Power to the people: a Syrian experiment in democracy
The Kurds in Rojava are testing a democratic model shaped by the political
philosophy of an American eco-anarchist
by Carne Ross
The Financial Times, October 23, 2015
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/50102294-77fd-11e5-a95a-27d368e1ddf7.html
Perhaps the last place you would expect to find a thriving experiment in
direct democracy is Syria. But something radical is happening, little
noticed, in the eastern reaches of that fractured country, in the isolated
region known to the Kurds as Rojava.
Just as remarkable, perhaps, is that the philosophy that inspired
self-government here was originated by a little-known American political
thinker and one-time "eco-activist" whose ideas found their way to Syria
through a Kurdish leader imprisoned upon an island in the Sea of Marmara. It’s
a story that bizarrely connects a war-torn Middle East with New York’s Lower
East Side.
I visited Rojava last month while filming a documentary about the failings
of the western model of democracy. The region covers a substantial "corner"
of north-east Syria and has a population of approximately 3m, yet it is not
easy to get to. The only passage is by small boat or a creaky pontoon bridge
across the Tigris from Iraq.
Turkey has closed its borders with Rojava, preventing all movement from the
north, including humanitarian supplies to Kurdish-controlled areas. To the
south, in Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government does not make access easy;
permits for journalists are not straightforward and, we were told, repeat
visits are discouraged.
The isolation is not only physical. Turkey regards the Syrian Kurd YPG
militia that is fighting the jihadi organisation Isis in Rojava as
synonymous with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), a longstanding enemy
inside Turkey. The YPG’s advance against Isis along Syria’s northern border
has been halted by the declaration by Turkey of a so-called "safe zone" to
the west of the Euphrates between the front line and the Kurdish-controlled
canton of Afrin in the north-west. For the Kurds, the motive seems
transparently clear: to prevent the formation of a contiguous area of
Kurdish control along Turkey’s southern border.
The KRG, which collaborates with Turkey against the PKK, has also been
reluctant to support the YPG, even though they share a common enemy in the
shape of Isis. Turkey has likewise pressured the US to eschew the Syrian
Kurds, although in the past few days Washington has come out in more open
support, including delivering arms supplies to the YPG. Meanwhile, the Kurds
maintain an uneasy truce with the Syrian regime, which keeps two small bases
in Rojava but otherwise has no military presence here--a tacit deal whereby
the Kurds control the territory in return for not fighting the regime.
Those journalists that do get here naturally gravitate to the front lines
like the devastated city of Kobani; similarly, images of the photogenic
young women who make up the female Kurdish militia, the YPJ, are more
eye-catching than the village hall meetings that comprise the reality of an
innovative grassroots democracy. But it is in those dusty assemblies across
Rojava that a democratic revolution is taking place.
The onset of the Syrian revolution in 2012 saw the collapse of the Assad
regime’s authority across much of Syria. When this vacuum opened in Rojava,
the Kurdish Democratic Union party (PYD) sought to fill it by building a new
form of democracy from the bottom up.
In this radical new dispensation, authority is vested primarily in the
communal level--the village. At one assembly I attended, villagers gathered
in a spartan town hall to debate their affairs. An old man began by
retelling all the decisions of the previous meeting. The audience grew
restive with boredom until a very young co-chair gently stopped him. Then,
others took turns to voice their concerns. These were the stuff of
day-to-day village life: anxiety about deliveries of medical supplies;
celebration following the announcement of the opening of a small new factory
for laundry powder. But the rocketing prices of bread and other basics were
lamented at length. The prosaic found its voice, too: someone complained
about children riding their bikes too fast around the village.
Not all decisions can be made at the most local level. Those that need
broader discussion go to district or cantonal assemblies (Rojava is
comprised of three cantons). Here, as in the villages, care is taken to give
non-Arab minorities and women prominence. Every assembly I encountered was
co-chaired by a woman. In one town, a very young Kurdish woman enthused to
me that never before had people like her--"the youth"--been included in
actual government. At meetings across the region I was struck by the sense
of a population trying to get used to methods of self-government that were
entirely unfamiliar after generations of dictatorship.
I was repeatedly told that special efforts were made to include the Arab,
Assyrian and Turkmen minorities. Some Arabs confirmed this to me directly,
with something resembling bewilderment. In Jazira canton, the two co-chairs
of the district’s "institutions of self-government", as this collective
system is awkwardly named, consisted of an aged Arab sheikh and another
young Kurdish woman. Accustomed to the traditional hierarchies of the Middle
East at such gatherings, I unthinkingly addressed the senior-looking man.
Without speaking, he turned to the young woman to speak for the group. She
then spoke Arabic for the benefit of non-Kurdish participants.
The Arab sheikh’s guards wore black uniforms and long beards, a resemblance
to Isis that suggested sympathies that may have only been conditionally
suspended. Indeed, I learnt later that the sheikh had been on the Isis side
until the extremists massacred members of his tribe. Inevitably, in a
country where ethnic groups and allegiances are thoroughly scrambled
together, the front lines are not always well defined.
A report released by Amnesty International recently claimed that the YPG has
forcibly removed some Arab families from towns captured from Isis. The YPG’s
response was that these examples are very few among the mass displacement of
tens of thousands, and inevitable in areas of extended combat with Isis,
which routinely conceals its fighters among the civilian population.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the democratic experiment in Rojava
is the justice system that has been established alongside self-government.
In Jazira, one chair of the justice committee (again a young woman)
explained that since courts and punishment represented the coercive
dominance of the state, such institutions had been replaced by a kind of
community justice, where "social peace", and not punishment, was the
objective.
Intrigued, though a little baffled by these slogans, I asked to see what
this meant in practice. The next day, I attended a mass lunch where one
family hosted another. A member of the first family had killed a man from
the second: lunch marked the families’ reconciliation, the culmination of a
collective process of compensation, apology and forgiveness, where the
perpetrator, briefly imprisoned, publicly acknowledged his crime. In turn,
this act of contrition, supported by his family by means including the
ceremonial meal, was accepted by the victim’s relations.
I asked the brother of the murdered man why he didn’t want the killer to
face further punishment. His eyes moist with grief, he replied, no: "social
peace" was more important than punishment. This was a better way, he argued:
what good would be served by a long punishment of the perpetrator? I was
staggered and moved. I thought of the barbarity of Rikers Island prison,
which I would fly over on my way home to the US. No one in that country
would claim that a system premised on punishment over reconciliation has
achieved "social peace".
Throughout the visit I met officials and ordinary citizens who enthused
about the virtues of participatory, non-hierarchical self-government. I was
amazed to find such a widespread consciousness of political ideas barely
discussed in the rest of the world. In one town, I found myself debating the
finer distinctions of anarchist philosophers--Kropotkin, Bakunin--with a
youth organiser who was fluent in the discourse of people power. Where on
earth had these ideas sprung from? The answer is New York City.
On the frontline in war-torn northern Syria
The reason for the strange emergence of communal self-government in Rojava
became clear during my visit. Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the banned PKK
party, is seen by Kurds in Syria, as well as those in Turkey, as the leader
of Kurdish liberation. This despite--or in defiance of--the fact that, for
the past 16 years, he has been held in a Turkish prison on an island in the
Sea of Marmara.
Ocalan, 67, was once a devotee of Marxism-Leninism but came to believe that,
like capitalism, communism perforce relied upon coercion (in capitalism’s
case, coercion is necessary inter alia to enforce the exploitative contract
between capital and labour). By chance, one book passed to him in jail was
the masterwork of a New York political thinker named Murray Bookchin. Like
Ocalan, Bookchin rejected communism when he became disillusioned with
Stalinism’s authoritarian bent. A passionate believer in equality and
freedom, he spent years teaching and arguing about anarchist philosophy in
the bars and radical political groups of the city’s Lower East Side.
Bookchin believed that true democracy could only prosper when
decision-making belonged to the local community and was not monopolised by
distant and unaccountable elites. In books such as The Ecology of Freedom
(1982), he looked back to democracy’s origins in ancient Greece, where all
citizens--although not, he noted, women or slaves--took turns to make
political decisions.
Outside of the radical and bohemian circles of 1970s New York, Bookchin’s
ideas have remained obscure, despite their pertinence today. Bookchin
married what we now call environmentalism with anarchism. He believed that
anarchism’s fundamental precept, the rejection of power of one over another,
should apply to mankind’s relationship with the natural world. Entrapped in
concrete cities, people were alienated from themselves and nature. The
disasters of pollution and pillaged resources would persist as long as the
false hierarchy of mankind over nature endured.
Bookchin ultimately eschewed the term "anarchist", which he saw tainted by
those who vaunted mere selfish individualism, "lifestyle anarchism". Some
kind of organised administration was, he believed, necessary to make
collective decisions, as long as it included everyone: government can only
be for the people when it is truly by the people. Bookchin called it
"communalism".
On his prison island, Ocalan saw that Bookchin’s concept of government
without the state was ideal for the Kurds--a people who had been denied
their own state. In pamphlets and books, he interpreted Bookchin’s
communalism for the Kurdish context and termed it "democratic
confederalism". If you wanted a society freed of coercion, you must abolish
the ultimate practitioner of coercion, including violence: the state itself.
In 2004, Ocalan wrote to Bookchin and invited him to Kurdistan, but Bookchin
was by then too unwell to undertake such a journey. He died two years later.
Ocalan’s new ideas were distributed across the PKK and, through them, to the
Syrian Kurdish PYD. His influence in propagating a system of democracy
without hierarchy presents one of the ironies of the situation in Rojava: a
system that emphatically rejects all authority was inspired by a singular
leader who has in the past used harsh methods to enforce organisational
discipline.
In meeting after meeting I attended in Rojava, one issue generated
particular emotion: emigration. My visit coincided with the tragic drowning
of Aylan Kurdi, the little boy whose picture is now the symbol of the
refugee crisis. That child came from Kobani, a city levelled by fighting. In
the assemblies I attended, by far the loudest sentiment was frustration that
people were leaving because of the desperate economic circumstances.
There were many complaints that the Turkish "embargo", as it is universally
termed in Rojava, has made life impossibly difficult. Reconstruction of
devastated towns recaptured from Isis, like Kobani, was all but impossible.
There was no choice but to leave. Local democracy can only fix so much when
the international constraints are intractable.
To these people, the west’s acquiescence in the treatment of Rojava by
Turkey and the KRG, both western allies, is bewildering. For them, these
radical ideas on self-government offer a democratic model for all of Syria.
One man argued to me that the centralised state, which he named the
"ziggurat", had been a catastrophe for Syria and Iraq in recent generations,
an argument hard to dispute. It was self-evident, he contended, that a
decentralised and inclusive structure of democracy had a better chance of
producing stability--woven from the bottom up rather than imposed from the
top down.
If and when there is ever a political deal to end Syria’s hideous war, this
option must surely be on the table. Recent examples of Middle Eastern
"state-building", after the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, are
not encouraging. Outside states continue to prefer to construct other states
that resemble themselves: the model of top-down government with its illusory
offer of control is deeply ingrained. Decentralisation, particularly in the
fullest sense advocated by Bookchin, threatens those used to authority--and
particularly those who wield it.
One irony of Rojava’s democratic experiment is it was only made possible by
the rupture of war and the effective collapse of state authority. What is
happening in the west is less dramatic, but is a crisis nonetheless. The
model of supposedly "representative" but hierarchical democracy as
manifested in western capitals is seen as less and less representative by
the people it is supposed to answer to. The fissure between the power of the
wealthy and connected and everyone else is painfully evident. The desire to
take power back is growing.
Rojava may seem exotic and its democratic experiment radical, but that word
means a return to the root, and that is exactly what is happening in this
remote corner of Syria: rule by the people; democracy returning to its
roots.
Carne Ross is a former British diplomat and author. He visited Syria for the
documentary film, ‘The Accidental Anarchist’, produced by Hopscotch Films
and Mentorn Media with support from the Sundance Institute for release in
2016
Photographs: Carne Ross; Janet Biehl
