Sinéad Barry
A look at the Kurdish-led region of northeast of Syria and its supposed conformity to democratic values
Ten years after the outbreak of civil war, the northeast of Syria (NES) has built an autonomous region on the periphery of the Assad controlled territories. The area is led by Kurds, loyal to the radical socialist values laid out by Abdullah Öcalan. The government, known as the Autonomous Administration (AA) is founded on principles of feminism, climate justice, radical democracy, secularism, and perhaps most ambitiously – resistance to the Ba’athist regime.
Öcalan himself is in prison on İmralı, a small island off the coast of Turkey, where he has been since 1999. In the first ten years of his term, he was the island’s sole prisoner. Sentenced to life imprisonment only due to the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey, Öcalan was charged with treason for founding the militant organisation, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in 1978. He had lived in Syria from 1979 to 1998 and his ideas have since woven the fabric of NES’s political identity.
The uptake of these progressive principles has challenged Western stereotypes of the Middle East. At the height of the civil war, images of beautiful young Kurdish women, strapped with guns to defend their homes against ISIS, flushed the global media. Some of these women had previously been subject to ISIS’s brutal oppression and their fight was as much one of women’s liberation as national struggle. All-female militias were and are a core part of NES’s defence units and women fighters played a key role in the defeat of ISIS. In the de facto parliament, there is a minimum quota of 40% female representation. (For context: less than one-quarter of Ireland’s TDs are women) (Carswell, 2020, February 14).
However, outside of gender, the extent to which progressive values are being implemented in NES is worthy of interrogation.
Truthfully, it is difficult to answer precisely. Built from (quite literally) the ashes of a nation, the on-the-ground reality in NES is in perpetual flux. So rapid is this change that policy papers published six months ago are already considered past their expiry date. Even fundamental data like the region’s population is up for debate, with estimates varying as much as between three and five million. This is due to varying reasons. Data collection is compromised by the constant fluctuation of the political situation. Moreover, the international coalition in Syria is steadily withdrawing as European and North American interest declines, worsening the availability of research for these audiences. Accurate data is further problematised by the overlap in power with Assad’s regime, which does not recognise the AA.
What is known is that power is concentrated in the hands of the minority. The Kurdish population comprises just one-third of NES; the region is approximately two-thirds Arabs, who are routinely excluded from power. Power in the region is highly decentralised, exercised via the many local councils. Formally, there are no rules preventing Arabs from civic participation and each ethnic body is represented on the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC). Yet, all of the top-ranking jobs remain in the hands of the Kurds.
An informal political economy prevails whereby positions of power are granted based on party loyalty. Espousing ideals of radical democracy, NES is yet to hold official parliamentary elections. Local elections were held across the Rojava region’s several thousand communes in 2017 but were subject to internal boycotts and wide contests. Many political factions refuse to recognise each other and would not participate in the local elections which they saw as illegitimate. The main opposition party, the Kurdish National Council (KNC) spearheaded this boycott, going so far at the time as to call the electoral process a “flagrant violation of the will of the people.” (Abdulssattar Ibrahim et al, 2017, September 21).
Furthermore, Kurdish and Arab children are educated separately, in their respective languages. One activist in the region has said that this practice exacerbates segregation by creating parallel communities (Khalaf, December 2016).
However, the significance of regional context cannot be overstated. Geographically, NES is wedged between an animose Turkey, an Iraqi government sparring with its own Kurdish population, and a Syrian regime working for the AA’s annihilation. The government is currently providing for several million people with funding from border crossings and oil sales, selling for less than half of its market value. The region is also flummoxed by Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and refugees that have been sent back to Syria by Europe. Progressive states cannot be built from thin air and the acknowledgement that it is economic conditions that foster or inhibit this development is intrinsic to progressive ideology itself. Considering its circumstances, both in terms of the material and collective psychology (having just emerged from one of the bloodiest wars of the twenty-first century) NES’s progressiveness is undoubtedly an outlier.
That being said, the exclusion of the Arab population cannot be explained in full by external factors. The discrimination against the majority group in NES is ultimately a domestic issue. A collective Kurdish will to integrate Arabs has not really been evident in the region. The Kurdish people have been on the receiving end of colonialism, prejudice, and oppression for centuries. Denied their promised homeland after the fall of the Ottoman empire and subject to a genocide in living memory, it is not difficult to understand why NES’s Kurdish population is reluctant to give up its shard of power. But, however understandable, historical oppression does not earn people the right to extend maltreatment to others. Going forward, the demographic majority cannot be left out if the principles on which the de facto state was founded are to be achieved.
Bibliography
Abdulssattar Ibrahim, M., Al-Haj Ali, M & Edelman, A. (2017, September 21). First-ever local elections to begin in Kurdish-held territories. Syria Direct. Retrieved from https://syriadirect.org/first-ever-local-elections-to-begin-in-kurdish-held-territories/.
Carswell, S.(2020, February 14). The shape of the 33rd Dáil – gender and age. The Irish Times . Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/the-shape-of-the-33rd-d%C3%A1il-gender-and-age-1.4172965.
Khalaf, R.(2016, December). Governing Rojava: Layers of legitimacy in Syria, Research Paper. Chatham House. Retrieved from https://www.chathamhouse.org/2016/12/governing-rojava-layers-legitimacy-syria.
“Map 2: The Deployment of Major Kurdish Groups Near the Border” in “The Making of the Kurdish Frontier: Power, Conflict, and Governance in the Iraqi-Syrian Borderlands”, Harith Hasan and Kheder Khaddour Malcolm H.Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center