The Islamic State (IS) was driven from the city of Manbij yesterday, a key supply route to the Turkish border in northern Syria, the conclusion of an operation launched on 1 June by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a front-group for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), represented in Syria by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). The SDF was backed by U.S. airstrikes. It is difficult not to see the defeat of IS as a positive development. It is, however, worth more closely examining the forces that are being enabled by Western power to fasten their rule across northern Syria, whose vision is deeply problematic—even in narrow terms of the fight against IS.
The PKK in Syria
The constitution for the Rojava-Northern Syria Democratic Federal System—to which we can be sure Manbij will be added—passed on 1 July 2016 and declares Qamishli its capital. The Federal System is controlled by Democratic Society Movement (TEV-DEM), which is a political coalition dominated by the PYD.
The PYD was founded in 2003 as the Syrian wing of the PKK. There remain those who deny that this is what the PYD is, the State Department among them, no doubt for reasons to do with the PKK’s presence on the list of foreign terrorist organizations. But the evidence—available in this report and these articles—is clear. The public admission by the U.S. Defence Secretary of at least “substantial ties” between the PYD and the PKK provided additional evidence, as did the reported death of Fehman Hussein (Bahoz Erdal) inside Syria on 9 July.
Hussein is reported dead semi-regularly, and supposedly denied his demise this time to Al-Jazeera. What is important here is that while Abdullah Ocalan remains the formal head of the PKK from his Turkish prison cell on Imrali Island, the day-to-day control of the organization is in the hands of three men: Hussein, Murat Karayilan (Cemal), and Cemil Bayik (Cuma).
Hussein, a Syrian Kurd from Kobani, was reported to be inside Syria as early as the summer of 2012 and to be leading the military side of the PYD/YPG, while the more political aspects were left in the hands of Saleh Muslim Muhammad, who is himself close to Karayilan. Hussein is also believed to be the commander of the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), a cut-out for the PKK that has claimed some of the more atrocious, civilian-focused terrorist attacks of late.
Just as Jabhat al-Nusra—or Jabhat Fatah al-Sham—is no less al-Qaeda for having a local focus, there can be no doubt that the PYD/YPG is fully subordinate to the PKK’s leadership in the Qandil Mountains. The PYD/YPG is led on the ground by the PKK’s military commanders and includes a not-insignificant number of PKK troops from and elsewhere. The PYD/YPG—and thus the SDF, whose Arab detachments are clearly subordinate and intended to stay that way—is also a totally integrated part of the PKK’s transnational political structure, the so-called Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK).
Democratic Confederalism
Even when it is conceded that the U.S.-led Coalition is supporting the PKK in Syria, an argument has been made that the organization has undergone a transformation away from the Stalinist-chauvinist cocktail of its founding. At the time of the March declaration of the Federal System, a spokesman for the TEV-DEM said it would be based on “Democratic Confederalism“. This ideology is the brainchild of Abdullah Ocalan, who is also known as “Apo” (hence the PKK’s ideology has been called “Apoism”).
The PKK at its founding in November 1978 was a Marxist-Leninist organization, even if this ideology was “secondary to the PKK’s nationalist drive” (p. 244) and the cult of its leader. By the 1990s Ocalan was said to have already showing signs of looking beyond Bolshevism and nationalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In prison, Ocalan’s evolution accelerated and Apoism formally abandoned outright separatism—indeed abandons the demand for a state at all—and adopts a hodgepodge vision of environmentalism, anarchism, and radical democracy.
Ocalan was arrested in Kenya on 15 February 1999, soon after being kicked out of Syria, and quickly demonstrated (p. 286-88) how firmly in control he remained on the ground. At the Seventh Conference in January 2000, the PKK formally renounced separatism, a bitter blow for many of the PKK old guard, and a number quit altogether and sought asylum in Europe.
In a book written in prison and published in 2011—originally submitted as part of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and then adopted as a manifesto at the 2002 Congress—Ocalan distanced himself from Communism and offered ideological self-criticisms (“The PKK’s founding manifesto reflected the Zeitgeist of the time … [but] did not … allow for a realistic approach … Real socialism has collapsed and the democratic civilization has proved its advantages”) and even some practical ones, conceding that the PKK ignored “signs coming from the Turkish authorities that a solution could be reached,” and fought on believing it was a “virtue to resist … compromise”. What began as self-defence ended as an “offensive” by the PKK, says Ocalan, “where we killed the best of our own comrades” and plunged into a “dirty, brutal war”. And for all that the status quo still held.
The final theoretical break of Apoism from the tyrannical Stalinism of its inception came in 2005, when Ocalan announced his conversion to an eco-anarchist form of direct democracy, inspired by Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), an American author whose youthful Communism had given way to “libertarian socialism”—a version of communitarian anarchism.
After reading a number of Bookchin’s books, Ocalan and Bookchin began corresponding in 2004 and in March 2005 Ocalan issued his formal declaration abandoning Marxism-Leninism in favour of Democratic Confederalism and renouncing the idea of creating a Kurdish state:
The only way out of this situation is to establish a democratic confederal system … Democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a state system, but a democratic system of the people without a state. … It is based on the freedoms of political, social, economic, cultural, sexual and ethnic rights.
Ocalan called for the establishment of a Koma Komalên Kurdistan (KKK), a prototype for the KCK that would be formed in 2007.
Expanding on this, Ocalan published a short book simply called Democratic Confederalism (2011). Ocalan rejects the nation-state entirely as an instrument representing the “national governor of the worldwide capitalist system,” rather than the common people, and which provides pressure toward homogenization that “leads into assimilation and genocide.”
It is rather notable that Ocalan situates himself away from rationalism, and instead takes up a position at the point where religion and New Age dogma intersect, rejecting “positivist science” and secularism as forms of superstition divorced from the spiritual needs of the people.
Ocalan situates his struggle within anti-capitalism rather than nationalism. “Without opposition against the capitalist modernity there will be no place for the liberation of the peoples. This is why the founding of a Kurdish nation-state is not an option for me,” Ocalan writes. Democratic Confederalism is an “anti-nationalist” concept that aims to proceed “without questioning the existing political borders,” since only “the ruling class or the interests of the bourgeoisie” desire a Kurdish nation-state.
In defining Democratic Confederalism, Ocalan says it is a “non-state social paradigm” that is in practice “a democracy without a state,” which is “multi-cultural, anti-monopolistic and consensus-oriented,” is opposed to centralization and hierarchy, based on community and grassroots democracy, and has “ecology and feminism [as] central pillars.” Still, Ocalan does conclude that “overcoming the … nation-state, is a long process,” and a “total rejection” of the state in the short-term is unwise.
This structure, according to Ocalan, could begin with a federation of the four Kurdish-majority zones—in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran—and then democratize the entire Middle East. Indeed, “global confederalism is not excluded”.
The PYD has used exactly this argument to contend that its Federal System can be expanded to allow local, democratic rule across all of Syria. This has naturally met with some scepticism given how the PYD has actually behaved.
The PKK in Practice
While Ocalan gives every indication of having undergone a genuine intellectual evolution and having formally imposed this on the PKK, the PKK in practice has shown itself bound by its founding. “Nothing much changed when the [Bashar al-Assad] regime withdrew … and the PYD took over,” a local resident of Efrin told Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami in their book Burning Country. Kurdish journalist Hussein Omer compared the PYD’s rule, in its seizure of the various branches of society, to the Ba’ath Party’s.
Continued........
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
efenders of Shrine sacrificing their lives,why attack them?didthey wrong iranian ppl?
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