Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria
Amid the Syrian warzone a democratic experiment is being stamped into the
ground by Isis. That the wider world is unaware is a scandal
by David Graeber
Comment is free, The Guardian, October 8, 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/why-world-ignoring-revolutionary-kurds-syria-isis
In 1937, my father volunteered to fight in the International Brigades in
defence of the Spanish Republic. A would-be fascist coup had been
temporarily halted by a worker’s uprising, spearheaded by anarchists and
socialists, and in much of Spain a genuine social revolution ensued, leading
to whole cities under directly democratic management, industries under
worker control, and the radical empowerment of women.
Spanish revolutionaries hoped to create a vision of a free society that the
entire world might follow. Instead, world powers declared a policy of
“non-intervention” and maintained a rigorous blockade on the republic, even
after Hitler and Mussolini, ostensible signatories, began pouring in troops
and weapons to reinforce the fascist side. The result was years of civil war
that ended with the suppression of the revolution and some of a bloody
century’s bloodiest massacres.
I never thought I would, in my own lifetime, see the same thing happen
again. Obviously, no historical event ever really happens twice. There are a
thousand differences between what happened in Spain in 1936 and what is
happening in Rojava, the three largely Kurdish provinces of northern Syria,
today. But some of the similarities are so striking, and so distressing,
that I feel it’s incumbent on me, as someone who grew up in a family whose
politics were in many ways defined by the Spanish revolution, to say: we
cannot let it end the same way again.
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. Having driven out agents of the Assad regime in 2011, and
despite the hostility of almost all of its neighbours, Rojava has not only
maintained its independence, but is a remarkable democratic experiment.
Popular assemblies have been created as the ultimate decision-making bodies,
councils selected with careful ethnic balance (in each municipality, for
instance, the top three officers have to include one Kurd, one Arab and one
Assyrian or Armenian Christian, and at least one of the three has to be a
woman), there are women’s and youth councils, and, in a remarkable echo of
the armed Mujeres Libres (Free Women) of Spain, a feminist army, the “YJA
Star” militia (the “Union of Free Women”, the star here referring to the
ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar), that has carried out a large
proportion of the combat operations against the forces of Islamic State.
How can something like this happen and still be almost entirely ignored by
the international community, even, largely, by the International left?
Mainly, it seems, because the Rojavan revolutionary party, the PYD, works in
alliance with Turkey’s Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), a Marxist guerilla
movement that has since the 1970s been engaged in a long war against the
Turkish state. Nato, the US and EU officially classify them as a “terrorist”
organisation. Meanwhile, leftists largely write them off as Stalinists.
But, in fact, the PKK itself is no longer anything remotely like the old,
top-down Leninist party it once was. Its own internal evolution, and the
intellectual conversion of its own founder, Abdullah Ocalan, held in a
Turkish island prison since 1999, have led it to entirely change its aims
and tactics.
The PKK has declared that it no longer even seeks to create a Kurdish state.
Instead, inspired in part by the vision of social ecologist and anarchist
Murray Bookchin, it has adopted the vision of “libertarian municipalism”,
calling for Kurds to create free, self-governing communities, based on
principles of direct democracy, that would then come together across
national borders – that it is hoped would over time become increasingly
meaningless. In this way, they proposed, the Kurdish struggle could become a
model for a wordwide movement towards genuine democracy, co-operative
economy, and the gradual dissolution of the bureaucratic nation-state.
Since 2005 the PKK, inspired by the strategy of the Zapatista rebels in
Chiapas, declared a unilateral ceasefire with the Turkish state and began
concentrating their efforts in developing democratic structures in the
territories they already controlled. Some have questioned how serious all
this really is. Clearly, authoritarian elements remain. But what has
happened in Rojava, where the Syrian revolution gave Kurdish radicals the
chance to carry out such experiments in a large, contiguous territory,
suggests this is anything but window dressing. Councils, assemblies and
popular militias have been formed, regime property has been turned over to
worker-managed co-operatives – and all despite continual attacks by the
extreme rightwing forces of Isis. The results meet any definition of a
social revolution. In the Middle East, at least, these efforts have been
noticed: particularly after PKK and Rojava forces intervened to successfully
fight their way through Isis territory in Iraq to rescue thousands of Yezidi
refugees trapped on Mount Sinjar after the local peshmerga fled the field.
These actions were widely celebrated in the region, but remarkably received
almost no notice in the European or North American press.
Now, Isis has returned, with scores of US-made tanks and heavy artillery
taken from Iraqi forces, to take revenge against many of those same
revolutionary militias in Kobane, declaring their intention to massacre and
enslave – yes, literally enslave – the entire civilian population.
Meanwhile, the Turkish army stands at the border preventing reinforcements
or ammunition from reaching the defenders, and US planes buzz overhead
making occasional, symbolic, pinprick strikes – apparently, just to be able
to say that it did not do nothing as a group it claims to be at war with
crushes defenders of one of the world’s great democratic experiments.
If there is a parallel today to Franco’s superficially devout, murderous
Falangists, who would it be but Isis? If there is a parallel to the Mujeres
Libres of Spain, who could it be but the courageous women defending the
barricades in Kobane? Is the world – and this time most scandalously of all,
the international left – really going to be complicit in letting history
repeat itself?
