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World News See other World News Articles Title: Syrian and Iraqi Kurds: Conflict and Cooperation Syrian and Iraqi Kurds: Conflict and Cooperation Volume XXII Spring Number 1 Till F. Paasche Dr. Paasche is a lecturer in political geography at Soran University in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Historically the role of the Kurds and Kurdish parties in Syria has been shaped by the Syrian government's regional power politics. Within Syria, the status of the Kurdish population ranges from being tolerated to being actively oppressed. At the same time, the Syrian government used the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) as a proxy to wage war in response to Turkey's "water-dam politics" that left Syria vulnerable to droughts. Within this complicated and ever-changing power landscape, the Kurds and the PKK had to adapt their aims and strategies.1 However, with the loosening grip of the Assad regime in 2011, the situation changed, and Syria's Kurds were able to take control of the Kurdish-majority areas. In particular, parties affiliated with the PKK were able to make the most of the situation. In late 2014, the Kurdish-controlled areas, with the exception of the besieged town of Kobane, are some of the few parts of Syria that show relative stability.2 Apart from being an effective force against the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS), the Kurdish-led autonomous government is also the only one offering a political alternative to the repressive Assad regime and the violent Islamic State. However, despite introducing a progressive democratic alternative, the Kurdish areas (now called Rojava, "the West") are widely misunderstood and consequently deprived of international support. In order to understand present day Rojava, it is necessary to go back to the late 1990s and the eviction of Abdullah "Apo" Ocalan, the PKK's leader, from Syria, which ended with his incarceration in Turkey. Based in Syria throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, the PKK was a state-centered, Marxist-Leninist national liberation movement subject to Syria's mercy. However, with his incarceration, Ocalan — and with him the PKK and its affiliates — changed his paradigm from a separatist struggle to a rejection of the nation-state as an institution in favor of "democratic confederalism," a multiethnic and multiconfessional grassroots democracy.3 For today's Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria, and all parties within their coalition, this means not questioning the territorial integrity of the Syrian state. They demand instead an autonomous area in which to practice their own innovative form of democracy. Similarly, in Turkey, the PKK no longer clamors for the break-up of Turkish territory to allow for an independent Kurdish state. This paper therefore highlights that support for the Yekineyen Parastina Gel (YPG, YPJ [Jine] for women) would not be a threat to the territorial integrity of the NATO member state of Turkey. There is no evidence of any action by the YPG that contradicts their official paradigm. However, this change in the PKK's and PYD's understanding is rarely acknowledged in the public discourse about potential allies in the war against the Islamic State. Moving on to the present-day situation in Rojava, Syria, it is argued below that while the PKK, PYD and YPG are indeed strongly interlinked, they are not the same organization. They share a similar political understanding based on Ocalan's writings, and individual members might move between parties. Furthermore, the PKK's armed wing, the Hezen Parastina Gel (HPG), is training the YPG and maybe even fighting with them. Nonetheless, the PYD and PKK are different entities. This fact is again essential when considering possible support. On a simple legal level, the difference matters. Unlike the PKK,4 neither the PYD nor YPG has ever been on any Western list of terror organizations, also unlike the Iraqi-Kurdish Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which the West is heavily supporting.5 This difference is also more important on a deeper level. Due to its history and nature, the PKK has always been an elitist organization that tolerates little or no deviation from its official line. Operating as a guerrilla organization in harsh mountains and with limited communication requires a certain level of uncompromising rigor. The PYD, by contrast, is active in large heterogeneous urban and rural areas where it operates in alliance with various other political parties, religions and ethnicities. The PYD is working within a parliamentary system with other parties and governing over a million people, not all of whom are sympathizers. This forces them into pragmatic compromises that guerrillas in the mountains do not need to make. Recent PYD meetings in Dohuk with opposing parties representing a more Western and Iraqi-Kurdish style of democracy serve as evidence of the ability and willingness of the PYD to compromise.6 Planned elections, something potential Western allies should encourage, will further balance Ocalan's relatively strict paradigm with Western forms of democracy.7 This also affects the status of YPG/YPJ forces as effective proxies on the ground in Syria, which Western powers are currently looking for. The PYD is a political party, while the YPG/YPJ is the armed forces of Rojava. Indeed, the YPG/YPJ is closely tied to the PYD, especially when it comes to the command structure of the armed forces. The YPG/YPJ is supported not only by the PYD but by a variety of parties and individuals. Instead of being seen as a one-party militia, the YPG/YPJ prefers to defend the theory of "democratic confederalism." This includes several other parties (although there might be a large number of locals right now who would support any army that is fighting IS). The PYD more recently signaled its willingness to respect another force besides the YPG/YPJ in Rojava, prehaps an attempt to legitimize democratic rule there. In particular, this refers to a Peshmerga-trained shadow army of the Syrian-Kurdish opposition parties based in an area between Fish Khabour and Dohuk in Iraqi Kurdistan. PARADIGM CHANGE For the first two decades after its founding in 1978, the PKK followed a clear and uncompromising Marxist-Leninist national-liberation agenda.8 The only solution for the "Kurdish question" was a Kurdish state on Turkish territory and nothing else. Our history has shown the following: by leaving Ankara we became a party, by going into the Middle East, we became an army; when we go out into the world, we shall become a state.9 To Ocalan and the guerrillas, the answer to the Kurds' cultural, linguistic and historical oppression had to be a Kurdish state, a demand the Turkish state was not willing to consider. With both sides unwilling to compromise, the fronts hardened, and a civil war erupted that cost the lives of thousands. While national liberation was a dominant discourse among the international left at the time, Ocalan had to adopt the theme of national liberation from Turkey for political and strategic reasons, as he was being hosted in Syria by the Assad regime, keen to control its own Kurdish population. Thus Ocalan had to tread very carefully to ensure that he did not promote any form of pan-Kurdistan. The interest of the Assad regime was to use the PKK as a proxy against Turkey, which was increasingly building dams in an attempt to control Syria's precious fresh-water supply. For the Assad regime, the benefits of causing trouble for a regional competitor outweighed the fact that Syria itself had a substantial Kurdish minority in the north of the country, which it has unremittingly suppressed.10 The deal between the Assad regime and the PKK was to use Syria as a logistical base and headquarters to wage war on Turkey, but to avoid any nationalistic or pan-Kurdish tendencies among the Syrian Kurds. Consequently, in 1996 Ocalan resorted to the problematic position that the Syrian Kurds are a product of Turkey's repression and are refugees originally from Turkey. Although historically not entirely incorrect, Ocalan thereby denounced the fact that the Kurds had found a new home in Syria and that many saw themselves as part of that country.11 While Syrian Kurds could join the ranks of the PKK to fight Turkey, under the PKK they were not allowed to fight injustice within Syria. The PKK attacks on the territorial integrity of one of the earliest NATO member states, in combination with applied military strategies at the time, caused the European Union (EU), NATO, the United States, Canada and many EU member states to declare, or list, the PKK and its direct affiliates as terror groups.12 However, as will be relevant later on, neither the PYD nor the YPG/YPJ appears on any of those lists. By the mid-1990s, the PKK, as an organization, was stuck in an ideological trap. As an ideological relic of the 1970s, the PKK depended on the mercy of the Syrian regime, and it was caught in an internecine fight in its attempt to secure its bases in northern Iraq.13 At the same time, it was engaged in a brutal guerrilla war with Turkey, with neither side able to make concessions without looking weak.14 Turkey could not give up territory without being seen as the loser to a guerrilla organization. The PKK, within their national liberation struggle, could not accept anything less than a state of its own. The PKK could not break with this paradigm; any non-state solution could have been perceived as a threat by their hosts in Syria, who were always wary of their own Kurdish population.15 If the PKK had pushed for any form of Kurdish autonomy within the boundaries of the Turkish state, Syria would have been alarmed, since this is a goal that the Syrian Kurds would have aspired to and claimed for themselves. Ocalan's imprisonment changed the situation, enabling the PKK to devise a way out of this conundrum. In 1998, the deal between the PKK and the Syrians ended with the Turkish-Syrian Adana Agreement, preventing the Syrians from allowing the PKK in their territory. In consequence, Ocalan was arrested after an odyssey through Europe and parts of Africa; he was imprisoned on the Turkish island 0mrali, where he is serving a life sentence.16 As this paper argues, imprisonment, although traumatizing for him and for many Kurds, turned out to be an advantage for the PKK strategically and ideologically.17 Although limited by his incarceration, for the first time he could speak freely without taking Syrian geopolitical views into consideration. This finally enabled him to abandon the nationalist discourse and create the base of a sustainable peace process with Turkey. He, the supreme head of the PKK, was imprisoned; therefore, the PKK no longer had physical headquarters. Removing Ocalan from the landscape of chaotic regional power struggles and ever-changing alliances to an isolated prison island meant that the PKK's ideas could be expressed outside the consideration of territorial allegiances. Indeed, the military command structure was now in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq, and the Turks exerted much effort to fight them there. However, the PKK's real problem, the ideological one-way street, could now be changed, and Ocalan did so immediately. Shortly after his incarceration, Ocalan published a new paradigm that presented solutions for the ideological stalemate with Turkey. At the theoretical core of those guidelines was a democratic solution that later became "democratic confederalism," a theory that not only rejects the nation-state but identifies it as the root cause of many societies' problems. From his prison cell, Ocalan promotes a grassroots democracy that applies to all Kurdish areas, not only the Turkish ones, regardless of national boundaries.18 The applied-governance form of "democratic confederalism" is a bottom-up committee structure including absolute gender equality and a multireligious/multiethnic approach: [T]his is a dynamic political process which needs direct involvement by the sovereign, the people. The people are to be directly involved in the decision-finding process of the society. This project builds on the self-government of the local communities and is organized in the form of open councils, town councils, local parliaments, and larger congresses. The citizens themselves are the agents of this kind of self-government, not state-based authorities. The principle of federal self-government has no restrictions. It can even be continued across borders in order to create multinational democratic structures.19 However, it is essential to understand that, although the new paradigm rejects the nation-state, it tolerates it at the same time. The strict rejection of the state emphasizes the PKK's own ideological turn from a separatist movement. As Ocalan outlines, the practical rejection of the state also means toleration of existing national boundaries, while ignoring them in daily life. Unlike many anarchist theorists who want to abolish the state, the new PKK just wants autonomous life within the different national boundaries. In essence, the new paradigm is no threat to any state's territorial integrity. Having been in an ideological and military stalemate, the new paradigm provides Turkey and the PKK with room for maneuver. In the past, however, this was not possible. The Syrian government would not have tolerated these ideas, as they meant a loss of power and control for any central government. While at first critics might have argued that the new paradigm is nothing but lip service, the peace talks that started in 2013 and the PKK's demands strongly suggest otherwise. Even now, there is no indication of any ongoing separatist claim. Furthermore, thousands of Kurds have suffered and died for the idea of an independent state. Changing the paradigm completely is a step no one took lightly. Discussions with PKK activists and sympathizers about this period of theoretical change revealed that the process, in the early 2000s, was painful for many of those involved.20 The intellectual cadres, however, had seen the changes in the paradigm coming. For them, it was a logical process that had started in 1988 with Ocalan's critique of existing socialism and continued throughout the 1990s. Being embedded in an institutional structure, where politics and their own theory is discussed extensively, most of the cadres understood and accepted the change as the right move. The often poorly educated base of sympathizers accepted the change with an almost religious trust in Ocalan, as one cadre explained in an interview. Having turned towards secularism, so the cadre claimed, Ocalan, to a degree, took on the role of a savior for many, especially in the Kurdish areas of Turkey and Syria. Consequently, everything Ocalan does is being accepted as the right way. Today the PKK presents no threat to Turkey's, or any other nation's, territorial integrity. The new paradigm does indeed imply the weakening of the central government, but not the fundamental structure of the state. However, as in the case of the Turkish-PKK peace talks, the level of autonomy can be negotiated. For the past 10 years, the PKK has not been fighting for a state anymore; it is not a separatist movement. However, many analysts, as well as the official terror lists, still portray the PKK as a separatist organization.21 By being affiliated with the PKK, the Syrian Kurdish resistance to the Islamic State is thus often also perceived as a nationalist and separatist movement. This, as outlined above, is incorrect. First, any potential support for the current Syrian-Kurdish struggle against IS does not mean that forces aiming for the break-up of Turkey are being supported. Second, supporting the PKK affiliates in Syria does not risk the break-up of Syria either. As the next section will show, support for the Syrian Kurds will not create more territorial turmoil. Instead, in conjunction with the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, a far-reaching zone of democracy and stability could be made possible, stretching from the Iraq-Iran border to Aleppo. However, by not acknowledging the change in the PKK paradigm, the only effective fighting force in Syria is weakened, and this plays into the hands of the Islamic State. THE PKK AND ITS SYRIAN AFFILIATES Poster Comment: Assad was wise to use the PKK as a tool against the depredations of the Turks who were damming rivers to control the water supplies in Syria. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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