The Kurdish question

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This is an updated, extended and revised version of an article that first appeared in German in the September 2014 issue of Marx21. Translation is by Loren Balhorn for International Viewpoint, the Fourth Internation­ al’s English-language journal. T Kurdish organisations in its fight against the Is­ he West has suddenly begun supporting various lamic State. So why is the largest Kurdish organisa­ tion of all, the PKK, still outlawed? This article dis­ cusses current developments in Kurdistan and gives a brief overview of the history of the Kurdish liberation movement and the PKK’s illegal status in Germany. It argues for a radical left strategy focused on defeating the ban on the PKK.

August 2014: Terrorist militias under the leader­ ship of the Islamic State (IS) storm a region in north­ ern Iraq near the Syrian border inhabited by the Ya­ zidis, a millennia-old monotheistic ethno-religious Kurdish minority. Divisions of the Peshmerga, the re­ gion’s armed forces, flee from the advancing IS troops without firing a shot. The Yazidis beg the Peshmerga to at least leave them their weapons so as to give them a chance at defending themselves, but the Peshmerga refuse.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis are forced to flee into the nearby mountains. Those who stay behind are subjected to brutal, genocidal acts: thousands killed, hundreds buried alive, and countless acts of rape, kid­ napping and enslavement are perpetuated against Ya­ zidi women. To add insult to injury, IS fighters ransack and destroy ancient Yazidi holy sites.

But even those who were able to flee faced the pos­ sibility of a looming humanitarian catastrophe. The fleeing Yazidis were surrounded by the IS and trapped in the mountains with little food or water under con­ ditions of extreme heat. Abandoned by the rest of the world, it seemed as if they had little choice but to wait for death—that is, until unexpected reinforcements arrived: divisions of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (PYG) break through IS lines in northern Syria, while guerilla fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) advance from the north and fighters from their Iranian sister organisation, the PJAK (Party of Free Life of Kurdistan), from the east.

The Kurdish fighters manage to establish an escape corridor, through which tens of thousands pass into liberated Kurdish areas of northern Syria. It is only days after their escape that the U.S. bombing cam­ paign and accompanying Peshmerga offensive begins. Surviving Yazidis repeatedly insisted to Western jour­ nalists that “it wasn’t the Americans who saved us. It was God and the PKK.”

The northern Syrian Kurds came to the Yazidis’ as­ sistance despite having to defend themselves from the IS on their home territory as well. The north Syrian Kurds in question are forces under the command of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a sister organisa­ tion of the PKK. PYD forces joined the struggle against Bashar al-Assad at the outset of the Syrian revolution and expelled his troops from the northern parts of the country.

Following this victory they declared themselves neutral in the ongoing civil war and restricted them­ selves to defending their territory. It was here on this territory that the Kurds began building a self-organ­ ised and democratic form of self-governance called “Rojava” that is stunningly unique in the world today.

In Rojava one finds a parliament with set quotas mandating the participation and inclusion of women in parliament and all levels of government, with simi­ lar rules for ethnic and religious minorities. To defend the region the Kurds established the non-partisan and non-sectarian defense units of the YPG, which also in­ clude large independent women’s divisions—estab­ lishing an island of hope toward self-organization and emancipation in the middle of the nightmare that is the Syrian civil war.

This island of hope, however, was threatened from the onset: Turkey closed its borders in an attempt to starve the Kurdish self-government. Ankara also sup­ ported the Islamist terror group ISIS, the predecessor to the IS, which attacked the Kurdish regions from the south.

The IS acquired extensive caches of weapons from the fleeing Iraqi army after they overtook Mosul, a city of over one million in northern Iraq, including heavy weaponry originally purchased from the U.S. These weapons were immediately dispatched to Syria to be used in a major offensive against Kobanê, a centre of the Kurdish self-government, in July 2014.

The YPG, militarily out-gunned and outmatched, prepared for a desperate fight-back. But, once again, assistance came from outside: people all across the Kurdish parts of Turkey donated money, food, and medicine to support besieged Kobanê. Thousands set up camp along the border to destroy the border fence in a provocative act of civil disobedience and thereby broke through the Turkish blockade.

The PKK sent hundreds of its guerrilla fighters down Jonathan Spyer (Left) Kurdish fighters in Syria.

from the mountains to join the strug­ gle in Kobanê, and volunteers from all over Kurdistan as well as mem­ bers of left-wing Turkish political parties joined them.

This impressive show of solidarity was successful: the offensive of the IS was stopped, Kobanê has still not fall­ en, and the democratic experiment of Rojava could live on. But at the time of this writing, Kobanê is once again under threat: the IS began a renewed offensive against the city at the end of September. IS terrorists have man­ aged to slip into the city and engage in house-to-house fighting with YPG units. After long delays, the U.S. de­ cided to “support” Kurdish forces by bombing IS positions.

The Kurdish liberation movement — a historical overview The IS offensive in Syria and Iraq has thrust the Kurdish question into the limelight of world politics for the first time in years, as well as high­ lighting the contradictions manifest in the West’s attitude toward it. West­ ern allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have at the very least tol­ erated (and perhaps even supported) the rise of the IS for quite some time, while historically the U.S., EU, and thus Germany have treated the PKK—the single most effective and successful force currently fighting the IS—as a terrorist organization.

The Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group without a state in the world. Their national interests went ignored by the major imperialist powers during the re-division of the Middle East after World War I, leaving up to 18 million Kurds living in Turkey, be­ tween five and seven million in Iran, five million Iraq and two million in Iran today.

The 20th-century history of the Kurds is a history of oppression and resistance. The century witnessed multiple uprisings for national independence, demo­ cratic freedoms, and cultural self-determination. In fact, an independent Kurdish state with loyalties to the Soviet Union emerged in Iran after World War II. After being defeated by Persian troops, left-wing Kurdish groups continued their armed struggle—first against the dictatorship of the Shah, and later against the clerical regime of the mullahs. Iraq, however, re­ mained the center of the Kurdish resistance move­ ment for many years.

This movement consisted primarily of two different parties leading the struggle against Saddam Hussein and for an independent Kurdistan: the traditional­ ist and conservative Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP), and the ideologically somewhat more progres­ sive Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

As history would have it, however, the Kurdish free­ dom fighters who would later come to be known as the Peshmerga quickly became the playthings of vari­ ous foreign powers. For example, during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, Iraq supported the Iranian Kurds while Iran armed the Iraqi Kurds; at the same time, the U.S. supported its then ally Saddam Hussein in his bloody suppression of the (Iraqi) Kurdish uprising. It was in the small Kurdish city of Halabja that, for the first time since World War II, German poison gas was once again implicated in mass killings—German cor­ porations had sold Saddam the chemicals used in the massacre.

This constellation shifted in 1990, at the outset of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. With the outbreak of the first Gulf War, Iraqi Kurds suddenly became po­ tential allies of the U.S. The U.S. established a no-fly zone across northern Iraq in the 1990s in return for their participation in the war, under the protection of which Kurdish fighters were able to expel Iraqi sol­ diers from the territory.

The Kurds also fought on the side of the U.S. in the second Gulf War in 2003, and were rewarded with an autonomous region following Saddam’s fall. This re­ gion was under control of the KDP and PUK, but only encompassed part of the Kurdish-populated areas of Iraq. The PKK was also able to establish guerrilla bas­ (continued on page 7)

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es there for their struggle against the Turkish state.

Kurdish uprisings continued to occur in Turkey itself as well. Oppression of Kurds is particularly severe in Turkey, due primarily to the fact that their existence as a separate ethnic and cultural group clashes with the vision of a unitary ethnic Turkish state as projected by the founder of modern Turkey, Atatürk. Kurds were forbidden from speaking their own language, using Kurdish names or even writing the letters W and X, which exist in the Kurdish, but not Turkish, language.

Following a series of large student and labour-led movements in the 1970s, Turkey became host to a plethora of large, left-wing parties, including the PKK, founded in 1978 by a group of left-wing activists cen­ tred around Abdullah Öcalan. The party adopted a Marxist-Leninist political programme and oriented itself towards armed revolution with the aim of estab­ lishing an independent, socialist Kurdistan.

The PKK was forced into exile with many other left­ ist groups in Turkey in 1980, after right-wing military officers enacted a coup and unleashed a wave of sav­ age repression against the Turkish left.

The PKK found refuge in the Lebanese training camps of the Palestinian popular liberation front, PFLP, and fought with them against the Israeli inva­ sion in 1982. The PKK began its own bloody guerilla war in the Turkish part of Kurdistan in 1984 and be­ gan establishing mass support amongst the Kurdish of imperialism.’ Tony Savino / Socialist Action

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6 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2014 ‘The Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group without a state in the world. Their interests were ignored after WWI.’