by Meredith Tax
The democratic Syrian opposition, vulnerable, overwhelmed, and furious about it, considered the Kurdish withdrawal a betrayal. Members of the opposition frequently accused the PYD of collaborating with Assad. In an interview early in 2016, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a widely respected Syrian Marxist intellectual and dissident who spent sixteen years in Assad’s prisons and then went into exile, voiced a vision of what Syria needed that was not that different from Abdullah Ocalan’s:
“The new Syria could be built on a number of essential principles: decentralisation; thinking of different ethnic, religious, and confessional communities as equal constituent communities; full equality among individual citizens (Arabs, Kurds, and others; Muslims, Christians, and others; Sunnis, Alawites, and others; religious, secular, and others).” But when he spoke about the Syrian Kurds and the PYD, his bitterness was palpable. His feelings were likely shared by many in the Syrian Left: “There is a real war in the Kurdish regions in Turkey, with poor people being humiliated, displaced, and killed. To Syria, the Turkish government exported its bad experience in dealing with the Kurds. And to make things worse, the Syrian PYD imported from Turkey its experience there, [and] people to apply this experience . . . What we are witnessing is, in my view, the building of an ultranationalist, one-party system, with hidden connections to the Assad regime and Iran, and less hidden ones with the US and Russia.”29
Though it would not be accurate to call the PYD nationalist in any ethnic sense, this accusation was often made by the Syrian opposition, whose rancor against the Kurds was a strong indication that the elements needed to build a new Syria would take a long time to come together. Yet the original Local Coordinating Committees, which still existed in some places in 2016, resembled Rojava communes in many ways, although they were more disparate ideologically, and some were dominated by Islamists. Syrian-British journalist Robin Yassin-Kassab described them as “practical, not ideological organisations. Their members are civil activists, family and tribal leaders, and people selected for technical or professional skills. They do their best in the very worst conditions to provide humanitarian aid and fulfill basic needs where the state has either collapsed or deliberately withheld them, including water, electricity, waste disposal and healthcare. . . . Council members are appointed by some form of democratic process, though the form differs from place to place, and is most severely restricted in regime- or ISIS-controlled areas where the councils must operate in secret . . .”
Although Yassin-Kassab too had many criticisms of the PYD, he shared with the Kurds a decentralized vision of Syria’s future: “The myth that a strong central state ensures the strength and dignity of its people runs deep in oppositional consciousness—nationalist, Leftist, and Islamist—despite all the evidence to the contrary. But decentralisation is the best way to deal with Syria’s currently explosive ethnic and sectarian polarisations. It would mean a recognition of autonomy for the Kurds, who have set up their own council system. It would also mean that different areas could govern themselves according to their social and sectarian composition.”30
Unfortunately, he was one of the few Syrian intellectuals to take this ecumenical view of the Kurds. It was far more common for members of the Syrian opposition to reiterate the charge that the Rojava Kurds were allied with the Assad government—otherwise they would not have been able to establish an autonomous area so fast. The PYD denied this from the beginning. In 2011, Salih Muslim argued that the Kurds were merely taking advantage of the upheavals in the region to achieve a degree of independence. Speaking of the 2004 Kurdish uprising, he said, “We fought then, too. Many of our members were imprisoned. But now we have established that since the beginning of the unrest, the regime has had no possibility to attack us. If it does attack us, it will see what happens. We are profiting from the unrest. It is a historical chance for us. We have a right and are making use of it. We do not kill anyone and we also do not fight against anyone. We are preparing our people and ourselves for the period after the fall of the regime. . . . The state knows that if PYD leaders are arrested, there will be serious protests everywhere. This is not in the state’s interest.”
When pressed to say whether the PYD supported the opposition in calling for the downfall of the regime, Salih Muslim replied, “We demand a fundamental change to the oppressive system. There are some who hold up the slogan: the fall of the regime. In contrast we demand the fall of the oppressive authoritarian system. Our problems are not problems of powers. The ruling powers in Damascus come and go. For us Kurds, this isn’t so important. What is important is that we Kurds assert our existence. The current regime does not accept us, nor do those who will potentially come into power. Our politics differ from a politics that seeks power. That needs to be clear.”31
The PYD’s own narrative was that, in the chaos of the Syrian civil war, their party was able to organize openly for the first time since its founding. In July 2012, the Syrian government had pulled most of its troops out of Rojava to fight in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Idlib, and the PYD’s local council took over Kobane without firing a shot.
“This action was planned for almost one and a half years,” explained Ehmed Sexo, one of the two elected heads of Kobane’s council after the takeover. “Because of this long preparation, we managed to take over the city without any bloodshed. Not one Syrian Army soldier was killed, and all surrendered.” The soldiers were stripped of their uniforms and weapons, then allowed to return to their home cities. If they could not return because of the civil war, they were placed under house arrest in the old army buildings.32
Benjamin Hiller, a German freelancer, was in Kobane during this period, and spent time with the troops protecting the city from incursions. “In Kobani, the outer city perimeter was quickly fortified with checkpoints on all major roads (flying the Kurdish flag) and heavily armed fighters controlling each incoming car. ‘We want to prevent any members of the Free Syrian Army, but also regime spies, from entering the city,’ said one masked fighter, proudly displaying his newly acquired shotgun. Some of the weapons used by the Kurdish fighters were smuggled into the country via northern Iraq. Other weapons were acquired on the black market or confiscated from [the] Syrian Army and police forces.”33
The Syrian government managed to maintain small garrisons in a few cities in Rojava, and also continued to pay the salaries of local employees like teachers. Critics of the PYD pointed to this to prove the Kurds were collaborating with Assad. But as Afrin Canton’s Minister of Economy pointed out, the Syrian government had continued to pay the salaries of civil servants and teachers all over the country, including in areas controlled by the opposition: “Right now in the whole of Syria there are former state employees who are going and applying to the regime saying ‘I am on duty and doing my job’ and take their salary. It makes no difference whether or not they are doing their job, they say this. It is like this in areas under the control of the Free Syrian Army, and it is also like this in areas under the control of other powers.” According to the Carnegie Middle East Center, the point of the policy was that it allowed Assad “to claim that the regime is the irreplaceable provider of essential services.”34
Democratic Autonomy in Rojava
Even before 2011, while the PYD was still underground, it had begun to develop local councils along the lines of those in Turkey, concentrating mainly on conflict mediation and restorative justice. As soon as the uprising began, as Salih Muslim told an EU conference in Brussels in December 2012, “local councils popped up everywhere. Developed under the umbrella of democratic confederalism, these councils had been active already as a parallel structure of government to that of the state since 2007, organizing justice and mediating in conflict; with the collapse of the state, they came out into the open. Since the summer of 2011, the de facto elections for those councils have been held in different cities and towns of the West Kurdistan and Syrian areas in which the Kurds live. For example, in Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, Kurds voted for their de facto represen
tatives in 35 electoral boxes in different districts.”35
Salih Muslim viewed local councils as part of a structure that could eventually replace a repressive state with local self-governing administrations in all of Syria, not just in the three liberated cantons of Rojava: “We call it the Western Kurdistan People’s Council. It is organized everywhere and it includes the Self-Defense Committees, also in the villages, and they are guarding the people. I mean the people themselves have organized the People’s Defense Units. They are armed groups and protecting the society. For daily demands and daily work, in the municipalities and towns, we have committees, so we don’t need the central authorities or the main government. Everywhere and in every place we have a kind of self-rule, self-government, and till now it is very successful. I think if we could have done it for whole Syria, the situation in Syria would have been different.”36
In 2016, the elected councils were the overall administrative wing of Rojava’s self-administration—they refused to use the word “government”—while the multi-party coalition, TEV-DEM, put democratic autonomy and economic self-organization into practice at the grassroots level. All of a city’s ethnic and religious groups were represented in TEV-DEM by quotas, along with civil society organizations and political parties. Many parties were represented, though the coalition’s ideological leadership clearly came from the PYD. TEV-DEM working groups and assemblies focused on project areas like the economy, education, the environment, women’s issues, defense, and more.
In the opinion of journalist Joris Leverink, the Rojava revolution was “one of the most important political projects being pursued in the world today. . . . The TEV-DEM can be singled out as one of the main reasons why the revolution in Rojava didn’t succumb to the destructive internal conflicts that haunted so many other opposition groups that have sprung up in the context of the Arab Spring. . . . The four principles of the TEV-DEM go a long way in explaining its appeal to the oppressed and marginalized people of Rojava. These are: the revolution must be bottom up; it has to be a social, cultural, educational as well as a political revolution; it should be directed against the state, power, and authority; and finally it must be the people who have the final say in all decision-making processes.”37
Following the liberation of Kobane, local councils took over other Syrian Kurdish cities with only a few glitches, except in Derik, where there was oil. There fighting broke out. “Around 30 Syrian soldiers holed up in the main military headquarters. The gun battle lasted for several hours, with bursts from AK-47s echoing through the narrow streets. Neighbors watched the escalating firefight with awe, applauding each Kurdish fighter, until the first bullets hit civilian houses. The YPG started clearing the streets and setting up traffic controls. . . . Eventually, Kurdish fighters brought in heavy weapons, including RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and a heavy machinegun, and the government soldiers surrendered. Kurdish forces now control several oil fields around the city.”38
By the end of 2012, the PYD had organized all three Rojava cantons. Feeling that the councils were too remote from the neighborhoods, they set up communes as the basic unit of administration and decision-making. An academic delegation visited Cizire canton in December 2014,39 and met with Cizire Co-chair Cinar Salih, who told them how the self-administration system worked: “Our system rests on the communes, made up of neighborhoods of 300 people. The communes have co-presidents [one male, one female], and there are co-presidents at all levels, from commune to canton administration. In each commune there are five or six different committees. Communes work in two ways. First, they resolve problems quickly and early—for example, a technical problem or a social one. Some jobs can be done in five minutes, but if you send it to the state, it gets caught in a bureaucracy. So we can solve issues quickly. The second way is political. If we speak about true democracy, decisions can’t be made from the top and go to the bottom, they have to be made at the bottom and then go up in degrees. There are also district councils and city councils, up to the canton. The principle is ‘few problems, many resolutions.’ So that the government doesn’t remain up in the air, we try to fill the bottom of it.”40
Eighteen communes made up a district, and the co-presidents of all of them were on the district people’s council, which also had directly-elected members. The councils decided on matters like garbage collection, heating oil distribution, land ownership, and cooperative enterprises. While all the communes and councils were at least 40 percent women, the PYD—in its determination to revolutionize traditional gender relations—also set up parallel autonomous women’s bodies at each level, including the highest level, the TEV-DEM. These determined policy on matters of particular concern to women, like forced marriages, honor killings, polygamy, sexual violence, and discrimination. Since domestic violence remained a problem, they also set up a system of shelters. If there was a conflict on an issue concerning women, the women’s councils were able to overrule the mixed councils.41
For people to be able to carry out this kind of self-administration, they had to learn how to think politically. “Democratic autonomy is about the long term,” Salih Muslim said. “It is about people understanding and exercising their rights. To get society to become politicized: that is the core of building democratic autonomy . . . You have to educate, twenty-four hours a day, to learn how to discuss, to learn how to decide collectively. You have to reject the idea that you have to wait for some leader to come and tell the people what to do, and instead learn to exercise self-rule as a collective practice.”42
On January 29, 2014, when the Rojava cantons declared autonomy, they adopted a remarkable constitution they call their Social Contract or Charter, which explicitly incorporates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and other internationally recognized human rights conventions. Its Preamble reads:
“We, the people of the Democratic Autonomous Regions of Afrin, Jazira and Kobane, a confederation of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Turkmen, Armenians and Chechens, freely and solemnly declare and establish this Charter, which has been drafted according to the principles of Democratic Autonomy. In pursuit of freedom, justice, dignity and democracy and led by principles of equality and environmental sustainability, the Charter proclaims a new social contract, based upon mutual and peaceful coexistence and understanding between all strands of society. It protects fundamental human rights and liberties and reaffirms the peoples’ right to self-determination. Under the Charter, we, the people of the Autonomous Regions, unite in the spirit of reconciliation, pluralism and democratic participation so that all may express themselves freely in public life. In building a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs, the Charter recognizes Syria’s territorial integrity and aspires to maintain domestic and international peace. In establishing this Charter, we declare a political system and civil administration founded upon a social contract that reconciles the rich mosaic of Syria through a transitional phase from dictatorship, civil war and destruction, to a new democratic society where civic life and social justice are preserved.”43
Sociologist Nazan Ustundag observed that, while Rojava aspired to a total lack of traditional government, it was at war and in transition, and could not reach that condition quickly: “As a result of war and embargo and the need to present themselves diplomatically at the global stage, as well as represent their cantons internally to people as emerging systems, canton governments often end up performing stateness. They collect information, speak in the name of the people, assume a Rojavan economy, and desire to create education and healthcare systems.”
She called Rojava “a movement that is situated in the dialectic between state-ness and society,” and argued that TEV-DEM and the people’s local militias and asayish (local police) would be key in preventing a state from emerging in future. Since state-like activi
ties needed to be performed, and there was no functioning state in Syria, she worried that what had happened in the past could also be the future if care was not taken:
“Armed warriors, polygamous chiefs who had unequal access to resources, and prophets promising a good life always carried the potential of becoming ruling figures, overtaking functions of production, reproduction, and defense from collectivities. Fighters against ISIS, canton officers who conduct diplomacy and make rules, and political cadres embodying revolutionary ethics bear a surprising resemblance to warriors, chiefs, and prophets.”
Her interviews with TEV-DEM members persuaded her that they consciously saw themselves as the first line of defense against the spontaneous development of government-like relationships: “The relationship between the canton government and assemblies is conceived not in terms of representation but in terms of self-defense. In other words, the primary aim is not to achieve the representation of assemblies in the government, although that could be the case. Rather assemblies, academies, and communes will be the means by which localities maintain their autonomy against the canton governments, unmake the latter’s claims to state-ness, and eventually appropriate their functions, proving them redundant.”44
The whole society was only a few years old when she wrote this, and still at the test-drive stage; only time can tell how this tension will play out.