Kurdistan democratic confederalists

Flag of the KCK. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_Communities_in_Kurdistan

With a population of 30 million, the Kurdish people are the world's largest stateless population. They form the majority of Kurdistan, a region in Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. Since 1999, their struggle for self-determination has taken a very anarchstic turn, and communities in Kurdistan have established direct democratic governance modeled on the Zapatistas and the theories of US anarchist Murray Bookchin. While Kurds comprise the majority, the movement has been diverse and multi-ethnic. For example, in the canton of Jazira in Syrian Kurdistan, Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs, Chechens, Armenians, Muslims, Christians and Yazidis co-exist and share political power.

Founded in 1975, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, traditionally operated as a Marxist-Leninist party, demanding a Kurdish state independent from Turkey. A quarter-century later, their struggle took a sharply anarchistic turn, due in part to the influence of anarchist writer Murray Bookchin and the Zapatistas. The PKK and other rebels have since established the Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), a confederation of direct democratic communal institutions across Turkish Kurdistan. KCK-affiliated groups have expanded the anti-authoritarian Kurdish social revolution into Iran, Syria and Iraq.

Turkey

In 1999, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was arrested by Turkish authorities, and in prison Öcalan became heavily influenced by American anarchist Murray Bookchin and the Zapatistas. Öcalan embraced Bookchin's theory of Communalism and renamed it "democratic confederalism." As Öcalan reflected and criticized his party's authoritarian past, Öcalan's followers too became swayed. Rafael Taylor writes, "The PKK itself has apparently taken after their leader, not only adopting Bookchin's specific brand of eco-anarchism, but actively internalizing the new philosophy in its strategy and tactics. The movement abandoned its bloody war for Stalinist/Maoist revolution and the terror tactics that came with it, and began pursuing a largely non-violent strategy aimed at greater regional autonomy."

The PKK and other Kurdish rebels in Turkey established the KCK, a direct democratic confederation that makes decisions at five levels: the village, the neighborhood, the district, the city, and the region (northern Kurdistan). Taylor reports, “The informal consensus among witnesses, nevertheless, is that the majority of decision-making is directly democratic through one arrangement or other; that the majority of those decisions are made at the grassroots; and that the decisions are executed from the bottom-up in accordance with the federal structure.” The highest level of the the KCK, the Democratic Society Congress or DTK,requires that women constitute at least 40 percent of each assembly. Although DTK members include representatives of a wide variety of Kurdish civil society organizations, 60 percent of DTK members are recallable delegates from the direct democratic grassroots.

Elanor Finley, a board member of the Institute for Social Ecology, writes:

The movement is not without contradictions. For one, as a paramilitary organization, the PKK maintains a hierarchical command structure with Abdullah Öcalan at its center. Thus councils are often established ‘from above’ and it is unclear whether the popular legitimacy of these councils stems from a grassroots revolutionary sensibility or rather the widespread perception of illegitimacy attributed to the occupational Turkish government. In the past, the PKK have violently repressed rival left factions and Kurdish nationalist groups. Today, they negotiate with Erdogan’s government and pursue regional alliances with liberal Turkish political coalitions. And yet despite all this, Kurdish revolutionaries have launched arguably one of the most important and unique socio-political projects in the world.

Iraq

In 2014, KCK-affiliated fighters, including the PKK, fought the far-right Islamist group ISIS and rescued thousands of Yadizis trapped and terrorized by ISIS in Iraq's Sinjar Mountains.

Syria

Starting on June 19, 2012, Kurdish fighters liberated the Syrian region of Rojava, with the three cantons of Kobani, Afrin, and Jazira. In the Kurdish-held territories, locally-elected councils in each community make decisions regarding topics such as energy, food supplies, and patriarchal violence. All councils require at least 40 percent of participants to be women. Communities also have commisions which administer criminal justice, establish worker cooperatives, protect the environment, and organize defense. Rojava's constitution affirmed a commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

In September 2014, ISIS attacked the city of Kobani (in the canton of Kobane), and by early October, the journalist Patrick Cockburn reported that ISIS was "close to capturing" Kobani. The Free Syrian Army and the Turkish anarchist group DAF traveled to Kobani and joined the town's fight against ISIS. The US and its ally Turkey virtually abandoned the city. US Secretary of State John Kerry explained that defending Kobani was not a "strategic objective," and, in the midst of a bombing campaign in Syria, refused to carry out meaningful airstrikes against ISIS near Kobani or to send aid and weapons to the Kurdish rebels. Turkey, while enabling ISIS fighters to freely cross its Syrian border, refused to allow Kurdish fighters, weapons and supplies from Syria to reach Rojava. As the fighting continued, however, the US drastically increased its airstrikes in Kobani, in part for "propaganda reasons" according to the BBC's diplomatic and defense editor Mark Urban.

On October 17, after a month of fighting, the KCK-affiliated militias YPG and YPJ--the former are men, the latter women--forced ISIS to begin withdrawing from Kobani.

During ISIS' siege of Kobani, Anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber compared Rojava's situation to that of revolutionary Spain in the 1930s:

If there is a parallel today to Franco’s superficially devout, murderous Falangists, who would it be but Isis? If there is a parallel to the Mujeres Libres of Spain, who could it be but the courageous women defending the barricades in Kobane?

By October 19, the US began airlifting arms and supplies to Kobani. Journalist Bill Weinberg argues that while this support should not stop anarchists from standing with Kobani, it does set up conditions for the US to betray the Kurds' struggle.

We can only anticipate that Washington will sell out the YPG in deference to NATO ally Turkey as soon as ISIS has been beaten back at Kobani. There's a long history of such betrayals that anarchists know all too well. Exactly like Trotsky used the Makhnovists to help defeat the Whites, then crushed them. Exactly as the Spanish Republic used the Catalan anarchists. Exactly as Carranza used Villa and Zapata. Et cetera.

--DFischer (talk) 13:37, 22 October 2014 (EDT)