Introduction ---- At the time of writing the following
text,theelementsthatnowapparent.The dizzying speed of events makes it
almost impossible to describe them in a way that respects the coherence
and criteria of topicality and updating that are most suitable for their
understanding. Here, therefore, we limit ourselves to recalling only a
few (in our opinion relevant), very recent (we repeat, at the time of
writing), which we hermeneutically consider to be precursors to possible
interpretative keys. ---- A significant part of the international
community (EU and not only) took very little time to "dissolve any
reservations" andto clear Assad's substitutes. The 5.8 billion destined
to support the coalition led by the "redeemed" Ahmed al-Sharaa(alias
Abou Mohammed Al Joulani) are.
Contrary to what many analysts and observers have ostentatiously argued,
the situation is far from being rationalized, normalized and, much less,
pacified. Just one tragic example can clarify the matter; in just 3 days
the provisional government has achieved the podium in terms of massacres
that have occurred in Syria from 2011 to today, focusing on the Alawite
minority (loyal to Assad) and causing around a thousand deaths , the
vast majority of which were women and children. The one uncorking the
very precious and prohibitive bottles of Gôut de Diamants seems to be
undeniably (albeit among others) Turkey. Only last Christmas, in
partnership with the USA and Israel, he supported without hesitation the
irresistible advance of the jihadists, but now that the Syrian branch of
the PKK, the PKK/Ypg, is "desisting" (and with it the possible
withdrawal of the USA, its protectors, is feared), the panorama, in
terms of geo-strategic influence, for Erdogan becomes much more
complicated, also in light of new and audacious Israeli plans.
The short text that has already been historicized as "Öcalan's Appeal"
has been shaking consciences, provoking bewilderment, surprise and
disorientation, and causing many to suffer crises of irreducible despair
for a few days now.
A careful, accurate and, above all, free from political-ideological
prejudices examination of the aforementioned text, offers instead the
picture of a lucid historical and cultural reading, and of a quality of
analysis (even in its extreme conciseness ) which places it on the level
of a dense and organic adherence to reality such as to distance it
siderally from any interpretative aspiration tending to liquidate it as
an act of abdication.
The leader and founder of one of the most brilliant expressions of the
liberation struggle in contemporary history, in fact, does nothing more
than take note of a global reality in motion and propose what he
considers an option (among others) that is "simply practicable".
In the entire "Appeal", not a single word that hints at contrition, the
will to atone or, worse, abjuration, is found; and this, undoubtedly,
does honor to the author and to "his" organization.
If the recent agreement signed between the interim President Ahmad al
Sharaa and the Commander of the Kurdish militias of the Syrian
Democratic Forces Mazloum Abdi, which should guarantee Kurdish political
rights and open the way to the integration of the main institutions,
must be read within the new phase that has opened with the overthrow of
the Bashar al Assad regime, the risk of a direct attack by Turkey, with
the support of the SNA militias, or of an intervention by HTS against
Kurdish governmental autonomy, represents a serious threat.
The concatenation of political and military dynamics in the Middle East
is the context within which the perspective of self-government and the
overcoming of the nation-state of the DAANES institutions is framed and
only an expansion of " Democratic Confederalism " to the entire Middle
Eastern area can guarantee its survival and avoid the risk of it being
swallowed up within the classist and sectarian dynamics of the
construction of the new Syrian state.
A new phase
After 25 years in power, the fall of the bloody regime of Bashar Al
Assad opens a new phase in the balance of power in the Middle East.
The Islamist militias of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), together with other
groups such as the Syrian National Army ,
supported by Turkey, with a rapid offensive that lasted only 12 days and
began with the conquest of Aleppo, they entered Damascus and took
control of it, forcing Al Assad to flee on a Russian military flight
bound for Moscow.
The end of the Al Assad government would not have been possible without
the Israeli military interventions in Gaza and Lebanon which, in
addition to thousands of civilian victims and the genocide of the
Palestinian people, have produced a weakening of the armed formations of
Hamas and Hezbollah, financed by Iran, which guaranteed, also supported
by the Russian military presence, the military containment of the
Islamist formations in Syria allied with Tehran. Therefore, we can argue
that the regime change in Syria must be placed in the context of the
crisis of the world order under US hegemony. And for this, it is
necessary to reconstruct the situation that has come to be determined in
Syria after 2011 and to frame the role of the international and regional
actors involved.
With the death of his father in 2000, Basher Al Assad assumed the
presidency of Syria. Assad governed the country by implementing a
neoliberal turn and developing a powerful repressive apparatus that he
used to repress dissidents, as well as other religious and national
groups. Trade unions remained under the control of the state or the
ruling Ba'ath party, such as the General Confederation of Trade Unions
of Workers (GFTUW), thanks to legislation that reduced the right to
organize. The Communist Party, which did not side with the mass
mobilizations of 2011 (the true Arab First), considering them an
"imperialist conspiracy", was co-opted by the regime. Furthermore,
during the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad, the oppression of the
Kurdish population was severely intensified.
The tragic social situation, the result of neoliberal recipes, with 30%
of the population living below the poverty line and 55% of young people
unemployed, in addition to the heavy climate of repression with
thousands of prisoners, tortured and murdered in prisons like Saydnaya,
provoked a popular uprising, in the wake of the Arab Springs that were
sweeping the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
In a short time, Islamist organizations and supporters of the Muslim
Brotherhood took control of the streets, blocking the first experiments
in self-organization and self-management which, thanks to the efforts of
comrades such as the anarchist Omar Aziz, arrested and assassinated by
the Assad regime, were spreading within the revolts with local
self-government, horizontal organization, cooperation, solidarity and
mutual support as means through which people could free themselves from
the tyranny of the state and the capitalist system.
The protests were bloodily suppressed: according to data collected by
the UN, the repression carried out by the Assad regime caused the death
of more than 5,000 civilians.
The interference of regional powers such as Turkey and the imperialist
powers, together with violent repression, led to a regimentation of the
resistance, transforming the autonomous and mass character of the
popular protests in favor of reactionary armed groups in the pay of
their foreign sponsors. The Syrian Spring was defeated, giving rise to a
devastating civil war that will cause thousands of deaths and millions
of displaced persons and refugees (about 6 million is the figure
provided by the UNHCR. Their distribution is concentrated in neighboring
countries: Turkey (3 million), Lebanon (783,000), Jordan (632,000), Iraq
(287,000), Egypt (158,000). In Europe, the distribution sees Germany in
first place (781,000), followed by Sweden (87,700), the Netherlands
(79,000), France (45,600), Switzerland (28,000) and the United Kingdom
(23,000)).
If Assad has been able to govern a country exhausted by 13 years of
civil war, it is thanks to the support of Russia and Iran.
According to two World Bank reports, "more than a decade of conflict,
compounded by external shocks, has further worsened Syria's economic
situation and led to a dramatic deterioration in the well-being of
Syrian families. Economic activity continues to decline due to a
weakening of trade; the Euro-US economic and trade sanctions against the
Assad government, which have affected oil exports since September 2011,
have interrupted Syrian crude oil exports, with losses for Damascus that
just a few months later, in January 2012, Syrian Oil Minister Sufian
Alao estimated at $2 billion. In 2022, poverty will affect 69% of the
population, or about 14.5 million Syrians. Extreme poverty, which was
virtually non-existent before the conflict, affected more than one in
four Syrians in 2022 and may have further worsened due to the impact
devastating earthquake of February 2023".
The attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October 2023, resulting in the
killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and the kidnapping of
around 250 people, which in Hamas' intentions was to bring the
Palestinian question, at risk of marginalisation following the Abraham
Accords, back to the centre of international attention, triggered the
Israeli reaction which, over the course of around a year and a half of
genocidal war, put its expansionist plans into practice, weakening the
role of Iran and the allied military formations in Lebanon and Gaza.
The redefinition of the reactive capacity of Iran and its allied
militias, as well as the impossibility for the Russian ally to sustain
two conflicts at the same time, since Russia is engaged in military
aggression against Ukraine, opens a new phase that, with the plan to
overthrow the Alawite government of Al Assad, disrupts the balance of
power in the Middle East. If the United States manages to weaken Bashar
Al Assad's ally Russia and derail the Chinese strategy for the Middle
East, Turkey and Israel can put their nationalist aims into practice.
The Syrian National Army, an ally of Turkey, is attacking the Syrian
Democratic Forces to take control of north-eastern Syria. The Israeli
armed forces have taken advantage of the situation to advance beyond the
buffer zone created in 1974 on the Golan Heights, on the border between
Israel, Syria and Lebanon, reaching as far as
40, perhaps 20 kilometers from Damascus; they sank the Syrian fleet, hit
infrastructure, depots and research centers of the armed forces, so as
to prevent aggression, cast their threatening shadow over the new
government (preventing it from getting its hands on the modern weapons
of the Syrian regular forces) and secure the precious local water
resources. The militias that overthrew Al Assad and took power in
Damascus are Islamist factions supported by Turkey. The two main
organizations are: 1) Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the
Liberation of the Levant), a Syrian Islamist armed formation of Salafi
orientation that played an important role in the Syrian civil war. The
group was formed on January 28, 2017 by the union of Jabhat Fath al-Sham
- an organization born on July 28, 2016 from the consensual separation
of the al-Nusra Front from the al-Qaeda network. The group is presumed
to still be aligned with al-Qaeda. HTS, which has exercised government
functions in the Idilib region, is responsible for serious human rights
violations and war crimes (violence against women and girls, political
oppression, forced conversions and discrimination against religious
minorities, etc.). The leader of HTS, Abu Moham med al-Jawlani (Ahmed
al-Sharaa), presents himself as a future new leader of Syria promising
freedom and democratic rights for all. 2) Syrian National Army (SNA),
sponsored by the Erdogan government of the Turkish state, heir to the
Free Syrian Army (FSA) already protagonist of the 2011 uprising and
civil war. This is an alliance of Islamist militias, militarily funded
by the Turkish army. Its main concern, under the leadership of its
Turkish masters, are the Kurdish forces in Syria. They attacked the
Kurdish region controlled by Afrin in 2018 and carried out ethnic
cleansing there. Now they are attacking the Kurdish region of Tell
Rifat, supported by Turkish artillery. It controls an area in the north
on the Turkish border under the Syrian Provisional Government. As we can
imagine, the new political power that is asserting itself in Syria with
the change of regime, does not bode well. The Syrian Transitional
Government is led by deeply reactionary political forces under blackmail
from their sponsors. Contrary to his promise to start a political
transition process with the involvement of all, the jihadist leader
Al-Jolani was elected President of Syria by a farcical "Conference",
made up of members of the interim government appointed by Al-Jolani
himself and all coming from Idlib (like some of his relatives), with the
exclusion of the opposition and the Kurdish and Druze factions.
Meanwhile, many Turkish companies expect to play a strategic role in the
reconstruction. As reported in an article in Il Sole 24 Ore on December
12, 2024, "The hope is that the reconstruction can favor the inflow of
foreign investments and start a sustainable expansion, a prospect that
pushed up the shares of Turkish construction groups in the session on
Monday: a reflection of the ambitions, supported by the same
President Erdogan, of a massive role for Ankara in the new course of the
transitional government".
Although the Sunni Muslim population represents 72-74%, Syrian society
is made up of a "mosaic of minorities". The criteria for describing the
different communities can be confessional (Alawites, Christians, Druze,
etc.), linguistic and ethnic (Armenians, Ciceros, Kurds, etc.) or
connected to a particular way of life (Bedouins).
The difficulties of coexistence between the different communities were
fueled by sectarian and centralist policies, as a product of the power
and class relations that were consolidated following the different
imperial balances that were asserted from time to time.
The only way out of the question of the self-determination of peoples is
to promote the rights of communities within a process of transformation
of capitalist production relations and overcoming the State in the
perspective of a generalized and federalist self-management. Where
people are divided into social classes and political power is in the
hands of an oligarchy, there will never be room for the
self-determination of minorities.
In this sense, the project of "Democratic Confederalism" put into
practice by the Syrian Kurds in the North-East of the country is
interesting and it would be desirable to spread throughout Syria, as
well as representing a possible "way out" to overcome the conflicts that
are holding the populations of the Middle East in check.
In the power vacuum left by the Baath Party regime, an extraordinary
political experience is beginning that takes its cue from the theories
of libertarian philosopher Murray Bookchin of libertarian municipalism
and social ecology. To quote Ocalan, "a non-state political
administration or a democracy without a state".
The resulting model of society is a pluralist model, founded on gender
equality and on a system of confederated popular assemblies that goes
beyond the hierarchical conception of the State, encouraging collective
participation in political life.
Despite several limitations and contradictions, "Democratic
Confederalism" currently represents the most advanced example of
libertarian socialism in the Middle East that can count on the
international support of various libertarian, anti-capitalist and
internationalist movements.
Even though we are pleased by the images of Syrians tearing down the
statues of Bashar Al Assad, as well as those of the liberation of
dissidents who have been missing for decades in the regime's prisons, we
are more than aware of the reactionary nature of the forces that
overthrew the Baathist government. And, unfortunately, the first signs
of a reinstatement of a despotic and sectarian state are the alarm bell
of a possible authoritarian and obscurantist drift that the Syrian
situation could assume.
Aware that the processes of emancipation and liberation can only arise
from the oppressed classes, any government, transitional or permanent,
must be fought because it expresses interests that are alien to those of
the oppressed classes.
Thirteen years of civil war and a heavy repression of dissent have
certainly cancelled out any residue of social resistance and protagonism
of the workers' movement. To relaunch a strong revolutionary and
internationalist movement in Syria and the Middle East, it is urgent to
rebuild social networks of solidarity and mutual support; to reorganize
trade union structures to relaunch autonomous class action; to develop a
transnational class movement that can involve workers from all Middle
Eastern countries; to support all those initiatives of self-government
and direct democracy that develop as an alternative to the State. In
light of the gigantic obstacles, all of an intimate superstructural
essence, that stand in the way of the establishment and development of a
"Class Consciousness" rigorously understood in much of the Middle East
and in other areas of the planet, it must absolutely not be forgotten
that alongside identitarianism, nationalism and revanchism, religiousism
embodies an unparalleled centrality.
And this is why the warning of the Fathers of our ideas is still valid,
more than ever: "The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into a
criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into a criticism of
law, the criticism of theology into a criticism of politics."
The history of the eternal struggle between the oppressed and the
oppressors teaches us that no hypothesis of social transformation can be
subordinated to the interests of the various factions of the dominant
classes, whether nationalist or imperialist, under penalty of failure.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
text,theelementsthatnowapparent.The dizzying speed of events makes it
almost impossible to describe them in a way that respects the coherence
and criteria of topicality and updating that are most suitable for their
understanding. Here, therefore, we limit ourselves to recalling only a
few (in our opinion relevant), very recent (we repeat, at the time of
writing), which we hermeneutically consider to be precursors to possible
interpretative keys. ---- A significant part of the international
community (EU and not only) took very little time to "dissolve any
reservations" andto clear Assad's substitutes. The 5.8 billion destined
to support the coalition led by the "redeemed" Ahmed al-Sharaa(alias
Abou Mohammed Al Joulani) are.
Contrary to what many analysts and observers have ostentatiously argued,
the situation is far from being rationalized, normalized and, much less,
pacified. Just one tragic example can clarify the matter; in just 3 days
the provisional government has achieved the podium in terms of massacres
that have occurred in Syria from 2011 to today, focusing on the Alawite
minority (loyal to Assad) and causing around a thousand deaths , the
vast majority of which were women and children. The one uncorking the
very precious and prohibitive bottles of Gôut de Diamants seems to be
undeniably (albeit among others) Turkey. Only last Christmas, in
partnership with the USA and Israel, he supported without hesitation the
irresistible advance of the jihadists, but now that the Syrian branch of
the PKK, the PKK/Ypg, is "desisting" (and with it the possible
withdrawal of the USA, its protectors, is feared), the panorama, in
terms of geo-strategic influence, for Erdogan becomes much more
complicated, also in light of new and audacious Israeli plans.
The short text that has already been historicized as "Öcalan's Appeal"
has been shaking consciences, provoking bewilderment, surprise and
disorientation, and causing many to suffer crises of irreducible despair
for a few days now.
A careful, accurate and, above all, free from political-ideological
prejudices examination of the aforementioned text, offers instead the
picture of a lucid historical and cultural reading, and of a quality of
analysis (even in its extreme conciseness ) which places it on the level
of a dense and organic adherence to reality such as to distance it
siderally from any interpretative aspiration tending to liquidate it as
an act of abdication.
The leader and founder of one of the most brilliant expressions of the
liberation struggle in contemporary history, in fact, does nothing more
than take note of a global reality in motion and propose what he
considers an option (among others) that is "simply practicable".
In the entire "Appeal", not a single word that hints at contrition, the
will to atone or, worse, abjuration, is found; and this, undoubtedly,
does honor to the author and to "his" organization.
If the recent agreement signed between the interim President Ahmad al
Sharaa and the Commander of the Kurdish militias of the Syrian
Democratic Forces Mazloum Abdi, which should guarantee Kurdish political
rights and open the way to the integration of the main institutions,
must be read within the new phase that has opened with the overthrow of
the Bashar al Assad regime, the risk of a direct attack by Turkey, with
the support of the SNA militias, or of an intervention by HTS against
Kurdish governmental autonomy, represents a serious threat.
The concatenation of political and military dynamics in the Middle East
is the context within which the perspective of self-government and the
overcoming of the nation-state of the DAANES institutions is framed and
only an expansion of " Democratic Confederalism " to the entire Middle
Eastern area can guarantee its survival and avoid the risk of it being
swallowed up within the classist and sectarian dynamics of the
construction of the new Syrian state.
A new phase
After 25 years in power, the fall of the bloody regime of Bashar Al
Assad opens a new phase in the balance of power in the Middle East.
The Islamist militias of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), together with other
groups such as the Syrian National Army ,
supported by Turkey, with a rapid offensive that lasted only 12 days and
began with the conquest of Aleppo, they entered Damascus and took
control of it, forcing Al Assad to flee on a Russian military flight
bound for Moscow.
The end of the Al Assad government would not have been possible without
the Israeli military interventions in Gaza and Lebanon which, in
addition to thousands of civilian victims and the genocide of the
Palestinian people, have produced a weakening of the armed formations of
Hamas and Hezbollah, financed by Iran, which guaranteed, also supported
by the Russian military presence, the military containment of the
Islamist formations in Syria allied with Tehran. Therefore, we can argue
that the regime change in Syria must be placed in the context of the
crisis of the world order under US hegemony. And for this, it is
necessary to reconstruct the situation that has come to be determined in
Syria after 2011 and to frame the role of the international and regional
actors involved.
With the death of his father in 2000, Basher Al Assad assumed the
presidency of Syria. Assad governed the country by implementing a
neoliberal turn and developing a powerful repressive apparatus that he
used to repress dissidents, as well as other religious and national
groups. Trade unions remained under the control of the state or the
ruling Ba'ath party, such as the General Confederation of Trade Unions
of Workers (GFTUW), thanks to legislation that reduced the right to
organize. The Communist Party, which did not side with the mass
mobilizations of 2011 (the true Arab First), considering them an
"imperialist conspiracy", was co-opted by the regime. Furthermore,
during the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad, the oppression of the
Kurdish population was severely intensified.
The tragic social situation, the result of neoliberal recipes, with 30%
of the population living below the poverty line and 55% of young people
unemployed, in addition to the heavy climate of repression with
thousands of prisoners, tortured and murdered in prisons like Saydnaya,
provoked a popular uprising, in the wake of the Arab Springs that were
sweeping the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
In a short time, Islamist organizations and supporters of the Muslim
Brotherhood took control of the streets, blocking the first experiments
in self-organization and self-management which, thanks to the efforts of
comrades such as the anarchist Omar Aziz, arrested and assassinated by
the Assad regime, were spreading within the revolts with local
self-government, horizontal organization, cooperation, solidarity and
mutual support as means through which people could free themselves from
the tyranny of the state and the capitalist system.
The protests were bloodily suppressed: according to data collected by
the UN, the repression carried out by the Assad regime caused the death
of more than 5,000 civilians.
The interference of regional powers such as Turkey and the imperialist
powers, together with violent repression, led to a regimentation of the
resistance, transforming the autonomous and mass character of the
popular protests in favor of reactionary armed groups in the pay of
their foreign sponsors. The Syrian Spring was defeated, giving rise to a
devastating civil war that will cause thousands of deaths and millions
of displaced persons and refugees (about 6 million is the figure
provided by the UNHCR. Their distribution is concentrated in neighboring
countries: Turkey (3 million), Lebanon (783,000), Jordan (632,000), Iraq
(287,000), Egypt (158,000). In Europe, the distribution sees Germany in
first place (781,000), followed by Sweden (87,700), the Netherlands
(79,000), France (45,600), Switzerland (28,000) and the United Kingdom
(23,000)).
If Assad has been able to govern a country exhausted by 13 years of
civil war, it is thanks to the support of Russia and Iran.
According to two World Bank reports, "more than a decade of conflict,
compounded by external shocks, has further worsened Syria's economic
situation and led to a dramatic deterioration in the well-being of
Syrian families. Economic activity continues to decline due to a
weakening of trade; the Euro-US economic and trade sanctions against the
Assad government, which have affected oil exports since September 2011,
have interrupted Syrian crude oil exports, with losses for Damascus that
just a few months later, in January 2012, Syrian Oil Minister Sufian
Alao estimated at $2 billion. In 2022, poverty will affect 69% of the
population, or about 14.5 million Syrians. Extreme poverty, which was
virtually non-existent before the conflict, affected more than one in
four Syrians in 2022 and may have further worsened due to the impact
devastating earthquake of February 2023".
The attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October 2023, resulting in the
killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and the kidnapping of
around 250 people, which in Hamas' intentions was to bring the
Palestinian question, at risk of marginalisation following the Abraham
Accords, back to the centre of international attention, triggered the
Israeli reaction which, over the course of around a year and a half of
genocidal war, put its expansionist plans into practice, weakening the
role of Iran and the allied military formations in Lebanon and Gaza.
The redefinition of the reactive capacity of Iran and its allied
militias, as well as the impossibility for the Russian ally to sustain
two conflicts at the same time, since Russia is engaged in military
aggression against Ukraine, opens a new phase that, with the plan to
overthrow the Alawite government of Al Assad, disrupts the balance of
power in the Middle East. If the United States manages to weaken Bashar
Al Assad's ally Russia and derail the Chinese strategy for the Middle
East, Turkey and Israel can put their nationalist aims into practice.
The Syrian National Army, an ally of Turkey, is attacking the Syrian
Democratic Forces to take control of north-eastern Syria. The Israeli
armed forces have taken advantage of the situation to advance beyond the
buffer zone created in 1974 on the Golan Heights, on the border between
Israel, Syria and Lebanon, reaching as far as
40, perhaps 20 kilometers from Damascus; they sank the Syrian fleet, hit
infrastructure, depots and research centers of the armed forces, so as
to prevent aggression, cast their threatening shadow over the new
government (preventing it from getting its hands on the modern weapons
of the Syrian regular forces) and secure the precious local water
resources. The militias that overthrew Al Assad and took power in
Damascus are Islamist factions supported by Turkey. The two main
organizations are: 1) Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the
Liberation of the Levant), a Syrian Islamist armed formation of Salafi
orientation that played an important role in the Syrian civil war. The
group was formed on January 28, 2017 by the union of Jabhat Fath al-Sham
- an organization born on July 28, 2016 from the consensual separation
of the al-Nusra Front from the al-Qaeda network. The group is presumed
to still be aligned with al-Qaeda. HTS, which has exercised government
functions in the Idilib region, is responsible for serious human rights
violations and war crimes (violence against women and girls, political
oppression, forced conversions and discrimination against religious
minorities, etc.). The leader of HTS, Abu Moham med al-Jawlani (Ahmed
al-Sharaa), presents himself as a future new leader of Syria promising
freedom and democratic rights for all. 2) Syrian National Army (SNA),
sponsored by the Erdogan government of the Turkish state, heir to the
Free Syrian Army (FSA) already protagonist of the 2011 uprising and
civil war. This is an alliance of Islamist militias, militarily funded
by the Turkish army. Its main concern, under the leadership of its
Turkish masters, are the Kurdish forces in Syria. They attacked the
Kurdish region controlled by Afrin in 2018 and carried out ethnic
cleansing there. Now they are attacking the Kurdish region of Tell
Rifat, supported by Turkish artillery. It controls an area in the north
on the Turkish border under the Syrian Provisional Government. As we can
imagine, the new political power that is asserting itself in Syria with
the change of regime, does not bode well. The Syrian Transitional
Government is led by deeply reactionary political forces under blackmail
from their sponsors. Contrary to his promise to start a political
transition process with the involvement of all, the jihadist leader
Al-Jolani was elected President of Syria by a farcical "Conference",
made up of members of the interim government appointed by Al-Jolani
himself and all coming from Idlib (like some of his relatives), with the
exclusion of the opposition and the Kurdish and Druze factions.
Meanwhile, many Turkish companies expect to play a strategic role in the
reconstruction. As reported in an article in Il Sole 24 Ore on December
12, 2024, "The hope is that the reconstruction can favor the inflow of
foreign investments and start a sustainable expansion, a prospect that
pushed up the shares of Turkish construction groups in the session on
Monday: a reflection of the ambitions, supported by the same
President Erdogan, of a massive role for Ankara in the new course of the
transitional government".
Although the Sunni Muslim population represents 72-74%, Syrian society
is made up of a "mosaic of minorities". The criteria for describing the
different communities can be confessional (Alawites, Christians, Druze,
etc.), linguistic and ethnic (Armenians, Ciceros, Kurds, etc.) or
connected to a particular way of life (Bedouins).
The difficulties of coexistence between the different communities were
fueled by sectarian and centralist policies, as a product of the power
and class relations that were consolidated following the different
imperial balances that were asserted from time to time.
The only way out of the question of the self-determination of peoples is
to promote the rights of communities within a process of transformation
of capitalist production relations and overcoming the State in the
perspective of a generalized and federalist self-management. Where
people are divided into social classes and political power is in the
hands of an oligarchy, there will never be room for the
self-determination of minorities.
In this sense, the project of "Democratic Confederalism" put into
practice by the Syrian Kurds in the North-East of the country is
interesting and it would be desirable to spread throughout Syria, as
well as representing a possible "way out" to overcome the conflicts that
are holding the populations of the Middle East in check.
In the power vacuum left by the Baath Party regime, an extraordinary
political experience is beginning that takes its cue from the theories
of libertarian philosopher Murray Bookchin of libertarian municipalism
and social ecology. To quote Ocalan, "a non-state political
administration or a democracy without a state".
The resulting model of society is a pluralist model, founded on gender
equality and on a system of confederated popular assemblies that goes
beyond the hierarchical conception of the State, encouraging collective
participation in political life.
Despite several limitations and contradictions, "Democratic
Confederalism" currently represents the most advanced example of
libertarian socialism in the Middle East that can count on the
international support of various libertarian, anti-capitalist and
internationalist movements.
Even though we are pleased by the images of Syrians tearing down the
statues of Bashar Al Assad, as well as those of the liberation of
dissidents who have been missing for decades in the regime's prisons, we
are more than aware of the reactionary nature of the forces that
overthrew the Baathist government. And, unfortunately, the first signs
of a reinstatement of a despotic and sectarian state are the alarm bell
of a possible authoritarian and obscurantist drift that the Syrian
situation could assume.
Aware that the processes of emancipation and liberation can only arise
from the oppressed classes, any government, transitional or permanent,
must be fought because it expresses interests that are alien to those of
the oppressed classes.
Thirteen years of civil war and a heavy repression of dissent have
certainly cancelled out any residue of social resistance and protagonism
of the workers' movement. To relaunch a strong revolutionary and
internationalist movement in Syria and the Middle East, it is urgent to
rebuild social networks of solidarity and mutual support; to reorganize
trade union structures to relaunch autonomous class action; to develop a
transnational class movement that can involve workers from all Middle
Eastern countries; to support all those initiatives of self-government
and direct democracy that develop as an alternative to the State. In
light of the gigantic obstacles, all of an intimate superstructural
essence, that stand in the way of the establishment and development of a
"Class Consciousness" rigorously understood in much of the Middle East
and in other areas of the planet, it must absolutely not be forgotten
that alongside identitarianism, nationalism and revanchism, religiousism
embodies an unparalleled centrality.
And this is why the warning of the Fathers of our ideas is still valid,
more than ever: "The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into a
criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into a criticism of
law, the criticism of theology into a criticism of politics."
The history of the eternal struggle between the oppressed and the
oppressors teaches us that no hypothesis of social transformation can be
subordinated to the interests of the various factions of the dominant
classes, whether nationalist or imperialist, under penalty of failure.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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