A Road Unforeseen Read online

  In 2005, the pioneering network Women Living Under Muslim Laws wrote the World Social Forum a letter accusing its leaders of ignoring the dangers presented by fundamentalism. It said,

  “We are now facing a new challenge: what seemed to be clear politically when we were talking of far off countries loses its clarity when fundamentalist policies come closer to Europe and the USA in the guise of ‘authentic’ cultural identity, and the worldwide support once given to both victims and resisters of fundamentalism vanishes under the weight of considerations of right to ‘difference’ and cultural relativism. . . . We have already witnessed prominent Left intellectuals and activists publicly share the view that they could not care less if fundamentalist theocratic regimes come to power in Palestine or Iraq, provided that the USA and Israel get booted out. We have witnessed representatives of fundamentalist organizations and their ideologists be invited and cheered in Social Fora. We have witnessed prominent feminists defend the ‘right to veil’—and this sadly reminds us of the defense of the ‘cultural right’ to female genital mutilation, some decades ago.”20

  Feminist sociologist Nadje Al-Ali made a similar critique of the anti-imperialist Left’s valorization of “the Iraqi resistance,” which amounted to endorsing attacks upon Shia civilians by jihadis linked to al Qaeda. She wrote: “At the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul in 2005, for example, almost every speaker either began or finished his or her talk with a similar statement: ‘We have to support the Iraqi resistance!’ Many speakers added that this was not just a matter of fighting the occupation inside Iraq but part of a wider struggle against encroaching neocolonialism, neoliberalism and imperialism. But none of the speakers explained to the jury of conscience, the audience and their fellow speakers what they actually meant by ‘the resistance.’ No one felt it was necessary to differentiate between, on the one hand, the right of self-defence and the patriotic attempt to resist foreign occupation and, on the other, the unlawful indiscriminate killings of noncombatants. Neither did anyone question the motivations and goals of many of the numerous groups, networks, individuals and gangs grouped all too casually under ‘the resistance’—a term that through lack of clear definition has been used to encompass various forms of non-violent political oppositions, armed resistance, guerrilla combat and mafia-type criminality.”21

  In recent years, feminists have sometimes seemed to be the only people at such left-wing events pointing to the dangers of fundamentalism. We knew fundamentalism was a threat because we were the ones being attacked. In the US, the Catholic Right and Protestant evangelicals have been campaigning against LGBTI rights and women’s reproductive freedom since the seventies. Latin American feminists are locked in struggle with the Church over birth control and abortion; Indian feminists have had to fight both Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists to win a uniform code of family law; women’s movements in the Middle East and South Asia are battling Islamists to gain basic human rights. And in most of these places, the Left has not been listening.

  In 1995, the year of the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, I became founding President of a transnational free speech network of feminist writers called Women’s WORLD (Women’s World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development), which drafted a manifesto for Beijing called The Power of the Word: Culture, Censorship and Voice.22

  We began by describing a world crisis, symptoms of which included the accelerating destruction of the environment, vast movements of population fleeing war and famine, the growing dominance of transnational corporations accountable to nobody but their shareholders, the triumph of free market policies that were impoverishing people all over the world, and the rise of various forms of religious fundamentalism as political movements targeting women and ethnic minorities. “The increasing internationalization and collusion of these movements,” we said, “raises the possibility of a worldwide reactionary movement similar to fascism in the 1920s and 30s.”

  Strategically, we could see only one source of hope: an alliance between feminists and other progressive social movements: “All our movements face the same oppressive forces: a New World Order that props up modern dictatorships, and a reactionary traditionalism that represents the worst form of patriarchal control. We have a common vision of a future in which extremes of wealth and poverty will vanish; in which human rights, sustainable livelihoods, universal literacy, and cultural diversity will become the norm; and in which decisions will be made and social conflicts resolved by negotiation, rather than force or domination.”

  But were our brothers on the Left willing to commit to such feminist principles?

  “Again and again,” we said, “women have fought beside men in movements for social change, only to see them set up new ruling elites that left gender and family hierarchies intact, continued to practice the power politics of dominance and submission, and resolved social and personal conflicts through violence or repression.

  “Today, women, particularly women of the South,” we went on, “make up the vast majority of the poor and politically disenfranchised people of the world, the true ‘prisoners of starvation’ and ‘wretched of the earth.’ Thus, any movement for real transformation must make the demands of women central. And, because so many of the chains that bind women are located in the realm of tradition rather than pure politics or economics, a thorough transformation must involve struggles over culture.”

  We had no idea that, while we were writing these words, Abdullah Ocalan and Kurdish women activists were wrestling with similar questions and beginning to build a movement that would eventually be able to test its ideas about women’s liberation in practice, using southeastern Turkey and northern Syria as a social laboratory. We can all learn from their experiments. For, with all our freedoms, Western feminists have seldom had the opportunity to test our ideas on a large scale and gain experience in strategic thinking.

  By strategic thinking, I do not mean what goes by that name in corporate seminars or NGO training sessions. I mean a way of thinking that moves between the big picture and one’s own situation to chart out a principled path to liberation and power. As Archimedes, inventor of the lever, said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Moving the world involves having a clear view of present conditions, grasping their potential for transformation, and seeing how to utilize one’s own meager strength as a lever for change. How do people learn to think this way?

  Over the centuries, men have learned strategy, tactics, and long-range planning by running countries, building businesses, serving in military campaigns, even leading sports teams. But, until very recently, women were barred from these fields. We did not accumulate capital or command armies. In most societies, our work was concentrated in subsistence agriculture and handicrafts, caring for children, managing the survival needs of our families, and engaging in low-level mercantile activity or small-scale garment or food production. Centuries of that kind of work have shaped women’s habits of thinking in ways that tend to emphasize cultural transmission, frugality, the value of life, and the importance of human relations.

  Abdullah Ocalan, ideological leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has suggested that women’s habits of mind can be symbolized by the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, symbol of sexuality and war in the Neolithic period, when people first began to live in villages. “Production developed with the unity of land and woman. . . . Animals were domesticated, seeded plants were cultivated, and women did the majority of these jobs. Ishtar was the goddess of this culture,” he says. Elsewhere, he has argued that “What underlies sacredness is food. . . . What underlies food is mothers’ labor. She is the creator, the inventor, and the nurturer. . . . [S]he works solely on production; she knows it; she sustains humanity through it. That is how she understands humanity.”23

  To Ocalan, the Neolithic village was an Eden where women had power and status equal to or possibly greater than that of men; only when males began to dominate did our species turn to war, empire, and slavery. In this
part of Ocalan’s thought, he is a classical Marxist, following in the tradition of Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”24

  This theory of human development may be based on very little solid evidence, but it has great and enduring power as a myth of The Fall. Like a number of feminist theorists, including Maria Gimbutas and Riane Eisler, Ocalan has been constructing a mythic version of prehistory to assert that patriarchy was not inevitable and gender arrangements could still be revised. Few Marxists have pursued this approach in recent years. As David Graeber says, “One of Öcalan’s most radical moves is to revive the notion of Neolithic matriarchy. This notion was very common in the 19th and early 20th century but has recently been cast aside. . . . [and] once it went out it just was gone. It became like a taboo, no one can touch it, you’re considered crazy if you talk about it.”25 Instead of invoking Ishtar, the dominant Western political and philosophical traditions, including Marxism, have favored Athena, the Greek virgin goddess of war and abstract thought. Athena was not born of woman but sprang directly from the forehead of her father Zeus. Dissenting from this narrative in her novel Cassandra, Christa Wolf asked, what would “the history of thought” have been like if it had come from some place other than the head of a male god? What would it have been like if women had helped to shape it?26

  The Kurdish women’s movement has asked the same question and called for a new sociology of women’s thought. Its word for this is Jineology—jin means “women” in Kurdish. In a speech at the first world conference on Jineology in Cologne, Kurdish writer Gonul Kaya explained the need for the “creation of a women’s paradigm” in the social sciences:

  As an extension of the patriarchal system, a field of social sciences has been created, which is male, class-specific, and sexist in character. This field is in turn broken up into different parts that are torn apart from each other. The implementation of the interpretations of these sciences has led to devastating results for nature, society, and human beings: The normalization of militarism and violence, the deepening of sexism and nationalism, the unrestrained development of technology, especially weapon technology for the control of society and individuals, the destruction of nature, nuclear energy, cancerous urbanization, demographic problems, anti-ecological industrialism, Gordian knots of social issues, extreme individualization, the rise of sexist policies and practices against women, rights and freedoms that only exist on paper.

  At this point, we propose Jineology. It was observed that it is necessary to overcome the system of the dominating field of science and to construct an alternative system of science. In addition, we understood that the existing fields of the social sciences must be freed from sexism.27

  This speech points to errors that run like a thread through the history of left-wing thought: male repression, exclusion, devaluation, and just not getting the point when it comes to real life issues that concern women. With few important exceptions, left-wing movements have been overwhelmingly led by men and served by women: men making speeches, women making coffee. As a result, the history of the Left is lopsided, reflecting the ideas, history, and experience of only half the species. Its theory does not accurately describe the world, and its practice does not prefigure any future society most of us would want to belong to. No wonder it has reached an impasse. How could a theory and practice based—at best—on the experience of only half the human race possibly be adequate? The famous Zen riddle asks, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” It is the sound we have been hearing for the last hundred years, the sound of left-wing feminists beating their heads against the wall.28

  So what makes the Kurdish women’s movement different? Considering that it evolved as part of the PKK, which began as a classic Marxist-Leninist party, how did women members avoid being stopped in their tracks and go on to form militias and become 40 percent of leadership on all levels? Have human beings finally been able to create a political culture that is not divided by gender? And how does that work with being constantly at war? Why were the left-wing militias of Rojava, despite their lack of sophisticated equipment and before they had any air support, the only ground forces able to resist Daesh? Does their military success have something to do with their ability to draw on the strength of women? Or with their commitment to bottom-up democracy?

  This book is an attempt to address these questions. Like a gyroscope, it revolves on two axes. One is the collision of three visions of social organization, all reflections of larger global paradigms but particularly intense in Kurdistan: the Islamism of Daesh, the “capitalist modernity” (Ocalan’s phrase) of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, and the new kind of left-wing, nonstate, democratic formation developing in the liberated cantons of Syria. The other axis is the role of women in these paradigms.

  Ocalan’s dream is that human domination, slavery, and empire will be undone in Kurdistan, by a people so oppressed they had almost lost any sense of their own worth. As Ocalan sees it, “Kurdistan is the place where humanity itself fades away in its most solid form. It is humankind’s oldest cradle. A magnificent victory for humanity may be gained in the place where it has been most ‘deformed’. Such magnificence will be in proportion to the debasement.”29

  In other words, by disdaining the “ring of power” that we call the state—power that, like Tolkien’s ring, is of no use to people who want to build an egalitarian society rather than one based on dominance and submission—the Kurds may become able to defeat Daesh and al Qaeda, the most vicious enemies of freedom. At the same time, they hope to bring democracy to Syria and Turkey, converting their brothers and sisters who still worship at the shrines of power and consumerism to more humane values. It’s a tall order, but they have already done the impossible just by continuing to exist.

  This book is an overview of the history of the Kurdish region, which is essential for understanding the painful, convoluted path that led to the experiment that is the Rojava Cantons. The cantons are an experiment in motion, a living, breathing entity, constantly evolving, offering a vision of social relations that many of us would have thought impossible. Whatever lies ahead, they have shown the world new ways to dream about democracy, equality, and living together.

  Cars abandoned on the Yazidi flight up Sinjar Mountain in August 2014.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Kurds

  IN 1976, A DUTCH ANTHROPOLOGY STUDENT named Martin van Bruinessen went to Kurdistan to do field work, and described its geography in his thesis: “The heart of Kurdistan consists of forbidding mountains that have always deterred invading armies and provided a refuge to the persecuted and to bandits. The eastern or Kurdish Taurus and the Zagros chain form its backbone, having a northwest-southeastern direction. On the southwestern flank a large number of parallel, often very high and steep folds gradually lower toward the Mesopotamian plains. To the north and northeast the landscape changes into a steppe-like plateau and highlands.”1

  Today these mountains and the ancient fertile crescent they protect are the focal point of an epic three-way struggle between the violent Islamist jihadis of Daesh and al Qaeda, the peshmerga of the autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq, and the left-wing Syrian Kurdish militias with their liberated territory in Rojava, as well as the main regional and global powers aiding one or the other. This struggle will not only determine the future of the Kurds; it is an illustration of three possible futures for the entire region, if not the world—futures that were rehearsed on Sinjar Mountain in Iraq in 2014.

  The Battle of Sinjar Mountain

  In June 2014, the leaders of Daesh decided it was firmly enough established to declare itself a caliphate—the Islamic State—and did so, claiming territory from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in eastern Iraq in pursuit of its goal of erasing the borders in
the region.2 Its armies began a blitzkrieg south into Iraq along the Tigris River. They did not expect to meet much opposition from the army of Iraq—local humorists say its name is an acronym for I Ran Away Quickly—and they didn’t. In fact, as they neared Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, the Iraqi Army and police force—52,000 men—fell apart. Their commanders fled, while soldiers stripped off their uniforms and threw away their guns, some even running through the streets in their underwear.3 In the next two days, Daesh fighters traveled over a hundred miles south and surrounded the oil refinery at Baji. By June 11, they had already captured Samarra with no difficulty and moved on to Tikrit.

  Daesh military strategy involves attacking several places at the same time. That June, besides threatening Baghdad, they moved into positions to attack two Kurdish targets: Kirkuk, at the edge of the autonomous region controlled by the Iraqi Kurds, and Kobane, the autonomous Kurdish canton in Syria.

  The Iraqi Kurds have been US allies since the Gulf War of 1990. Though technically citizens of Iraq, they are self-governed, for most practical purposes, by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Closely allied with Turkey, which controls much of its economy, the KRG is progressive in the context of the Middle East as a whole but troubled by tribalism and corruption. It is controlled by two feuding political parties: the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), led by Masoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani. Barzani is currently President of the Kurdish Regional Government and, though his last term ended in August 2015, seems determined to remain in office.4