A Road Unforeseen Page 5

  The Kurds had no reason to suspect they were being lied to. After all, the French and British had said the main reason they got into the war was “the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks,” and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points said “nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”38

  But talk is cheap. After all the treaties were signed, the Kurds found they had been divided up between four different states: Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Over the following decades, they frequently revolted against these states but were always defeated and often savagely repressed, a minority people, as they always say, with “no friend but the mountains.”

  And what part did women play in this tormented story? It is difficult to know, because there is so little about them in most histories of the Kurds. In fact, one cannot even find “women” in the index of most of the authoritative English-language books on Kurdistan (which is considered to encompass the Kurdish areas of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey). Turkish social scientist Ali Kemal Ozcan is one of the few to acknowledge women’s role in the introduction to his book on the PKK, although he goes no further than an acknowledgement:

  “An interesting point about the Kurdish movement is the remarkable participation of women. In the sphere of both civilian (mass protests, marches, celebrations, festivals) and military (guerrilla) activities the noteworthy presence of women appeared to me to be an important phenomenon. Considering the unusually high percentage of women in Kurdish guerrilla forces, set against the fanatically religious and largely pre-feudal state of Kurdish society—and also in view of the fact that the party persists in identifying itself as Marxist-socialist—this issue cannot be ignored. However, it necessitates an additional study in itself. Furthermore, as a man, I felt discouraged from examining an issue that I might not fully understand.”39

  According to activist and researcher Shahrzad Mojab, scholarly neglect of Kurdish women is partly an artifact of the way academic fields are set up and their work financed: “Kurdish studies is shaped by the status of the Kurds as a non-state nation. . . . Middle Eastern studies programs are predominantly focused on Turkish, Arab, Persian and Hebrew studies, some of them with close ties to the Middle Eastern states. . . . The Kurds are excluded from Middle Eastern studies establishments and Kurdish women are excluded from studies of Middle Eastern women.”40

  While nationalist writers may contend that Kurdish women have always been more equal than others in the Middle East, they have not done the work necessary to back up these claims, of which Martin van Bruinessen says: “In some parts of Kurdistan women have a certain freedom of movement, perhaps more than in many other parts of the Middle East. This is certainly not characteristic, however, of all Kurdistan, and the nature and degree of this freedom moreover depend much on their families’ social status.”41

  In fact, violations of women’s human rights such as forced marriage, child marriage, “honor crimes,” and seclusion can be found in Kurdistan as elsewhere in the region, and female genital mutilation (FGM) in particular is extremely common among Iraqi Kurds, though not in other parts of Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan has an FGM rate of 72 percent according to a survey done by WADI, a small German-Iraqi women’s NGO. In 2011, the practice was made illegal but the ban is seldom enforced.42 Rates of FGM in other parts of Kurdistan are not known.

  Today the Kurds number between thirty and forty million worldwide. While they are dispersed in many countries, including a diaspora of at least two million in Europe, their main concentration of population, some fifteen million, is still in historic Kurdistan. In each of these countries, Kurds have a great smorgasbord of organizations, open and secret, nationalist, left-wing, and Islamist, which battle each other and the government and try to get help from other Kurds and neighboring states. Because of this proliferation of organizations, each one with its three-letter abbreviation, discussions of Kurdish politics can sound like alphabet soup.

  Over eight million Kurds live in Iran. Because they have not been a strong factor in the recent regional struggle, they do not figure prominently in this story. The Iranian Kurds live mostly in the mountain area bordering Turkey and Iraq. Unlike Turkey, Iran allows its many minorities cultural rights like the use of their own languages, but all separate Kurdish parties are banned and, in 2015, a number of Kurdish political prisoners were executed.43

  Iraq

  Iraq has about five and a half million Kurds, who make up 17.5 percent of the country’s population; they were the first group of Kurds to mobilize on a nationalist basis, and rebelled against the government fairly frequently from the time it was taken over by the British after World War I. At the end of the war, Iraq had become a British protectorate under the nominal rule of King Faisal I. The monarchy remained in power until 1958, when it was overthrown by a left-wing military coup. A succession of rulers followed, until the Baath Party, with CIA help, staged its own coups in 1963 and again in 1968.44 By that time Saddam Hussein was already running the party’s security apparatus and gradually took control of the country.

  Saddam became President in 1979 and immediately declared war on the new Islamic Republic of Iran, which had called for a similar Islamic revolution to take place in Iraq. The war went on for eight years with no one the victor. During the struggle the KDP, the Kurdish nationalist party in northern Iraq, helped Iran seize the Iraqi border town of Hajj Umran.45 In revenge, Saddam Hussein waged a genocidal campaign against the Kurds, which included the use of chemical weapons. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were murdered and thousands of villages destroyed during the campaign, which is known as the Anfal after a Koranic chapter on the spoils of war.

  In 1991, to recoup his losses from the war with Iran, Saddam invaded and annexed Kuwait. This time, in what became known as the Gulf War, the US put together a coalition to stop him, with allies that included Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UK, and many others. During the war, Saddam again started bombing the Kurds. Kurdish refugees flooded into Iran, which let them in, but when they tried to get into Turkey, they found the borders closed. Hoping to avoid another Kurdish genocide, the US and UK set up a no-fly zone in northern Iraq, which not only prevented further air attacks by Saddam, but also gave the Kurds the opportunity to establish an unofficial autonomy.

  The UN put severe economic sanctions on Iraq after the Gulf War, resulting in general malnutrition and a high level of infant mortality. For the next four years, the Kurds suffered heavily from these sanctions, since all postwar aid went through Baghdad, and Saddam would not give them even their reduced share. Northern Iraqi Kurdistan could get food via Turkey, but the cities further south suffered severely; by January 1993, residents were getting no more than 10 percent of the UN rations provided for other Iraqis.46 For the next twelve years, Iraqi Kurds were subject to severe economic sanctions, punished by both the UN and Saddam’s regime, but their leaders continued to look to the US.

  In 2003, when the US invaded Iraq, the Kurds rose up again and this time were rewarded with official status as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), an autonomous region of Iraq under the terms of the 2005 constitution. In subsequent years, they have had a contentious relationship with the central government in Baghdad, which cut off all their funds when they bypassed it to sign their own oil contracts with Turkey and Western oil companies. But in the middle of fighting a war with Daesh, the Baghdad government has had problems bigger than the Kurds.

  Iraqi Kurdistan has two main political parties, the KDP and the PUK, both based on dynastic and tribal politics. A third party, Gorran, founded in 2009, quickly turned into the largest opposition party. The government is extremely corrupt and, in the fall of 2015, there were large demonstrations and a one-week strike by civil servants who had not been paid for three months.47 Even with these problems, however, the Kurdish Regional Government, as social scientist Hamit Bozarslan says, “represents one of the most dy
namic, politically pluralistic and peaceful spaces in the Middle East.”48

  Syria

  Established as a French protectorate after World War I, Syria gained its independence in 1946. Its first years were rocky, with numerous coups. A climate of rising Arab nationalism led to ethnic tensions, notably an arson attack in 1957 in which 250 Kurdish schoolboys perished.49 When Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic 1958, publications in Kurdish were banned. The UAR was ended by a Syrian military coup in 1961 and the next year, the Arab Republic of Syria was founded. Because Syria is a mosaic of many peoples; defining the country as Arab excluded a number of ethnic groups. In 1963, a Baath Party military coup made Syria a dictatorship, ruled under a permanent state of emergency decree by Hafez al Assad (1970–2000) and then by his son Bashar.

  Syria has only 1.7 million Kurds, around 10 percent of its population, who live mostly in the northeastern part of the country. In 1962, when Syria declared itself an Arab republic, 120,000 Kurds were stripped of citizenship on the claim that their ancestors had infiltrated into Syria from Turkey.50 This made it impossible for them to get an education, jobs, or public benefits. Their land was given to Arabs who were strategically placed in an “Arab Belt” to break up the contiguous Kurdish area near the Turkish border.51

  Abdullah Ocalan, founder of the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), lived in exile in Damascus from 1980 to 1998. He and the Baath Party government had a more or less acknowledged agreement that the PKK could recruit Syrian Kurds as long as they didn’t fight in Syria. Thus the PKK had Syrian members from the beginning; recent estimates of the percentage of Syrians within its ranks range from 20 to 30 percent.52 Syria’s arrangement with the PKK ended in 1998, when Turkey threatened to invade Syria unless Ocalan was handed over and he fled the country. After that, the government heavily suppressed Kurdish political activity.

  In 2003, Syrian members of the PKK founded the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and in 2010 Salih Muslim, a chemical engineer, was elected as chair. The PYD was involved in organizing the first major uprising of Syrian Kurds the next year, after police violence at a soccer match in Qamishli in which nine people were killed. Police also fired on the Kurdish funeral march the next day, killing another eight. Demonstrations and street fighting broke out in Cizire, Afrin, Aleppo, and Damascus. Two thousand Kurds were arrested, with PYD leaders particularly targeted.53 Salih Muslim was arrested so many times he finally went into exile in Iraq.

  When the Arab Spring uprising in Syria began in 2011, many young urban Kurds were involved, but the Kurdish political parties were unsure about participating, nervous about Arab nationalism and suspicious of the strong Muslim Brotherhood influence within the Syrian opposition. When the opposition Syrian National Council refused to discuss their desire for autonomy at a meeting, all the Kurdish parties walked out.54

  Salih Muslim returned to Syria in April 2011, and the PYD soon became “the best organized, best armed, and single biggest Kurdish party inside Syria,” leading the struggle to declare self-rule and establish an autonomous region in the Rojava cantons on Turkey’s border.55

  Turkey

  Like other countries in the region, the Republic of Turkey was established after World War I, in a process that involved the overthrow of the Sultanate by an army led by General Mustapha Kemal Pasha, later called Ataturk or “father of his country,” who became the republic’s first president. Ataturk’s vision of nationhood involved an extremely strong and centralized state, secularism, and cultural and linguistic homogeneity. In practice, Kemalism, or “Turkification” has come to mean forced assimilation.

  In 1947, as part of an effort to prevent a Communist revolution in Greece, the US proclaimed the “Truman Doctrine,” which included massive military and security-related aid to both Greece and Turkey. This policy inaugurated what is now called the “deep state,” a hidden array of security operatives and secret government groups allied with right-wing paramilitaries and fascists.56 Nevertheless, Turkey progressed toward becoming a multiparty republic, though this advance was disrupted by coups and states of emergency in 1960, 1971, and 1980.

  Although most of the country’s population is Turkish and Sunni, Turkey has numerous ethnic minorities—Armenians, Arabs, Circassians, Greeks, and many others—as well as minority religions: Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Alevis (a minority branch of Shia Islam, often considered heretical by Sunnis and mainstream Shia), among others. Kurds, at about 20 percent of the population, are the largest minority. Because there are so many of them, Turkey has always suspected them of separatist tendencies.

  The virulence of Turkish ethnic nationalism was evident even before the formation of the republic, in the Armenian genocide during World War I. Since then, Turkey has pursued Kemalist policies towards the Kurds that include forced population transfers; mass random killings; a ban on use of the Kurdish language, costume, music, festivals. and names; and extreme political repression.57

  The policy of repression escalated after the formation of the PKK, which initiated armed struggle in 1984. The guerrilla war that resulted lasted until 1999, when PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured and imprisoned. For much of this time, southeastern Turkey was under martial law and Kurds were subject to arbitrary arrest, torture, and death. There have been alternating periods of ceasefire and renewed warfare since.

  In 1990, Turkish Kurds attempted to gain some political space by forming a legal political party, HEP, and running candidates for Parliament, but, as historian David McDowall says, “The state was determined to stifle any Kurdish voice.”58 HEP was banned in 1993 and its deputies prosecuted for alleged ties to the PKK. What followed was a twenty-five-year long game of political musical chairs, in which the Kurds attempted to have a legal political voice by starting first one party, then another, with each declared illegal in turn.

  But the game changed in 2013 with the occupation of Taksim Square in Istanbul, which became the Turkish version of Occupy Wall Street. The occupation began in response to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plan to destroy Gezi Park, one of the few green spaces left in Istanbul, and hand the land over to developers, combined with his increasing authoritarianism, restrictions on freedom of expression, and imposition of Islamist ideas. A loose coalition of Leftists, secularists, feminists, greens, the LGBTI movement, and Kurds, occupied the Square and sparked a national protest movement. The Erdogan government responded with a harsh crackdown. The Turkish Left had already suffered from repression, arbitrary arrest, and censorship. Now, faced with even greater police brutality, they began to work in coalition with the Kurds to contest the next national elections.59 The People’s Democratic Party (HDP), previously the party of the urban Left, feminists, and gays, merged with the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), and formed a new social-democratic, secular, and minority-rights party which kept the name of the HDP but adopted much of the program of the radical Kurds. Journalist Adam Barnett described this program in February 2015:

  “A social-democratic bloc of Kurds, secularists, feminists, LGBT activists, and greens with twenty-eight seats in the Turkish national assembly (making it the fourth-largest party), the HDP . . . advocates equal rights for all minorities (including Alevis and Armenians) and state neutrality on matters of religion, as well as mandating at least one female co-chair at every administrative level and applying a sort of ‘affirmative action’ for LGBT candidates. . . . But what truly distinguishes the HDP, and could have wider resonance across an ever more fragmented Middle East, is its call for a radical decentralization of powers from Ankara to regional assemblies, along the lines of the democratic experiment being conducted in the area of northern Syria known to Kurds as Rojava.”60

  Revolution from the Bottom Up

  Since 2005, revolutionary Kurds associated with the HDP had been trying to build a structure of local democratic autonomy in cities across southeastern Turkey, but meeting with government harassment and arrest at every turn. The Syrian civil war gave the Kurdish liberation movemen
t a stage where they could freely test out Ocalan’s ideas about democratic self-rule in practice.

  In the summer of 2012, as opposition to Bashar al-Assad grew and Saudi- and Qatari-sponsored jihadis flocked into Syria, followed by Daesh, Assad withdrew most of his troops from Northern Syria to protect his home base in Damascus and on the coast. The Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) moved into the vacuum with its own militias, the People’s Protection Units (YPG ) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), and set up three independent cantons—Afrin, Cizire, and Kobane.

  By January 2014, they had established a system of participatory democracy in each canton, with political decisions made by local councils, and social service and legal questions administered by civil society structures under the umbrella of a coalition called TEV-DEM (Democratic Society Movement). While most of TEV-DEM’s ideological leadership came from the PYD, it included people from all the ethnic groups and political parties in the cantons, including a party affiliated with the KDP in Iraq.

  The feminism of the Rojava cantons, and their ability to resist Daesh, grew out of changes in the political line of the PKK in the 1990s, as it evolved from a disciplined Marxist-Leninist party to something a lot more complicated. By 2016, the Kurdish liberation movement was more like a network of groups united by common ideas than like a Leninist party, although elements of the latter were still strong in the PKK itself. Social scientists who study the Kurdish liberation movement have described it as “a formation of parties and organizations comprising several parties (including the PKK as a party), a co-party which separately organizes women, sister parties in Iraq (PCDK), Iran (PJAK), and Syria (PYD), and guerilla forces related to these parties.” The network also contained mass organizations and coalitions led by the PKK, including the Association of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), made up of elected local and regional councils, and the National Congress of Kurdistan, which brought together representatives of various parties, religious organizations, and the Kurdish diaspora.61