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<h1 itemprop="name headline "><small>Why is the world ignoring
the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?</small></h1>
<div itemprop="description" id="stand-first"
class="stand-first-alone"
data-component="Article:standfirst_cta"><b><big>Amid the
Syrian warzone a democratic experiment is being stamped
into the ground by Isis. That the wider world is unaware
is a scandal<br>
<small><small><small><small><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/why-world-ignoring-revolutionary-kurds-syria-isis">http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/why-world-ignoring-revolutionary-kurds-syria-isis</a></small></small></small></small></big></b><br>
<ul class="article-attributes trackable-component b4"
data-component="Article:byline">
<li class="byline"><span itemscope="" itemprop="author"
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span
itemprop="name"><a class="contributor" rel="author"
itemprop="url"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/david-graeber">David
Graeber</a></span></span> </li>
<li class="publication"> <span
class="social-buttons-twitter-contributor
trackable-component" data-component="Twitter Follow
Journalist"></span><time itemprop="datePublished"
datetime="2014-10-08T04:04EDT" pubdate="">Wednesday 8
October, 2014<br>
</time></li>
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<p>In 1937, my father volunteered to fight in the International
Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic. A would-be
fascist coup had been temporarily halted by a worker’s
uprising, spearheaded by anarchists and socialists, and in
much of Spain a genuine social revolution ensued, leading to
whole cities under directly democratic management, industries
under worker control, and the radical empowerment of women.</p>
<p>Spanish revolutionaries hoped to create a vision of a free
society that the entire world might follow. Instead, world
powers declared a policy of “non-intervention” and maintained
a rigorous blockade on the republic, even after Hitler and
Mussolini, ostensible signatories, <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_involvement_in_the_Spanish_Civil_War"
title="">began pouring in troops and weapons to reinforce
the fascist side</a>. The result was years of civil war that
ended with the suppression of the revolution and some of a
bloody century’s bloodiest massacres.</p>
<p>I never thought I would, in my own lifetime, see the same
thing happen again. Obviously, no historical event ever really
happens twice. There are a thousand differences between what
happened in Spain in 1936 and what is happening in Rojava, the
three largely Kurdish provinces of northern Syria, today. But
some of the similarities are so striking, and so distressing,
that I feel it’s incumbent on me, as someone who grew up in a
family whose politics were in many ways defined by the Spanish
revolution, to say: we cannot let it end the same way again.</p>
<p>The autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one
of few bright spots – albeit a very bright one – to emerge
from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution. Having driven out
agents of the Assad regime in 2011, and despite the hostility
of almost all of its neighbours, Rojava has not only
maintained its independence, but is a remarkable democratic
experiment. Popular assemblies have been created as the
ultimate decision-making bodies, councils selected with
careful ethnic balance (in each municipality, for instance,
the top three officers have to include one Kurd, one Arab and
one Assyrian or Armenian Christian, and at least one of the
three has to be a woman), there are women’s and youth
councils, and, in a remarkable echo of the armed Mujeres
Libres (Free Women) of Spain, a feminist army, the “YJA Star”
militia (the “Union of Free Women”, the star here referring to
the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar), that has carried out
a large proportion of the combat operations against the forces
of Islamic State.</p>
<p>How can something like this happen and still be almost
entirely ignored by the international community, even,
largely, by the International left? Mainly, it seems, because
the Rojavan revolutionary party, the PYD, works in alliance
with Turkey’s Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), a Marxist guerilla
movement that has since the 1970s been engaged in a long war
against the Turkish state. Nato, the US and EU officially
classify them as a “terrorist” organisation. Meanwhile,
leftists largely write them off as Stalinists.</p>
<p>But, in fact, the PKK itself is no longer anything remotely
like the old, top-down Leninist party it once was. Its own
internal evolution, and the intellectual conversion of its own
founder, <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_%C3%96calan"
title="">Abdullah Ocalan</a>, held in a Turkish island
prison since 1999, have led it to entirely change its aims and
tactics.</p>
<p>The PKK has declared that it no longer even seeks to create a
Kurdish state. Instead, inspired in part by the vision of
social ecologist and anarchist Murray Bookchin, it has adopted
the vision of “libertarian municipalism”, calling for Kurds to
create free, self-governing communities, based on principles
of direct democracy, that would then come together across
national borders – that it is hoped would over time become
increasingly meaningless. In this way, they proposed, the
Kurdish struggle could become a model for a wordwide movement
towards genuine democracy, co-operative economy, and the
gradual dissolution of the bureaucratic nation-state.</p>
<p>Since 2005 the PKK, inspired by the strategy of the <a
href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/02/mexicos-zapatista-rebel-movement-marks-20-years/4284461/"
title="">Zapatista rebels in Chiapas</a>, declared a
unilateral ceasefire with the Turkish state and began
concentrating their efforts in developing democratic
structures in the territories they already controlled. Some
have questioned how serious all this really is. Clearly,
authoritarian elements remain. But what has happened in
Rojava, where the Syrian revolution gave Kurdish radicals the
chance to carry out such experiments in a large, contiguous
territory, suggests this is anything but window dressing.
Councils, assemblies and popular militias have been formed,
regime property has been turned over to worker-managed
co-operatives – and all despite continual attacks by the
extreme rightwing forces of Isis. The results meet any
definition of a social revolution. In the Middle East, at
least, these efforts have been noticed: particularly after PKK
and Rojava forces intervened to successfully fight their way
through Isis territory in Iraq to rescue thousands of Yezidi
refugees trapped on Mount Sinjar after the local peshmerga
fled the field. These actions were widely celebrated in the
region, but remarkably received almost no notice in the
European or North American press.</p>
<p>Now, Isis has returned, with scores of US-made tanks and
heavy artillery taken from Iraqi forces, to take revenge
against many of those same revolutionary militias in Kobane,
declaring their intention to massacre and enslave – yes,
literally enslave – the entire civilian population. Meanwhile,
the Turkish army stands at the border preventing
reinforcements or ammunition from reaching the defenders, and
US planes buzz overhead making occasional, symbolic, pinprick
strikes – apparently, just to be able to say that it did not
do nothing as a group it claims to be at war with crushes
defenders of one of the world’s great democratic experiments.</p>
<p>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? Is the world – and this time most scandalously of all,
the international left – really going to be complicit in
letting history repeat itself?</p>
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