Who are they, these revolutionary Rojava women?
Berivan, Commander in the PKK. Photo: JoeyL.com
Imagine
a life amidst war, another war, and recovery from decades of war, where humans
decide that all public positions are shared between women and men, and where,
in fact, everything is shared.
It’s
not a bleak but beautiful fantasy dreamed up by Ursula le Guin, it is here and
now on the border between Syria and Turkey. It is Rojava.
Compare
and contrast with a rich, lush, green and pleasant land that has just voted –
whether it fully knows it or not – to abandon equality and human rights and
sharing anything with anyone. It is here and now and it is England.
Across
the Atlantic, in New York, a stalwart seeker after equality and human rights, the
feminist writer-activist Meredith Tax, noticed morsels of news about that
faraway enclave called Rojava and became excited: could it be? Could it be true
that amidst the wreckage of the Middle East something beautiful was being
crafted?
Two
years ago when Daesh attacked Syria’s northern city, Kobane, Tax began to see
‘pictures of smiling rifle-toting girls in uniform defending the city.’ Who
were these Kurdish girls?’ she wondered.
The
same question animated writer Rahila Gupta to write a six-part series on her
journey: Witnessing the Revolution in
Rojava on openDemocracy (her story will also feature in the book we are
co-writing, Why Doesn’t Patriarchy Die?). Here in Rojava, she
thought, a revolution was being made in our own inhospitable times.
How
could these women resist the waves of masked jihadis razing towns, fields
and cities, wreaking terror? How could they do what no one else, not Iraq’s
army, not the Kurds’ fabled Peshmerga, nor Western bombs, had managed to
achieve?
But
they did. However, no sooner had these photogenic heroines appeared than they
became invisible. They didn’t disappear, of course, but to western eyes they
were out of sight and out of mind.
The
Obama administration described the Daesh warriors as ‘an imminent threat to
every interest we have’ and yet hesitated – with every interest it had – to
become the friend of its enemy’s enemy.
Something
about the Rojava confounded and discombobulated the international players,
whose hands and footprints already littered the ruined landscape.
Rojava
thrilled Meredith Tax, who set about finding out about these women and their
mission.
‘I
decided it was my responsibility to tell my friends about Rojava,’ Then she
wrote an article for Dissent magazine, then she wrote this book, A
Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State (Bellevue Literary Press, August 2016).
It
is the outcome of her swift, intense and forensic inquiry. Her narrative is
also informed by the wisdom accumulated during her radical own history:
she was a member of one of the founding Women’s Liberation groups of the late
1960s, Bread and Roses – a name branded on the consciousness of activists in
the Seventies.
She
belongs to a generation of activists and intellectuals who made and were made
by the black civil rights, feminist and anti-war movements in the US, that
confidently quarried revolutionary theory and practise for inspiration.
Between then and now this generation has lived with the rise and fall of
revolutionary experiments – it knows all about failure. And so she brings the
habit ‘optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect’ to her
inquiry.
The
journey takes her deep to the history of Middle East and the fate of Kurds,
sliced up between the post-imperialist divisions of the region, and the
interminable repressions of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Accommodations were
made, tribalisms refreshed, massacres perpetrated, villages evacuated.
Crucial
was the US and Saudi sponsorship of jihadis across the region and the
resistance of Turkey, Iraq and Syria to any possibility of Kurd autonomy. Kurds
were confronted by jihad on one flank, state repression on the other.
During
the 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq pursued a scorched earth policy
against the Kurds – thousands of villages were razed and refugees poured across
the borders into Turkey and Iran. Turkey would not tolerate Kurd autonomy. The
US didn’t want a fragmented Iraq – though that’s what the invasion in 2003
delivered.
After
enduring astounding violence, they were only to discover during Iraq’s invasion
of Kuwait in 1990 that the Bush administration in Washington did not want to
reach out to save them.
Tax
traces the conjunctures when Kurdish struggles for survival reach out to modern
theories of revolution or ancient practises of tribal hierarchy, all the time navigating
alliances, seeking spaces of respite where they think afresh.
Ironically,
it is in the grotesque aftermath of the Iraq invasion that Kurds, in a sense,
re-discover themselves.
In
oil-rich Iraq, Kurdistan is established, malls are built, billions pour in,
fortunes are made and squandered, and hope of a new dawn for women dashed.
By
contrast, the Kurd guerrilla movements based in Syria and Turkey re-think their
relationship to their social base.
Women
are central to that process, both because their activism is grounded in
everyday life, in civil society, in relatives’ movements on behalf of prisoners
and lost loved ones, and also because gender becomes a decisive term in the
intellectual quest to modernise theory in the wake of so many failed revolutions.
It
would not have emerged in the sequestered and hierarchical guerrilla movements
themselves – these highly disciplined fighters were governed by profoundly
authoritarian and centralised leadership.
But
gender equality drives the new thinking of their leader Abdullah Ocalan, whilst
imprisoned by Turkey (with the support of the CIA). Incarceration – the fate of
so many guerrillas – creates the context, time and space, to read and
think.
Indeed,
Tax’s story is punctuated by conjunctures that make the Kurd guerrillas
re-think and re-group.
A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.
In
prison Ocalan reads and reads – Marxism, anarchism and feminism – and discovers
the axis between patriarchy, property and the nation state.
Meredith
Tax explains how Ocalan in the 1990s brings that critique to the specific
experience of stateless Kurds’ experience of tribalism, imperialism and
capitalism.
The
commitment to sharing men power with women, and to a political strategy founded
upon equality and environmental sustainability, is, to a degree, imposed on the
men and enthusiastically embraced by women who had, by then, developed intimate
solidarities in the guerrilla militias, in prison and in organising
communities’ besieged survival.
Harassed,
raided, tortured on all sides, they manage to build something formidable – so
poor, but so strong.
It
was they, above all, who engineered the liberation of the Yazidis from Daesh
warriors.
Now
they are improvising a new model of living in an enclave that is not an ethnic
state but a confederation of half a dozen ethnicities, organising co-operative
economy in an egalitarian borderland called Rojava.
Meredith Tax wonders whether they can survive. But she is inspired. And reading her
book, you will be, too.
A Road Unforeseen: Women fight the Islamic State will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in August 2016