by Meredith Tax
Abdullah Demirbas, a former philosophy professor and teachers’ union activist who was elected mayor of Sur, a municipal district of Diyarbakir, in 2007, was one of the most prominent local Kurdish politicians. He was also an exemplar of the movement’s changed organizing approach. In his campaign for mayor, he promised to provide municipal services in the banned Kurdish language, which was often the only language of his constituents. Once in office, he also provided information to constituents in Assyrian and English. Ankara removed him from office within a year. When he was re-elected in 2009 by a much larger margin than in 2007, the government prosecuted him for “language crimes” and for being connected to the Association of Communities in Kurdistan. He was sentenced to two years in prison.7
Demirbas suffered from deep vein thrombosis and, after a campaign to free him, was released from prison on medical grounds in 2010, although he was not allowed to leave the country for treatment, as his doctors had recommended. Despite his legal problems, he was re-elected again in 2012, at which time seventy-four different prosecutions against him were underway. His lawyer told him that if he were convicted in every case, he could be sentenced to prison for 483 years.8
As mayor, one of his main projects—and one for which he was being prosecuted—was the repair of Surp Giragos, a nineteenth-century Armenian cathedral that fell into ruins when the Armenians fled Turkey after the genocide. Referring to the role played by some Kurds at that time, he said, “Our grandparents, incited by others, committed wrongs, but we, their grandchildren, will not repeat them.”9
Another crime of which he was accused was misusing municipal funds by printing Diyarbakir tourist brochures in Armenian, Assyrian, Arabic, Russian, and Turkish. He asked a reporter, “Why is it . . . that tourists who visit Topkapi Palace in Istanbul can get an audio listening guide in English, French, Spanish, German, or Italian, but when I publish a small tourist brochure in Armenian, as a welcoming gesture to Armenian tourists who want to visit their ancestral home, I am accused of committing a crime?”10
Democratic Autonomy at the Grassroots
In 2011, a group of German activists called TATORT Kurdistan, which means Crime Scene Kurdistan, went to Turkey to investigate the growing movement for local self-rule. They published their interviews in a book called Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan: The Council Movement, Gender Liberation, and Ecology—in Practice. According to their report, the newly-developed basic unit of democratic autonomy in southeastern Turkey was the neighborhood council. These councils were elected by smaller units called communes, which might consist of only a few blocks.
This structure was the product of a long process of home visits by organizers. One of the points of such laborious one-on-one organizing was to involve women, who were sometimes reluctant to leave the house to attend meetings. There was a minimum quota of 40 percent women on every council and committee and each was chaired jointly by a woman and man. The other purpose of such intensive outreach was to ensure that all the different ethnic and religious groups in a neighborhood were included in the citywide body to which the neighborhood councils would send representatives.
Democratic autonomy seeks to guarantee the protection and development of all the cultures present in Turkey, wrote the TATORT authors. “Its activists seek to organize all these diverse social groups and identities democratically, by creating councils in the urban neighborhoods and by civil society organizing.”11
By 2011, the Kurdish movement for democratic autonomy was strong enough to call a conference that brought a thousand people together in Diyarbakir. It elected a coordinating group and set up committees to focus on municipal government, religion, language, women, and youth.
In cities where the elected officials were movement people, the government and the local democratic autonomy councils worked together to solve community problems. Much of the energy of these local councils went into restorative justice and conflict mediation. Since people had little faith in Turkish courts and were not permitted to speak Kurdish in state institutions, they preferred to bring their problems to the councils. A local activist described the process: “We work with conversation, dialogue, negotiation, and when necessary, criticism and self-criticism. When someone does something wrong, the party who perpetrated the harm has to make it up to the people he injured. We accomplish a lot that way. There’s no death penalty, we don’t put perpetrators in prison or penalize them financially. Instead, we use social isolation. Relationships with people freeze up, until the person acknowledges the mistake and corrects it. I was mayor for a year. . . . I’ve seen many cases of blood feuds and honor killings, for which the state has no solution. We stepped in and, because we better understood people’s sensitivities, we were able to solve the problem.”12
Such intensive local work was key to organizing women, particularly peasant women who had relocated from the countryside and were not accustomed to being seen in public, much less working outside the home or participating in politics. The problems such women faced were described by an organizer for the local women’s council who set up sewing cooperatives modeled on those of the Zapatistas in Mexico. The women she was trying to recruit were mostly married, in their thirties and older, without education or previous work experience outside the home, and unable to speak Turkish so they couldn’t get regular jobs. They were totally lacking in self-confidence and told the women’s council they didn’t know how to do anything. Their husbands were also a problem. Said the organizer: “The attitude of the husbands is not really positive. But we have a clear advantage in that the movement exists—even in relation to the women’s question. The husbands who are tied to the movement try somehow to overcome their negative view of women. They have to work on themselves. That helps us—especially in the councils, where you’ll notice men giving up their places to women. . . .
“At first many women came here secretly, without their husbands knowing, or they had to argue in order to be allowed to come here. But over time something’s changed in the society. If a woman comes home with money and says, ‘Look, I’m also contributing to the budget. I’m also bringing money in,’ then maybe it doesn’t change a man’s complex opinion, but it weakens some of his reservations a little. Husbands become more open to their wives going outside and working. And another fact: the stronger a woman becomes and the more self-confident she gets, then the less likely she is to allow her husband or other men to oppress her.”13
The movement set up thirteen educational institutions, called academies: nine were political, two were women’s, and two were religious, one for Alevis and the other for Sunnis. Part of the purpose of the religious academies was to offer a progressive Islamic education to counter the aggressive propaganda of Islamist groups, some of which had enough money to give students stipends for attending classes. All the academies had three levels of program: a three-month course aimed at cadre, a one-month course for community activists, and popular education programs offered on demand. The head of the Amed [Diyarbakir] General Political Academy was explicit about what they didn’t teach: “Stay away from nationalism. Stay away from scientific knowledge that has been warped by discrimination, the science that produces weapons, the cancerous science that’s responsible for the destruction of nature. Stay away from religion that’s been warped by domination and has become an instrument of the powerful. Stay away from sexism. We come into the world as women or men, and then certain roles are attributed to us. But if you want to be in this movement, if you want to build this society with us, you have to cut yourself loose from these traditional gender roles and relations.”14
Although the PKK and its organizational partners were secular, in that they believed in the separation of religion and politics, they were not antireligious. Beginning in 2011, according to Aliza Marcus, they even organized Friday prayer services. “The PKK promotes environmentalism, women’s rights (women make up around half of BDP [now HDP] candidates, more than in any other political party in Turkey), and a certain tolerance, at leas
t in the media, of gays and lesbians,” she wrote.
“The PKK has also taken on Prime Minister Erdogan in an area where he claims to be supreme: Islamic piety. PKK supporters and BDP politicians have encouraged attendance at the alternative Friday prayer services run by Kurdish imams and Kurdish Islamic scholars in Diyarbakir and other cities in the region. The prayer services . . . [are] led by Kurdish religious figures who were frustrated by the state’s longstanding requirement that salaried imams recite the prayers in Turkish and give their weekly speech in Turkish (reading from a prepared text sent by Ankara). Barred from the state mosques, these Kurdish imams and scholars started holding services in empty lots, construction sites, and in courtyards near mosques. In Diyarbakir, these weekly Friday prayers can attract thousands of people.”15
Organizing on this scale could not have happened in the nineties, when most of the Kurdish population was still rural. But as social scientist Hamit Bozarslan wrote in 2014, “During the last decades, Kurdish society in Iraq and Turkey has become a predominantly urban society, where thousands of villages were systematically destroyed during the 1980s and 1990s, and in Iran and Syria, where developments gave way to the emergence of a middle class, distinct from the former urban notabilities or craftsmen. The emergence of this class metamorphosed the Kurdish urban landscape and gave birth to a new habitus, new ways of consuming, living, socialising, thinking, and struggling.
“An intellectual ‘class’, distinct from the politicised intelligentsia of the 1950s and 1960s, also appeared and became the agent of new forms of socialisation, political mobilisations, as well as cultural production. In the 1970s and 1980s, but also in the 1990s, being a ‘Kurdish militant’ primarily meant being a member or sympathiser of a political party; in contrast, the intellectuals of the 2010s develop non-partisan forms of being, behaving, and struggling. Both the middle classes and this intellectual stratum are widely integrated across Kurdistan and entertain close relations with the outside world.”16
In the nineties, the only way to work with the PKK was to become a guerrilla and go to the mountains. The new, more flexible approach allowed for much broader recruitment. While joining the PKK itself still meant becoming a soldier, now people could help the movement in other ways. Instead of training as guerrillas, they could work in mass organizations, neighborhood committees, or a political party. These new activists were joined by more seasoned ones who were newly released from jail, where they had served time for PKK activities. They were “trusted, respected, and experienced,” according to Aliza Marcus, and had a strong influence over decision making. “By offering people a route to get involved and show support for the PKK without having to risk their lives in armed struggle, the rebel group has gained new adherents and respect. It’s not that the group has become democratic, but that it acknowledges the importance of (and in fact, need for) nonviolent activism, be it through the political party BDP or in a center teaching illiterate women to read.”17
Ultimately the three earlier strands of Kurdish activism—the PKK, the electoral parties, and the popular civil resistance and movement for democratic autonomy—melted together in popular consciousness and the Kurdish population as a whole became much more radical. In 2012, Zubeyde Zumrut, co-chair of the BDP in Diyarbakir, told Marcus, “‘The PKK has become part of the people. You can’t separate them anymore.”18
The new party line led to a profound change in organizational structure. As Marcus wrote, it was not so much that the inner core of the PKK had changed as that it was now surrounded by a proliferation of other organizations. The number and variety of groups in the PKK network was staggering.
At the top of the pyramid was Ocalan, referred to as “the Leadership,” and the Executive Committee of the KCK, the Association of Communities in Kurdistan, the administrative group for the entire structure. The KCK was governed by a periodic general assembly or legislature, with an elected Executive Committee of thirty-one members. In 2013 the whole PKK network, with the exception of the armies, adopted the co-chair system, with one male and one female leader for every structure.19
The armed groups, the People’s Defense Forces (HPG) and Free Women’s Forces (YJA-Star) were also part of the structure, as were the series of electoral parties, each of which was made illegal by the government and replaced by a successor. In 2016, the party was a combination of the BDK, which was based in southeastern Turkey and largely Kurdish, and the HDP, an urban party of Leftists, progressives, feminists, and LGBTI activists. The two had merged in 2014 under the name of the HDP and won more than 13 percent of the national vote the following year.
While the HDP was not organizationally affiliated with the PKK, there were many overlapping members. Moreover, after thirty years of struggle, the PKK’s prestige and ideological leadership were so great that opposing them—as the Turkish government and even the EU pressured the HDP to do—would have been politically impossible. Like all the other organizations within the orbit of the PKK, the HDP had an autonomous organization for women.20
Government repression made it impossible to fully implement democratic autonomy in Turkey, because Kurdish elected representatives were constantly being jailed, along with any journalists who wrote about the movement. The first place where these new ideas could be fully tested in practice was, ironically, in the middle of a war zone—Syria.
The PYD and the Rojava Revolution
The history of the Kurds in Syria is not different in essence from that of Iraq and Turkey. They are a smaller percentage of the population but they suffered from similar policies of cultural genocide and land theft, particularly after 1963, when the Baath party took power in Syria and developed its plan to break the Kurds up geographically by creating an “Arab Belt” and settling Arab villages between Kurdish ones. Thus even the most underdeveloped agricultural regions of Rojava were, by 2016, a mixture of Arab and Kurdish peasants, plus refugees.
According to Dr. Amaad Yousef, the Minister of Economy in Afrin (also called Efrin) Canton, smallest of the three Rojava cantons, the Syrian government deliberately kept Rojava underdeveloped. “60% of Syria’s poor were Kurds,” he told a Kurdish newspaper. “Because they did not allow factories to be open, or development or any form of enrichment in the region of Rojava. For example in Efrîn there were close to 200 olive processing plants. Outside of this there was not even the smallest workshop. . . . The regime passed a law in 2008 in order to force Kurds to migrate. With this law it was made very difficult for Kurds to own property. At the same time it made it much easier for Arabs to buy this property.
“There were elementary and middle schools in every village in Efrîn. These schools were built for assimilation. You would not find a single high school or professional school and they were forbidden. Kurdish language education was forbidden. . . . The one thing that developed was loansharking. In Efrîn’s Reco district you would know which house belonged to whom. You could look at a house and say that’s the house of a usurer. . . . They rendered the Kurds homeless and propertyless. . . . They were taking their property and forcing them to migrate.”21
Inevitably under such conditions, Kurdish nationalism developed in Syria, beginning with a sister party of the Iraqi KDP called the KDP-S; this kept splitting, and by the nineties there were numerous small nationalist parties, each grouped tribal fashion around one leader and seeking a share of whatever resources were available.22 When Salih Muslim, a civil engineer, decided to become politically active, at first he joined the KDP-S, but was frustrated by their lack of impact and in 2003 became one of the founders of the PYD, the Democratic Union Party, an offshoot of the PKK. In response to a police attack on Kurds at a soccer game in 2004, the PYD helped organize the Qamishli uprising against Assad.23 After that, Muslim spent a few months in jail every year—“the Middle East type of prison with the underground rooms for torture,” he told the BBC.24 When criticized for going their own way since 2011, Syrian Kurds often point to the lack of solidarity they received from Syrian left-wing groups
in 2004.
In 2010, Muslim and his wife fled to Iraq to avoid another arrest, and that’s where he was in April 2011 when the Syrian uprising began. He immediately decided to return to Syria. Five hundred to a thousand guerrillas came back with him, and established the party’s military wing, the People’s Defense Units and Women’s Defense Units, the YPG-YPJ that fought in Kobane.25
The Syrian Kurdish parties kept their distance from the rest of the Syrian opposition, even though the opposition was at first led by progressives. As international relations specialist Kamran Matin said: “We should remember that for many months after the outbreak of anti-Assad protests, secular-progressive forces such as the Local Coordination Committees of Syria were in the forefront of the popular uprising. They lost their political clout only when Assad’s forces’ incessant violence against peaceful protests led to the militarisation of the opposition, which was in turn quickly sectarianized as a result of the indirect intervention of regional reactionary pro-Western, anti-Assad states of Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, all of which sought Assad’s downfall at any price.”26
While many of the Local Coordination Committees were indeed progressive, the Muslim Brotherhood was a presence in the Syrian National Council from the beginning and soon came to dominate it, pushing for an armed uprising.27 The Syrian Kurds distrusted the Brotherhood and were wary of an uprising over which they would have no control. When the Syrian opposition refused to discuss Kurdish autonomy until after Assad was overthrown, all the Kurdish parties withdrew from the coalition. After that break, Kurds affiliated with the PYD concentrated on building their own base in Rojava. They called this strategy the “Third Path” or “Third Way,” since they were not aligned with either the rebellion, increasingly dominated by Islamists, or the Assad government.28