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The SIEGE OF Kobani by Islamic State (ISIS) brought worldwide attention to the Syrian Kurdish PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, Democratic Union Party), the leading force in the Kurdish-majority areas in northern Syria. The PYD calls this region Rojava-literally meaning "land of the sunset" but also translated as "West Kurdistan."
The discourse of the PYD, revolving around terms like democracy and equality and stressing women's rights, exercises a strong attraction on the worldwide left. Likewise, the struggle of the YPG/YPJ fighters (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, People's Protection Units/ Yekîneyên Parastina Jinê, Women's Protection Units), organized by the PYD against ISIS, receives widespread sympathy.
Different initiatives to support the "Rojava revolution" have sprung up worldwide. A German campaign unapologetically named Waffen fur Rojava (Weapons for Rojava) raised over US $135,000; other initiatives focus on humanitarian aid and political support.
In Rojava, the PYD says it is realizing a democratic society with equal rights for women, in which different ethnic and religious groups live together; political power is supposed to be organized through structures of autonomous councils. The PYD maintains that in Rojava a unique revolution is taking place, inspired by the thought of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, PKK). Even after his arrest in 1999, Ocalan remained the political leader and the movement's "philosopher."To begin to understand the experiment in Rojava, and the attitude of the left towards it, one must consider Ocalan's ideology and compare its claims with developments on the ground.1
Roots of the PKK
Ocalan was born in 1949 as a son of a Kurdish peasant family. The Kurdish provinces of Turkey were always the poorest parts of the country, partly because of racist state policies that discriminated against Kurds. Speaking Kurdish was a crime, and use of the letters x, q, and w-which exist in the Kurdish alphabet but not in the Turkish-could be prosecuted; even publications that mentioned the word "Kurd" were banned. The state tried to assimilate the Kurdish minority into the Turkish majority.
Ocalan laid the groundwork for the PKK when, in the early seventies, he built the "Kurdish Revolutionaries" (Soresgeren Kurdistan, SK). This group adopted the notion of Turkish sociologist Ismail Be^ikçi that "Kurdistan" was an international colony, occupied by Turkey, Iran,...