[Peace-discuss] FW: American Leftists Need to Pay More Attention to Rojava

[David Johnson]

American Leftists Need to Pay More Attention to Rojava

By Michelle Goldberg <http://www.slate.com/authors.michelle_goldberg.html>  

Description: 496845568-children-flash-the-victory-sign-after-singing-the_1 

There is an astonishing story in Sunday
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/a-dream-of-utopia-in-hell.html>
's New York Times about Rojava, a Kurdish region in Northern Syria that's
ruled by militant feminist anarchists. Rojava's constitution enshrines
gender equality and religious freedom. An official tells journalist Wes
Enzina that every position at every level of government includes a female
equivalent of equal power. Recruits to Rojava's 6,000-strong police force
receive their weapons only after two weeks of feminist instruction. Reading
Enzina's piece, it's hard to understand how this radical experiment in
democracy in one of the bloodiest corners of the world isn't better known
internationally, particularly on the left.

At the start of piece, Enzina himself isn't quite sure Rojava is real. It
sounds too fantastical:

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.

The reports, Enzina eventually finds, are largely true. In Rojava's three
Kurdish cantons, together comprising an area about the size of Connecticut,
society is being organized according to the principles of an American
anarchist-ecologist philosopher named Murray Bookchin. (Bookchin's most
famous work is
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/08/11/marxist_guerrillas_on_the
_u_s_terrorist_list_are_america_s_best_hope_against.html> The Ecology of
Freedom.) This unlikely turn of events springs from the ideological
conversion of Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party,
or P.K.K., which was once a Marxist Leninist terrorist group in Turkey. With
America's help, Turkey captured Ocalan in 1999, and he was imprisoned
alone-surrounded by over 1,000 soldiers-on an island near Istanbul. There he
discovered Bookchin, who inspired a manifesto he issued in 2005. Enzina
writes:

 

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.

In Rojava, the Kurds, under the government of a P.K.K. affiliate, are
following Ocalan's directive. More amazing still, Rojava's militias, the
Y.P.G., or People's Protection Units, and the all-female Y.P.J., or Female
Protection Units, are successfully taking on ISIS
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/08/11/marxist_guerrillas_on_the
_u_s_terrorist_list_are_america_s_best_hope_against.html> . The New York
Review of Books has just published a story
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/dec/03/syrian-kurds-are-winni
ng/>  by Jonathan Steele about their military successes, titled "The Syrian
Kurds Are Winning!" In January, with the aid of U.S. airpower, the Y.P.G.
drove ISIS out of Kobani, a town on the Turkish-Syrian border. In July,
again with American help, the Kurds rousted ISIS from another border town,
Tal Abyad. "This meant ISIS had lost two of the three crossing points from
Turkey through which it could bring foreign volunteers, finance, and
weaponry to strengthen the jihad," Steele writes.

Given this, how has Rojava remained relatively obscure? Some have certainly
tried to raise awareness: Over a year ago David Graeber, a major figure in
Occupy Wall Street, published a piece in the
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/why-world-ignoring-rev
olutionary-kurds-syria-isis> Guardian titled "Why is the world ignoring the
revolutionary Kurds in Iraq?" He compared the hellish conflict in Syria to
the Spanish Civil War, where leftists from around the world went to fight
fascism. "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?"

If calls like this aren't resonating, I suspect it's because similar ones
were made in the run-up to the Iraq war. Over the years, it has become hard
to imagine why more than a few prominent progressives either supported that
war or opposed it only ambivalently. But at the time, several Iraqi
leftists-most notably Kanan Makiya
<https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/03/16/kanan-makiya-regret-about-pres
sing-war-iraq/k6ZsBxp4sXptfXrcRAocdO/story.html> -pleaded with their
ideological allies in America not to oppose the overthrow of the fascist
Saddam Hussein, however compromised George W. Bush's motives were. I
remember appeals to the memory of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American
leftists who fought Franco in Spain. The memory of Bosnia was still fresh,
and at least some progressives believed that Western military force could be
a force for good.

Very few on the left believe that anymore. The Iraq war not only destroyed
Iraq, destabilized the Middle East, and lead to the rise of ISIS; it also
destroyed Western faith that much can be done to help the people who are now
struggling to stop ISIS's spread. Maybe part of the reason Americans haven't
heard more about Rojava is because we don't want to. We're ashamed at having
unleashed the horror that besieges them, and ashamed that we have no idea
how to help them stop it without making things even worse. Writing in
Dissent about international apathy towards Rojava, Meredith Tax asks
<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-revolution-in-rojava> ,
"Are we in the United States too cynical or depressed to believe anything
new can happen? Are we able to recognize revolutionary ideas when they come
from Greece, Spain, or Latin America but not from the Middle East?"

Yet aiding the revolutionaries of Rojava needn't be framed purely as a
question of American intervention. Tax writes:

I recently spoke to someone from the Kurdish women's movement in Rojava and
asked what they need most. She said they need a massive international
solidarity campaign, beginning with political education about the evolution
of the PKK and its politics, including its emphasis on democratic
governance, anti-sectarianism, secularism, ecology, and women's liberation.
In practical terms, they need all possible international pressure to be put
on Turkey and the KRG to end the embargo and let supplies through. They need
the terrorist designation to be lifted so they can travel and raise money
and do public speaking.

That doesn't seem like too much to ask for the feminists dying for America's
foreign policy sins.

 

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