Graphic Novel (2023)

Book Review from the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Blood Got Mixed. Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS. By Janet Biehl. PM Press. 2022. 246pp.

‘Rojava’ (the Kurdish for ‘West’) is the name given by Kurdish nationalists to an area of Northeast Syria largely inhabited by Kurds but also home to Arabs and Assyrian Christians. It is the western part of their aimed-at state of Kurdistan, incorporating areas from Iran in the east, through Iraq and Turkey to Syria in the west, where the majority population is Kurdish-speaking. It is a de facto independent region of Syria, always threatened but not controlled by Turkey and the Syrian government. Currently it is controlled by the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), a vanguard party led by Abdullah Ocalan.

In prison in Turkey (where he still is) Ocalan read and was impressed by the ‘communitarian’ ideas of American social theorist, Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, who was also the long-term partner of Janet Biehl, the author of this book, developed the idea that the basic unit of society should be a decentralised, face-to-face participatory democracy, which he called ‘municipalism’, practising ‘community support and solidarity’ as opposed to the way ‘capitalism has organised society for competition and manipulation’. The PKK adopted this policy for local decision-making while keeping a firm hand on major political decisions and its militia.

Biehl explains, in a chapter entitled ‘Why I’m Here’, how she first visited the region in 2014 and was attracted to it by its claim to be putting into practice Bookchin’s ‘communitarian’ vision. She carried on visiting the region, most recently in 2019, and it is on her personal experiences and knowledge of the region that she gained over her visits that much of this book is based.

The system of district and local councils there is often held up as a model of democratic co-operative organisation by those seeking an alternative both to authoritarian centralised rule and capitalist democracies of one kind or another. The region has since been subject to aggression, sometimes savage, as by Islamic State forces, and by the Turkish military, who have effectively taken over part of the region spreading death and destruction. Despite this, it survives as a kind of communitarian experiment, but constantly teetering on the edge and, as someone has put it, ‘trapped within a spider web of competing Great Powers and local powers’.

Biehl has made a brave effort to make sense of this by producing what is termed a graphic novel (though it is not a novel in the normal sense of fiction or imagined reality) which seeks to represent, in art work, commentary and ‘word bubbles’, the history, social organisation and way of living of the multi-ethnic groups that co-exist and intermingle (hence the sub-title ‘Their Blood Got Mixed’) in this small border area. She does this in a way that displays her admiration for these people while at the same time not being afraid to show the downsides, often bloody, of the path they have taken. A selection of the titles of the 15 chapters into which the book is divided gives an idea of the areas she covers: Islamic State, A Place of Refugees, Women and Men, Economics, Security, Social Ecology, Democracy, Self-Administration.

Her book illustrates both some of the most disturbing things that have happened to the people of the region, part of which she refers to as ‘the long tortured history of Kurds in the Middle East’. But she also describes, with obvious enthusiasm, some of the most positive and optimistic sides of what she considers they have established. So while, for example, on the one hand a piece of her graphic art pictures an ISIS soldier saying ‘The Koran says it’s permitted to take non-Muslim women and girls captive and rape them’, on the other she vividly brings out the joy experienced by the city of Raqqa at being liberated from the terror of the IS caliphate. She also details the suffering of the region’s people when the Turkish army invaded parts of it in 2018 but at the same time waxes rather lyrical about its system of citizens’ assemblies, committees and regional councils and extols Ocalan’s call for ‘gender equality, a cooperative economy, and ethnic and religious inclusiveness’. Yet even the positive side is complex and she is at pains not to portray it without flaws. She expresses a certain degree of doubt about the claim she hears that ‘our revolution is ecological, stateless and of women’, and it is not hard for the reader to join with her in questioning this given that without exception the women we see in her pictures are wearing hijabs, refer to those who’ve died in the fighting there as ‘martyrs’ and seem steeped in religious belief. She also wonders about the reality of the claims that ‘leadership here gets no special treatment … everyone is a link in the chain’, and recognises that the Bookchin model of a decentralised ‘face-to-face democracy’ and ‘an ecological society based on non-hierarchical relations’ may not be being followed as closely as she would like it to be.

A socialist would add that society in the region continues to use a money economy, markets (even though called ‘cooperative markets’) and buying and selling, which are the very essence of the wider capitalist system, and so does not merit the title ‘revolutionary’. So even if the author sees it as a kind of haven attempting to practice ‘communitarian’ principles, it is nevertheless trapped within the capitalist system and forced to rely on ‘protection’ from outside by coercive state regimes at war with one another. Like all other attempts to ‘go it alone’ in the capitalist world, its survival is perilous to say the least.

Small-scale attempts at establishing anything even slightly different (eg, the abolition of money and trade and ‘free consumption’ in some Republican communities during the Spanish Civil War and the ‘horizontal’ social and economic organisation of the Zapatistas in 20th century Mexico) are ultimately likely to fail. For socialists, in fact, as long as the capitalist world system exists, there can be no ‘islands of socialism’. No matter what the wishes or intentions or, no matter how sincere the participants are, eventually the logic and demands of the capitalist state system will prevail.

Howard Moss

The Fall of Rojava (2019)

From the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Amid the horror of the Syrian civil war it had seemed that there was one shining beacon of hope. In the north of Syria Kurdish militants, inspired by the political thought of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, filled the vacuum when the Assadist forces abandoned most of the Kurdish regions, and were combatting and defeating the seemingly unstoppable Islamic State.

The nature of the new regime being created under the protection of the YPG/PYG was greatly attractive to leftists and anarchists. Ocalan in prison had been influenced by the writing of Murray Bookchin and other anarchist-inspired writers and this had shifted the PKK and its allied Kurdish parties away from a rigid and military Stalinism towards a polity which stressed mutualism and participatory democracy.

The vision of this communitarian experiment becoming flesh in the villages and towns of Syrian Kurdistan in the teeth of Islamist obscurantism and Turkish militarist assault galvanised solidarity. Recruits came from all over the world to embattled ‘Rojava’ (the Kurdish word for ‘west’ as the western part of the wider region, spanning several countries, inhabited by Kurds). One volunteer unit renamed themselves the Bob Crow Brigade after the British rail union leader.

At the time voices urging a certain caution tended to be drowned out or were silenced by the sheer enormity and barbarity of the opposition that the Kurdish forces faced. For socialists, as long as the capitalist world system exists, there can be no ‘islands of socialism’. No matter what the wishes or intentions or, no matter how sincere the participants are, eventually the logic and demands of the capitalist state system will prevail.

Rojava, trapped within a spider web of competing Great Powers and local powers, either faced extinction or acceded to this logic and took its own place as a junior partner to one or other of the great military powers. Becoming the armed fist of the US effort against ISIS must have seemed a sure bet; arms, advisors and money poured in, at a time when the democratic Syrian opposition was being starved of support and the rebel cities were being pounded into rubble by Assad and his Russian allies. 

The abandonment of Rojava to Turkey by Trump’s Twitter diplomacy led to an almost ritualised ‘changing of the guard’, as Russian troops took over on patrol where US special forces had been just days before. But this masked a more brutal exchange as Kurdish forces abandoned Syrian villages to Assadist forces and the brutal Mukhabarat secret police.

With America’s betrayal and Turkey threatening its very existence, it is unsurprising that the nascent state of Rojava would be drawn to the siren call of Putin’s Russia. The alliance with Assad may shock a few of their Western cheerleaders, but nationalism, however it justifies itself ideologically, will always be first and foremost a movement for the establishment and defence of a nation within a capitalist world system; Rojava’s principles would always take a second place to this.

D.W.

The Kurdish Question (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The biggest dilemma facing the Kurdish nationalists is that the "Kurdistan" they propose is spread out across five countries — Turkey, Syria, Iraq. Iran and the former Soviet Union — none of which has been prepared to concede any part of their territory to allow the formation of a Kurdish state.

When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany, the allied forces promised the Kurds an independent homeland on condition they remained hostile towards the Ottoman Empire. In 1920, following the collapse of Ottoman rule, the Kurdish nationalists believed they were close to realizing their dream when the Allies began carving up the Middle East at the Treaty of Sèvres. One of the new political entities was to be Kurdistan, a strip of land running from northern Iraq to the southern border of Armenia.

Britain, however, soon realized that giving the Kurds such a homeland would mean losing the oil-rich regions of Mosul and Kirkuk. So a new treaty was drawn up at Lausanne in 1923 which left the Kurds divided up between British-held Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria and the Soviet Union. The Kurdish nationalists, angry at having again been betrayed, began an armed revolt, quickly suppressed by the RAF. Further rebellions in 1931 and 1944 were crushed in a similar way.

Iraq

It would be 1971 before the West found a use for the Kurds again. Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, thought it would be a good idea to encourage the Kurds to revolt against Saddam Hussein, at that time embroiled in a border dispute with the then US-friendly Shah of Iran. Again the Kurds were betrayed when Iraq and Iran signed the 1975 Algiers agreement. The US stopped supplying the Kurds and began supplying Iraq and Iran with the arms with which they put down the Kurdish rebellion.

In 1991, as the Gulf War was ending, it was George Bush's turn to encourage a Kurdish rising, promising them full support if they would attempt to weaken the Baghdad regime. Then came the mother of all betrayals. Saddam came down heavy on the Kurds and the US deserted them, realizing that any successful attempt at founding an independent Kurdistan would in turn encourage Kurds in Syria and Turkey to take on their respective governments, thus upsetting important allies of the West in the Middle East.

After the Iraqi chemical weapon attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, the West made a token protest and then went on to double its credit to Saddam to $350 million. The net result was that Saddam’s offensive against the Iraqi Kurds destroyed 3,000 out of 4,000 villages, leaving upwards of 150,000 dead.

Turkey

If Iraq takes first place in human rights abuses against Kurds, then Turkey, the most pro-Western of the Kurdistan-straddled countries, takes a close second. It is only the past two years that Ankara has lifted the ban on the Kurdish language, games and music. This was hardly an altruistic gesture towards Turkey’s 12 million Kurds (20 percent of the population). Rather it was an attempt to tidy up a human rights record that has always acted as a barrier to Turkish entry into the Common Market.

Between 1983 and 1988, Turkey enjoyed a hot pursuit agreement with Iraq, enabling it to attack alleged PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) villages across the Turkish border. Meanwhile, the Turkish authorities, devoid of logic, also endorsed the Kurdish aim of autonomy in Iraq. The "Marxist-Leninist" PKK views Ankara’s reconciliation with the Iraqi Kurds as an attempt to outflank and isolate the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey itself.

Here we have a further dilemma for the Kurdish nationalists: there is no single set of ideas that they all hold. The PKK leader Abdulah Ocalan believes in the "original” Kurdish homeland, a state that would be the largest in the Middle East. Ocalan’s "Marxism" is indeed ambiguous. As he states himself: "you would need a thousand witnesses to realise what kind of Marxist I am" (Guardian, 28 March 1992). Massoud Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish leader, declares he is "diametrically opposed" to Ocalan. He condemns the PKK method and mentality in fighting for an independent Kurdish state, believing the PKK to have a “self-righteous regard for themselves as the sole representatives of Kurds everywhere" (Guardian. 2 April 1992).

The PKK began their armed struggle in 1984, and evidence has emerged that they have had the backing of Iraq since 1990. However, since the Gulf War ended, the PKK has increased its activity in northern Iraq, taking advantage of a power vacuum created chiefly by the enforcement of the Allied air-exclusion zone protecting Iraqi Kurds from Saddam.

Recently, Peshmerga forces representing Barzani’s KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party) and the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) have also began attacks on PKK strongholds, blaming them for endangering everything they have accomplished since the Gulf War — an "Independent Kurdistan" (unrecognized by the international community) with a parliament and supposed attributes of self- determination.

In March it looked as if the PKK was moving in a new direction when they announced a ceasefire. However, the ceasefire only lasted until May when PKK guerrillas ambushed and shot 30 Turkish soldiers in the town of Bingal. Two weeks later the PKK announced they were reverting to an all-out offensive against Turkey — promising to carry their cause to Turkey as a whole, attacking economic and tourist targets.

In late August this year, Iranian state radio announced that 600 members of the KDP and PUK had been killed in clashes in northern Iraq, giving fuel to the argument that the Kurds are not only a "nation" at war with their neighbours, but that they are also a "nation" at war with themselves.

In mid-August, the PKK leader Abdulah Ocalan was telling the Turkish government that "the situation is suitable for a ceasefire", and urging a federal solution to the Kurdish question (Guardian, 22 August). While the PUK and the KDP were battling it out in northern Iraq, Turkish forces made another attack on a PKK base, killing 250 on August 30, further compounding the situation and incensing PKK rebels.

The PKK and the Kurdish people they claim to represent — many of whom have long been assimilated into the nations Kurdistan straddles — would do well to realize that nationalism is a tumour in the path of socialism, made all the more malignant by the contradictions of capitalism. As an organization claiming to be Marxist the PKK should be aware that workers have no nation and that an armed struggle by a vanguard is no way to bring about Socialism.

The complex rivalries between the capitalist powers have turned the Kurdish people into a reserve army of pawns. As one Guardian writer put it: "The Kurds have all too frequently linked their struggles to the realpolitik of the powerful, serving as useful but dispensable tools in the perennial Middle East game of nations" (9 November 1992). 

John Bissett