every level
of government in Rojava, she said, includes a female equivalent of equal
authority. Just as Yusuf was co-governor of Jazeera, Salih Muslim, the
chairman of the P.Y.D., had a female counterpart, a woman named Asya
Abdullah.
Yusuf shared power with an Arab tribal leader named Sheikh Humeydi Daham
al-Hadi. At the start of the civil war, Hadi, who controls a fighting force
of 3,000 soldiers, was allied with Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. Since
joining the P.Y.D.’s coalition government, he has embraced Ocalan’s
ideology, and his soldiers have been incorporated into the Y.P.G. "Hadi is
certainly not a feminist," Yusuf said, "but he supports us because we offer
a new, functional society that respects everyone, unlike Assad, unlike ISIS,
unlike Erdogan." My interpreter spoke briefly on the phone with Hadi, but we
were told it wasn’t safe to visit him. He joked about his new codependent
relationship with an interviewer in 2014. "I didn’t ask to share power with
a woman," he said, seated alongside Yusuf. "They made me do it."
I visited a sweltering building in downtown Qamishli where 46 members of the
Martyr Ramsi commune had assembled to discuss security in the region. Theirs
was one of 97 neighborhood-based communes in Qamishli. There are hundreds of
others in Afrin and Kobani, Rojava’s other two cantons. The communes are
Bookchin’s utopian idea materialized--municipal assemblies, enshrined in the
social contract as the building blocks of society. The 46 people in
attendance were seated on plastic chairs, fanning themselves with cardboard;
the glowering, olive-pitted eyes of Ocalan watched over the room from a
poster.
"We have had several recent close calls with ISIS sympathizers," a woman
said, standing up. Jihadists had been coming to town, posing as refugees and
then planning attacks on the city. "What are we going to do?"
"Let’s set up an extra patrol," said a man, resting his hands on his
enormous potbelly.
"Who wants to volunteer first?" asked another woman, who wore a long
polka-dot abaya and a matching head scarf.
A withered woman raised a hand. "Me," she said. The thought of her
patrolling with an AK-47 was improbable, but no one questioned her.
Chenar Salih, a representative for the Movement for a Democratic Society, or
Tev-Dem--a coalition of six political parties that the P.Y.D. has formed to
help govern Rojava--marveled at how rapidly locals had taken to the new
system, though she explained that some tribal leaders have had a hard time
relinquishing authority. "We were not expecting this," she told me at her
office downtown, a few blocks from the Martyr Ramsi commune. She believed
that Turkey or Iraq would be liberated first, but "since the Arab Spring,
Rojava has become the center of the Kurdish revolution."
To ensure that a Kurdish majority doesn’t dominate, Salih claims the P.Y.D.
has implemented checks on its own power. "As a repressed minority in
Turkey," she said, "we know the importance of giving everyone an equal role
in government." On March 13, cantonwide elections were held in Jazeera. Out
of 565 candidates, there were 237 women, 39 Assyrians and 28 Arabs, from a
multitude of political parties.
But some say the P.Y.D.’s claims of inclusiveness are a ruse. According to
Jian Omar, the spokesman for the Future Party, an opposition Kurdish group
in Syria, the P.Y.D. is a "dictatorship" whose "arbitrary practices against
the Kurdish people in Syria" include "repression, assassinations and
detentions for those who oppose P.Y.D. policies."
Human Rights Watch has also raised some serious concerns about the P.Y.D.’s
rule. In February, after a three-week visit, the group released a report on
"Abuses in P.Y.D.-Run Enclaves in Northern Syria," detailing how soldiers
opened fire on unarmed civilian protesters in 2013; how 13-year-old boys and
girls were serving in its military; and how a 36-year-old drug addict was
beaten to death by the police, supposedly for cursing the name of Ocalan. In
October, Amnesty International published even more troubling concerns,
accusing the Y.P.G. of committing "war crimes" by razing entire Arab
villages as punishment for harboring ISIS fighters--a tactic once used by
the Turkish government against the P.K.K.
"We have evidence they were cooperating with ISIS," Hediye Yusuf told me
when I asked about allegations of forced displacements, and she denied the
claim that homes of civilians were ever purposefully destroyed. But she
admitted that "we are in the middle of a war and a revolution, and we’ve
made mistakes." She pointed out that the P.Y.D. had fully cooperated with
the Human Rights Watch investigation, and the perpetrators had been
punished--one with a life sentence in prison. A Human Rights Watch adviser,
Fred Abrahams, even applauded the P.Y.D. for its response to the report,
which included a new law prohibiting anyone under the age of 18 from
enlisting in the Y.P.G. or Y.P.J. Since then, underage fighters have
returned to the battlefield. (During my visit, I attended a martyr’s funeral
in Qamishli for a 16-year-old Y.P.G. fighter.) Also troubling is the cult of
Ocalan. Today, according to several sources, the P.Y.D. co-chairman, Salih
Muslim, a Syrian engineer who was trained by the P.K.K., is making some key
decisions in Rojava. But even he describes his role as mainly implementing
the ideas Ocalan communicates from prison. "There is a reason that we apply
Apo’s philosophy and ideology to Syria," Muslim told an interviewer in
November 2011. "It offers the best solution to Kurdish problems." When I
asked Yusuf in her office if she thought such reverence for a leader
contradicted efforts to create a society based on radical grass-roots
democracy, she echoed Muslim. "I don’t know why the West always vilifies
Ocalan," she said. "We love him and follow his philosophies, put quite
simply, because they are correct."
During my time at the academy, it was easy to forget about my students’
uncertain futures. Their curiosity seemed somehow amplified, not exhausted,
by the violence surrounding them. I settled into something of a
routine--sleeping on the floor and sharing meals and jokes with them,
playing volleyball during midday breaks.
One evening, during a discussion about the relationship between war and a
free press, they asked me about Murray Bookchin. The academy’s library
housed several of his books, but my pupils knew nothing about the details of
his life. "Was he thrown in prison, too?" asked Sipan Syr, a towering,
bearded man in a white polo shirt with the collar up. "Is there a movement
to carry out his ideas? Did they lock him up like Ocalan because they feared
his power?"
"No," I said. "People have mostly forgotten about him."
Silence lingered. Another student asked if he was still alive. No, I said,
he died nearly a decade ago.
Our only real conflict involved how much they were willing to reveal about
their own lives. I had asked my students to write a short essay about where
they were four years earlier, when the war started, and where they hoped to
be in another four years. The mood shifted. "Why are you asking us about our
personal lives?" said Malk Ali, a student with owlish, obsidian eyes, giving
him more than a passing resemblance to a young Ocalan. "Why do you need to
know where we were four years ago?"
"They’re getting a bit suspicious," Rasool, my interpreter, warned me. I
realized that my question--about their whereabouts at the beginning of the
revolution, which was largely started by young people--smacked of the kind
of interrogations Kurds endured under Assad.
I assured them that I was genuinely interested about their lives. Sami Saeed
Mirza, the Yazidi man, covered his face with his hands. Other students
stared back coldly. Malk Ali asked me to leave. The students held a private
meeting in our classroom, and I stood in the hall, briefly listening through
the door before going to my room. The muffled sounds of shouting lasted
until midnight. I worried they were going to throw me out of the school, in
which case I imagined I could flee across the Turkish border, about five
miles away, which had been officially closed since 2013. As I struggled to
sleep, curled up in my sleeping bag, I was more saddened than scared.
At class time the next evening, I waited in our room, the faint pop of what
sounded like distant gunshots punctuating the evening’s calm. Rasool and I
were the only ones there. "Dude," he said, "no one’s going to show up."
But then they did: Sami, Nariman, Mahmour, Walid and even Malk Ali, who had
challenged me. Without waiting for me to say anything, he stood up and
explained that their education encouraged them to challenge their teachers.
"We reject the master-and-slave relationship as a model for the
teacher-and-student relationship," Ali said. "But we’ve decided that you’re
welcome to continue teaching us."
Ramah, the atheist, stood up and said, "I’m so happy you’re here." They all
approached my desk and turned in their assignments.
Four years ago... I applied for a job as an engineer, and as soon as they
learned that I was Kurdish, I was not accepted for the job.
When the civil war started, I was living in Afrin. At that time, we were
deprived of everything.... If there was a small argument between an Arab and
a Kurd, the Arab would protect the Arab, and the Kurd would protect the
Kurd, even if the Kurd was in the wrong.... I experienced a lot of racism.
I had just entered [university] and was studying electrical sciences. My
dream was to become an electrical engineer, and I passed, but I had to stop
studying because the whole world collapsed.
I was: a zero, a joker.
Rojava started educating the Kurdish people, and here I am now at
Mesopotamia Institute.... Honestly my happiness is indescribable.
I can now say that I am committing suicide in order to be resurrected.
The academy’s rector asked me to leave the school four days into what was
supposed to be a five-day course. A battalion of several hundred new
recruits was being moved to the front lines, and the academy would be a
temporary shelter. It was a fitting metaphor: the ivory tower turned into
barracks.
"We’ll take you somewhere else," said Reshan Shaker, the young teacher who
had first shown me my room at the academy. He was going to be my escort, and
he grabbed a Kalashnikov for protection. "This is the last safe place the
soldiers will sleep in for a while, so I’m happy to give it up."
A few days later, we followed the soldiers’ route to the front. Shaker, who
wore skinny jeans and a plaid button-down, accompanied me to Tel Brak, a
village 15 miles south of Qamishli that then served as an outpost against
ISIS, whose fighters were encamped less than a mile away. Three days
earlier, they had tried to retake the village. Parts of downtown were so
ruined they looked more like an archaeological dig than a town. In one of
the still-standing homes, we met Deniz Derik, a 24-year-old Y.P.J. commander
who wore pink socks and a calculator watch, her coal-black hair pulled into
a ponytail tucked beneath a backward camo cap. Derik was in charge of 23
girls who lived with her at the house. Her troops were aged 14 to 21, though
she claimed the youngest ones were "in training." The house’s parlor, where
I first met her, was decorated with two teddy bears--one pink, one yellow.
In the breast pocket of her camo shirt, she kept a bullet and a cyanide
pill, for suicide in case of capture. Her young cadets called her "Smiles,"
because even under fire, she grins.
Outside, the signs of the recent ISIS occupation were everywhere. Theocratic
graffiti read, "The gates of paradise lie in the shadow of the sword." In an
alleyway so full of rubble it resembled a dry riverbed, a blindfolded ISIS
prisoner led by a Y.P.G. soldier shambled past, trying not to fall.
"Why are you in school and these kids are in the military?" I asked Shaker,
who was walking beside Derik and me.
"Anyone who wants to can come to the school," he said, "as long as they
prove they are serious."
"Would you want to study?" I asked Derik.
She explained that even soldiers studied Ocalan’s theories for two hours per
day. "This is my classroom," she said, sweeping her arms out across the
devastated village. "World history."
We passed a martyr flag hanging from a lamppost, celebrating a dead Y.P.G.
soldier. "He was my friend from high school," Shaker said. He told us how he
fought Assad’s regime in 2012 in his hometown, Tel Abyad, and he said that
all the students at the academy were trained in combat as well as Kurdish
history and Ocalan’s philosophy.
It occurred to me then that his generation, a whole lost segment of Syria’s
youth, has been forced to become either refugees or warriors. And for those
who choose the latter, their only options are different flavors of
militancy: the Islamic State, Assad’s regime, the Kurdish revolution.
Syrians have endured an endless cycle of extreme conditions over the past
four years, and so, perhaps, it should be no surprise that only the most
extreme ideologies, no matter how brutal or utopian, are thriving.
"I didn’t know he had been martyred," Shaker said, sighing. He snapped a
photo with his cellphone, to send to the boy’s mother.
Derik led us to a mangled storefront, its plate-glass windows smashed and
serrated. Inside, she had stashed a blanket that she sometimes used for
naps. Y.P.J. fighters aren’t allowed to marry, and I asked if she had ever
wanted a husband.
"Are you proposing?" she said, punching me on the arm and smiling.
"Are you afraid of dying?" I asked her a few moments later.
"Afraid?" she said. "Why should I be afraid? Being a martyr is the best
thing possible.... Fighting is ugly," she added. "But fighting for this is
beautiful. Fear is for your Western women in their kitchens."
We ventured into a bombed-out schoolhouse to drink water in the shade. It
was 110 degrees outside, but cool in the dusky building. The abandoned
classrooms were filled with spent ammunition casings, extinguished
campfires, the walls Swiss-cheesed with bullet holes. In one classroom, I
found an ISIS lesson still chalked on the board. Just a few months earlier,
this room was filled with pupils of the Islamic State, most likely Syrian
kids not so different from Shaker and Derik, but imbibing drastically
different lessons. "Allah the mighty revealed the Revelation to his people,"
the chalkboard read.
"Everyone has to choose a side now," Derik said. "ISIS has chosen the side
of slavery. We’ve chosen the side of freedom."
"We’re fighting for our ideas," Shaker said. "Ideas, like people, die if we
don’t fight for them."
Wes Enzinna is a deputy editor at Vice Media and teaches writing at the
Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His continuing reporting in Syria is funded in
part by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on November 29, 2015, on page
MM38 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Rojava Experiment.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/a-dream-of-utopia-in-hell.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
