Posted: 11 Jul 2015 07:27 AM PDT
Unfortunately, ISIS has claimed much of the same area as the Kurdish ethnic homeland as part of its own caliphate which it intends expand over the rest of the Middle-East, much of Africa and Southern Europe. Despite also being mostly Sunni Muslims the Kurd's vision of society could not be more different from that of the bleak and brutal one envisaged and manifested by the extremists and foreign-born fighters of ISIS.
The Kurdish people constitute a stateless nation which stretches over the current borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. The YPG is the armed-wing of the Kurdish People's Union, which is linked to the PKK that is based in the Kurdish region of Eastern Turkey. The PKK, which has been fighting a long guerrilla war with the Turkish government to establish a Kurdish state, is designated a terrorist organisation by the British government and also by many other Western powers.
The PKK is no longer anything remotely like the old-style Marxist-Leninist party it once was. Its own internal evolution, and the intellectual conversion of its own founder, Abdullah Ocalan, held in a Turkish island prison since 1999, have led it to entirely change its aims and tactics. They now say "No we are no Communists."
"When the PKK was founded over 35 years ago, they were first Marxists-Leninists. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, they analysed books and articles by philosophers, anarchists, feminists, communalists, and social ecologists. That is how writers like Murray Bookchin came into their focus. In a PKK Congress 1995, the PKK called the Soviet Communism a phase of “primitive and brutal socialism” and called for a new period in the socialist struggle. By the inspiration of Murray Bookchin the PKK Leader Öcalan, an atheist and ex-muslim, founded the democratic confederalism, which means a “democratic, ecological, gender-liberated society.“
The principles of democratic confederalism are participatory democracy, local autonomy,
gender equality, religious tolerance and an ecological socialist economy. This includes autonomy for all ethnic groups. Democratic Confederalism has as its goal the autonomy of society: in other words, instead of the state governing society, a politicized society manages itself."
The PKK has declared that it no longer seeks to create a Kurdish state based on a centralised government. Instead it is calling for Kurds to create free, self-governing communities, based on principles of direct democracy. In this way, they hope, the Kurdish struggle could become a model for a worldwide movement towards genuine democracy, co-operative economy, and the gradual dissolution of vast bureaucratic governments and corporate power. Under the pressure of war the Kurds have set about achieving this liberation.
Popular assemblies have been created as the ultimate decision-making bodies, councils selected with careful ethnic balance based on the ethnic make-up of each municipality (for example, this could 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 a women's army, the “YJA Star” militia (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.
Right now the YPG needs military support to defeat ISIS and are welcoming Westerners with combat experience to fight alongside them. This provides a much-needed counter-balance to the disgrace of those travelling on British passports to join Islamic State. At home we can learn a lot from the Kurdish resistance to oppressive totalitarian governments and extremist ideologies guided by a constitutional model for regional self-government, by building our own systems of popular self-management that work not only for the majority or minority but for all!
Biji Kurdistan and Free England!
