by Meredith Tax
To futher complicate matters for US and EU diplomacy, Russia is also courting the Rojava Kurds, who set up their first diplomatic office in Moscow in February 2016. By failing to give Rojava more diplomatic and economic support, and by continuing to tolerate Turkey’s attacks on the Syrian Kurds and its own Kurdish citizens, the US could drive Rojava into the arms of Russia, which is surely not the object of its Middle East strategy.
Rather than continuing to pursue a foreign policy with so many internal contradictions, the US needs a fundamental reorientation of its attitude towards the Kurds, as well as a re-examination of its relationship with Turkey. Aliza Marcus and another longtime student of Kurdish politics, Andrew Apostolou, believe that the US has not caught up with facts on the ground: “The arguments against Kurdish independence are obsolete. It’s not a question of whether the world should allow Kurds to have independent states. It’s a matter of the international community catching up with what the Kurds have already done. In Iraq and Syria, Kurdish groups have established their own states—albeit de facto—without waiting for anyone’s permission. These are not fully fledged independent countries with diplomatic missions at the United Nations and international recognition. They don’t need to be. Kurds have shown they can manage without that. . . . Given how Kurds have been treated in the countries in which they live, it’s no surprise that they have demanded the right to govern themselves and are willing to fight. So it’s time that the international community caught up with Kurdish desires and helped Kurds build stable, democratic institutions, instead of taking the side of those who want to rule over the Kurds.”49
Tekoshin, PKK Sniper, Makhmour.
CODA
Some Questions Remain
I WROTE THIS BOOK TO ANSWER my own questions about what kind of revolution was possible in the 21st century, how it could happen and what it would look like. Was it imaginable that the Left would ever put women at the center of its politics, and what would happen if it did? And how would a decision to focus so much on women, a decision which would probably have to be made from the top at the beginning, mesh with democracy?
These questions preoccupied me long before the battle of Kobane. As I learned about the struggle of the Kurds, I reframed them, as I have said in the preface to this book. I hope some answers have emerged from the history I have recounted.
After the battle of Kobane, as Western journalists and activists began to hear about Rojava and even go there, progressives in many parts of the world started to get interested in Ocalan’s thought and in Kurdish feminism. The YPG had begun to recruit foreign fighters online, and a number of young men from Europe and North America had already made their way to Syria to join the “Lions of Rojava,” while solidarity groups emerged in a number of Western cities.
The Ocalan cult of personality could be a stumbling block in such solidarity work. Janet Biehl observed that “Western visitors who admire the remarkable accomplishments they witness in Rojava quickly also notice something that many find disquieting: seemingly every interior space (a notable exception being the self-government buildings) features an image of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned PKK leader, affixed to the wall. The disquiet arises from memories of assorted twentieth-century dictators—Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong—whose images, in the many nations they long tormented, were similarly ubiquitous.”1
Another stumbling block was the counter-narrative, sometimes influenced by Turkey or the Syrian opposition, sometimes coming out of left-wing purism, that said the PKK could not have changed from a totalitarian terrorist organization to a democratic one, pointing to the fact that some of the men who led it during its most Stalinist period, including Cemal Bayik and Murat Karayilan, were still in charge. These voices said that Rojava was one big Potemkin Village. They reminded the world that naive visitors had gone overboard on revolutions in the past, revolutionary tourism being a tradition at least as old as John Reed—dumb, over-privileged Americans blissing out on the idea that the workers’ paradise had finally arrived in Russia or Albania, China or Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua or Peru, India, Nepal, Tanzania, or Zimbabwe.
I take such criticisms seriously, having had my own experience of revolutionary tourism in China in 1973 at the height of the Cultural Revolution, too credulous to question what I was looking at half the time. I remember how I wanted everything people told me to be true and tried to disregard my own misgivings. But I also agree with David Graeber when he says that this is a real revolution and that’s the reason it scares people:
“I don’t think there’s any guarantee this one will work out in the end, that it won’t be crushed, but it certainly won’t if everyone decides in advance that no revolution is possible and refuse[s] to give active support, or even devote their efforts to attacking it or increasing its isolation, which many do. If there’s something I’m aware of, that others aren’t, perhaps it’s the fact that history isn’t over. Capitalists have made a mighty effort these past thirty or forty years to convince people that current economic arrangements—not even capitalism, but the peculiar, financialized, semi-feudal form of capitalism we happen to have today—is the only possible economic system. They’ve put far more effort into that than they have into actually creating a viable global capitalist system. As a result the system is breaking down all around us at just the moment everyone has lost the ability to imagine anything else.”2
I am excited by Rojava because the people there are trying something new, and women are in the center of it all. This is not to say that complete equality has already been achieved; nobody with any sense would make such a claim after so short a time. So when debunkers note that women don’t talk very much in mixed meetings; that the women co-chairs are less well known than the men; and that you don’t see many women driving cars or starting businesses, I am not so concerned. It takes time and mutual support for women to get the confidence to speak up, learn how to drive, and claim equal space after generations of oppression. Those things will come.
Other questions remain. How strong is the position of women, really? How much are women in leadership really listened to? Is there more rotation among them than among the men, especially the veterans at the top? Are women stronger in Rojava, where they actually have the power to create a new society—though under very difficult conditions—than in the Kurdish regions of Turkey? There are no answers to these questions yet.
To me, there are inherent contradictions in trying to mesh a top down party-type organization like the PKK with the bottom-up grassroots democratic politics of communes and councils. What happens when differences of opinion arise? Under peacetime conditions, these differences can be worked through. The process will not be painless but time is on the side of the young, who are more likely to understand new models than are hard-bitten old warriors. But under conditions of war, a disciplined party and military command structure will probably prevail in most cases.
In other words, as long as the war goes on, the voices of the PKK military leaders in Qandil are likely to overrule the voices of civilian politicians like Leyla Zana and Selahattin Demirtas—especially if Ocalan, who tends to push for ceasefires, continues to be held incommunicado in a Turkish island prison.
I don’t mean to say that democracy is impossible under conditions of war. But it is more likely to thrive under conditions of peace, when all the differences of opinion, affiliation, and material interest can come out into the open, unconstrained by the need for unity against an external enemy. On the other hand, any revolutionary society is likely to be threatened from the outside, so there will still be pressure to conform even if no shooting war is going on. Add to that a strong sense of group identity and a view that individualism is tied to capitalist modernity, and you have a model where freedom of thought and expression could become problematic. In the Rojava-to-come, how much room will there be for open discussion of basic points in “the Philosophy?”
This all remains to be seen. There are reasons, based on past revolutions, to fear the worst and there
are reasons to believe that, like the rest of us, the Kurds have learned from these past revolutions and are looking for a different way. It is already clear that, even under wartime conditions, Rojava may well be the best place in the Middle East to be a woman. One can only imagine what such a place could mean for the region—a liberated area with a secular, egalitarian approach to gender, governance, economics, land usage, and ecological sustainability. Dissidents all over the region would have a place to get a secular education, escape the draft, and run away from forced marriages.
And, with all the new educational institutes being set up, and so much contact with people from other countries, young activists in Rojava are likely to be more sophisticated politically than earlier generations of militants in other revolutions—for one thing, they will have access to a much wider range of educational materials, not just Marxist classics or speeches by Ocalan, though they will certainly have those too. Widespread education is likely to temper uniformity of party thought and language—what the Chinese call “stereotyped party writing”—and allow for more individual variations of tone.
Will the commitment to democracy remain as strong as it is today? One of the problems with past struggles led by men with guns has been that, after the revolution, the men turned into an elite with police powers. What happens in a revolution where women also have guns? Will the guns wielded by the asayish and community self-defense brigades be enough to prevent the emergence of elites and a quasi-state? Maybe, but even thinking such a thought in a country plagued by the National Rifle Association and “lone shooters” is enough to make me nervous.
And what about Ocalan’s idea that the state is becoming an obsolete form of organization?
By the end of the 20th century, global financial institutions like the World Bank and transnational treaties like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—including some, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),3 that are so destructive of state control that the politicians favoring them have tried to keep them secret from their own people—have already eroded the authority of the nation-state. The European Union is an attempt, though hardly a completely successful one, to make a political unit that overrides national control and dispenses with borders. And though Daesh calls itself a state, the classic salafi vision of a caliphate is more like a vast cultural union without borders where everyone (at least everyone who counts) is the right sort of Muslim, living under sharia law. In contrast, we have the radical local democracy of the Syrian and Turkish Kurds who hope to form some kind of federation that leaves state relations up to various national governments but keeps everything else—administration, law, education, economics—close in hand.
In the end, what will happen to the state is still a road unforeseen. Perhaps the question is not whether the ethnic-nationalist state will eventually be superseded, but what it will be superseded by—a globalized form of capitalism that leaves current social and political relations largely in place, but sucks out all the money for a tiny elite? An Islamist theocracy combining some aspects of capitalism (like oil extraction) with violent and repressive seventh-century social customs? Or the radical local control envisioned in Rojava, based on democracy, equal citizenship for all, feminism, and ecology?
If these are the choices, I know where I would put my energy.
—New York, April 2016
Photographer Joey Lawrence with YPG-YPJ, Tel Hamis, Cizire Canton, Rojava.
Notes
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In March 2016, the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman was seized by the Erdogan government and its archive was taken offline. Due to this and other reasons, some of the following URLs may no longer be viable. Archived pages may still be accessed using a search engine or web applications such as the Way Back Machine.
Introduction: A Road Unforeseen
1Samantha Rollins, “France says the name ‘ISIS’ is offensive, will call it ‘Daesh” instead,” The Week, September 17, 2014, http://theweek.com/speedreads/446139/france-says-name-isis-offensive-call-daesh-instead; Zeba Khan, “Words matter in ‘ISIS’ war, so use ‘Daesh’,” The Boston Globe, October 9, 2014, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/09/words-matter-isis-war-use-daesh/V85GYEuasEEJgrUun0dMUP/story.html; Amanda Bennett, “Daesh? ISIS? Islamic State? Why what we call the Paris attackers matters,” The Washington Post, November 25, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/11/25/daesh-isis-islamic-state-why-what-we-call-the-paris-attackers-matters/.
2Justin Sink, “Obama makes ISIS enemy No. 1,” The Hill, August 22, 2014, http://thehill.com/policy/international/215797-obama-makes-isis-enemy-no-1.
3David Graeber, “Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?” The Guardian, October 8, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/why-world-ignoring-revolutionary-kurds-syria-isis.
4Danny Postel, “Should We Oppose the Intervention Against ISIS?” In These Times, December 18, 2014, http://inthesetimes.com/article/17423/should_we_oppose_the_intervention_against_isis.
5J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1965), 280.
6Meredith Tax, “The Revolution in Rojava,” Dissent, April 22, 2015, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-revolution-in-rojava.
7Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980; 2nd edition, Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001, with a new introduction), 256.
8Memed Aksoy, “A(y)lan Kurdi and the Kurdish Question,” Kurdish Question, Sept. 4, 2015, http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/insight-research/aylan-kurdi-and-the-kurdish-question.html.
9Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, I, 1875, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.
10See, for instance, Meredith Tax, “An Expedient Alliance: The Muslim Right and the Anglo-American Left,” Dissent, February 26, 2013, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/an-expedient-alliance-the-muslim-right-and-the-anglo-american-left; “The Antis: anti-imperialist or anti-feminist,” openDemocracy 5050, November 19, 2014, https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/meredith-tax/antis-antiimperialist-or-antifeminist-0.
11A basic discussion of globalization myths can be found in John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: New Press, 1998).
12Ahdaf Soueif, “Image of unknown woman beaten by Egypt’s military echoes around the world,” The Guardian, December 18, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/18/egypt-military-beating-female-protester-tahrir-square.
13Handan Caglayan, “From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in post-1980 Turkey,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, 14, 2012, http://ejts.revues.org/4657.
14Deniz Kandiyoti, “Fear and Fury: women and post-revolutionary violence,” openDemocracy 5050, January 14, 2013, http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/deniz-kandiyoti/fear-and-fury-women-and-post-revolutionary-violence.
15Gita Sahgal, “Purity or Danger? Human Rights and Their Engagement with Fundamentalisms,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law), 100, March 29–April 1, 2006, 417, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25660137.
16FGM stands for the mutilation or complete removal of the female clitoris, an operation with many attendant psychological and medical complications performed on young children or adolescents, particularly in parts of the Middle East and Africa.
17Susan Waltz, “Who Wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?” IIP Digital, November 19, 2008, U.S. Department of State Publications, http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2008/11/20081119135247xjyrrep6.023806e-02.html
18Gita Sahgal, “Who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights/,” openDemocracy 5050, December 10, 2011, https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/gita-sahgal/who-wrote-universal-declaration-of-human-rights.
19Sonia Alvarez with Nalu Far and Miriam Nobre, “Another (Also Feminis
t) World Is Possible: Constructing Transnational Spaces and Global Alternatives from the Movements,” trans. Arturo Escobar, World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, eds. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman (New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, 2004), http://www.choike.org/documentos/wsf_s313_alvarez.pdf; Jenny Burchall and Jessica Horne, “World Social Forum: Integrating feminism and women activists into visions and practices of ‘another world,’” Bridge, April 2013, http://socialmovements.bridge.ids.ac.uk/case-studies; Ara Wilson, “Feminism in the Space of the World Social Forum,” Journal of International Women’s Studies, 8.3, April 2007, http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol8/iss3/2.
20“WLUML Statement to the World Social Forum—Appeal Against Fundamentalisms,” WLMUL, January 21, 2005, http://www.wluml.org/node/1850.
21Nadje Al-Ali, “A Feminist Perspective on the Iraq War,” Works and Days, 29, 2011, http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/12116/.
22Meredith Tax with Marjorie Agosin, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ritu Menon, Ninotchka Rosca, and Mariella Sala, The Power of the Word: Culture, Censorship and Voice (Women’s WORLD: New York, August 1995), http://www.meredithtax.org/gender-and-censorship/power-word-culture-censorship-and-voice. For an article on the organization’s work, see Meredith Tax, “Women’s WORLD: A Transnational Organization of Women Writers: The Targeting of Feminist Writers,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2, 1, 2001, pp. 177–185.