Rojava Revolution: Women’s Liberation, Democracy and Ecology in North-East Syria
Bioneers | Published: June 4, 2024 JusticeWomen's Leadership Article
Over the past decade, the most far-reaching social revolution of the 21st century has taken place in Syria’s Kurdish-majority Northeast, commonly referred to as Rojava. Though still largely unknown, today roughly a third of Syrian territory is governed not by a nation-state but through a federation of participatory local councils known officially as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). Despite conditions of constant war and isolation, the people of Rojava are building and defending a society rooted in principles of direct democracy, women’s autonomy, cultural diversity, cooperative economics, and social ecology.
Below is an edited transcript of a panel discussion held at the 2024 Bioneers Conference featuring two writers and activists who recently returned from the region, Anna Rebrii and Arthur Pye of the Emergency Committee for Rojava. They discuss the revolution’s achievements, its challenges, and its enduring relevance for liberatory movements worldwide. Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies moderated the panel, which was co-sponsored with the Emergency Committee for Rojava.
J.P. HARPIGNIES: I’m going to start by explaining why we at Bioneers felt this was an important session to include in the conference program, even though it might seem a little unusual and more specifically geopolitical than what we normally cover.
I think that the first reason is that quite a few of us in the Bioneers community come out of movements rooted in ecology, and many of those emerged out of communitarian and eco-socialist and anarcho-socialist kinds of traditions. And right now, in the world, there is no more progressive governance in that type of lineage than what is going on in Northeast Syria, and it’s a really under-told story. It’s actually shocking the extent to which it’s not covered in our media. It’s a very complex situation, as you will see, so we’re not going to attempt to fill in every granular detail. We hope to inspire those of you who become interested to then follow up and learn more.
Anna Rebrii and Arthur Pye are both affiliated with the Emergency Committee for Rojava. Both of them have spent quite a bit of time in Northeast Syria, and they’re going to try to unpack for us a lot of the complexities about the type of governance there; the very progressive, feminist and ecological values informing the movements; and the enormous contradictions, threats, and difficulties in that region. And ideally, we’ll come away far better informed and with many questions.
We’ll open with Anna giving us some background about the history of and situation in Rojava.
ANNA REBRII: Rojava is an area in northeast Syria that’s populated by around five million people and is roughly the size of Belgium. This region gained de facto autonomy from the Syrian government at the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War back in 2012, and once they did that, they set out to transform radically their political, social, economic system based on the principles of direct democracy, women’s liberation, ethnic and religious pluralism, a democratized economy, and ecological sustainability. It’s very ambitious, and it’s hard to believe that it’s happening in Syria.
It’s no longer in the news that much, but this has been an intense war zone for more than a decade. It saw the rise and fall of ISIS just a few years back. So, this is a revolution that’s happening under the most adverse circumstances in just about the least likely place and the least likely time, and yet they’re doing it.
It’s a fascinating story. To understand the story of the Rojava revolution, we have to talk about the Kurds, who constitute a sizable majority in northern Syria. This has been their homeland. They’re an Indigenous people in this area of the Middle East that’s historically been known as Mesopotamia, and the Kurds are one of the world’s largest stateless peoples. Despite being Indigenous, they do not have control over their territory or any political, socioeconomic or cultural rights in the territory that they have lived in for millennia, and that’s because when the Western imperialist powers, after the first world war, decided to carve up the Middle East, what used to be in the just defeated Ottoman Empire, they started drawing artificial borders and creating new states that they wanted to exercise control over. They decided that creating an independent Kurdistan, a Kurdish state for millions of Kurds who used to live under the Ottoman Empire, was not in European interests, so the Kurds were arbitrarily divided between four new nation states—Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq. They basically became minorities in their own homeland ruled by other ethnic groups—Turks, Arabs, Persians, respectively.
And they found themselves in this situation of brutal internal colonialism, including genocidal massacres, dispossession, displacement, and forced assimilation, not unlike what happened to Indigenous communities all across the so-called Americas, and, inevitably, they resisted as any other oppressed community across the world would do. They resisted, and it is in that resistance that we see the seeds of the Rojava revolution.
The Kurds in Turkey in the 1970s started organizing a revolutionary anti-colonial national liberation movement, which was part of the global wave to kick out Western colonial powers that had begun after World War 2. Their goal was to establish an independent socialist Kurdistan. They formed a group called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Just like other colonized peoples, they saw the need to take up arms to fight against, in their case, Turkish colonialism, but as the years went by, they saw that while some other national liberation struggles had succeeded in abolishing colonialism in their countries, those struggles had failed to bring about real emancipation for their people. Right? In nearly all those cases, the colonial elites were basically replaced by local elites, and oppression, marginalization and exploitation had continued. Based on that, in the late ‘80s and the ‘90s, the movement started rethinking its philosophy. They started rethinking their program for liberation.
In 1999, the movement’s leader, Abdullah Ӧcalan, was captured by the Turkish state in an international operation in which the CIA was involved. He was captured and imprisoned by Turkey on an island where he is the only detainee with thousands of guards. In this prison, his lawyers were able to help him get hold of a wide range of books of philosophers and social and political thinkers, ranging from Foucault, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, a long list. This included books by Murray Bookchin, a U.S. social radical from New York who spent most of his life in Vermont, who developed a theory called “social ecology” during the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s. He had been one of the first people to recognize the urgency of the climate crisis and that ecological problems were social problems.
Ӧcalan was very impressed by Bookchin’s ideas and actually tried to get in touch with Bookchin and communicate with him through his lawyers. Bookchin’s ideas helped Ӧcalan rethink the ideology of the Kurdish liberation movement. He even passed the word down to movement members that they should start reading Bookchin’s books. After a while Ӧcalan came out with a new philosophy that represented a radical break from where the movement started out in the ’70s: it abandoned the demand for an independent state because Ӧcalan now argued that all nation states were inherently oppressive. Instead, he advocated the building of a decentralized system of direct democracy in which decision-making takes place through local popular assemblies, so people can come together and decide what they need for their collective affairs rather than go and vote once every few years for representatives who will then make decisions for them.
This new philosophy also centered women’s liberation and ethnic and religious pluralism, which is something one has to grapple with in the Middle Eastern context, where you most often have different communities sharing their homelands. This new program wanted to ensure that all the different ethno-religious groups sharing the same land had the same access to power and resources. Another element was a democratized economy based on cooperatives, in order to eliminate exploitation and inequality. The final important element was the restructuring of the entire society based on the principle of ecological sustainability, something very inspired by Bookchin.
And that’s the program that they’ve been working to implement for the last 12 years now, in Rojava, in northeast Syria. And, miraculously, it’s not just Kurds; it’s Kurds and their allies from other ethno-religious groups working to implement this program. It’s still a work in progress, as they have had to be doing it while also fighting an intense war to defeat ISIS. It’s no longer in the news, but the Kurds and their allies, from Arab, Armenian, and Syrian communities lost more than 10,000 fighters fighting against ISIS. In that context, it’s a miracle that it’s happening at all.
ARTHUR PYE: I suspect many of you are thinking: “Why haven’t I heard more about this.” During the peak of the war against ISIS around a decade ago, a lot of people were hearing that ISIS, the so-called Islamic state, was taking over large parts of Iraq and Syria. At that time there was actually a lot of mainstream media coverage of the conflict and of Rojava. But what was it? A lot of it was pictures of beautiful Kurdish women wearing floral scarves carrying their AK-47s riding into battle against ISIS, conveying a kind of romanticized, othered, simplified image of the people fighting ISIS, the Kurdish people, and the Kurdish women in particular.
But what’s not talked about is the society that they were defending. The truth is that these people were not taking up arms to defend the society that they had been living in previously. They were taking up arms first, of course, to defend themselves and their communities physically. They had no choice at all: they were facing genocide, but they were very much fighting for the chance to build something new, a society that offered alternatives to the state and capitalism and patriarchy. It’s definitely not perfect. It’s not a utopia. Anybody who’s been there can tell you that, but they’re really doing it. It’s a living, breathing social revolution.
Our mainstream media tries to condense everything into sound bites, so it is bound to present a very shallow analysis of things like this, so most Americans don’t perceive the populations of the Middle East as just human beings like us in societies with rich histories and social movements, just like anywhere else.
J.P.: I would just interject one thing, which is that there’s also a problem in the progressive community and its media here in the U.S regarding this situation. One would expect progressives to be an avid audience for news about what’s happening in Rojava, but there are some strange factors, one of which is that the U.S. Army and the military units of Rojava have been collaborating in the battles against ISIS, and for some people on the left, that’s anathema. For them, if the U.S. is involved in any way, it must be bad, so there’s been a weird lack of engagement and coverage from key parts of our own communities.
ARTHUR: I think you’re exactly right. There’s a lot of paradox when it comes to understanding this conflict and its coverage. There are obvious ideological reasons why, say, The Wall Street Journal isn’t tripping over itself to tell you all about this movement that’s trying to make corporations and the state obsolete. They might want you to see this picture of the woman with the scarf and the AK-47; that’s compelling, and it’ll get you to click on their articles, but people talking about how to create a direct democracy to overcome patriarchy and capitalism, that’s another thing. But for left-leaning media, it is more surprising and depressing that we aren’t talking about it much more.
I think it’s important to see this revolution not just as this kind of inspiring thing that’s happening on the other side of the world, and wouldn’t it be nice if things were completely different here and we could have a chance to do that. But whether we say it out loud or not, we kind of assume nothing like that could ever happen here. Well, we want to challenge y’all to see that as maybe a copout and that actually this movement is incredibly relevant to the struggles that we have here. If Rojava gives us hope, it gives us hope for life beyond the state, life beyond capitalism and patriarchy. And I don’t say that in the sense that they’ve figured it all out and those things don’t exist in any form in northeast Syria, and it’s a utopia. No. The truth is, it’s a real living, breathing social revolution with ongoing struggles. It’s reality. And that’s actually what gives us hope, because it means it’s real.
Another thing that makes it relevant is the relationship between crisis and revolution. We’ve been seeing on some of the panels here at this conference that people, for good reason, are very worried about the multiple, interrelated crises we’re facing. We’re staring down the barrel of, not just ecological crisis, but crises of democracy and socio-economic crises. These are very real, and they’re probably not going to get better until they get worse, even in the best-case scenarios.
But what Rojava shows us is that in a country such as Syria, where, something that started as a popular, peaceful protest against a basically authoritarian regime—the Assad government—spiraled out of control, militarized, and escalated into an extremely chaotic and intensely violent situation, something as progressive as Rojava could occur. This teaches us what can happen when a crisis comes in a place and a time when a social movement is prepared to take advantage of that crisis and to turn it into an opportunity.
The Kurdish freedom movement had been organizing for decades in the community, developing their ideas, developing forms of organization, creating local, grassroots organizations through which people can govern themselves collectively outside and against the existing systems in power. So, when those systems crumbled and chaos came, there was an outright power vacuum, and it could have turned out a very different way. But who was waiting in the wings to fill that power vacuum when the Syrian regime could no longer afford to keep its forces in control of the Kurdish region far away from the capital? If the Rojavan liberation movement hadn’t been ready, who would have filled that vacuum? ISIS. And they almost did.
Again, it doesn’t mean the Kurds there were perfect and had everything figured out, but they were organized. They had an understanding of the world that they wanted to live in; they had a set of values to guide them; and they had a practical program of direct democracy that they were able to implement as soon as ISIS and the forces of the Syrian regime retreated. They said, alright, let’s try it. They went into the neighborhoods, and they said, we’re going to set up a commune in every single neighborhood and that’s a directly democratic assembly that everybody in the neighborhood has a right and a responsibility to show up to and participate in, and this new democracy that we’re going to build is going to start there.
The system they’re engaged in building is called “democratic confederalism.” It has its roots in some left anti-state socialist traditions that want power and initiative to flow from the bottom up, so it starts at the neighborhood level and it moves out from there. The neighborhood assemblies are called communes, and every residential home belongs to its respective commune. It’s an extremely intimate form of democracy, and it’s based on, ideally, active participation at the base by everybody in the decisions that affect their lives.
But from there you can’t run a whole society at that micro level, so the local communes have to coordinate with the larger neighborhood, with the city, and with the equivalent of a county, and then with the whole region. The way they do that is to send a delegate; they’ll elect a delegate to go to the next level. And at every level there, women’s participation is institutionalized, more so than anywhere in the world today. Any deliberative body has to meet a 50% gender quorum to be functional. If half of the people in the room are not women, it’s not seen as a legitimate or democratic decision. If there’s a position of leadership that must be taken, a position of responsibility, even down at the neighborhood level, they always elect co-chairs. There have to be two, and one of them has to be a woman, all the way up, in every decision-making body.
They’re also trying to develop alternative justice systems, abolitionist systems rather than incarcerating people. They try as much as possible to solve problems and conflicts at the neighborhood level. The defense of the society is organized with similar values. Some people may have heard of the YPG and the YPJ. These are Kurdish acronyms for the People’s Protection Units, but also even in the military, there’s the YPJ, the Women’s Protection Units, which is an autonomous, all women’s army. They command themselves. A man cannot ever give commands to a woman, even when they’re coordinating together on a military operation.
There’s a larger umbrella called the Syrian Democratic Forces, which includes not just Kurdish self-defense forces, but many other culturally autonomous minority militias that are rooted in different ethnic communities. Every community has its own right to organize its own defense forces, and they federate together under the structure of the Syrian Democratic Forces. There are also a variety of more local autonomous community defense forces at the commune level. It’s an elaborate system that strives to be as democratic as possible at every level.
ANNA: In my overview earlier, I listed some of the intellectual influences on Ӧcalan, but I didn’t explain the influence that Kurdish women had on him and on the leadership of the movement, which ultimately resulted in Ӧcalan’s centering women’s liberation so greatly in the philosophy that he came up with while in prison.
What happened was that back to the 1970s when the Kurdistan Workers’ Party started organizing and taking up arms to fight the Turkish state, they needed as many people to join the fight as possible, and they realized after a while that they needed women fighters, but it’s a very gender-conservative society, and it was even much more so back in 1970s, so this caused some problems. Men in the guerilla army did not want to see women fight, and there was a lot of resistance. Some commanders would just send women who wanted to join the struggle back to their villages.
These women had joined the movement because they felt oppressed as Kurds, but the attitudes within their own movement highlighted how much they were also oppressed as women, not just by the Turkish state, but also by their fellow Kurdish men, so that’s where this emphasis on women’s liberation comes from, because women pushed from within the movement until they got their own women’s army. This had already happened before Rojava, within the ranks of the PKK in Turkey. That’s where the co-chair system—one woman/one man in every leadership position originated. That’s how they got the 50% quotas in any decision-making bodies, but it was a real fight. There was a lot of push-back, and there’s still a lot of push-back, but that’s basically the system that got transplanted from Turkey’s Kurdistan region to Rojava. It was the starting point to the empowerment of women in northeast Syria.
And this is not just about military and political participation. There’s a form of multi-disciplinary women’s studies at university level in Rojava that has been developing theoretical frameworks for looking at millennia of women’s exploitation, women’s oppression, women’s marginalization and what can be done to liberate women. And that subject, which they call genealogy, is a mandatory subject from elementary schools to the university. And if you’re going to join any institution that’s part of this government in northeast Syria, including the self-defense forces, you have to take a workshop in women’s liberation. You can’t get a weapon unless you learn about why women’s liberation matters and how you should contribute to it.
Another really important aspect of the movement that we started to discuss earlier is ethnic and religious pluralism. As we’re seeing the genocide unfolding in Palestine, it reminds us that oppression, dispossession and genocide have been the case for many communities in the Middle East, especially in the modern era because of Western imperial interference and of the imposition of artificial nation-states. That’s why Ӧcalan and the Kurdish movement gave up on the idea of creating an independent Kurdish state. They realized that an independent Kurdish state would necessarily entail marginalizing, displacing other communities that also call Kurdistan their home—Armenians, Arabs, Syrians. It’s such a mosaic. This region historically has been a mosaic.
This long history of instrumentalization of ethnicity and religion in this region goes back a long way, most recently to the Ottoman Empire, then the Western imperialist powers, then to the new nation state elites following independence. They all have used a divide-and-rule approach, pitting these communities against each other, sponsoring ethno-religious violence and genocides. And as a result, if you go to the region now, these communities that had lived together for so long, most of the time peacefully, now view each other with distrust and often with open hostility because of this history of being pitted against each other.
If you talk to Kurds, they do not trust Arabs because they have been oppressed by the Arab Nationalist Syrian government. Arabs do not trust Kurds because they have been taught by the Syrian government to view Kurds as foreign agents who are dangerous to the unity of the country. If you talk to the Armenians or Syriacs, they blame Kurds for the early 20th Century genocide, that was really directed and carried out by the Ottoman elites, but with the participation of some Kurds.
So, this new system in Rojava is an attempt to get away from the history of inter-ethnic violence of their region. It’s conceptually similar to the different safeguards and mechanisms they have in place to ensure women’s full participation. They try to achieve proportional representation for the main four ethnic and religious groups depending on their makeup in a specific area, so the co-chair system doesn’t just work for gender. Depending on which part of the territory you’re in, you will often encounter one co-chair who’s an Arab and the other a Kurd, or one Armenian and an Arab, etc.
And all these different communities have been encouraged, very intentionally, to create their own self-defense forces, not to rely on other communities to defend them. That was very critical in the war against ISIS, and now, they’re again under attack by Turkey. Each minority group, each mixed community, is encouraged to establish its own autonomous bodies to represent their collective interests and to prevent future marginalization/oppression by other groups in this region.
One of the other core values of the movement is ecology but that aspect of the revolution has been the one on which the least progress has been made because the need to struggle to survive has superseded it. A major contradiction is that they rely on their local oil resources, for fuel, electricity and as a much-needed source of income. That’s an obvious contradiction to the founding philosophy of this movement that wants to restructure the entire society and to rebuild its economy based on the principle of ecological sustainability, to be in harmony with non-human nature. But, for now, they just don’t have any other alternatives. There’s a lot of solar potential in that hot desert region, but they’re under an embargo from Turkey, so they can’t import any equipment or materials to build solar panels. Turkey has made it difficult to import even foods and medicines, the most basic necessities.
J.P.: Let’s explore a little further the contradictions and the paradoxes facing the revolution and the military situation that threatens the very existence of Rojava, so, Arthur, take a stab at it…
ARTHUR: It’s true. It’s a situation full of challenges, full of problems and paradox, both external and internal. This is a movement that is having to learn as they walk. They don’t have time to kind of figure it all out and then implement their system. They’re fighting a war on several fronts just to survive. They’re under embargo. There are a lot of constraints on what they can do, even if they had it all figured out, and because they’re a living, breathing social revolution that’s having to figure things out quickly, they’re not getting everything right, and they’re stumbling along the way, and they’re encountering the kinds of challenges that exist with any revolution once it achieves a certain degree of success or power and has the chance to build a new system of governance.
One big issue is that they quickly realized that it’s one thing for us to have, on paper and in theory, this very robust program of direct, local democratic governance and to have forums and structures that we can put in place everywhere in our territory, but that requires that people show up. Do people really want that system? The way they put it to me one time is that you can’t have a democratic forum without a democratic culture. And some people might prefer a state that tells them what to do, or aren’t motivated enough to participate in their own governance.
And what happens when a village or town says that we really like this idea of local governance, but in our village, we don’t think women should participate in politics. Allowing that would violate a core principle of gender equality but then the locals feel that you’re imposing your views on them, which isn’t really local autonomy, so the situation is often dynamic. It’s moving, it’s flowing, it’s full of paradox.
And yes, they have a lot of really great ideas and structures for the peaceful coexistence of all people, for a genuinely pluralistic democracy, but if people hate each other and want to kill each other, encouraging them to create their own autonomous, local militias could have very bad results. So, at every step of the way you see that the struggle to create a kind of profoundly democratic society is not just a structural one; it’s not just a question of power. It’s a question of values, a question of consciousness, of a way of life, and that doesn’t change overnight, even if the government goes away and you create a confederated assembly system.
And one of the problems that they’re having, even amongst the people who agree with these ideas, is just getting folks to show up and participate. A lot of people, even in the Kurdish community, who were loyal to the movement for many, many years, who love these ideas, don’t turn up for meetings. A lifelong committed militant Kurdish community organizer complained to me: “It’s easier to get these Kurds to go pick up a gun and die on the frontline than to show up to an assembly meeting.”
That really paints the picture of the problem. You’ve got to get people to show up and participate, but they can’t wait for people to show up to keep the trains running on time, so to speak. They need to feed and defend the society and make governance decisions, so when people aren’t showing up, if local committees are not functioning like they should be, whatever kind of co-leadership they elected to the next level has to carry out that work, but every step of the way, they’re begging people at the base to solve their own problems as much as possible.
JP: We don’t have a lot of time, and just so people understand how precarious the military situation is there and that it’s an open question as to whether Rojava’s autonomous region will be able to survive, let’s unpack that a little bit.
ANNA: Yeah. It’s a very, very precarious situation that Rojava is in. They defeated ISIS, miraculously, but Turkey’s a much greater enemy they have to face. It’s a NATO member with the second largest army in that alliance. It’s been waging war on Kurds with the complicity of the international community, the United States in particular, for decades. And, as I mentioned, the Kurds have been divided between four nation states, and the biggest Kurdish population by far is in Turkey, which has long brutally repressed the Kurds within its own territory, and now it has been doing the same to the Kurds in northeast Syria because they’re afraid that a successful revolution in Rojava, an autonomy for Kurds in Rojava, would serve as a very inspiring example for the Kurds in Turkey, and they do not want the Kurds to rise up.
Turkey has invaded with ground forces twice, in 2018 and 2019, and it took over chunks of northern Rojava with the help of some of its jihadi proxies, who people on the ground told me are worse than ISIS and are engaged in ethnic cleansing. They have displaced around 500,000 people in total in these two invasions, mostly Kurds, and they are being replaced by Arabs from other parts of Syria and even beyond Syria, a sort of intentional demographic engineering to prevent any sort of Kurdish project from succeeding in the border area between Turkey and Syria.
And the war has gone on. Turkey has been bombing regularly in the frontline areas and carrying out drone assassinations of political and military leaders of Rojava, killing the best people who are leading this revolution, targeting in particular women leaders who were the pioneers of this whole project. Most recently, last year in October, Turkey started carrying out the systematic, large-scale bombardment of civilian infrastructure, deliberately targeting oil facilities, water and power stations, factories, hospitals, schools.
Turkey really wants to invade again, and more massively this time, but it can’t at the moment because of the geopolitical situation in Syria, in which different powers, including the United States, Iran and Russia have a say in what can happen in the region. But, being unable to invade for the moment, they have basically pursued a strategy of trying to make the region uninhabitable through whatever means it can, and military attacks are just one aspect of that strategy.
Turkey has weaponized water, damming the downstream flow of the Euphrates River, leaving millions of people with barely any water or electricity. That’s one of the biggest factors that discourages people from participating. Daily life is really difficult, especially in the summer when it’s so hot, and you don’t have electricity or water. It’s very demoralizing, and that’s what Turkey wants.
But Turkey’s President Erdoğan really does want to invade and destroy Rojava, and that brings us to a contradiction that was brought up earlier, the presence of roughly 900 U.S. troops in the region that were allied with the Kurds and their allies in Rojava in the brutal fight against ISIS, and are still there ostensibly to prevent the resurgence of ISIS, which has lost its territory, but is still there as an underground force and still engages in quite frequent attacks against the autonomous administration in northeast Syria.
Those few troops serve as a buffer against a unilateral Turkish invasion. Turkey cannot invade unilaterally. There has to be permission from the United States, and sometimes we encounter this discomfort among certain circles in the American left that are so opposed to American military deployments that they won’t support the revolution in Rojava.
ARTHUR: Those U.S. troops are Special Forces and they only coordinate with the Syrian Democratic Forces on operations against ISIS, but it’s true, whether we want to admit it or not, that if they leave, the next thing that’s going to happen is a fascist state with NATO’s second largest army, Turkey, will invade and will occupy more territory, possibly crushing the whole of this region currently being governed under their feminist democratic form of governance. It could crush the revolution. This is an existential question for them.
I’m a long-time committed leftist. I got into politics, protesting the Iraq War. I want to see the United States get out of the Middle East, and frankly so does the movement in Rojava, eventually. But to advocate right now that the U.S. troops should pick up and leave, which by the way just means that they’d move from one side of the Iraqi border to the other, that’s not going to contribute to ending U.S. imperialism, and if NATO’s second largest army invades and crushes the most promising anti-state socialist revolution in the world, is that a victory for anti-imperialism? I don’t think so.
So, they’re in a tough place, but every revolution in history has had to make complicated, tricky decisions to secure its own survival. No survival, no revolution. It’s a tough question, but at the same time, I think it’s really important that people understand that it was an accident of history that the U.S. and the Kurdish-led forces found a common enemy in ISIS at a point when the Kurds were threatened with total annihilation and desperate and would have accepted weapons from anybody.
But, overall, the United States has overwhelmingly supported the enemies of Rojava and of most Kurds. First of all, the United States and NATO, through their actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, created the very conditions that led to the rise of ISIS in the first place. Also, they have, for decades, been arming and politically supporting a fascistic dictatorship, which is oscillating between different political forms but has always been a fiercely anti-Kurdish ethno-state in Turkey, turning it into NATO’s second largest military, so when Turkey drops bombs on Kurdish hospitals and schools and community centers and assassinates political leaders, they use F-16s made in the United States provided by the U.S. government, paid for by U.S. tax dollars, something we’re complicit in and need to reject. In fact, Congress recently approved the sale of an entire new fleet of brand-new U.S.-made F-16s to Turkey. What are they going to use them for? To bomb Rojava.
The United States has long registered the Kurdistan Workers’ Party as a terrorist organization. We need to be calling for them to be delisted. Many of you know Nelson Mandela was on the terrorist list for decades. We need to see this in a similar light. The U.S. even has a bounty on the heads of the men and women who are in leadership positions of the Kurdistan Communities Union, which is the biggest umbrella organization of the Kurdish freedom movement, so to look at this situation and only zoom in on these operations against ISIS and to condemn the Rojavan movement for being “allied with U.S. imperialism” is silly. The vast power of the U.S. has overwhelmingly supported the destruction of Kurdish liberation movements, and the joint operations against ISIS constitute a rare exception.
And if you sit down with leadership there and have a chai, you will quickly find out that they have zero illusions about the intentions of the United States military. They understand that they’re there for their own cynical imperialist interests, but that doesn’t change the situation either. If the U.S. Special Forces leave, Turkey will invade with massive force…
J.P.: It’s important to acknowledge the contradictions in life. In the French Resistance, there were royalists and communists. Sometimes you have to work with enemies and compromise to defend your lives against a more immediate threat.
ARTHUR: Mazloum Abdi, the general commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces said that if we are forced to choose between compromise and genocide, we will choose our people every time. I couldn’t say it better than that.
Q&A:
J.P.: We have about 14 minutes left, so let’s open it up to a few questions, and please, think haiku, not Tolstoy, i.e., ask an actual short question, if possible.
Audience Member (AM): Are there any mutual aid models or groups that you’re aware of in the United States that are modeling community-based action on this sort of commune model found in Rojava?
ARTHUR: Great question. I think there definitely are movements here that are inspired by the Kurdish freedom movement and other movements with that kind of that lineage. The most noteworthy example that comes to mind is Cooperation Jackson. Are people aware of Cooperation Jackson?
J.P.: They were here at Bioneers a few times.
ARTHUR: It’s a grassroots organization based in the Black community in Jackson, Mississippi, and they’re very much trying to implement this idea of directly democratic local assemblies in the community. They’re also trying to build cooperative economic structures.
We didn’t have time to get into that today, but the Rojava revolution is also an anti-capitalist revolution. A big part of their work is to develop what they call the social economy, which is basically a socialist economy. And they’re mainly doing it through cooperatives and unions. It’s mixed so far because of the complicated situation, but that’s another way that they’ve inspired communities here in the United States.
But frankly, when I think about movements in the U.S. and the influence of Rojava, I think what we see is a lot of patchwork inspiration and patchwork projects. There are small dispersed mutual aid networks or cooperatives, or neighborhood groups here and there; there’s a lot of promising organizing amongst tenants and rank-and-file workplace organizing, but the part that we’re not getting yet is the integration of these things into a bigger picture. What does it mean to build a coherent program and an organized mass movement with the ability to build something new, and even within the shell of the old, to build momentum towards that something new? I think, frankly, most of the answer is that we’re not there yet, and that’s on us.
AM: What’s the relationship between Rojava and the current Syrian ruling government?
ANNA: Not good for Rojava. They have a vision for a federated Syria and ultimately want to reform the entire country, and that’s, of course, not something that the Assad regime would accept. There have been attempts by the autonomous government in northeast Syria to negotiate some sort of settlement with the Assad regime, but the regime just won’t accept any of the basic demands that the movement puts forward, so that has been at a dead end for years now. And the Assad regime is supported by Russia, so they’re not in a position of weakness at this point, and so they can afford to push back and just keep the relationship as it is, letting Rojava have its autonomy as well as it can, maybe until the next Turkish invasion.
The movement in Rojava wants the international community to ensure that these five million people in what’s a third of the surface area of Syria are represented in any peace talks with the Syrian government. So far, they have been excluded. There is a peace negotiation format sponsored by the U.N that’s kind of dysfunctional at the moment, but what’s important for us is that the autonomous administration of northeast Syria has been excluded, even though they represent such a big number of Syrians, while groups close to Turkey that do not represent anyone, basically, have been included. So that’s something that the international community has to put pressure on to make sure that there is that sort of inclusion.
AM: Can you talk a bit more about their approach to restorative justice issues, and how they can handle it when sometimes there may be really egregious violations of people, between people within the community.
ANNA: That’s an interesting aspect of the revolution. The movement has set up a new justice system, a community-based justice system, so each commune, as Arthur explained, has a conflict resolution committee, which is actually not something new; they just basically institutionalized a pre-existing form of conflict resolution, a pre-state form still practiced in many of the communities in the Middle East. It’s usually the elders in the community or people with moral authority who are called upon to attend to an issue. In this model, the people who serve on these conflict resolution committees are usually elected by their communes. The basic idea is that it’s the people who live in a neighborhood who are better positioned to take care of any conflicts, any issues within their neighborhood, rather than state institutions or external actors like judges or lawyers, etc.
That said, there is still a court system that kind of exists parallel. If an issue is not resolved at a community level, it goes to a higher instance, and the approach they use is mediation. They try to get two sides to agree to a solution rather than impose a solution from above, with the ultimate goal of restoring these relationships within the community, but they have not completely got rid of the court system.
The long-term desire of the movement is to develop people’s consciousness and conflict mediation skills to such a degree that it will make the courts and prisons obsolete. They have very far to go till they get to that point, but that’s the idea.
AM: Are there any relationships between Rojava and other countries?
ARTHUR: There isn’t a single nation state in the world that recognizes the democratic autonomous administration of North and East Syria as a legitimate governing body, even the United States, who’s working with their military structure. I think there’s a relationship with the Parliament of Catalonia that has recognized the autonomous administration as kind of the legitimate governing body of their region. There have been a few relationships between movements, including Barcelona En Comú, a social justice/community rights-oriented political party in Barcelona. They’ve had a relationship with the Zapatistas and with a few other revolutionary movements. There’s a growing dialogue with the democratic resistance in Myanmar right now. But, of course, the naked truth is that for their survival, it is incredibly important that they receive more formal political recognition.
That’s one of the things that we at ECR, the Emergency Committee for Rojava, are demanding, is that the United States give political recognition to the autonomous administration. And that’s something we encourage everybody to support.
J.P.: The relationship with Catalonia is really interesting. I think Arthur wrote an article that mentioned this recently. He mentioned Rojava as a kind of modern iteration of the Catalonian anarcho-socialist movement that George Orwell famously wrote Homage to Catalonia about. The periods when these sorts of movements actually governed a region are rare in human history. There was the Makhnovist movement in Ukraine, which certainly had its problems, and, along with Rojava, those are about the only three instances of actual large-scale anarcho-socialist governance of any kind that I can recall.
ARTHUR: Zapatistas.
J.P.: And yes, of course, the Zapatistas. We have two minutes left, so if you want to offer some closing thoughts, go for it.
ARTHUR: We want you. We want you in our organization; we want you in this movement.
ANNA: Yeah. We work on different fronts. One big area is to actually build bridges between progressives here in the United States and people in Rojava. We are facilitating that, so if you are part of any organization, be it a union, cooperative, some environmental, ecological project, they want to talk to people outside; they want to learn. I mean, we didn’t really go into this, but a lot of the constraints and failures that they’ve experienced are because they don’t have experience in many of the things that they’re trying to practice, such as cooperatives, for example. We would love to stay in touch and explore what kind of conversations, what kind of exchanges, what kind of mutual solidarity projects we can develop.
ARTHUR: You can go to DefendRojava.org to find out more. We ask you to please sign up to our email list where we’ll give you updates not only what’s happening in the region, but opportunities to attend events, whether it’s in person or online; and how you can participate in our kind of scrappy but hopefully meaningful advocacy efforts to increase pressure on the U.S. state to stop arming Turkey, to offer political recognition, to delist the PKK, and things like that.
Get in touch and tell us about the movement work you’re doing and how we might build bridges together and help you build bridges with the movement itself.
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