A-Infos (en) Italy, Livorno: 2012 - 2022 The example of Rojava (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Among the anniversaries that have marked this year 2022 that is about to end, 
among many historical events, one concerns a fact that ten years ago made little 
news, but which started a process, still ongoing, which has aroused over the 
years enormous attention for having released a great revolutionary potential in 
an area marked by one of the most violent inter-imperialist conflicts in recent 
decades. ---- On July 19, 2012, what is known as the Rojava Revolution began. In 
the context of the Syrian civil war, in the power vacuum left by the weakened 
Assad regime, the People's Defense Units (YPG), a militia of the Democratic Unity 
Party (PYD), assumed control of the city of Kobanê, along the border between 
Syria and Turkey, occupying government buildings and access roads to the city. 
From that moment, in that northern part of Syria which the Kurds call Rojava, 
Southern Kurdistan in Syrian territory, a real revolutionary process began. The 
forces of the central authorities are deprived of authority and removed, the YPG 
and YPJ take control of the territory and the Movement for a Democratic Society 
(TEV-DEM), an umbrella organization created by the PYD, reorganizes society with 
the aim of applying confederalism democratic. Democratic confederalism is the new 
ideological paradigm elaborated within the Kurdish movement and adopted by the 
Kurdish Community Movement (KCK) in the 2000s. The PYD is part of the KCK but 
also the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) active in Bakur, the Northern Kurdistan 
in Turkish territory and the corresponding parties active in the areas marked by 
the Kurdish presence in Iranian and Iraqi territory. It is the movement that 
refers to Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the PKK who has been in prison since 1999, 
and which claims to have abandoned Marxist-Leninist ideology between the 1990s 
and 2000s to embrace democratic confederalism, an eclectic ideological paradigm, 
which also assuming libertarian references proposes an ecological, feminist and 
democratic perspective. But the main cornerstone of democratic confederalism is 
the rejection of the nation-state, a key issue for a party that is the 
spokesperson for a minority, the Kurdish, in a region, the Mesopotamian, marked 
by the presence of states with a strongly nationalist matrix, such as Turkey, 
Syria, Iran and Iraq. After decades of guerrilla warfare with the goal of 
independence, for the construction of a new state entity based on the Kurdish 
identity, the perspective changes radically. The idea of independence through a 
new nation-state with its own borders is abandoned, and is replaced by the 
creation of forms of territorial self-government that can represent the cultural 
plurality of the different peoples of the region, without predetermined borders, 
without a single linguistic identity, ethnic or cultural. It is in this 
perspective that the TEV-DEM initiates the establishment of forms of 
self-government: cooperatives, people's houses, women's houses, a decentralized 
political system on several levels, from the district council, to the canton, up 
to the highest level, a system that has never become one-party over the years.

This process took place in a very particular context. In 2011, the Mediterranean 
is one of the areas where the conflict between institutions and protest movements 
born in the context of the great global economic crisis of 2007/2008 is 
strongest. But if in Europe the class movements are unable to scratch the 
policies of social butchery and the protest of the political class only generates 
new forms of legitimization of more authoritarian power, along the southern coast 
of the Mediterranean instead a real insurrectional cycle overwhelms the 
dictatorships. After Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, Syria is also affected by this 
disruptive movement which is called the "Arab spring". To prevent these processes 
from calling the neocolonial order and with it the social order itself into 
question, the global and regional powers decide to intervene both with direct 
military engagement and with the support of "new" power groups, or by creating 
"counter-revolutionary" gangs and armies or in any case charged with ensuring the 
interests of the government that arms them on the ground. This leads to civil war 
in Syria. At a time when the war sweeps away from the scenario of Syria any 
possibility of a social transformation from below, the self-government of Rojava 
represents, not without contradictions, a space in which to give substance to the 
aspirations for freedom that animated the movements of those years.

Turkey's internal situation also played an important role. With the bloody 
repression between the spring and summer of 2013 of the large protest movement 
that was born in Gezi Park in Istanbul against the authoritarian and business 
model of the religious conservative government led by Erdohan's AKP, the 
revolutionary left and the opposition generally seek a strategy for the overthrow 
of the ruling power bloc. When all margins for peace talks between the Ankara 
government and the Kurdish movement close, the perspective becomes clear: to join 
forces for change on both sides of the border, between Turkey and Rojava. Between 
2014 and 2015 this perspective grows and matures together with the international 
solidarity that knows, between the exodus of the Ezida population from the 
mountains of Shengal and the siege of Kobanê, the moment of maximum attention. 
From 2015 until 2016, with the massacres and internal war, the Turkish state 
unleashed a ferocious repression to physically eliminate the opposition and 
forcibly prevent the concrete development of a common perspective of liberation 
between Syria and Turkey.

Over the years the revolutionary process has always been under attack from many 
quarters and many argue that it has effectively stopped. Often even on these 
pages, as in many public initiatives, we have faced, even on a critical level, 
the limits and contradictions of what has never qualified as an "anarchist 
revolution", but which undoubtedly represents an experiment in transformation 
social exceptional in times like these, and it cannot fail to arouse not only our 
interest but also our solidarity commitment. The war brought by Turkey, by proxy 
or directly, with the successive invasions of Afrin in 2018, of Serekaniye in 
2019 and today with the bombing of Kobanê. The need to wage war against the 
Islamic State and the various counter-revolutionary gangs in the region. The 
military and diplomatic intrigues of the powers present in the field, from the 
USA to Russia, to Iran, up to the troops of Damascus themselves, have often 
isolated the experience of Rojava, demonstrating how formally enemy states easily 
find an agreement when it comes to settling a blow to a dangerous revolutionary 
prospect. The continuous war has certainly weakened the prospect of profound 
social as well as political change. It is one of the most classic problems in the 
history of revolutionary movements, that of the contradiction between war and 
revolution. But the contradictions, the elements to discuss are many. The 
question of private property in a predominantly agricultural economy devastated 
by war, the question of the extraction of fossil resources, the establishment of 
the Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria and the specter of the 
crystallization of state institutions which could make forms of self-government, 
the administration of justice, the management of thousands and thousands of 
prisoners of war citizens of European countries who refuse to take them back, 
preferring to leave them as a destabilizing element in Rojava. Elements that 
could not be summarized in a short article, which would not give due space to 
such important issues and how they have developed over the course of a decade.

But one thing is certain, even if this experience were to terrifyingly end in 
war, even if contradictions were to take over and block the transformation 
process, Rojava would still have an extraordinary example to give to the world. 
The rejection of hegemony and the recognition of the plural nature of society is 
probably the most original and important message of this process. One of the most 
visible concrete implications of this assumption is the construction of forms of 
coexistence, co-management, cooperation between the different identities, 
populations and cultures present in that region. This is an aspect that has never 
failed in the experience of Rojava, it has never gone backwards, on the contrary 
it has grown and developed over time. Many sympathetic when Rojava began to be 
talked about, with a gaze not always free from neocolonial lenses, exalted the 
importance of these practices of coexistence and tolerance in a land that has 
always been marked by sectarian, religious and ethnic conflicts, by the massacre 
of minorities, by "tribal" warfare, by the oppression of women, by the blood rule 
of one group over another. But the true importance of all this I think we have 
only now been able to understand. While in civilized Europe there is a return to 
fighting in the name of ethnic and linguistic nationalism, and the lies about 
cultural and blood identity become, again, a distinction between "friends" and 
"enemies". In the context of war in Europe, even some subjects among those who 
politically supported the revolution in Rojava today are lining up to support the 
"right to defence" of a people, whether they speak Ukrainian or Russian. 
Overcoming the idea of the people as a linguistic and ethnic unit that 
constitutes a nation, recognizing the plurality of the cultural composition of a 
region, the class division of societies, the oppressive role of states, seems to 
have become difficult in today's Europe. We can find answers precisely in those 
lands that many considered "tribal". The perspective of democratic confederalism 
proposes possible paths, rejecting the nation state, recognizing plurality, 
rejecting the polarization imposed by war and developing a third way. After all, 
the Kurdish movement arrives at democratic confederalism after the ferocious war 
that in the early 1990s caused massacres and devastation of villages in Northern 
Kurdistan in Turkish territory. Democratic confederalism was an attempt to 
construct a peace strategy. Not understood as the absence of war or as an 
agreement between governments, but as solidarity between the oppressed and 
exploited classes. An often overlooked aspect that shows us the revolutionary 
value of peace.

Dario Antonelli

https://collettivoanarchico.noblogs.org/post/2023/01/12/2012-2022-lesempio-del-rojava/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en