WORLD WORLDWIDE PORTUGAL KURDISTAN ROJAVA News Journal Update - (en) anarkismo.net: Anarchists in Rojava: Revolution is a struggle in itself by Jurnal mapa - Interview of Uniao Libertaria to Tekosina Anarsist (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

União Libertária, a group of young libertarians in Portugal, came into

contact with militants of the Tekosîna Anarsîst (TA, Anarchist Struggle
in Kurdish), present in Rojava, in northeastern Syria. This is a
militant conversation around the reflections of this voluntary anarchist
group around justice, art, religion and what it is to be
"revolutionary". TA, in addition to having participated in the difficult
fight against the forces of the Islamic State (ISIS), currently also
functions as a unit of combat medics, assists in agricultural work and
plays an educational role.

1 - We have seen statements about the work of TA outside of the
battlefield, from medical support to education. This second one is of
great interest to us, could you please clarify a bit on how you proceed
with educational campaigns, not only amongst yourselves but also with
local communities? Are there any lessons you wish to share about the
role (and process) of revolutionary education? How do you see pedagogy
as not only a tool, but also a space within the struggles you must face?

Education is what builds the foundations of a new society. It is often
our best tool to defend ourselves and our communities. The kurdish
liberation movement values education a lot, and this also brought us to
reflect on our approach. In rojava it is a common practice to join
educations of several months, where militants from different places have
no other work than learn and develop. This is not a new practice from
rojava, the kurdish movement has been working on their educational
methods for decades. Joining some of those educations, we also noticed
how much our understanding of education is connected to school,
university and other state systems. And how much we should develop our
own educational programs, shaped by our own political views and values.
In this, the pedagogy of the oppressed of Paulo Freire can give very
important perspectives.

Revolutionary education can be everything we do, if we learn from it in
an organized way. Closed educations allow us to work deeper on one
topic, like learning about the philosophy and political views of
Abdullah Ocalan, study the proposals of Makhno or Malatesta about
organized anarchism and the different attempts to put it in practice, or
learn about first aid and medical care during war situations. But this
also has to come with practice, which is often the best education, like
when we work in society with our kurdish, arab and other comrades, when
we build our organization day to day, or when we work as combat medics
in the front lines. Theory brings knowledge and helps to build
understanding and confidence, but is practical work what builds our
experience.

Some knowledge we carry with us, is scarce here, and is important to
collectivize it. We have been running educations of first aid and
tactical field care to kurdish, arab and armenian comrades. We also
shared our knowledge and experiences among ourselves, sometimes in short
seminar formats sometimes in longer closed educations. This helped us to
build our capacities and a common frame as organization, practically as
well as ideologically. With time, our methods and systems of education
are getting more adapted to our needs, reflecting not only of what we
want to teach and learn but also how we want to do it. For some comrades
it is helpful to read or listen a seminar for several ours, for others
is better to do things and learn on practice. We try to keep this in
mind but also challenge ourselves, like by encouraging comrades that are
more familiar with academic areas to work on the ground, and push for
ideological development and theoretical works with those more oriented
to field work.

2- In previous statements you have discussed the need for
revolutionaries to disengage from individualistic, selfish mindsets, as
well as issues of ego when dealing with comrades and organization. How
have you within TA managed to deal with such mindsets? We recognize this
view, where anarchism and revolutionary struggle continuously straddle a
difficult line between lifestyle and commodity, not allowing us to build
meaningful relations on the march to liberation. Are there any lessons
or warnings from your own activities that can be parted?

That is a very difficult question, because it is one of the main
challenges we face. Anarchism has always discussed the contradictions
between individual militants and the need revolutionary organizations.
We are working to balance those points, because we see very important
arguments to be made on both sides. As many anarchists before us, we
reached the conclusion that organization is a necessity, not as an aim
in itself but as a means to an end. We don't accept unnecessary
hierarchies and we value the individuality of our militants, often
referring to the idea that "there is no organization without militants,
there is no militant without organization". With this we also want to
point out the importance of individual responsibility towards the
organization, as well as collective responsibility of the organization
towards the individuals.

Becoming a militant of a revolutionary organization comes with
individual and collective contradictions. The main aspects of our
personalities have been shaped by the societies we have grown up in.
Life in capitalist modernity relies on individualization. In school, in
the work place, in the media we consume, we are told that individual
freedom is everything that matters. "Your freedom ends where the freedom
of other starts" is often the main idea running our societies. It denies
collective belonging and it promotes individualist mindset and values.
Is therefore no surprise that individualist anarchism manage to thrive
in those capitalist societies we come from, because it connects with
those individualist values that liberalism promotes. We want to
challenge that. We believe our only way out is solidarity and mutual
aid, and for this we have to challenge the deeply rooted individualism
that we all carry with us.

Individualism can take many forms. Some are more obvious, like
selfishness, elitism, or narcissism; but more subtle forms can take more
time to notice, like refusing help when needed, not sharing information
or knowledge with comrades, not listening or considering others
proposals and ideas. We all have traces of individualism, and they are
often connected with our ego and the image we have and we project of
ourselves. Overcoming this requires that we are able to evaluate
ourselves and others as well as our ways of relating. Criticism and
self-criticism go hand in hand, we need to be able to acknowledge our
shortcomings to meaningfully engage with the shortcomings of others.
Admitting to ourselves that there is a difference between how we
perceive ourselves/how we want to be perceived and how other perceive us
can be painful. However acknowledging that gap opens the door for us to
develop. Everyone has this gap, for some it is wider, for some it is
more narrow, and to challenge it can create space to grow and learn.
Keeping this in mind, we can build better relations that are founded in
honesty and trust.

Trust is scarce in our societies. It is much easier to learn to suspect,
to be afraid of your neighbor, to step on your co-workers to get upper
hand and get a better piece of the cake. Capitalism relies on
competition, and lying and selling yourself, on the society of
spectacle. There is no place for honesty and trust in a system that is
based on performance, on appearance of what you are not, on faking it
and believing that one day you will make it. To be honest and
transparent with our comrades necessitates vulnerability. We had been
told to hide those things, to not let others see our weak points, to
present ourself as the all-capable person that can do anything that is
needed. All those individualist traits play against us, specially in
difficult moments when stress and hardships reveal the things we try to
hide.

We have been working on these issues by putting into practice tools like
tekmil and platform, which we learned from the kurdish movement. We also
explored other methods, and lately we have been deepening our knowledge
on conflict resolution, with restorative circles and transformative
justice. Transformative justice provides a good approach, connected to
our ideological values and oriented towards topics like responsibility
and accountability, that should always be the base of our organizing. We
learned that organization is a struggle in itself, and that
contradictions, conflicts and challenges will always arise in our
organizing. In absence of hierarchical structures, how we take decisions
and how we solve conflicts is a very important part of our organizing.

3- Maybe related to above, how is inter-personal conflict resolved at
large in NES? We have seen several abstract perspectives, but little of
actual accounts on the processes of justice and equity, how are such
issues dealth with? Do the several autonomous groups have the freedom to
deal with them "in-house"? Are all conflict resolutions centralized?

There are currently two justice systems at play in NES. One similar to
state justice and one more based on communitarian justice. The
communitarian system consists of peasant consensus committees and local
councils that are often composed of religious leaders and community
elders. These encourage people to take responsibility and agency over
their own problems. However this system is not working so well,
unfortunately. Because of this many conflicts are still settled through
the state-like legal justice system that is half inherited from the
Al-Assad regime and half reorganized by the Autonomous Administration.
It is an awkward mix that works with the tools at hand in a difficult
situation. The union of lawyers played an important role, as well as the
effort to write the "social contract" of AANES, some kind of
constitution that is revisited every few years in discussions with
different political and social organizations.

The reasons that lead the Autonomous Administration to put more efforts
to reorganize the general legal system instead of promoting the
communitarian justice councils is not so clear to us. We suggest you
talk to justice committee of the AANES directly, they will be better
able to answer that. Besides these, there are also the women's
autonomous structures such as the women's houses (mala jin) and women's
law. These have played and are playing an important role in addressing
problems around gender as well as finding solutions around family
conflict concerning women (marriage, divorce, abuse, etc.).

Councils, committees, communes, and autonomous organizations have some
degree of freedom to deal with conflict "in-house". How exactly it is
approached and if people involve the state-like legal system depends on
the nature and size of the conflict as well as the people and groups
involved. With crimes that have big social impact, like brutal murders
or organized treason (giving intelligence to Turkey that is used to
assassinate revolutionaries, helping ISIS to plan and carry out
attacks), there have been popular trials. Those trials gather different
representatives of the social community, especially those more affected
by the crime judged, and function as popular jury to decide the penalty.

For our organization and for organizations in europe we think it is
important we come to understand the value of transformative justice, and
that we build capacity to start offering alternatives to the legal
'justice' system, which is a racist ableist punitive lie and deeply
connected to nation-state power. The topic on transformative justice has
been on the table in leftist circles in europe for a while. We see it is
slowly moving into a more practical phase now. Let us start with small
practical adjustments, once we start gaining some experiences from the
daily life, we can and should supplement them with some
reading/study/theory. Conflict resolution cannot be learned from books,
its fundaments can only be learned in practice, books will be very
helpful to improve us but only if we are already putting it in practice.
We will have to make many mistakes, and that is fine. We have a lot to
unlearn from the state imposed systems of 'justice'. We are making an
imperfect start by using tools like tekmil, restorative circles and
autonomous women's structures to build on this.

4- What is the current status of art and self-expression within rojava?
Has there been the chance and space for people to be able to perform,
create, or show artistic creation? How is such received? How has the
changing facets of the conflict affected it?

Tevgera Çand u Huner (Tev-çand, the organization of art and culture) is
a coordination of all the art and culture centers, present in every
city. Most of those centers have different groups, like dance, music,
theater, cinema, paint, literature, sculpture, etc. They mainly promote
art connected to kurdish culture, language and identity. Every ethnic
group is encouraged to promote its own traditional art and culture while
also making space for other forms of art outside folkloric tradition.
Tev-çand has a political approach to art, seeing it as a vehicle to
share and spread the values of the revolution. A couple of successful
examples are Hunergeha Welat - with their youtube channel publishing new
songs and videoclips made in rojava - or the Komina Film a Rojava - the
cinema commune that produced several movies, shorts, clips. Komina Film
a Rojava recently published a series about rojava called "Evina Kurd"
(kurdish love).

The local groups often perform in local celebrations, festive days and
other cultural events. In the last years some of those groups and
artists are gaining experience and getting more professional, and we
start to see their art in different theaters, expositions and events.
Art is seen as popular and cultural wealth, and there is no process of
commodification around it. Theater, cinema and music are performed and
shared for free, and we have never seen any cultural event with entrance
fee. This is part of the political approach on ethics and aesthetics
that is promoted. To keep it short, we can simply point the efforts to
connect aesthetics to political and ethical revolutionary values. This
approach challenges the standards of beauty that capitalist modernity
tries to impose, seeing art as a vehicle of expression of the people, of
the society and its values. A lot of art is connected to the resistance
against ISIS and turkish fascism, with special focus on women's
resistances and YPJ, but also about the historical roots and struggles
of the kurdish people.

In that approach to art we can see a shift that the revolution brought,
that maybe started even before rojava. Kurdish cinema from the 20th
century is often tragic, about the massacres and the exile that kurdish
people suffered. Dengbêj, a traditional music/poetry, is also infused
with stories of destroyed villages, murdered families and orphaned
children. It is in this new century that kurdish art has started to
reflect a new image. One not so focused on kurds just as victims of
inhumane tragedies, but also as actors of change. The songs of YPG and
YPJ defeating ISIS or the guerrillas fighting in the mountains, the new
movies of the resistance in Sur or in Kobane, the big celebrations of
NewRoz (kurdish new year) are examples of a rebirth of the kurdish
people and their will to resist. They are not just a people whose faith
is suffering, they are a stateless nation whose land has been occupied
and whose villages burned down. They learned from other anticolonial
struggles and from revolutionary movements of national liberation and
they will take their destiny in their hands. They will defend their land
and their culture, building a future for next generations, with weapons
but also with music, with dance, with cinema.

5- What is TA's view on the role of religion, and how has it affected
their capacity to connect and relate to local communities? Have there
been challenges, or chanegs in attitude of the militants? In the west we
struggle to separate anti-clericalism from base islamophobia nad
eurocentrism, what lessons have you gained from your insertion in
Kurdish and Arab societies?

Religion is not the problem for us when it is connected to the people
and ethics, it is a problem when religion is connected to power and
rule. It is this wielding of authority that we are against, as you also
touching with anti-clericalism. Some anarchists came here with atheist
backgrounds, and when asked about our religion is easy for us to answer
we have no religion. But this answer is often understood as if we have
no ethics, and also made us reflect how most of us, even if not
practitioners, had been raised in a christian culture.

We agree with you that we in the west can do a bad job at separating
anti-clericalism from islamophobia and eurocentrism. The society we are
in is overwhelmingly muslim (with small minorities of other belief),
nearly everyone has belief in the Quran, even if not everyone describes
themselves as practicing muslims. This reality grounds our work with
people here. We should understand the importance religion holds to the
people and local comrades. Knowing a little, or a lot, about islam is
very helpful when we discuss with local comrades. Arguing from religion
for a revolutionary perspective is a tactic that has proven successful.
It is necessary to respect peoples religious conviction, but at the same
time we also critique or question comrades when this leads them to take
actions that are not in line with the revolutionary values in NES. There
are efforts to build a democratic islam, looking at the ethical side of
islamic religion and not so much at the Sharia law. This is a necessary
process to come to terms with the aftermath of islamist fundamentalism
carried out as theocratic fascism by ISIS. Though from the outside it
might seem like ISIS is no more, the fight against its ideology very
much continues here. In some regions of NES, ISIS ideology is still
widespread and it will take time and effort for everyone to move towards
a democratic islam.

6- Anarchist and so-called revolutionary movements in Europe have
struggled for decades find something which can overcame our own
weaknesses and smallness, looking at methods old and new. What is your
perspective on this? Do you also agree or feel the movements are
limiting themselves, and if so why? Lack of use of insurrectionary
violence, lack of structures directing the struggle, lack of resources,
lack of conviction?

This is a very important point and question you bring up here. We agree
that movements are limiting themselves. We see the issue at the core as
a lack of organizations that can create and promote long term aims
perspectives, as currently we mostly see affinity based groups with
short term thinking.

The wave of insurrectionism in the 90's, especially in italy, brought a
short term struggle perspective that seemed to promote effectivity. In
some ways, it worked, however it did so at the cost of undermining
organizational capacity. Organization capacity is crucial. By becoming
an organization, we as TA, now have the ability to accumulate
experience, we do not constantly have to start anew. We can also build
lasting projects and relations, we can deepen our understanding and
learning of other organizations that have struggled and are struggling.
Not only on an individual level, but on an organizational one. Meaning
that such knowledge and experiences cease to become merely tied to one
person or one cell or affinity group, but that the whole organization
takes ownership of it. This greatly grows our capacity as an organization.

To develop as a revolutionary organization is not easy, we already
talked about this. We have to break with the liberal individualist
mindset that is so deeply ingrained with capitalist socialization. Our
societies are organized around those capitalist values, and to change it
we have to develop our own values and social institutions, to anticipate
the society we want. The things you mention lacking in anarchist
movements (structures to direct the struggle, resources, conviction,
action) can often be connected to the lack of organization. If we find
ourselves isolated, as individuals or in small groups, our capacity to
influence and change the society around us diminish. As we can learn
many things in rojava, there are also many lessons we can take from the
anarchist organizations in latin america. The ideas of "especifismo"
(english: specifism), a theoretical frame oriented to develop specific
anarchist organizations, are the result of decades of struggle. We can
track them back to platformist proposal of Peter Arshinov and Nestor
Maknho, but developed in practice by the Federacion Anarquista de
Uruguay (FAU). As portugese anarchists, you have easy access to the
materials and texts developed by brazilian anarchist organizations.

7- There was critique recently of the focus and resources given by
western leftists towards nascent anarchist movements in Ukraine, who,
without true autonomous structures and being inserted in statist armies,
have received generous support and funds, while non-white movements have
struggled for a fraction of this support. Do you agree with this critique?

We assume you are referring to the article "Anarchist who Fought in
rojava: Response to 'No War But Class War' Debate", that can be found on
Abolition Media. We agree with the article that the amount of resources
sent to Ukraine from western leftist is very disproportional with the
amount of material support comrades in NES have gotten, especially given
that the revolution here is so explicitly rooted in libertarian
revolutionary ideology and praxis, where this is more debatable for
Ukraine as the article pointed out. "Solidarity is something you can
hold in your hands", a slogan popularized by the anti-imperialist group
KAK, active in Denmark in the 70s, is a statement we can very much find
ourselves in. While NES has gotten an alright amount of solidarity
pictures, awareness campaigns, diplomatics campaigns, etc. on the side
of material, financial or other support that we can "hold in our hands"
the western left has absolutely not given it serious effort.

That being said, the war in Ukraine has been going on for a bit over a
year now, the war in rojava for over 10 years. Of course these
timescales also have an effect. Ukraine is on the news and we aren't, we
won't be either, until a new invasion, and even then we will only
receive a fraction of the media attention that Ukraine is getting. When
we look broader than Ukraine and rojava, we ask: who has been looking at
the genocidal warfare in Tigray or the recent war unfolding in Sudan?
Who has been organizing material support for those conflicts? The Tigray
peoples self-defense forces have a long revolutionary tradition, with a
project similar to the ideas of democratic confederalism. In Sudan we
have recently see a military escalation after big mobilizations and
uprisings shook the country, that had a remarkable anarchist organized
movement not common to find in most of African countries. But few
articles are written about it, and even less anarchist book-fairs
discussions about those conflicts. It is not fair either that those
movements received little to no media coverage, let alone material
support. This is part of the colonialism that we are trying to fight
against. For us this is also a reason to stay with rojava, where values
of anticolonialism are very much alive.

Coming back to Ukraine, Anarchists have been struggling since the
beginning of the recent conflict, they were there at Maidan square and
tried to organize form there. Probably this is not the place to discuss
how much this movement is rooted in the historical anarchist movement in
Ukraine, with the Black Liberation Peasants Army and the Makhnovist
revolution, but nowadays the presence of anarchists is crucial to
question the nationalist narrative of the far-right, that has been a
dominating presence in the protest in Ukraine from the start. We have a
responsibility as anarchists to take our place in such times, we cannot
leave all the space to the far-right, because if we do they will take
it. Now the current situation in Ukraine is not a revolution aligned
with our principles, but it is our task to push our principles to the
forefront and make them known. We can quote Malatesta when saying that
"We are in any case one of the forces acting in the society, and history
will advance, as always, in the directions resultant of all the forces".

Historically war and revolution have an important connection. War
environments see state authority stumble and authority diffuse in some
places. The state isn't always there anymore to provide people with
infrastructure and resources. This means there are often windows of
opportunity to assist in the self organization and management of the
people, initially primarily along lines of mutual aid and solidarity.
This is a situation in which bringing our ideology and applying it in
practice with the people can be a useful way of strengthening our
tendency, as Malatesta says.

We support our anarchist comrades fighting in Ukraine, we have an
approach of critical solidarity to the people of Ukraine and aim to
engage the contradictions that it brings up and not devolve into a
binary and dogmatic approach. We would also like to draw your attention
to comrade Leshiy and comrade Ciya, they have both spend time in NES and
fell on the Ukrainian front lines together with other anarchist comrades
in Ukrainan front lines. We grieve this loss, and aim to learn from
their lives and decisions, they also show us a way of nuanced analysis
and consideration that has space for the contradictions that inevitably
come up when we get our hands dirty in revolution. We agreed with the
comrade who wrote the article that it is very easy to be purist and
judgmental about decisions made in Ukraine and rojava from a comfortable
armchair. Participating in an actual revolution or armed conflict will
quickly make it clear that there are often no "clean" or clear-cut
solutions and being a revolutionary in action, not just in words, means
gaining a deep understanding of nuanced analysis and contradictions.

8 - How can we assist you in TA; materially or otherwise?

The main points in which we can see your assistance to be help us are;
a) ideological development b) engaged network c) resist repression d)
militants e) resources

a) Ideological development of anarchist struggle is the basis for us to
move forward. We see that we have come to a point where we realize as
european anarchists that affinity based organizing alone is not
sufficient. We need anarchist organization or structures that keep us
together not just based on personal affinity, but in an organized way,
to be able to think long term and develop a wider strategy. By further
developing anarchist ideology and praxis in our current context, we
strengthen each other.

b) Engaged networks are a foundation to exchange discussion, projects,
resources and experiences. We see this in the form of building long term
relations with solid organizations, and such exchange can take place
through visits and exchange of militants as well as other forms of
communication. Related to the point about ideological development, this
includes reading and discussing each other statements and letters,
learning from each other experience and giving feedback, proposals and
critique on them.

c) Networks also leads into resisting repression. In the past years,
militants who have been to rojava and the kurdish movement in general
have been increasingly criminalized. Quite a few comrades are spending
time in prison or are in other kinds of legal problems. We need
anarchists everywhere to push back against this criminalization.

d) We need more militants to join us in rojava to fight and struggle
here. There is also opportunity for comrades are already organized in
europe to join us here while remaining connected to their european
organization. We would like this actually. We see this as a potential
way to strengthen ties between our organization and anarchist
organizations in europe.

e) On the directly material side, we need money. Since exactly what
materials we need changes from time to time, sending materials directly
can be a little tricky, though we can talk about this if there is a
desire to do something like that. With money directly we can allocate it
to the most pressing needs and make adjustments when necessary in this
every changing situation we are in.

Related Link:
https://www.jornalmapa.pt/2023/09/23/anarquistas-em-rojava-a-revolucao-e-uma-luta-em-si-mesma

https://www.anarkismo.net/article/32832
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