DD

Dictatorship and
Resistance in Turkey
and Kurdistan

Sarah Parker and Phil Hearse

3/3

Dictatorship and Resistance in

Turkey and Kurdistan
Sarah Parker and Phil Hearse

Published by Left Unity

5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX.
www.leftunity.org
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Printed by helloprint, http://www.helloprint.co.uk/

Contents
1. Foreword by Kate Hudson

2. The government crisis, repression and renewal of war

3. Erdoan s Strategy of Tension

4. War against the Kurds renewed

5. Repression of the opposition in Turkey

12

6. Liberal Islam collapses

16

7. Conflicts in the ruling class and state apparatus

20

8. Elective despotism

22

9. Gezi Park

26

10. The Turn of the PKK

29

11. The PKK shift to confederalism

31

12. The PKK and women

37

13. Turkeys international ambitions

42

14. Plan to destroy the Kurdish Ghettos

48

15. Refugees crisis

50

16. Defending the environment

53

17. Solidarity with the opposition

55

18. Glossary

58

Foreword
Left Unity is an internationalist party that puts solidarity with people in struggle at the heart of its work. We see the problems that
we face in Britain like austerity, racism and war as global,
systemic problems, not ones we can deal with on a national basis. So we actively work to build links, across Europe and beyond, with progressive, left parties and movements to fight for an
alternative and build a better world. As part of the European Left
Party we have a good basis from which to act.
One of the crucial causes today is for solidarity with the struggle
for human rights and democracy for the Turkish and Kurdish people, and we have reached out to link hands with the opposition to
the brutal Erdoan regime in Turkey. We have taken part in actions in solidarity with the HDP party and those under vicious assault for defending democracy and opposing dictatorship.
This pamphlet is a contribution to that developing solidarity. We
hope, through providing expert information and analysis, to help
break the silence about the war on the Kurds, raising awareness
and increasing public understanding of the desperate struggle
that is taking place. Our ultimate goal is to see an end to the war,
to the displacement, and to the abuse of human rights. We will
stand shoulder to shoulder in this struggle until that goal is
achieved.
Kate Hudson
National Secretary
Left Unity
3

1. Turkish government crisis, repression and renewal of war

ombs in the street killing hundreds, military occupation and siege in the
South East killing over 1000, thousands of activists thrown into jail and
brutalised by the jailers, opposition MPs stripped of their parliamentary
immunity and threatened with terrorism charges, newspapers taken over by
the government and hundreds of journalists hounded out of their jobs and the
daily bombardment of Kurdish areas in northern Iraq and Syria.
Welcome to Turkey 2016, where the experiment with liberal Islam has
collapsed. While this crushing of human rights takes place on its borders, the
leaders of the European Union say little or nothing, desperate to secure
Turkish President Erdoans help in stemming the flow of migrants from Syria
going through Turkey.
As this pamphlet was written further evidence of Turkeys road to dictatorship
accumulated. Journalists Can Dndar and Erdem Gl of the
Cumhuriyet newspaper were jailed for 5 yeas 10 months and 5 years
respectively for revealing the truth about Turkish arms shipments to Islamists
in Syria. Can Dndar narrowly survived an assassination attempt outside the
court.
Prime Minister Ahmed Davutolu was forced to resign by increasingly
authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoan and replaced with the even
more compliant Binali Yildirim. On 20 May the Turkish parliament voted to
remove the immunity of more than 100 MPs, as a prelude to launching
prosecutions against them. And on 30 May Erdoan made a frightening
speech calling on Turkish women to abandon birth control and have at least
three children each.
Whats going on? How did all this happen?
In the June 2015 general election something amazing happened. The HDP
the Peoples Democratic Party, an alliance based on supporters of Kurdish
rights, leftist groups, womens organisations and other oppressed groups in
Turkey - got 14% of the vote and 80 MPs. By doing this the HDP burst through
the 10% threshold needed to get MPs elected, a figure set deliberately high
to keep out militant opposition forces.
This was a major breakthrough for pro-Kurdish forces and the left. It also
meant that Turkey faced a hung parliament, putting the continued rule of
Erdoans AKP (Justice and Development Party) in question. Erdoan had

The moment the first bomb detonated at the October 2015 HDP-led
peace rally. Many suspected government agents had planted the bomb.
been hoping not just for the AKP to return to power, but also a big majority to
ensure a new constitution and massively increased presidential power - so
he would have to pay even less attention to political opposition and civil
society in general.
To no ones very great surprise Erdoan effectively overruled the electorates
decision and asked them to try again by calling another election in November.
Exactly what this strategy meant was shown less than a month later when a
socialist youth delegation in the southern town of Suru, close to the Turkish
border, was bombed killing 32 people. The regime immediately blamed
Islamic State (IS) because the delegation was about to make a solidarity visit
to the besieged mainly Kurdish town Koban just over the border in Syria to
help with reconstruction, but this account was widely disbelieved. Many
people in Turkey suspected that the regime itself was behind the bombing,
whether it was carried out by ISIS, fascists or secret state agents.
Erdoan immediately capitalised declaring a national emergency caused by
terrorism. The November election was to be fought around the issue of
terrorism and the need for a strong hand to ensure public safety. In adopting
the strategy Erdoan was putting in place what Naomi Klein has called the

Shock Doctrine, using the publics disorientation following massive

collective shocks wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters - to achieve
control1. Signs of the regimes intentions were already evident during the
election campaign itself, when rallies and more than a hundred HDP offices
were attacked by supporters of the regime. Erdoan also wanted to appeal
to strident Turkish nationalism and appear as its main defender.

2. Erdoan s Strategy of Tension

he Suru bombing was followed up on 10 October 2015 by two massive

blasts killing 90 people at a peace rally in Ankara led by the HDP. Erdoan
and the AKP leadership immediately blamed the Kurdish Workers Party
(PKK), the leading party of the Kurdish national movement that has waged a
lengthy guerrilla war against the Turkish state (some 29 years in total, 22
years fighting and 7 years on ceasefire). This accusation was transparent and
absurd, but grist to the mill of the strategy of tension2 being used to fix the
November election.
Erdoans strategy worked, at least temporarily. In the November 2015
election the vote for his AKP party went up from 46% in June to 49.5% - from
not being a working majority in June to effectively a majority in November.
The main factor in this was the decline of nearly 4% in the vote of the fascist
MHP (Nationalist Action Party). In other words under the pressure of the
atmosphere of crisis created, a section of the fascist vote came over to the
AKP to help ensure order. In the atmosphere of threat, crisis and intimidation
the HDP lost some of its vote, but nonetheless still managed to cross the 10%
threshold and re-elected 59 of its 80 deputies. Whether they will be allowed
to function in parliament is doubtful (see below).
Erdoans strategy of tension was maintained in January when 10 tourists,
nine of them German, were killed at a tourist site in Istanbul. Erdoans then
Prime Minister Davutolu now pushed out for lacking 100% subservience

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin 2008

The strategy of tension (Italian: strategia della tensione) is a theory that
Western governments during the Cold War used tactics that aimed to divide,
manipulate, and control public opinion using fear, propaganda,
disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and false
flag terrorist actions in order to achieve their strategic aims
2

to the president blamed ISIS. The AKP is trying to consolidate and extend
power by attacking on several fronts simultaneously. These include:

Striking at Kurdish guerrilla forces in northern Iraq and Syria.

Savage military assault on rebel Kurdish towns and cities in south

east Turkey.

A wide ranging attack on civil rights throughout Turkey, especially

the imprisonment of dozens of journalists, the closing down of
opposition in the press and broadcast media, particularly savage
attacks on the HDP party, making it very difficult for the party to
function, and the harassment and prosecution of academics who in
January 2016 signed the statement of refusal to participate in the
massacres in the south eastern cities and calling for peace.

3. War against the Kurds renewed in Turkey, Syria and Iraq

n late June 2015 a NATO meeting held at Turkeys request gave the green
light to a bombing campaign against terrorists across the southern borders
in Syria and Iraq. The terrorists meant not only the Islamic State (ISIS) in
Syria but also the PKK in its Iraqi mountain redoubt of Qandil.

For show, Erdoans airforce carried out a few symbolic raids against ISIS,
but in reality the aerial offensive was against the Kurdish fighters in Northern
Iraq.
Turkey is unable to carry out bombing raids against Kurdish forces in Northern Syria because the airspace if effectively controlled either by the Russians
or the Americans. But in addition to attacking the Kurds in south east Turkey
and northern Iraq, they are strongly supporting Islamist forces fighting the
Kurds in Syria and have shelled them across the border.
The hypocrisy of this situation is staggering. The United States and others
have praised the Kurdish fighters as the most effective force in the battle
against ISIS in Syria, but these fighters are the victims of Turkish attacks
sanctioned by NATO.
From early September 2015 many thousands of troops were deployed to attack Kurdish towns and cities in south eastern Turkey, particularly Cizre, the

Sur area of Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of Turkish Kurdistan, irnex, Silopi, Gever and Nusaybin. The aim of this was to crush the attempt by municipalities to declare self-rule and to crush those militants defending self-rule.

Kurdish youth build barricades in the Sur district of Diyarbakir

Starting in September 2015 supporters of the pro-PKK Patriotic Revolutionary
Youth Movement (YDG-H) dug ditches and put up barricades to defend the
self-governing areas, but they were met with a massive military assault, using
tanks, artillery, mortars and heavy machine guns against residential areas.
More than 1000 Kurds have been killed and up to 500,000 displaced by the
governments brutal assault.
According to Jesse Rosenfeld, one of only two Western journalists to get access to the besieged area:
This is not Syria, nor is it Iraq. It is Turkey, Americas NATO partner, now in
the throes of a rapidly expanding war against its Kurdish population in the
countrys southeast Now, on the streets of the de facto Kurdish capital of
Diyarbakir, the example the YPG has set of liberating Kurdish territory by
force in Syria is increasingly popular. Turkeys siege and bombardment of the
district of Sur, lasting more than 90 days, has become a driving force in this
changing attitude. Reports of civilians trapped by the fighting and stories of

women fighters killed in action being stripped naked and left in the streets to
rot for weeks have incensed the population. The few dozen guerrillas still
fighting to hold off Turkish security forces have become a symbol of inspiration to many Kurds. 3
In late May 2016 Kurds around the world mobilised to try to prevent a civilian
massacre in Nusaybin. Following the announcement by the Civil Defence
Units (YPS), the Kurdish militia fighting Turkish state forces in the besieged
town, that they had withdrawn from the embattled district after 72 days of
heroic resistance, state forces continued shelling civilian neighbourhoods in
the area. Turkish television on 26 May showed 40 Kurdish civilians in the
besieged district taken into custody by the Turkish army and claimed they
were terrorists surrendering. Given the many massacres committed by Turkish state forces, these captives were in great peril.
In the states dirty war against the Kurds in the 1990s, hundreds of Kurdish
villages were destroyed by the military. Hundreds of thousands flooded into
the cities to escape the repression. The new confrontations with the regimes
police and soldiers are in many of those cities. The sons and daughters of
those forced to flee are now leading the resistance. In the face of overwhelming odds, the fighting died down in the spring of 2016 but intense fighting
continued in Nusaybin until May 20 when the YPG fighters withdrew.
The brutal actions of the Turkish armed forces in the south east of the country
have attracted criticism from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein. He said he had received reports of unarmed civilians including women and children being deliberately shot by
snipers, or by gunfire from tanks and other military vehicles.
There also appears to have been massive, and seemingly highly disproportionate, destruction of property and key communal infrastructure including
buildings hit by mortar or shellfire, and damage inflicted on the contents of
individual apartments and houses taken over by security forces, he said.
There are also allegations of arbitrary arrests, and of torture and other forms
of ill-treatment, as well as reports that in some situations ambulances and
medical staff were prevented from reaching the wounded.

http://www.thenation.com/article/turkey-is-fighting-a-dirty-war-against-itsown-kurdish-population/)

Maps showing Kurdish controlled enclaves of northern Syria. Lower map also
shows shows Kurdish towns of Suruc, Nusaytun and Cizre on Turkish side of the
border, all savagely attacked by Turkish forces.
Most disturbing of all, the High Commissioner said, are the reports quoting
witnesses and relatives in Cizre which suggest that more than 100 people
were burned to death as they sheltered in three different basements that had
been surrounded by security forces.
In the conflict in Syria, Turkey has played a pernicious role. In September
2014 ISIS launched an attack on the north Syrian Kurdish city of Koban,
centre of the Koban canton. The population of dozens of towns and villages
in the area was assaulted by ISIS, killing many and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee across the border into Turkey. Koban was surrounded on three
sides by ISIS and the fourth side faced the Turkish border.

10

The Turkish army along the border prevented aid and Kurdish reinforcements
going across to Koban, although some Kurdish fighters managed to get into
the city to join the YPG fighters. The Turkish state has no desire to see Kurdish fighters being successful in the fight against ISIS. There is considerable
evidence that the AKP regime has bought oil from ISIS and facilitated the flow
of arms and fighters across its border to reinforce ISIS, including during the
siege of Koban. In October 2014 protests erupted in various cities in Turkey
regarding the lack of support for the Syrian Kurds from the Turkish government.
Protesters were met with teargas and water cannon, and initially 12 people
were killed. Thirty-one people were killed in subsequent rioting. Erdoan said
that he was not ready to launch operations against ISIS in Syria unless it was
also against the Bashar al-Assad government.
In January 2015 the Kurdish resistance was able to launch a major offensive
aimed a retaking Koban, and this was backed up by units of the Free Syrian
army and by air strikes against ISIS launched by American planes. By the
end of March 2015 Koban had been largely cleared of ISIS fighters by the
YPG, which also began to reconquer the outlying villages in the canton.
In June 2015 ISIS retaliated with car bomb attacks and a four-day massacre
of Syrian Kurds in Koban and in the nearby village of Barkh Butan at the
same time, killing a total of some 223 people.
The resistance to ISIS in Koban was heroic and it cost the YPG hundreds of
dead. Among those who did not celebrate were Erdoan and his government,
petrified by the prospect of a self-governing Kurdish enclave in northern Syria
that would act as a bastion of support for the Kurds in Turkey itself.
It is just this prospect that will open up if Kurdish forces are able to link up the
three cantons in northern Syria which have a majority Kurdish population.
The Syrian Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party, close to the PKK) and its
military wing the YPG have kept their pledge to defend their area if attacked.
They are currently still defending the three majority Kurdish and mixed selfdeclared autonomous cantons of Afrin in the west (under heavy attack by Al
Nusra, and Ahrar Al Sham forces backed of course by Turkey), Koban and
Jazira (Qamishlo and Hasakah), and the isolated but mainly Kurdish area of

11

Sheikh Maqsud in Aleppo and trying to cut ISISs supply lines from Turkey
going east via Raqqa and Shengal to Mosul.

4. Repression of Opposition in Turkey

fter Erdoans Justice and Development Party (AKP) was deprived of a
majority in the June 2015 election, the government struck out against the
HDP and its base in the Kurdish areas of south east Turkey, making it hard
for HDP to mobilise. Still, the HDP was able to hold onto its parliamentary
fraction in November as well, albeit on a diminished basis (10% of the popular
vote), thus helping to keep alive the spirit of the left wing Kurdish movement
(as at Koban in Syria) and that of the Gezi Park uprising of 2013.

The government routinely charges that the opposition is promoting terrorism.

The likely government response to HDP electoral success was already seen
during the election campaign. Some 400 HDP offices were attacked on September 8 by mobs by the fascist MHP (Nationalist Action Party), the Ottoman
Hearths (Osmanl Ocaklar) a rightwing group close to the AKP and
maybe government agents as well. The government launched waves of mass
arrests to attempt to hobble all opposition groups. In fact the mass arrest of
HDP activists was already underway in 2012 and 2013, by which time the
number of arrests was over 9000. More arrests and more attacks on HDP
offices came after the June elections and are continuing up to the present.
According to HDP honorary chairman Erturul Krk:
The AKP had believed that, no matter what, the Kurds were conservative
and pro-Erdoan, now they saw they had been wrong. For Erdoan this was
a disaster; it meant the whole world was falling down. Now it was war. They
instantly began attacking the party thousands of HDP activists were arrested directly after the elections Government-sponsored mobs targeted 400
HDP offices in one night. This was when it became clear. It was a kind of
Kristallnacht.4

Kristallnacht (English: Crystal Night) was a pogrom against Jewish homes and
businesses in Germany and Austria on the night of 9/10 November 1938
carried out by Nazi SA stormtroopers and civilians. Taking its name from the
smashed glass of shop windows, hundreds of Jewish people were killed and
injured.

12

Erdoan used everything at his disposal - force, money, the intelligence services, street gangs, everything they even blamed the massacres of HDP
members on HDP and the PKK. They started a full-scale war in the southeast5
At the same time, mass casualty attacks began to occur at HDP rallies. In
Suru, Diyarbakir, and even Ankara, scores of people were killed in attacks
by reactionary forces. The Turkish army then bombed PKK positions in the
Qandil Mountains on the border between Turkey and Iraq. According to
Erturul Krk: We were unable to keep the mass movement going. We
were under attack by suicide bombers, state-hired thugs, the media,
everything.
Erdoan announced new elections would be held in November, but the HDP
was hamstrung in its ability to campaign. The party suspended all plans for
public rallies, and HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas refused to appear on television. The new wave of repression has been extended to Turkish intellectuals and academics, after over 1400 of them signed a statement by Academicians for Peace against the repression of the Kurds. The petition also featured a number of well-known intellectuals of the left outside Turkey like
Noam Chomsky and Slavoj iek.
The petition began with these words: The Turkish state has effectively condemned its citizens in Sur, Silvan, Nusaybin, Cizre, Silopi, and many other
towns and neighbourhoods in the Kurdish provinces to hunger through its use
of curfews that have been ongoing for weeks. It has attacked these settlements with heavy weapons and equipment that would only be mobilised in
wartime.
As a result, the right to life, liberty, and security, and in particular the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment protected by the constitution and international conventions have been violated.
It concluded: We, as academics and researchers working on and/or in Turkey, declare that we will not be a party to this massacre by remaining silent
and demand an immediate end to the violence perpetrated by the state.
5

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/rise-and-falter-turkeys-hdp1149857874

13

In response, the Erdoan regime detained dozens of academic signatories

at Turkish universities on support of terrorism charges. While most were
soon released, the signatories are being threatened with violence by nationalists and in many cases are being fired from their jobs. Many are also being banned from travel abroad.
The repression has been particularly harsh against journalists. Control over
the media and clamping down on any criticism, even on social networks, has
been a significant feature of Erdoans rule.
According to Amnesty International:
The government exerted immense pressure on the media, targeting media
companies and digital distribution networks, and singling out critical journalists, who were then threatened and physically attacked by often unidentified
assailants. Mainstream journalists were fired after criticising the government.
News websites, including large swathes of the Kurdish press, were blocked
on unclear grounds by administrative orders aided by a compliant judiciary.
Journalists were harassed and assaulted by police while covering stories in
the predominantly Kurdish southeast.6
Erdoan has dealt with the media either by intimidating owners into sacking
journalists, or by directly taking over the media outlets concerned. In March
2016 the regime took over the widely read Daily Zaman, which is now produced under the watchful eye of dozens of soldiers that occupy its building,
and has now come out as a pro-regime paper! The important Cihan news
agency has also been taken over. And now journalists Dndar and Erdem
Gl have been jailed. Amnesty International says:
In the six months to March, the Minister of Justice gave permission for 105
criminal prosecutions for insulting President Erdoan under Article 299 of the
Penal Code.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-centralasia/turkey/report-turkey/

14

There have also been attacks on foreign journalists, as the AKP regime tries
to prevent the outside world witnessing its repression. Diyarbakir-based
Dutch journalist Frederike Geerdink was acquitted of making propaganda for
the PKK in April, but detained and deported after covering a story in the
southeastern province of Yksekova in September.
In August 2015, three Vice News journalists were questioned by police after
covering clashes between the PKK and security forces, then charged with
assisting a terrorist organization and remanded in pre-trial detention. British
citizens Jake Hanrahan and Philip Pendlebury were released and deported
after eight days; Mohammed Rasool, an Iraqi Kurdish journalist, was released
in January after 131 days in detention.
There seems little doubt that the AKP government is intent on making it legally impossible for the HDP to function. On 19 May the Turkish parliament
decided on the initiative of the AKP to remove the immunity of up to a third
of MPs, including 59 HDP deputies, 51 from the Kemalist Republican Peoples Party and 27 from the ruling AKP, because of their alleged support for
terrorism. There will be immediate charges against 46 HDP deputies for supporting a terrorist organisation the PKK. There are likely to be ongoing
mass show trials. The objective of de-legitimising the opposition also serves
the AKPs electoral objectives: while the trials could takes many months, the
accused MPs will be ejected from parliament and banned from standing for
public office again and the AKP hopes to be able to won most of the byelections caused, further strengthening its total political domination.
A reign of repression and fear has descended on Turkey targeting in particular the HDP and the Kurds in the South East. While the adverse publicity
internationally will do nothing for Turkeys ambition to join the European Union, the AKP government has rightly judged that the European Union will do
little or nothing so long as they are dependent on Erdoans government to
stem the flow of migrants crossing from Turkey into Greece. But by opting for
repression the AKP government has stored up massive long-terms problems.
Its much vaunted liberal Islam has collapsed and with it the illusions of all
those who thought there might be a democratic Islamic alternative to the
kind of repressive Islam on display across the Middle East, and in particular
the repressive heartlands of the two main confessions in Islam Saudi Arabia
and Iran.

15

5. Erdoans dictatorship: liberal Islam collapses

he overthrow of the Shah of Iran and its replacement with an Islamic regime at the end of the 1970s delivered a massive shockwave to the Middle East and Western Asia. Since that time secular, non-Islamic regimes have
become something of a rarity in the region. As the old Turkish secularist
parties ran out of steam in the 1990s, and as Turkey shared its neighbours
corruption, economic stagnation and authoritarianism, the issue became
whether Turkish Islamism could take over the government. After several
failed attempts in the 1990s, finally the AKP came to power in 2002 and
Erdoan became prime minister in 2003.
The AKP was able to win this victory by winning political influence way beyond traditional Islamist supporters. It did this on the basis of a unique political
profile and programme with which it attempted both to win the support of the
pro-Islamist masses, many of them poor, and give reassurance to the Turkish
capitalist class and its Western allies. The fundamental planks of the new
outlook were:

Political liberalism, pushing back the power of the armed forces and
judges, and allowing pluralism in public expression and debate.
A pro-Western outlook in which Turkey would be a loyal member of
NATO and step up the process of Turkey becoming part of the
European Union while still adhering to the nationalism of the previous Kemalist7 ideology.
While adhering to Islam and promoting it, no compulsion and flexibility on social matters, for example alcohol and wearing the veil.
Most important of all, support for American/British style economic liberalism and a pro-business attitude above everything else. Most importantly it sought to win over sections of the middle and capitalist
classes by offering a Western-style consumer culture.

The government parties before the AKP were all followers of the nationalist
and secular ideology of Mustapha Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, founder of the
modern Turkish state, hence Kemalist. Political Islam has been in persistent
conflict with Kemalism, represented today by the Republican Peoples Party
(CHP), but also strong in the armed forces, judiciary, civil service etc. Kemalism
is a specific form of strident bourgeois nationalism.

16

It is no surprise that this posture of the AKP government won widespread

support in Western business and political circles. Here was the possibility of
being Islamist, but only moderately so, and being business friendly and proWestern at the same time. A win-win situation for American and European
capitalism!
Erdoan was rewarded when in June 2004 US president George Bush Jnr
visited Turkey, and made a speech at the Bosphorus Bridge in which he
warmly welcomed the AKP government and supported their claim to become
part of the EU. He said: All of us have been impressed by the changes that
have happened in Turkey. I look forward to Turkey taking its rightful place if
this progress continues.
In an overt nod in the direction of liberal Islam he said: And I assure you
when I speak about the blessings of liberty, coarse videos and crass commercialism are not what I have in mind. There is nothing incompatible between democratic values and high standards of decency."
In other words you can have a consumerist culture, but not the crude, glitzy,
celebrity obsessed culture we have in the West, but a decent Islamist consumerism, high definition television and big cars plus (democratic) political
and social Islam! Everyones a winner once again.
So why did this project for liberal Islamism eventually go into crIsis? Of
course its liberalism always veered between the very partial and the rhetorical. AKP appeals to democracy have been, outside of a few brief interludes,
solely aimed at preventing intervention by its opponents in the military and
judiciary, and not part of the normal practice of the state which has remained
repressive.
After the financial crIsis of 2001 Turkey implemented an IMF-designed restructuring process, imposing strict controls on government spending. Many
markets were de-regulated according to neoliberal diktats, and foreign investment and tourists flooded in. A giant construction boom ensued and the Turkish middle class in particular got bigger and richer. The AKP picked up the
kudos from economic growth. But after a decade the regime started to suffer
from the contradictions inherent in its brand of neoliberal Islamism.
First you cant have neoliberalism without sections of the masses generally
the workers and rural poor suffering. The past thirteen years have been a

17

period of breakneck economic growth in Turkey: GNP has expanded from

$230bn to $788bn, driven by the AKPs export-oriented free-market strategy
and huge inflows of foreign investment. While financialisation, land speculation and overseas trade have generated big fortunes for a minority of capitalists and a section of the upper middle class, workers real wages have declined significantly and the gap between rising manufacturing productivity and
wage growth has widened.
At the same time, a wave of rural-to-urban migration, starting from the 1990s
- with peasants pushed from their land by the elimination of rural subsidies,
as well as the internal displacement of more than two million Kurds from the
countryside - has accelerated the growth of a vast informal proletariat. By
2011, an amazing 55 per cent of the labour force was working in the informal
sector. This dispossessed population has boosted the level of structural poverty in the cities. A sharp class divide between the well-heeled urban upper
and middle classes, on the one hand, and the growing informal working class
on the other, has emerged.
A big growth of higher education, has not produced much in the way of high
qualification jobs: nearly 20 per cent of graduates between the ages of 20
and 30 are unemployed or under-employed as part of the vast informal proletariat.
The real situation for many workers was shown by the Soma mining disaster
in 2014. More than three hundred miners died there. A fire had broken out in
the local coal mines. One of the pits was engulfed with carbon monoxide. It
was Turkey's worst ever industrial accident some of the 301 miners who died,
were burnt alive, others suffocated. The mine, while still technically state
owned, was leased to a private company in 2005. As the owners sought to
reduce the cost of production - the Soma CEO boasting that he had lowered
it from $140 a tonne to less than $24 - safety standards were compromised.
A cosy relationship between government officials and mine executives meant
problems were ignored. Just two weeks before the disaster, the parliamentary
opposition had called for an investigation into accidents at that very mine but the AKP rejected it. When Erdoan visited Soma in the aftermath of the
disaster he was booed by relatives of the dead and others and his bodyguards attacked some of the crowd. Erdoans statement that death and injury were an inevitable part of a coal miners life illustrated his regimes hostile
attitude to workers and especially trade unionists.

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Soma shone an uncomfortable light on Turkey's terrible record of workplace

deaths: the highest in Europe and among the worst in the world. Labour rights
specialist Asli Odman told the BBC than an emphasis on Turkey's economic
development at any cost is the problem. Workers are paying the price of deregulation and subcontracting, as well as legal restrictions on their right to
organise. Another major blow to workers rights and living standards comes
from the subcontracting system, which has been heavily promoted in recent
years. Even state institutions are increasingly outsourcing to subcontractors,
who pay lower wages to non-unionised workers. The practice has expanded
so much that even parliament, supposed to lead efforts to protect labour
rights, has outsourced many of its own needs, such as cleaning and catering. About 600,000 workers are officially employed today in the subcontracting system, but this excludes workers in the huge informal sector.
The negative effects on the workers and poor of the headlong rush into neoliberal development is illustrated by the gentrification process in Istanbul, the
metropolis and centre of the countrys economic growth. According to David
Lepeska:
Many locals feel overwhelmed and shunted aside by the ongoing makeover,
which they view as focusing on profit for the privileged while ignoring the majority. They see disappearing green spaces, overpriced apartments, forced
evictions, endless commutes, vast corruption and in contrast to America
the sudden ubiquity of that 1980s retail relic, the shopping mall. 8
It was the governments proposal to flatten Gezi Park and Taksim Square to
build a shopping mall that led to the giant pro-democracy movement in 2013,
discussed below.
6. Conflicts in the ruling class and state apparatus

radually it became clear that sections of the AKP leadership, including

Erdoans own family, were using their position in the state apparatus to
enrich themselves. Police in Istanbul in 2013 used Erdoan's absence on a

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/02/istanbul-gentrificationforce-locals-angry-luxury-hotels-turkey

19

foreign trip to arrest around 40 AKP officials and charge them with corruption.
The government retaliated by conducting a purge in the police force; sacking
dozens of police chiefs, most notably Hseyin apkn, the Chief of Police in
Istanbul. More than 400 serving police officers were fired in Ankara alone.
The Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice also changed their regulations, making security forces inform their seniors of their actions at all
times. Five prosecutors who earlier had helped Erdoan purge army generals
(see below) were also fired.
These events may be connected to a more protracted fight that the AKP has
been waging against remaining Kemalist strongholds in the army and judiciary, but also the Peoples Republican Party (CHP), the main opposition party
and the main survivor of the pre-AKP era Kemalist political establishment.
Between 2007 and 2011 more than 270 leading officers in the army and air
force have been sacked or imprisoned in a series of purges.
Using the courts and a compliant judiciary to attack his opponents is a trick
that Erdoan learned well from the old Kemalist state apparatus. He himself
was briefly imprisoned after the armys 1997 postmodern coup when it
forced out the government by the threat of a coup, not by actually sending
soldiers into the streets.
The AKP has utilised Islamic populism to posture as the champion of the
interests of the popular classes, while pursuing an orthodox neoliberal, proEU, pro-NATO line (despite the tensions with the US over the Islamic State
and Syria). It portrays the Kemalist political establishment - chiefly composed
of the Republican Peoples Party (CHP) and its media outlets - as representing the old economic, social and military elite.
The AKPs onslaught against its Kemalist rivals escalated into a regime-wide
purge during the 2000s, with the Erdoan government initiating vast police
and juridical operations against its opponents, jailing journalists, academics,
politicians and army officers in the infamous Ergenekon trials.
These trials, which started in 2008 and finished in 2013, targeted hundreds
of army officers and other state officials politically reactionary nationalists accused of creating a network to bring down the AKP government and of
carrying out terrorist attacks. It is people like these who are referred to as the

20

deep state, politically ultra-hostile to Kurdish nationalism and the left, but
also because of their Kemalist background hostile to the AKP.
Given the background of those accused, it is quite possible that there was
some in the accusations of them plotting against Erdoan, but nearly
everyone agreed that the court proceedings were farcical and politically
motivated. In a surprise judgement on 21 April 2016 Turkeys Supreme Court
overturned all the convictions on the grounds that the existence of a plot had
not been proved; a re-trial may ensue.9
The democratic part of liberal Islam, if it ever amounted to much, was uneven
and short lived. In the decade following the AKPs rise to power the state
repeatedly attacked journalists, Kurdish political forces, left wingers and
Kemalist opponents. By 2009-10 it was obvious that the old police station
beatings and jail tortures were back in business.
In 2010, the AKP pushed through a referendum allowing it to rewrite the constitution. This was presented as a big democratic reform and its main provisions were to curb the power of the army and the judiciary, as well as imposing new limitations of trade unionism (for example compulsory arbitration
by the government for state employees).
The following year, Erdoan won his third electoral victory, putting him in an
even stronger position. The AKP government became more openly authoritarian and socially conservative: liberal Islam went in to reverse. Pressures
on organised labour increased, both through privatisation and subcontracting,
and direct political repression. Legislation was introduced limiting womens
rights, including tightening the law on abortion - legal in Turkey since the
1980s - and requiring doctors to inform the families of pregnant women about
their pregnancy.
Honour killings of women increased fourteen-fold between 2002 and 2009,
alongside the killings of transgendered people. The AKP also introduced
stricter regulation of the sale of alcohol. Erdoan himself has made repeated
attacks on the consumption of alcohol and on public displays of affection between couples. The Sunni Islamist credentials of the regime were being polished, and this was reflected in an open support for the Islamist rebels in
neighbouring Syria as Erdoan sought a wider role as an Islamic leader of
the whole region.
9

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36099889

21

7. Elective despotism: how the corrupt Erdoan-AKP state works

n May 2016 Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutolu was effectively purged
for being insufficiently enthusiastic about his presidents authoritarianism.
Erdoan is in the process of building a dictatorship which is not just about
total AKP dominance, but is also an extremely personalised state, based on
the dominance of the great leader himself. How is this achieved?

As discussed above Erdoan has been assiduous in closing down all centres
of opposition within the state apparatus and to this end hundreds of judges,
army officers and journalists have been fired. But the core of his operation is
personal patronage and dependence. This takes place at two levels. First
there is a network of trusted advisors and officials who are the real power, a
shadow state. They are the real policy makers and everything they decide
has to go through Erdoan. Ministers who are not in the inner circle have to
wait to be told what their policy is, once Erdoan and his magic circle have
discussed it.
Second, all major government contracts and licenses have to go through
Erdoan, and he doles them out to cronies and AKP loyalists. There are many
rumours that Erdoan and his family have benefitted from the kickbacks of
this patronage.
There have been repeated corruption scandals, some of which are ongoing.
One of Erdoans sons is under investigation in Italy for money laundering, in
connection with a 2013 corruption scandal that rocked the Turkish political
establishment.
The Bologna public prosecutor opened a file on 35 year-old Bilal Erdoan
after a key opponent of the Turkish regime officially denounced the presidents son alleging he brought in large amounts of money to Italy last September to be laundered.

22

The Erdogan personality cult is well under way

In 2013 Bilal Erdoans name surfaced in a massive graft scandal that hit the
AKP and senior government officials. Turkish prosecutors said it involved an
alleged money laundering scheme designed to bypass United States-led
sanctions on Iran. They ordered the arrest of 52 people in December 2013
and went on to accuse 14 people including several family members of cabinet ministers of bribery, corruption, fraud, money laundering and gold
smuggling.
Erdoan responded by claiming that a coup was under way and by dismissing
even more prosecutors, judges and police officials.
The subsequent release on YouTube of audio recordings in which President
Erdoan was allegedly heard telling his son to urgently get rid of tens of millions of dollars ignited a political firestorm. Erdoan claimed the recordings
were falsified but experts have contradicted this.
But scandal refuses to go away, particularly because of the involvement of
US prosecutors in tracking down Iran sanctions busting that Erdoan and his
entourage seem to have been involved in. In March 2016 Reza Zarrab, a

23

Turkish-Iranian business partner of Erdoan, was arrested by the FBI while

on holiday in Miami on suspicion of sanctions busting.
According to Zvi Bar'el: Zarrab, a gold trader, is suspected of brokering
blockbuster deals between the regime in Tehran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and international corporations. He transferred the sums through Turkish banks. He is also responsible for creating a gold route: facilitating the
transfer of the precious metal from Turkey to Iran, in exchange for oil and gas
from the latter, in order to evade American sanctions, which pertained to cash
but not gold until the United States closed off this route, too.
Zarrab was arrested in Turkey in 2013 on suspicion of bribing senior government officials, among them the sons of three top ministers. Erdoans son
Bilal was also involved in the affair. The bribery was apparently necessary to
allow money transfers via Turkeys Halk Bank, whose general manager was
arrested after millions of dollars stuffed in shoe-boxes were discovered in his
home.
The arrest of Zarrab, who had lived in particularly comfortable conditions,
stirred a massive political storm in Turkey, whose echoes have yet to subside.
Erdoan has blamed the prosecutors and police commissioner in Istanbul, as
well as hundreds of police officers, judges and prosecutors of conspiracy to
overthrow the government. Most of them were fired or transferred to other
positions while Zarrab was released and even received an award for export
performance.10
Previously, in December 2013, Turkish police had raided homes of allegedly
corrupt officials, including two belonging to the families of the ruling elite. In
the course of the investigation they confiscated $17.5 million in cash, money
allegedly used for bribery: $4.5 million was found at the residence of Sleyman Aslan, the director of state-owned Halkbank, and $750,000 at the home
of Bar Gler, son of the former minister of the interior.
According to Berivan Orucoglu: Erdoans wrath over the scandal was so
all-encompassing that it even drew in Francis Ricciardone, then U.S. Ambas-

10

http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-1.711273

24

sador to Turkey who was accused publicly of engaging in provocative actions. Though the initial sweep had yielded enormous amounts of highly incriminating evidence, in May of last year officials announced that they were
closing the graft probe. Meanwhile, the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutors Office rejected appeals filed against an earlier decision to dismiss corruption
and bribery charges. The farce continued last month, when the Prosecutors
Office decided to return money seized from the homes of Aslan and Gler with interest.On January 5, to no ones surprise, the parliamentary Corruption Investigation Commission decided to quash the cases. Just to heighten
the absurdity, the commission also declared that it would soon reconvene for
the purpose of destroying the incriminating audio clips that feature some of
the accused ex-ministers and their sons. 11
To try to close down all criticism and investigation of corruption, Erdoan and
the AKP have forced through parliament measures requiring presidential approval of investigations of top officials.
The Erdoan-AKP state is being formalised with the measures now before
parliament for a change of the constitution to transfer decisive powers from
the parliament to president. All power levers, all patronage, will focus on the
personage of Recep Tayyip Erdoan. The ability of the AKP to sustain this of
course rests on their continued ability to win elections, and that in turn forces
the party leadership into ever more grotesque suppressions of human rights
and control and manipulation of the media.
A stunning symbol of that is the new 1000 room presidential palace dubbed
the White Palace - in the Betepe neighbourhood of Ankara. This palace
cost more than $600m to build, a fitting symbol of the philistine greed and
corruption of the regime.
8. The Gezi Park rebellion: shattering the illusion of liberal Islam

n 2013 a massive pro-democracy movement took place in dozens of urban

centres, involving at various times up to 3.5 million people. This movement
was violently repressed with more than 20 deaths and many life changing

11

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/06/why-turkeys-mother-of-allcorruption-scandals-refuses-to-go-away/Its

25

injuries among demonstrators. Without doubt the growing social conservatism and blatant Islamism of the regime brought many middle class people
into the fray. This has led numerous commentators to suggest that this was
mainly a middle class movement, but as we explain below detailed surveys
among the protestors has shown that most of the people on the streets were
from different sectors of the working class.
The initial cause of the conflict is utterly symbolic of the nature of the AKP
regime. Gezi Park, one of the few green spaces left in Istanbul, backs on to
Taksim Square, one of the central squares in Istanbul. On the European side
of the city, it is a cosmopolitan area famous for its cultural life, restaurants,
shops and hotels. The proposal to dig up the Park and turn it into a shopping
mall was seen as a piece of cultural vandalism, perfectly fitting into the regimes neoliberal character.
The movement detonated on 29 May when the police violently removed a
small group of protestors from a camp they had established in the Park.
Erdoan made an aggressive intervention denouncing the occupiers, which
only helped to build the movement. After several days of clashes the police
withdrew on 1 June after a night of violence in which more than 1000 people
were injured, and did not re-occupy the park for two weeks. During that time
the movement mushroomed across the cities of western Turkey.
Erdem Yrk and Murat Yksel explain:
The movement snowballed in response to this repression: the numbers taking part rose from tens to hundreds and then thousands between 27 and 30
May, finally reaching hundreds of thousands on the night of 31 May, as a sea
of protesters crowded stiklal Street and other boulevards around Taksim,
building barricades and trying to reach the square itself and Gezi Park, which
thousands managed to cross the Bosphorus Bridge from the Anatolian side,
reaching Taksim in the early hours of 1 June.
Hundreds of thousands more in other cities followed what was happening in
Istanbul through social media and took to the streets in their own localities.
Istanbuls Sixth Administrative Court belatedly granted a stay of execution on

26

the shopping-mall project, but it was already too late to defuse the protests.12

Taksim Square rally

were then surrounded by police. Protests spread to other parts of Istanbul:
thousands managed to cross the Bosphorus Bridge from the Anatolian side,
reaching Taksim in the early hours of 1 June. Hundreds of thousands more
in other cities followed what was happening in Istanbul through social media
and took to the streets in their own localities. Istanbuls Sixth Administrative
Court belatedly granted a stay of execution on the shopping-mall project, but
it was already too late to defuse the protests.13
Gezi Park removed any lingering illusions about the nature of the Erdoan
AKP regime and raised the issue of whether its democratic and socially liberal
aspirations were anything more than a conscious deception, a feint aimed at
gathering electoral support. Who were the Gezi Park activists? Cihan Tual,
12

https://newleftreview.org/II/89/erdem-yoruk-murat-yuksel-class-andpolitics-in-turkey-s-gezi-protests
13
https://newleftreview.org/II/89/erdem-yoruk-murat-yuksel-class-andpolitics-in-turkey-s-gezi-protests

27

author of the influential Fall of the Turkish Model 14 strongly argues for the
idea that the protestors were mainly composed of, and led by, middle class
people mainly young, highly educated and skilled people who are becoming
the new focus of radical change worldwide replacing the working class as
the social subject of progressive social change. He claims:
Professionals not only led the movement, but also constituted the core of the
participants . . . The Gezi Resistance appears to be an occasionally multiclass, but predominantly middle-class movement. Generously paid professionals who have some control over production and services (even though
they may not have ownership), rather than white-collar proletarians (such as
waitresses, sales-clerks, subordinate office clerks, etc.) seem to predominate.
However Turkish Marxist scholar Korkut Boratav strongly rejects this and argues that many of the so-called middle class people involved were in fact
highly educated and skilled young workers and indeed this was a mature
class movement. Several detailed surveys done among the Gezi protestors
showed that although there was a significant participation by young middle
class professionals, a large majority were young workers, including many unemployed or working in the informal sector.15
Whatever the precise class composition of the Gezi rebels, the demands and
issues raised made it primarily a movement for democracy, opposing the
AKPs authoritarianism and social conservatism. But the building of a shopping mall in Gezi Park for the moment halted was part and parcel of the
process of neoliberal gentrification of Istanbul, a process going on in all major
cities. The victims of this are the workers and the poor. Fighting against gentrification in Istanbul like everywhere is a class question.
At the June 2015 general election the AKP won only 25% of the votes of 1825 year olds, whereas it won around 40% of the total vote. But while its sup-

14

The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic
Liberalism: Verso 2016.
15
https://newleftreview.org/II/89/erdem-yoruk-murat-yuksel-class-andpolitics-in-turkey-s-gezi-protests

28

port among young people is slipping, Erdoan and the AKP retain solid support among the Muslim poor, people who felt excluded and marginalised by
the old authoritarian Kemalist regime. Political Islam in Turkey is in many
ways a product of their rebellion against the old regime, but the beauty of it,
the exquisite skill that Erdoan had displayed, is to get mass support from
people whose interests he does not at all represent. In the same way that
American Republicans for example Donald Trump and the Tea Party - get
mass support from poor whites, while representing only the interests of the
super-rich. Such is the power of socially reactionary ideologies - in the absence of a powerful and sustained left wing alternative.
9. The Turn of the PKK
he accelerated move towards dictatorship by Erdoan and the AKIP is
the result not only of the rise of the HDP and anti-AKP forces in general,
but also in part of the changes in the strategy of the PKK in the past 10 years.
These have especially revolved around the issues of democratic confederalism. Changes in the PKK of course stem from major shifts internationally
in particular the collapse of Stalinism but also its understanding of the
course of the guerrilla struggle.

From the late 80s and throughout the 1990s the government and the PKK
fought a brutal civil war, in which the government destroyed and emptied
thousands of Kurdish villages. Some estimates put the number of PKK dead
as high as 32,000 (now up to 45,000) with something like 6000 government
soldiers killed.
Thousands of civilians were also killed, and torture of PKK and political prisoners routine.
In the face of this the PKK leadership has attempted to move the struggle
onto the political terrain (while not disarming the guerrillas) by declaring several unilateral cease fires. The government response to these has been cynical: the AKPs basic strategy has been to encourage the guerrillas to put
down their weapons without granting any significant political reforms or concessions to Kurdish self-determination.
The PKK declared a unilateral ceasefire in 1998, which was ended when the
Turkish state (with the aid of the CIA) captured key PKK leader Abdullah
calan. calan himself managed to get the ceasefire restored in August 1999

29

and it lasted through to 2004. No major progress towards a negotiated settlement was made during this period, although as Paul White explains:
Ankara did introduce some very timid reforms in this period, to appease its
Kurdish population. Most notably in 2003 limited use of the Kurdish language
was permitted in state television broadcasts. This was not designed as a government confidence-building measure to prepare for a lasting peace
process however. The prime function of such limited reforms at that time was
an attempt to wean Kurds off supporting the PKK. 16
This points to a reality, namely the existence of a more conservative layer of
the Kurdish population in south east Turkey, who were not spontaneously
supporters of the PKK. In the early years of the AKP government (ie from
2002 onwards), the AKP was able to build a base among the Kurds. However
the concessions were not maintained and the attempt to use piecemeal reforms to undercut the PKK turned out to be half-hearted and unsustained.
In response to the continued repression, PKK military operations were resumed in late 2004. The war was escalated with government incursions into
Iraq to try to strike the PKKs redoubts in the Qandil Mountains in 2007.
A further series of state concessions to the Kurdish population came in 2009.
At the start of the year the government announced a Kurdish language TV
channel, TRT 6, and other plans to allow more freedom of Kurdish self-expression, including restoring the names of some Kurdish villages that had
been given Turkish names, restoring Turkish citizenship to Kurdish refugees
abroad and offering conditional amnesty to PKK fighters who came down
from the mountains.
The pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) the predecessor to todays HDP used the temporary relaxation of repression to drastically increase its vote in the local elections in South East Turkey in March 2009 to
more than 50% (it won 99 municipalities). In the wake of this breakthrough
the PKK announced another unilateral ceasefire.

16

https://newleftreview.org/II/89/erdem-yoruk-murat-yuksel-class-andpolitics-in-turkey-s-gezi-protests

30

The Turkish government at this point made its so-called Kurdish opening,
expressing its willingness to negotiate with the PKK. Then-president Abdullah
Gl declared that the Kurdish issue was the biggest problem the Turkish nation faced and that an historic opportunity to solve it through negotiations existed. However repression continued. In an eerie portent of what was to come
in 2015, the Erdoan government responded to Kurdish democratic success
with repression. Three vice presidents and more than fifty leading activists of
the DTP were arrested. The government hoped that a flood of PKK fighters
would come down from the mountains, but they were mistaken. Until well into
2010 wave after wave of arrests of DTP activists occurred and the party was
itself banned.
Despite the losses and the arrests the PKK decided to push through its new
strategy of building local autonomous self-rule, based on democratically
elected regional and local councils, in the framework of the theory of democratic confederalism.
10. The PKK shift to confederalism
ollowing the closing down of the 2009 Kurdish opening the PKK decided
to go ahead anyway and renew its strategy on the axes of democratic
confederalism and womens struggles.

The PKK shift on democratic confederalism can be explained like this. Many
socialists have had a position on oppressed nationalities that champions the
right of self-determination, up to the formation of a separate state. But some
Marxists, in particular the Austro-Marxist theorist Otto Bauer, have pointed
out that a separate state is just one variant of self-determination. Autonomy
limited self-rule within a broader multinational state is also an option depending on circumstances.17
The position put forward by PKK leader Ocalan was that of proposing the
reorganisation of the Turkish state on the lines of democratic confederalism,
ie of larger or smaller self-governing communes.

17

See Fatherland or Mother Earth? by Michael Lowy, Pluto/IRRE, 1998. His

argument is summed up in a shorter article available at
https://victorianpersistence.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/lowy-nationalismand-internationalism.pdf

31

This was explained via a radical critique of the nation state:

It is often said that the nation-state is concerned with the fate of the common
people. This is not true. Rather, it is the national governor of the worldwide
capitalist system, a vassal of the capitalist modernity which is more deeply
entangled in the dominant structures of the capital than we usually tend to
assume: It is a colony of the capital. Regardless how nationalist the nation
state may present itself, it serves to the same extent the capitalist processes
of exploitation. There is no other explanation for the horrible redistribution
wars of the capitalist modernity. Thus the nation-state is not with the common
people it is an enemy of the peoples. (Democratic Confederalism, Ocalan
Abdullah, International Initiative, p13).
This is then applied to Kurdistan in the following way:
Over the last decades the Kurds have not only struggled against repression
by the dominant powers and for the recognition of their existence but also for
the liberation of their society from the grip of feudalism. Hence it does not
make sense to replace the old chains by new ones or even enhance the repression. This is what the foundation of a nation-state would mean in the
context of the capitalist modernity. Without opposition against the capitalist
modernity there will be no place for the liberation of the peoples. This is why
the founding of a Kurdish nation-state is not an option for me..The solution
to the Kurdish question, therefore, needs to be found in an approach that
weakens the capitalist modernity or pushes it back. There are historical reasons, social peculiarities and actual developments as well as the fact that the
settlement area of the Kurds extends over the territories of four different countries which make a democratic solution indispensable. Furthermore, there is
also the important fact that the entire Middle East suffers from a democracy
deficit. Thanks to the geostrategic situation of the Kurdish settlement area
successful Kurdish democratic projects promise to advance the democratisation of the Middle East in general. Let us call this democratic project democratic confederalism. 18
This of course implies extremely radical changes of position by the PKK. Its
not just in the ideology at least a separate Kurdish state is not set as any

18

ibid p19

32

kind of immediate goal, it is rather rejected in advance as something that

would result in an oppressive structure.
In arguing the nature of democratic confederalism, Ocalan states:
This kind of rule or administration can be called a non-state political administration or a democracy without a stateDemocratic confederalism is
open towards other political groups and factions. It is flexible, multi-cultural,
anti-monopolistic, and consensus-oriented. Ecology and feminism are central
pillars.
In the frame of this kind of self-administration an alternative economy will
become necessary, which increases the resources of the society instead of
exploiting them and thus does justice to the manifold needs of the society
Going into further detail Ocalan argues the case for multiculturalism and political pluralism:
In contrast to a centralist and bureaucratic understanding of administration
and exercise of power confederalism poses a type of political self-administration where all groups of the society and all cultural identities can express
themselves in local meetings, general conventions and councils. This understanding of democracy opens the political space to all strata of the society
and allows for the formation of different and diverse political groups. In this
way it also advances the political integration of the society as a whole. Politics
becomes a part of everyday life.
This is an argument that goes well beyond the democratic state based on
local popular sovereignty argued by many Marxists, for example by Lenin in
The State and Revolution. Ocalan is arguing directly against any kind of alternative state structure and going beyond the state directly. However this is
qualified by the statement that:
Democratic confederalism is not at war with any nation-state but it will not
stand idly by at assimilation efforts. Revolutionary overthrow or the foundation
of a new state does not create sustainable change. In the long run, freedom
and justice can only be accomplished within a democratic-confederate dynamic process. Neither total rejection nor complete recognition of the state is
useful for the democratic efforts of the civil society. The overcoming of the
state, particularly the nation-state, is a long-term process.

33

Clearly this is preparing the ground for self-governed, autonomous regions

within the Turkish (and potentially other) states.
Democratic confederalism in practice
From 2005-7 the PKK and its allied organisations started to put into practice
its idea of democratic confederalism through the formation of self-governing
councils in south east Turkey (northern Kurdistan). The councils are organised as part of the KCK (Koma Civakn Kurdistan, the Association of Communities in Kurdistan), a societal organisation presented as an alternative to
the nation-state. Aiming to organise itself from the bottom up in the form of
assemblies, the KCK is according to Joost Jongerden "a movement which
struggles to establish its own democracy, neither grounded on the existing
nation-states nor seeing them as the obstacle".19
In its founding text, the KCK Contract, its main aim is defined in terms of a
struggle for the expansion of a radical democracy which is based upon peoples' democratic organisations and decision-making power. Joost Jongerden
and Ahmed Akkaya explain:
There is popular participation in the councils, including from non-Kurdish
people, and whilst neighbourhood assemblies are strong in various provinces, in Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkish Kurdistan, there are assemblies
almost everywhere. Elsewhere, in the provinces of Hakkari and Sirnak
there are two parallel authorities (the KCK and the state), of which the democratic confederal structure is more powerful in practice. The KCK in Turkey
is organized at the levels of the village (ky), urban neighbourhood (mahalle),
district (ile), city (kent), and the region (blge), which is referred to as northern Kurdistan.20
It is these areas in south east Turkey that have been under brutal military
attack since September 2015. Prior to that, especially since 2009, thousands
of members of the neighbourhood and regional assemblies have been arrested. The Turkish state obviously sees the democratic council movement

19

http://www.kurdishinfo.com/rethinking-politics-and-democracy-in-themiddle-ast
20
https://roarmag.org/essays/pkk-kurdish-struggle-autonomy/

34

as a threat to its own sovereignty in the area and a route towards Kurdish
self-determination.
The military clampdown in southeast Turkey comes in the wake of bitter
fighting in many towns. As the mass arrests continued in August and September 2015 Kurdish youth organised in the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth
Movement (YDG-H) began resistance building barricades, digging ditches,
fighting back with cobblestones, bottles and whatever came to hand.
The violent response of the state was overwhelming. In addition to using
planes, tanks and artillery, mortars and heavy machine guns against residential areas, on March 19, local people claimed a chemical attack killing 40 people had been launched in Gever, a mountain town in the province of Hakkari,
near the Iranian and Iraqi borders.
Rojava
The same violent reaction against any sign of Kurdish self-government has
led the regime to shell forces of the pro-Kurdish Peoples Protection Units
(YPG) across the border with Syria. YPG units have distinguished themselves
by being one of the few forces capable of standing up to and defeating Islamic
State in their heroic defence of the besieged town of Koban. Kurdish fighters
heroically rescued the Yazidi population, threatened by Islamic state, from
the Sinjar Mountains.
Turkeys government is facing the fact that the YPG, the militia of the PYD
(Democratic Union Party), is trying to link up the three cantons it controls on
the Turkish border, and that on 17 March a Constituent Assembly of 200 delegates and 31 other representatives meeting in Rmeilan in Hasakah province
declared the Democratic Federal System of Rojava-Northern Syria, a selfgoverning region for the Kurds and other peoples of Northern Syria. The intention is that this region would be a part of an overall federal Syria, and the
model is being put forward as something that the rest of the country could
follow as a way out of the deep crIsis that the peace talks in Geneva have so
far not been able to resolve.21

21

http://anfenglish.com/kurdistan/final-declaration-of-the-federal-systemconstituent-assembly-announced

35

Erdoan and the AKP are open about their view that any Kurdish/ independent self-governing entity across the Syrian border is a dagger pointing at the
heart of Turkish domination of the Kurdish areas in Turkey. Given the presence of Russian forces, and given de facto US military support for the YPG,
an all-out military assault by Turkey across the border is for the moment impossible, however shelling is likely to continue.
The application of democratic confederalism in Rojava is being closely
watched by progressive forces around the world. In an interview with two journalists from Australias Green Left Weekly, inar Salih, a local leader of the
Movement for a Democratic Society (TEV-DEM), explained how the autonomous self-government works:
"In each commune there are five or six different committees. Communes
work in two ways. First, they resolve problems quickly and early - for example,
a technical problem or a social one. Some jobs can be done in five minutes,
but if you send it to the state, it gets caught in a bureaucracy. So we can solve
issues quickly. The second way is political," Salih said.
"If we speak about true democracy, decisions can't be made from the top and
go to the bottom, they have to be made at the bottom and then go up in degrees. The co-presidents are one male and one female ... Female representation is guaranteed on all the peoples councils. No gender is allowed more
than 60 percent representation. In addition, there are parallel women-only
structures," he explained.
"Women's councils exist in parallel at all levels, the commune, the district, the
city, and the canton. The women's councils don't decide on general issues
that's what the people's councils are for. They discuss issues that are specifically about women ... They have veto power on issues concerning women." 22
The interaction of democratic objectives in terms of autonomy, gender equality, pluralism and multiculturalism was explained by Ruken Isik after interviewing women from Rojava:
The constituency of the Rojava Autonomous Region does not include or recognise Kurds only, but also Armenians, Syriacs, Arabs, Turkmens, and

22

https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/59977

36

Ezidis. The idea of democratic autonomy is directly opposed to the ideology

of the nation-state, especially as in the Middle East, where it is tightly bound
to ideas of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. The new system in Rojava is
more of a multicultural, multilingual, and multireligious system that is designed to allow the legal participation of individuals who will be able to mobilise and organise along the lines of ethnicity, religion, gender, class. It is a
system of self-governance that rejects the model of centralised administration. This is the model of self-rule advocated also by the Kurdish movement.
11. PKK and women
he role of female fighters among the PKKs guerrilla force is well known.
But for the PKK and its supporters the issue of womens oppression and
its role in the liberation struggle goes much further than this. As ever PKK
leader Ocalan has theorised this. He says:

Womens freedom can emerge as the big winner from the current crIsis.
Whatever has been constructed by the human hand, can be demolished by
the human hand. Womens enslavement is neither a law of nature nor is it
destiny. What we need is the necessary theory, programme, organisation and
the mechanisms to implement them.if we want to defeat the system, we
need a radical, new approach towards woman, man and their relationship.
History, in a sense, is the history of the dominant male who gained power
with the rise of classed society. The ruling class character is formed concurrent with the dominant male character...
(http://www.freeocalan.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/liberating-Lifefinal.pdf)
Many radicals will find things to disagree with in Ocalans account of the history of womens oppression and his view that women (as an undifferentiated
category) have replaced the working class as the central focus for radical
anti-capitalist change. What is certain however that is the feminisation process of the PKK and supporters, including in the leading bodies of the KCK
in the autonomous communities in northern Kurdistan and in the liberated
areas of Rojava, is real. Both in the Kurdish autonomous municipalities of
south east Turkey, and in the Kurdish-dominated liberated zones of Rojava
(northern Syria) are putting into practice a minimum quota of 40 per cent
women in all leadership bodies and the practice of co-leadership for example having a man and a woman jointly being mayor of municipalities.

37

According to Ruken Isik:

For Kurdish women in Rojava, it is important to seek ways to make sure that
women are not just instrumentalised for the national cause during the revolution and sent back to homes afterwardsas seen in the backlashes that
women faced after the revolutions in Vietnam, Russia, and France. Therefore,
Kurdish women have started to organize themselves in fields that would enhance the status of women in local society. For instance, building new educational institutions has been a way to engage not only women but also men
for long-term social change. The co-presidency system with one man and one
woman that is implemented in all institutions at all levels is another important
marker for long-term social change.
The same gender-equality imperative is pursued in the autonomous municipalities in Turkey and in Rojava For example, authorities in the Baglar district
of Diyarbakir have launched a campaign to encourage female bus and taxi
drivers, and are also supporting a co-operative market for women to make
and sell their own wares.23
If we look at the work of the Kurdish womens movement and its allies, we
see that in all parts of Kurdistan and in the diaspora it includes some millions
of women - from activists and supporters in the mass movement to guerrillas,
from lawyers to mothers of martyrs, MPs to trade union activists, journalists
to doctors and health workers.
Women today are active in all parts of the Kurdish movement, from co-mayors
of Kurdish cities like Gltan Kanak co-mayor of Diyarbakir, a survivor of the
atrocious struggles in Diyarbakir Prison in the early and mid-80s, to Figen
Yksekda, herself Turkish, co-chair of HDP party; from Leyla Zana, the exDEP MP who served a prison sentence for insisting on taking her oath of
allegiance in Kurdish to the Peace Mothers, mothers of martyrs who protest
at repression, who have made constant appeals for peace, who cherish the
memories of their fallen children. They have sometimes gone to battlefields
to interpose their bodies between the Turkish army and guerrillas or

23

http://notesfromkurdistan.com/from-the-medians-to-the-pkk-the-centralityof-women-to-the-kurdish-national-struggle-2/

38

protesters under attack, and who during the peace process tried to make
common cause with mothers of slain army soldiers.
To understand the importance of the Kurdish womens movement, it is important, to look not simply at what Kurdish women have achieved in the PKK,
Rojava, the autonomous communities and the HDP, but also to compare what
the Kurdish womens movement and the left womens movement offer to
women in the region compared with the line of the ruling AKP.
Authoritarian Islam on Women and the Family
The AKPs authoritarian Islamism is giving full rein to the most conservative
ideas about the role of women. Erdoan says openly hes against womens
equality. Violence against women and honour killings have increased alarmingly. And millions of women are being thrust into poverty by the AKPs neoliberal policies. True, Erdoan has passed a law allowing women to wear
the veil in universities and given material rewards to party supporters, including women. But for the majority of women the effects of AKP government are
negative, especially in relation to the family, birth control and divorce.
In May 2016 Erdoan made a major speech in which he declared that no
Muslim family should use birth control and that the first duty of women was
motherhood. He declared that Turkish women should have at least three children each. Erdoan has previously described birth control as treason.
An extremely dangerous recent development is the report of a parliamentary
commission on divorce and family law. The commission was charged with
investigating the problem of a large number of divorces, rather than the
rights of women and children. The report, which has now been presented to
the Speaker of the Turkish parliament and is likely to form the basis of legislation, calls for legal immunity in rape cases if both the perpetrator and the
victim are under 15 and the rapist agrees to enter a successful and problem
free marriage for five years. What is being dusted off here is the practice
seen in many countries of forcing victims of rape to marry those who abused
them.
In addition, it provides for a legal defence of unjust treatment in domestic
violence cases ie a husband who beats his wife could claim she treated him
unjustly. Finally the report aims to make divorce more difficult by providing
a system of reconciliation in cases of domestic violence or if the woman

39

wants a divorce. In other words instead of divorce being a democratic right,

women will have to go through a lengthy process of being interrogated and
cajoled by social workers and others, in all probability with an Islamist
agenda, before divorce proceedings can begin. These questions vividly
demonstrate the collapse of any liberal pretence in the AKPs social policies.
The movement against violence against women goes deep - there are lots of
campaigns around it, and all sorts of incidents that provoke a massive feminist response.
In February 2015 20
year-old
zgecan
Aslan was killed by a
minibus
driver
because she resisted
his attempt to rape
her. At her funeral the
women insisted on
carrying the coffin
(usually traditionally
done by the men of
the family) and more
Funeral of Ozgecan Aslan
or less told the imam
(usually in charge of
proceedings) to get lost - basically a huge display of fury at the society that
tolerates, normalises and incites these levels of femicide - they said they
didn't want her touched by men again.
Again, one could contrast the rise of the movement against violence against
women and children with the atrocities committed daily by the Turkish state
such as the killing of a guerrilla called Ekin Wan last year. The army stripped
her body naked and published photographs, carrying on an old tradition of
trying to humiliate her and her family. But women from her family and many
others carried out protest demonstrations and turned the insult round, holding
posters explaining that she was their honour, and that they would continue
the struggle. The contrast with the Kurdish movement and the left-oriented
womens movement could not be greater. The participation of women in the
democratic confederalism experiment has been outlined above. The Kurdish
women guerrillas participate in mixed units and also have their own units.
They played a heroic role in the defence of Koban, in rescuing many Yazidi

40

Kurds from Shengal24. They helped defend Erbil and Kirkuk from the ISIS
assault, they are still defending Shengal and helping women there to organise
their own self-defence units- pointing out that the tragedy could not have occurred on the scale that it did if the Yazidis had had their own organisations
and not been forced to rely on the KDP.
As women explained in a long interview with Rahila Gupta25 that as well as
fighting for their own freedom, they are fighting for all women and for all humanity and that they believe in defending a Middle East that values diversity;
sometimes they talk about how much their own lives have changed and how
they feel better because they are respected and are able to feel they are
making a useful difference in the world. Contrast the above with the agenda
promoted by the AKP - nothing less than the polarisation of society on a misogynistic basis. We could perhaps say that the Kurdish movement, the left,
the women's movement are attempting to build a new society around emancipation especially of women, while AKP is clearly trying to salvage and promote a reactionary and patriarchal Turkish/Sunni identity - embracing ISIS
and all sorts of reactionary Islamist misogyny.
The role of women in the Kurdish movement may only have become wellrecognised globally during the rush to save the Yazidis of Shengal in August
2014 and the heroic defence of Koban in September of that year, but these
struggles, as Kurdish women commentators such as Dilar Dirik have emphasised, did not come out of nowhere the PKK always had a strong participation of women and a strong determination on the part of women that they
should be part of the movement and be able to develop their self-organisation.
12. Turkeys international role

or more than 50 years Syria and Iraq have been the focus of struggles of
the local people to free themselves from want, autocracy and colonialism.
At each stage they have been confronted by local reactionary and the intervention of outside imperialist powers. Today there is the complication of what

24

http://socialistresistance.org/6632/kurds-resist-islamic-state-butchers
Its raining women, https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/rahilagupta/rojava-revolution-it-s-raining-women
25

41

Gilbert Achcar calls a third pole or second counter-revolutionary force of extreme right-wing Islamist organisations, such as those including Isis and the
Al-Nusra front, which unfortunately were able to substantially marginalise the
progressive forces in the Syrian revolution over the last few years.
The Kurdish people are situated geographically on the fault line between the
western sphere of influence including Turkey, and what we could call the Russian-Iranian sphere of influence. A complicating factor is the extreme ethnic
diversity of the region.
The Kurdish areas also comprise people of many religions and none: though
most Kurds are Sunnis, there are many Shia Kurds, and also many Alevi
Kurds who meet fierce oppression from the Turkish state, as well as the Yezidis of Sinjar, while in parts of Kurdistan there are also mixed areas with
some Christian (Armenian or Assyrian) citizens and so opposing sectarianism
is a vital part of the Kurdish liberation struggle.
Similarly in northern Syria / Rojava, as well as the Kurdish majority areas of
the three cantons there are some mixed Arab/ Kurdish areas, with either native or settler Arab populations, some Turkmens, and various other minorities.
So out of belief in common humanity, acceptance of a long history of mixed
societies, and out of practicality, the Kurdish movement welcomes diversity
and defends it. This is the nature of the arena in which the battles are being
played out.
Relations between Turkey and Syria now
The Turkish state is deeply involved in military and other interference in northern Syria and northern Iraq. The people who currently run Turkey combine
the dream of rebuilding the Caliphate (the old Ottoman empire) with recovering what they regard as their old lands, projecting their regional power, and
dominating the region so as to undermine the Kurdish quasi-state of South
Kurdistan (Northern Iraq) and to enable Turkish businesses to accumulate
wealth.
In Turkey as in many other places the neoliberal economic regime requires
increasingly harsh measures to keep it functioning. The resistance of the
Kurdish people in all parts of Kurdistan, and of the working class in Turkey,
are an obstacle to these projects, so they and their key allies including Britain

42

find an unbending policy of repression the most suitable for reclaiming their
former regional power.
Russia
Russia has several reasons for intervening in Syria. Like other imperialist
powers much of its policy is determined by perceptions of its geostrategic
interests. For 150 years the western powers have sought to exclude Russia
from the Mediterranean, so its port facilities at Tartus are important. Similarly
NATO is continuing to pressure Russia on its western border, so maintaining
alliances that ease that pressure is important, hence additionally backing
Irans support for the regime in Syria.
There is also a long history of tension often resulting in bloody wars between
the Russian state and various Turkic states from the early middle ages down
to the late 19th century. This is accompanied by Great Russian chauvinism
at the state level and hence a determination, with the short and partial exception of the years after the Bolshevik revolution, to govern or suppress the
various largely Muslim nationalities that historically have lived to the south
and south east of Russia.
The Russian suppression of the Chechens in the last 200 years notably has
made Chechnya fertile ground for jihadi groups that of course are currently
joining the fray in Syria probably with assistance from the Turkish state. As
socialists we condemned the utterly brutal war against the Chechen people,
and now we condemn Russias support for the Damascus regime. If anything
Russias present role will drive more Syrians into the arms of the jihadis.
The Kurdish struggle in Syria
The Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party) and its military wing the YPG
(Peoples Defence Forces) in Syria said consistently from the time of the start
of the widespread protests in 2011, that they would defend their own areas if
attacked, and they have done that. They are currently still defending the three
majority Kurdish and mixed self-declared autonomous cantons of Afrin, Koban and Jazira (Qamishlo and Hasakah), and the mainly Kurdish area of
Sheikh Maqsud in the city of Aleppo.
At the time of writing, fighting to break the isolation of the western canton of
Afrin is taking place as are fierce battles to defend Sheikh Maqsud, bombed

43

by the regime and under heavy attack by Al Nusra and Ahrar Al Sham forces
equipped by Turkey.
YPG forces are still fighting in the so-called Raqqa Corridor to cut the supply
lines from Turkey to ISIS, which run down via the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa
to the Shengal area (which has been partially liberated) and to Mosul, still
under ISIS control since their shock attack in June 2014.
The same violent Turkish reaction against the declaration of Kurdish self-government that we have seen in north Kurdistan (ie south east Turkey) has led
Ankara to shell Kurdish areas and forces of the pro-Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) in Syria. YPG units distinguished themselves as the most
effective force to stand up to and defeat Islamic State in their heroic defence
of the besieged town of Koban, where with the support of US air strikes, ISIS
was defeated. In this and other battles against ISIS women fighters have
been to the fore.
The YPG is trying to link up the three cantons it controls on the Turkish border. On 17 March 2016 a Constituent Assembly of 200 delegates and 31
other representatives meeting in Rmeilan in Hasakah declared the Democratic Federal System of Rojava-Northern Syria, a self-governing region for
the Kurds and other peoples of Northern Syria. The intention is that this region
would be a part of an overall federal Syria, and the model is being put forward
as something that the rest of the country could follow as a way out of the deep
crIsis that the peace talks in Geneva have so far not resolved and probably
cannot26.
The declaration was immediately opposed by Damascus, Ankara, the High
Negotiating Committee in Riyadh, (the Syrian opposition negotiating committee agreed in Saudi Arabia for the purposes of the Geneva peace talks), the
Arab League and the White House. The British government also opposes the
declaration. Socialists and democrats should support the right of the Kurds
and other people of North Syria who do not want to live under ISIS, Assad or
Turkey to make this declaration and to run their own areas. In principle it
should be possible for collaboration between this autonomous area with local
26

http://anfenglish.com/kurdistan/final-declaration-of-the-federal-systemconstituent-assembly-announced

44

assemblies and with the councils and Local Co-ordinating Committees which
still survive in some parts of the rest of Syria, if opposition to local self-rule by
the Kurds and others is not made a stumbling block on the grounds that Syria
must be run from the centre.
Erdoan and the AKP are open about their view that any Kurdish/ independent self-governing entity across the Syrian border is a dagger pointing at the
heart of Turkish domination of Kurdish areas in Turkey. Erdoan said recently that Turkey would not make the mistake over Syria that it made a few
years ago over Iraq meaning that the refusal by Turkey to allow US forces
to move through Turkey to Iraq during the invasion of 2003 had an unfavourable outcome for Turkey, because it resulted in the emergence of the quasistate of South Kurdistan whereas if Turkey had allowed the US forces to
move through Turkey, a quid pro quo would have been permission for Turkish
troops in Iraq on a more solid footing than they currently enjoy and would
perhaps have enabled the nipping in the bud of the setting up of the Kurdish
Region.
In Syria, given the presence of Russian forces, and given de facto albeit limited US military support for the YPG, an all-out military assault by Turkey
across the border is for the moment impossible, however shelling is likely to
continue. On 8 March an attack involving what was thought to be phosphorus
was launched on Kurdish fighters and civilians in Sheikh Maqsud in Aleppo27.
In April and May 2016 the level of bombardment increased.
Turkeys policy in Syria tilts towards sympathy with ISIS and other jihadi
groups. Kurdish fighters accuse Erdoan of allowing weapons and equipment
for ISIS to go across the Turkish border, buying oil from ISIS which is a key
part of their funding, and sending Turkish special forces to train the ISIS fighters. The cheap oil contributes materially to Turkeys economy, especially of
course to the part controlled by the elite.
The Policy of the US and EU

27

(See the YPG account of this on their Twitter

feed https://twitter.com/RedurXelil/status/707208737979768832)

45

Despite periodic speculation that the US and EU member states dislike some
of Turkeys policies, ever since the AKP disowned the Dolmabahe Accords
between the Turkish government and the PKK and restarted the war in July
2015, there have been few comments from other NATO members other than
terse statements of support for Turkeys right to defend its national security.
As the Turkish army bombards Kurdish cities in order to retake them, there is
a deafening silence from other governments.
Over Syria there was initially a lot of rhetoric from the US and the EU about
the cruelty of the Assad regime, but almost all military assistance to the opposition was funnelled from Turkey and Qatar and Saudi, key western allies,
to assorted jihadi groups. These consequently became stronger at the expense of the rest of the opposition. The US-Russia-Iran alliance has nearly
finished imposing a brutal military victory against both the revolutionary and
jihadi forces in central and south-eastern Syria including Aleppo. Either the
US changed its mind half way or never seriously intended to help remove the
regime. Although there is supposedly a ceasefire in place, many cities are
still under siege by the regime which continues its efforts to starve out all
forms of opposition, while the Turkish state is still bombarding Kurdish held
areas and supporting proxies that can contest control of those areas on the
ground.
This reminds us of Iraq, where extreme air and ground campaigns weakened
the regime, allowing mass uprisings in the southern Shia area and in the
northern Kurdish area. These were encouraged by George Bush, but when
push came to shove, the US didnt want revolution, only to cut the regime
down to size. So the defeated regime was allowed access to its helicopters
and put down both uprisings bloodily.
This should all tell us that it is vain to appeal to the humanity of the US and
EU governments their enthusiasm for human rights and democracy is
usually confined to polemic, and it is no good relying on them. The two overarching aims have been to break the revolutionary wave of 2011, and to control the region in the interests of imperialism. ISIS has been a useful enemy
to many powers Ankara, Damascus, NATO in all cases being used to
justify military intervention to control areas that might otherwise be uncontrollable. As Salih Muslim said, it seems that everybody has their own ISIS.
The security of the areas in Rojava that the Kurds have defended is by no
means certain US air support there when it was given was for their own

46

purposes. Groups that relied on Turkey for support against Assad have been
ill-served it usually made working with PYD impossible. Turkey seems to
have underestimated the depth of Russian and Iranian support for Assad,
and the reluctance of the US to allow the regime to be demolished. The violent battle for control of Northern Syria including Rojava seems set to continue, in a setting where both the Iranian side and the Sunni powers, and their
allies, are marshalling their forces for another round, while the crIsis of government in Iraq also deepens.
Perhaps there will be a Round Two in which the regime or part of it will go,
as in Iraq. Alternatively as Gilbert Achcar says, the revolutionary process in
the Middle East will be lengthy. But at any rate, the price that has been paid
thus far has been very heavy.
The attitude of the US seems to be that the Syrian Kurdish forces are currently useful for keeping ISIS within bounds, as are the PUK peshmerga in
Iraq; and that in due course Turkey will be free to deal with both. The attitude
of the British government towards the PYD and YPG is even more grudging
and hostile. Obviously most of the Kurdish people have a different ambition
survival, self-determination, peace, and even democratisation of the whole
of the Middle East, and socialists must stand with them.
13. Plan to destroy Kurdish ghettos
n March 9 2016 Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutolu announced
plans for a massive urban redevelopment that would destroy many of
the Kurdish communities that have supported autonomous self-government
in south east Turkey. Critics fear this is really a plan for gentrification and
massive forced resettlement in the areas where the fighting has been harshest. A prime target is the Sur district in the historic heart of Diyarbakir.

During the fighting in December when Sur was being pounded by tanks, a
local resident asked journalists when the urban transformation project would
stop. He insisted the army was trying to destroy the district and rebuild smart
new housing for those who could afford tithe reason why the government
would want to break up communities like Sur is explained by the Al-Monitor
website:

47

Home to some 125,000 people, half of them residents of the ancient walled
city, the district is dotted by numerous historical monuments and houses of

Destruction in Cizre
traditional architecture. Its labyrinth-like neighbourhoods, crisscrossed by
narrow alleys and dead ends, have proven convenient for PKK militants to
hide, escape police raids and organize. At the height of the Kurdish conflict
in the 1990s, many impoverished people from villages emptied or burned
down by the army settled in Sur, which offered the PKK a fertile base to rally
support and recruit members.28
The Turkish government plans are sweeping and backed by the expropriation
of many properties:
The district emerged in ruins from the security operations, which ended after
103 days in early March. Yet the curfew remained in place as heavy-tonnage
trucks moved in to remove debris. Still barred from their neighbourhoods, the
anxiety of locals grew. They knew something was going on, and soon, the
alleged urban transformation plan turned out to be true. In late March, the
government issued a decree for the expropriation of some 7,000 plots in Sur,

28

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/04/turkey-pkk-clashesankara-pledges-urban-renewal.html

48

corresponding to more than half of the districts land. Residents now fear losing homes and shops in return for low compensation, while many believe the
government plans to destroy the human fabric of the area.29
The governments gentrification plan is no surprise. Construction was one of
the pillars of the Turkish economic boom during the last decade and provides
endless opportunities for corruption by Erdoans cronies through the state
construction procurement agency TOK. Urban geographers Nicolas
Glastonbury and Defne Kadolu say that this is a plan for revenge against
Kurdish rebellion:
This revanchist strategy has been used in other forms in Istanbul as well: in
2007, former TOK President Erdoan Bayraktar stated that the Beyolu
neighbourhood of Tarlabahome to an ethnically diverse group of working-class rural and international immigrants and refugees as well as Roma
and LGBTIQ individualsis the hearth of terrorism, drugs and a crooked
view of the state. The area is currently undergoing one of the most comprehensive urban transformation projects in the city aiming at a more or less
complete exchange of the population. The fact that AKP leaders now have
used the term ghetto for the Southeast, of course adds a more clear ethnic/racial dimension to this discourse of urban decline. The discursive construction of the ghetto, thenverging on discrimination and ethnic cleansing,
by Davutolus own logicis a precondition for the Turkish militarys wholesale destruction of these spaces.30
14. The Refugee Crisis
t a meeting in November 2015, Turkish president Tayyip Erdoan openly
threatened European leaders that unless they agreed to his conditions
he would flood Europe with Syrian refugees. This only confirmed what many
had suspected, that Erdoan was turning the tap of refugees trying to get to
Greece on and off to try to get concessions.

29

Ibid
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/24097/%E2%80%9Ccleaning-outthe-ghettos%E2%80%9D_-urban-governance-and-t
30

49

On March 18 2016 the European Union concluded a deal with Turkey that
would see refugees reaching Europe from Turkey by sea sent back if they
could not prove they were genuine asylum seekers: in return Europe would
agree to take refugees from the camps in Syria on a one-for-one basis, to be
distributed among the EU nations. The deal would also see Turkey given
6bn to help cope with refugees, a promise to speed up Turkeys accession
to the EU and visa-free access to the core EU states, the Schengen group
that excludes Britain and Ireland.
But there are huge doubts whether the deal can work and even more about
whether it should work. In the first place the distinction between genuine and
non-genuine asylum seekers is spurious. The overwhelming majority of the
refugees are from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, fleeing from war zones and
collapsing societies. Forty-eight per cent of them, according to the UNHCR,
are trying to rejoin relatives who have already migrated to Europe. They are
all genuine refugees, even if most of them cannot prove an immediate and
direct threat of persecution.
The deal almost certainly contravenes international law, which prevents mass
deportation of refugees to third countries. Where deportations are allowed to
a third country, it has to be a safe destination for refugees. There must be
many doubts about whether that is true of refugees deported to Turkey. Amnesty International has revealed that Turkey is deporting hundreds of Syrian
refugees across its borders every week. The organisation says:
Large-scale forced returns of refugees from Turkey to war-ravaged Syria expose the fatal flaws in a refugee deal signed between Turkey and the European Union research carried out by the organization in Turkeys southern
border provinces suggests that Turkish authorities have been rounding up
and expelling groups of around 100 Syrian men, women and children to Syria
on a near-daily basis since mid-January. Over three days last week, Amnesty
International researchers gathered multiple testimonies of large-scale returns
from Hatay province, confirming a practice that is an open secret in the region.31

31

https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2016/04/turkey-illegal-massreturns-of-syrian-refugees-expose-fatal-flaws-in-eu-turkey-deal/

50

In order for the deal to go through Turkey is meant to reach 72 benchmarks,

including some in relation to human rights and terrorism laws. On May 5th
Erdoan made clear that he is not going to allow Turkeys terror laws to be
changed: they are a key instrument in his arsenal of repression and are likely
soon to be used against the leaders of the HDP.
The European parliament has to sanction the visa free deal, and in the current
climate this is very unlikely. But the European leaders will want to press on
with it because they fear the consequences of allowing the migration from
Turkey to continue. This is not a matter of Europe being overwhelmed by a
flood of refugees, but of the total inability of the mainstream political leaders
in the biggest European countries to stand up to the tsunami of xenophobic
nationalism, and racist Islamophobia that is fuelling the rise of the far right
across the continent.
The history of the last 200 years shows that mass migrations of desperate
people ultimately cannot be stopped. Mass migration into Europe is the answer to its demographic crIsis, with countries like Portugal, Germany and Italy
facing precipitous population decline as the number of retired people soars.
Gary Younge explains: Herein lies the basic, ugly folly behind so many shortterm immigration policies throughout the developed world. If you build a 10ft
fence to keep out people who are hungry, they will build an 11ft ladder to
climb over it. If you weaponise a fortress to repel people who fear hunger or
war, they will seek ever more desperate ways to penetrate it. They have no
choice. They are fighting for their lives. And we should support them.32
But Erdoan wants more than just money and visa free travel. Turkey pushing
thousands of refugees back over the border into Syria corresponds with
Erdoans plan for a safe zone corridor along the Turkish border in Syria in
which Syrian refugees could be resettled. You only have to glance at a map
to see what that means: Erdoan wants the Europeans to give the go ahead
for Turkish troops to overrun the Kurdish cantons of Rojava and destroy the
YPG-PDY led administration in the autonomous areas. In particular Erdoan
demanded The PKK should not be given some kind of cloak of legitimisation
by fighting against Daesh (Isis).

32

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/26/mediterraneanmigrants-journey-benefits-anti-immigration

51

In fact Erdoan is furious with the Europeans and the United States for not
agreeing his safe zone plan. In February 20016, according to Reuters:
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoan upbraided the United States for its support of Syrian Kurdish rebels on Wednesday, saying Washington's inability to
grasp their true nature had turned the region into a sea of blood. Turkey
should respond by implementing its own solution, he said, alluding to the creation of a safe zone in northern Syria - something Ankara has long wanted
but a proposal that has failed to resonate with the United States and other
NATO allies.
His comments, a day after Turkey summoned the U.S. ambassador over its
support for Syrian Kurds, displayed Ankara's growing frustration with Washington, which backs Syrian Kurdish rebels against Islamic State militants in
Syria's civil war. Ankara regards the Syrian Kurdish PYD group as terrorists,
citing their links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a
three-decade-old insurgency for autonomy in the mainly Kurdish southeast of
Turkey. 33
The latest stunt to justify the "safe zone" consists of sporadic incidents of
shelling of the town of Kilis just inside Turkey by ISIS from within Syria; Turkey
is predictably claiming that it may have to go into Syria. Such a scheme was
aired in a leaked tape purporting to record a conversation between Davutolu
and MIT chief Hakan Fidan two years ago, so no surprises there.
(http://www.wsj.com/articles/islamic-state-rocket-attacks-drive-syrian-refugees-from-turkish-border-haven-1463074065).
15. Defending the environment

he Kurdish movement has worked on ecological issues for many years.

A key example is the campaigns to prevent the destruction of the large
Munzur valley in Dersim (home of a long-standing Alevi community), and the
ancient city Hasankeyf (see below). These campaigns have been going on

33

(http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-kurds-idUSKCN0VJ0E3

52

for more than 20 years, in the face of Turkish state plans, which aim to control
the territory and water resources of the area through the building of environmentally destructive big dams through the so-called South East Anatolia Project.
Rojava
A more recent area of struggle has been occasioned by the revolutionary
process in Rojava, where people were thrown into a situation of having to
improvise under a blockade, in an area that had been kept systematically
underdeveloped by the Syrian Baath Party regime. As is well-known, co-ops
and communes have been formed to try to overcome the shortages to some
degree, and also so that people can themselves start to reconstruct the society on a more human basis.
Ecological practice is one of the main ideas in the education systems in Rojava, to aid people to put their everyday activities on a better basis, and some
reconstruction projects have a special ecological emphasis.
The best known campaign internationally has been the campaign to stop the
building of the Ilisu
Dam and the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive. Activists and local people
have campaigned
tirelessly
against
this dam for many
years because it involves the destruction of parts of the
ancient city of Hasankeyf and the
forced relocation of
thousands of local people. The project is damaging environmentally, destroys
cultural heritage, and - probably not by accident - denies territory and mobility
to the PKK guerrillas.
Campaigners worked together with friends in Europe, delaying the project for
years by obliging several big European engineering companies to pull out,

53

and helping ensure that some rescue work was done for the monuments that
would otherwise have been completely lost. The dam is nearly complete now
but not yet in operation and the full area has not been flooded. Local and
international opposition continues, with a two day conference taking place in
the nearby town of Batman on 7 and 8 May 2016.

A growing movement
The first two-day conference34 of the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement took
place in April 2016 in Wan in North Kurdistan (Turkey), with 100 delegates
from a variety of places and organisations, and an attendance of 170 people.
The conference issued an important statement explaining the seriousness of
the ecological crIsis, its origin in the dynamics of capitalism, and the need to
broaden the democratic and ecological resistance, to take back control of the
lands and resources that are currently being pillaged, and the need to build
stronger links internationally with other parts of the ecological movement. 35
Clearly the ability to take such a step given the war against the Kurdish people
going on at the moment in Turkey and Syria shows a determined movement
that is on the march.
Kurdistan is a huge mainly mountainous area with some cities and many
towns and villages. Two of the biggest and most important rivers of the Middle
East rise here and flow through here; the Turkish state has been developing
a policy on water resources, based on controlling the rivers of Kurdistan via
large dams, since the 1950s. The aim is to deprive the inhabitants of control
over their own conditions of life, but also to be able to threaten the downstream states, Syria and Iraq, with water shortages.
During the dirty war the Turkish army has often deliberately and wantonly
burned forests. The Zagros Mountains, where such burning has happened,

34

http://new-compass.net/articles/mesopotamian-ecology-movementpresents-its-aims
35
https://peaceinkurdistancampaign.com/2016/05/06/mesopotamianecology-movement/

54

were one of the main sites of the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals from about 12,000 years ago, so there is a long history of
living and working with nature.
This experience and the historic understanding of their land and its potential
is also threatened by the Turkish states genocidal policies of destruction or
assimilation; resistance to this, and the need to preserve the land and the
best of traditional ways of working it, combined with an understanding of the
calculating yet senseless destruction of nature across the planet motivates
Kurdish environmental campaigns. The Dicle news agency maintains a site36
which details ongoing environmental campaigns in the Kurdish region.
16. Solidarity with the Opposition in Turkey and Kurdistan
espite Erdoans brusque treatment of EU leaders and human rights organisations, what Europe thinks about Turkey matters. People and institutions in Europe taking a stand in defence of human rights and democracy
and in defence of the Kurdish people makes it easier for the Turkish/Kurdish
opposition to operate. Linking hands with that opposition also is part of the
struggle against the rotten deal (and the collusion that will continue even if
the deal falls) between the EU and Turkey over refugees in exchange for
muted criticism of AKP policies on many fronts.

Pressure needs to be stepped up on US, EU, and here especially on Britain

to drop its support for Turkish state. Moreover, although NATO policy is formulated behind closed doors, it is often clear that other members support
what Turkey does in Kurdistan. There needs to be much more educational
work on the purpose of NATO and agitation against its many devastating policies.
How you can help
There is not one single central solidarity campaign, but a variety of campaigns
and initiatives which people can usefully support. Key issues at the moment
are defending democracy and opposing dictatorship, as called for by HDP,
defending academics for peace and journalists, breaking the silence on the

36

http://www.diclehaber.com/en/ECOLOGY

55

war on Kurdistan, calling for freedom for Ocalan and the other political prisoners, ending the war and demanding peace, and offering solidarity to people
displaced or trying to rebuild their homes and communities whether in Turkey
or Rojava.
Campaigns include: Peace in Kurdistan (PIK), an umbrella for many campaigns including an international campaign to free Abdullah calan, political
prisoner, PKK leader, and addressee of negotiations for peace in Turkey.
This campaign liaises with Kurdish community organisations running their
own campaigns, works with MPs, organises meetings, and delegations to the
region, including Rojava; it promotes meetings on the issues, whether hosted
by Kurdish organisations / solidarity networks, such as The Womens Alliance
for Kurdistan, Iraq and Syria; campaigns against the proscription of the PKK;
builds links, such as with Campaign Against the Arms Trade and Corporate
Watch; PIK can tell you if there is a solidarity group in your area.
https://peaceinkurdistancampaign.com/
The more action based Stop War on Kurds, which held a demonstration on
March 6 in London under the main demands Break the Silence Stop War
on Kurds; http://www.stopwaronkurds.org/

56

Solidarity with People of Turkey The Solidarity with People of Turkey

(SPOT) Network aims not only to support the struggle of the people of Turkey
but also contribute to the working people's struggle in the UK by forming a
bridge between Turkish speaking communities living in the UK and the local
work force in the country.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/868318019911351/
News from a Women's Perspective - http://jinha.com.tr/en/
For those who want to give material aid, Heyva Sor / Kurdish Red
Moon, is a charity run by Kurdish people in the diaspora and in Kurdistan
raising money and doing medical and relief work. Scroll down Donations
section for English details at: http://www.heyvasor.com/en
For specific projects in Rojava go to: http://helpkobane.com/ and
https://coopfunding.net/en/campaigns/feed-the-revolution/
To support for Academics for Peace who are being persecuted in Turkey
go to: https://barisicinakademisyenler.net/
http://internationalsolidarity4academic.tumblr.com/
or
https://www.facebook.com/barisicinakademisyenler/?fref=ts
Additional sources of information:
http://kurdishquestion.com/
https://www.facebook.com/thekurdishquestion/?fref=ts
Rojava Updates: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Rojavafin/
Rojava Breaking News: https://www.facebook.com/rojavabreaking/?fref=ts
Firat News Agency: http://anfenglish.com/
Arte documentary Kurdish Women at War:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csLMrM0vUJw
http://bianet.org/english
http://sendika10.org/category/english/
https://www.cpj.org/blog/2016/05/turkey-crackdown-chronicle-week-of-may8.php

57

Glossary
This is intended to give basic information, especially for organisations usually
referred to by Kurdish or Turkish acronyms. Wikipedia is a good starting point
for finding more detailed information on these and other terms used in the text.
HDP Halklarn Demokratik Partisi - Peoples Democratic Party - An
alliance based on supporters of Kurdish rights, leftist groups, womens
organisations and other oppressed groups in Turkey
AKP - Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi - Justice and Development Party - Rightwing coalition of Islamists, reformist Islamists, conservatives, nationalists,
centre-right, and pro-business groups. Led by authoritarian president Recep
Tayyip Erdoan.
PKK - Partiya Karkern Kurdistan - Kurdistan Workers Party - Founded in
1978 to fight for the national liberation of the Kurdish people and for socialism
and the liberation of all the peoples of the Middle East.
Kurdistan - Large area of the Middle East centred on the Zagros Mountains
where Kurdish people form a majority of the population, though within the
borders of the present states of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.
MHP - Milliyeti Hareket Partisi - Nationalist Action Party or Nationalist
Movement Party. Far-right Turkish nationalist party, closely connected to the
violent fascist organisation known as The Grey Wolves.
Qandil Mountains - High and inaccessible area of the Zagros in South
Kurdistan (Iraq) near the border with Iran. Traditional refuge for Kurdish
guerrillas and presently headquarters of the PKK. Subject to regular heavy
cross-border bombing raids by Turkish airforce since summer 2015.
Sheikh Maqsud A Kurdish majority area in Aleppo, still defending itself
against various external attempts to overrun it.
YDG-H - Tevgera Ciwanen Welatparz Yn oreger (Kurdish) / Yurtsever
Devrimci Genlik Hareket, (Turkish) Patriotic Revolutionary Youth
Movement Youth resistance movement in Bakur / North Kurdistan (south east
Turkey) which emerged in 2013 in Cizre [dize]. In sympathy with the aims of
the PKK.

58

YPS - Yekneyn Parastina Sivl - [jkinjen parastna svil] - The Civil

Protection Units / Civil Defence Units - Formed in 2015 largely from members
of YDG-H to defend people in the cities of south east Turkey; has branches in at
least 8 cities and districts.
YPS-J - Yekneyn Parastina Sivl a Jin - The Civil Protection UnitsWomen/ the Civil Defence Units-Women.
YPS womens brigade, set up on 8 January 2016 in south east Turkey
HPG - Hzn Parastina Gel - Peoples Defence Forces - Military wing of the
PKK, commander-in-chief Murat Karaylan
PYD Partiya Yektiya Demokrat - The Democratic Union Party - Main
Kurdish party in Rojava, Syria. Co-chairs are Asyah Abdullah and Salih Muslim
YPG - Yekneyn Parastina Gel - The People's Protection Units - Syrian
Kurdish defence forces, members mainly but not exclusively Kurdish.
YPG-J Yekneyn Parastina Jin, Syrian Kurdish Women's Protection Units
or Women's Defence Units
SDF Syrian Democratic Forces Mixed, mainly Arab and Kurdish forces
aligned with YPG
YJA STAR - Yekneyn Jinn n Azad PKK womens army
KCK - Koma Civakn Kurdistan - Group of Communities in Kurdistan Umbrella organisation for implementing the idea of Democratic Confederalism. It
is led by an assembly called Kurdistan People's Congress (Kongra-Gel). Cochairs are Cemil Bayik and Bese Hozat.
Afrin, Jazira (includes towns and districts of Qamishlo and Hasakah), and
Koban - Self - declared autonomous areas or cantons from 2013.
Osmanli Ocaklar - the Ottoman Hearths far right group close to Erdogan
Federation of Northern Syria Rojava or Northern Syria Federation
Declared on 17 March 2016 as the process of uniting the three cantons and
liberating other parts of North Syria from ISIS progressed.

59

CHP - Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi - Peoples Republican Party

Old Party of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Enough of their MPs voted with AKP on 20
May to enable Erdoan to pass the law lifting immunity from MPs.
DTP - Demokratik Toplum Partisi - Democratic Society Party Pro-Kurdish
party, predecessor to todays HDP. Banned in 2009.
TEV-DEM Tevgera Civaka Demokratk - Movement for a Democratic
Society The political coalition established to run the majority Kurdish areas
including through the setting up of local committees in 2011 when the Syrian
government largely pulled its personnel out of those areas.
Yezidis - Kurdish religious group originally living mainly in and around Sinjar /
ingal (variously town, district and mountain in Nineveh province of northern
Iraq). The area is currently defended by 3 Yezidi units (HP - Hza Parastina
zdxan - Ezidkhan Defence Units, founded by Haider Shesho; YB Yekneyn Berxwedana engal - Sinjar Resistance Units; and YJ Yekinyen
Jinn zidxan zidxan Women's Units ) jointly known as the Sinjar Alliance.
DEP - Demokrasi Partisi the Democracy Party. Pro-Kurdish, founded 1993,
banned 1994.
KDP - Partiya Demokrat a Kurdistan Kurdistan Democratic Party. Large
party in South Kurdistan (Iraq). Founded by as a Kurdish resistance party in
1946, now reduced to a tribal party autocratically led by Masoud Barzani and
close to Turkey, Washington and Whitehall.
PUK / YNK - Yektiy Nitmaniy Kurdistan Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Split from KDP in 1975. Fought heroically against Baathists for many years
under leadership of Jalal Talabani, but in recent years suffering from leadership
corruption and a crIsis of perspective.
Gorran / Biztinewey Gorran - Movement for Change
2009 split from PUK on reform and anti-corruption platform, led by veteran PUK
leader Nawshirwan Mustafa. May 2016 agreement made between Gorran and
PUK, presumably in attempt to break the economical and political logjam in
South Kurdistan, and to reduce the influence of KDP and Turkey in Kurdistan as
a whole.

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