Your Freedom and Mine Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdoğan’S Turkey
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Your Freedom and Mine Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdoğan’s Turkey Edited by Thomas Jeffrey Miley and Federico Venturini Montreal • Chicago • London Copyright ©2018 BLACK ROSE BOOKS No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means elec - tronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copy - right Licensing Agency, Access Copyright, with the exception of brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. Black Rose Books No. SS391 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Your freedom and mine: Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish question in Erdoğan’s Turkey / omas Jeffrey Miley, Federico Venturini, eds. Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-55164-670-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-55164-668-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-55164-672-5 (PDF) 1. Öcalan, Abdullah. 2. Kurds--Turkey--Politics and government--21st century. 3. Turkey--Politics and government--21st century. I. Miley, omas Jeffrey, editor II. Venturini, Federico, editor DR435.K87Y68 2018 956.1’00491597 C2018-901211-0 C2018-901212-9 C.P. 9;=>> Succ. Léo-Pariseau Montréal, QC H 8X 6A: CANADA www.blackrosebooks.com ORDERING INFORMATION: USA/INTERNATIONAL CANADA UK/EUROPE University of Chicago Press University of Toronto Press Central Books Chicago Distribution Center ;867 Dufferin Street Freshwater Road 77696 South Langley Avenue Toronto, ON Dagenham Chicago IL <6<8> M9H ;T> RM> 7RX (>66) <87-8=9< (USA) 7->66-;<;-?;89 +:: (6) 86 >;8 >>66 (==9) =68-=666 (International) [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Black Rose Books is the publishing project of Cercle Noir et Rouge DEDICATED TO ThE M EMORY OF J uDgE E SSA MOOSA (1936–2017) Table of Contents vii Foreword. Dilar Dirik x Prefaces. omas Jeffrey Miley and Federico Venturini xiv Note from the Publisher. Dimitri Roussopoulos xvi Maps and Photographs Part One: e Historical Context of the Conflict 3 e Turkish-Kurdish Conflict in historical Context. omas Jeffrey Miley with Cihad Hammy and Guney Yıldız 122 Living Freedom: e Evolution of the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict and Efforts to Resolve It. Adem Uzun Part Two: Campaigns of International Solidarity 167 Abdullah Öcalan: A Life of Four Decades of Resistance. Havin Guneser 176 My Encounter with the Kurdish Movement. Kariane Westrheim 182 e Eu Turkey Civic Commission (EuTCC) and the Peace in Kurdistan uK Campaign. Michael Gunter and Kariane Westrheim 190 e Freedom for Öcalan Campaign and the British Trade union Movement. Interview with Simon Dubbins Part ree: e EUTCC İmralı International Peace Delegations 199 e Plight of the Kurds in Turkey and the Fate of the Middle East. omas Jeffrey Miley aer the First İmralı Delegation 204 Joint Statement of the First International İmralı Peace Delegation (Istanbul, Turkey; February 2016) 213 Turkey and the Kurds: A Chance for Peace? Jonathan Steele Reports from the ird İmralı Delegation 221 State Terror, human Rights Violations, and Authoritarianism in Turkey: Report of the ird İmralı International Peace Delegation (Istanbul and Diyarbakır, Turkey; February 13–19, 2017) 253 e Council of Europe and the Death of the Peace Process: Report from the İmralı Delegation to Strasbourg. omas Jeffrey Miley Part Four: Reflections of the EUTCC İmralı Peace Delegates 265 Fighting the Lion Inside the Cage. Janet Biehl 270 My Tryst with the Kurdish Freedom Struggle. Radha D’Souza 274 A Basque Politician in Kurdistan. Miren Gorrotxategi 277 Still a Long Way to Peace: Changing Minds about the Kurdish Issue. Andrej Hunko 280 An Exercise in understanding. Ögmundur Jónasson 285 “Please Tell My Story.” Joe Ryan 288 Repressing Comedians, Journalists, and Politicians. Ulla Sandbæk 291 An Activist-Researcher as a Peace Delegate. Federico Venturini 296 e Experience of an Ignorant European Politician. Julie Ward 302 Ten Powerful Moments of an Outraging Experience. Francis Wurtz Part Five: Analysing Democratic Confederalism 309 A Seeker of Truth. Abdullah Öcalan 317 Capitalism and the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Reimar Heider 324 Democratic Confederalism, Democratic Autonomy. Havin Guneser 331 Review of Abdullah Öcalan’s Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization. Donald H. Matthews and omas Jeffrey Miley 347 Struggling hand in hand with the Kurdish Youth Movement: Dispatches from the Long March for the Freedom of Öcalan. Mohammed Elnaiem 360 e Perils and Promises of Self-Determination: From Kurdistan to Catalonia. omas Jeffrey Miley Part Six: Geopolitics, Dilemmas, and the Scramble for the Middle East 371 Regional and global Power Politics in the Syrian Conflict. Jonathan Steele 375 e War on Terror and Europe’s Refugee Crisis. omas Jeffrey Miley 379 Dancing with the Devil. Darnell Stephen Summers 384 Delisting the PKK and the Resulting Benefits. Michael Gunter 387 Consolidating Peace, Democracy, and human Rights aer Raqqa: Prospects for the Region and the Kurds. Panel Discussion 394 Aerword. Cihad Hammy 403 Notes on the Contributors 408 glossary of Acronyms Foreword Dilar Dirik e following anecdote is oen told among comrades in the Kurdish freedom movement. One day, young Abdullah Öcalan met an old Kurdish man and spoke to him about Kurdistan. Pointing at a lifeless, dry tree trunk, the old man asked resignedly: “e Kurdish people are like this dead tree. Can you make it become green again?” Öcalan knew what this was supposed to mean; the old man’s words told a tale of the withering of a people faced with a history of denial, violence, and genocide. It was not only the Kurds who existed like a shrivelled tree trunk; the failures of existing socialism, social democracy, and certain national liberation movements had disappointed peoples’ existential hopes in the promise of a free, democratic society that would lead us toward human emancipation. Over the next decades, this dead tree resurrected and grew into a garden of colourful diversity, luscious energy, and rooted resilience. is tale of hope and liberation is the legacy that Abdullah Öcalan’s unshakeable convictions transmit to the generations to come. In the tradition of the people’s philosophers of the Middle East, he derived his insights from the pain and suffering of the oppressed who wandered the streets of poverty, misery, and despair. As a Kurd in Mesopotamia and as a worker in Turkey, as a socialist of the 20th century, as a freedom fighter in the mountains, and as a brother of enslaved women he found himself caught in the middle of a chaos of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. It is in the midst of this chaos that he become a revolutionary in Kurdistan. Inside the cold, worn down walls of a tiny brick house in the Fis village of Amed (Diyarbakır) were packed a few dozen young people, bright-eyed with ideals. ey had come from nothingness and poverty, driven by their deep feelings for the wretched and forgotten. From the darkness of this dank room, the guerrilla flame of Kurdistan’s revolutionary Newroz fire embraced, warmed, and enlightened the poor, the young, the wretched, the women, the workers, and the peasants; it was a flame that seemed to drive away all oppressors. Abdullah Öcalan and his comrades taught our parents the importance and meaning of struggling against colonialism, fascism, and state terrorism. Our parents were tortured in prisons, murdered in dark alleys, slaughtered in the village streets, burned alive in basements, and uprooted in exile. But they never surrendered. ey taught us that resistance is life and that surrender is be - trayal—betrayal to both our existence and our place in history. In order to exist, one first has to fight. But what is the meaning of such an existence? Breathing life back into the veins of the marginalised required diving into the roots of history to understand the emergence of human enslavement: from the ancient ziggurats of the Sumerian city-state to the mansions of the ruling classes of today. Öcalan guides us through the universality of humanity’s ancient struggle for freedom, from the stem cells of early society, born between the viii YOUR FREEDOM AND MINE Euphrates and Tigris rivers, to the techno-cultural ruptures in the history of civilisation, to the sociology of the quantum moments of freedom and the po - tentiality of every human being. But he does not leave it there. his vision is nothing less than a manifesto to build another world. Perhaps this is nowhere clearer than in the most revolutionary task that he has set himself and his movement: the uncompromising liberation of women from all enslaving shackles of domination. e consequences of Öcalan’s insis - tence on confronting patriarchy are nothing less than turning the course of history upside down. In a region where women can be traded off for a few goats or pieces of land, where a man’s “honour” is considered more sacred than life itself, where the meaning of womanhood has been reduced to mere sexual en - slavement and domestication, women, as the first rebels of history, are weaving life with their own hands, in their own colours. Abdullah Öcalan’s paradigm— democratic nation and democratic confederalism based on democracy, women’s liberation, and ecology—became the weapon of the women who, throughout history, had lost their power of self-defence as well as their means of politics, economy, creation, and culture. In the knowledge that Öcalan is their greatest comrade, women of Kurdistan faced towards the mountains, removing their shackles one step at a time, re-claiming their stolen thrones from history, and becoming the goddess-like pioneers of a culture of resistance, ethics, and beauty. e patience of Inanna and Tiamat is radiating from the labouring hands of women in Mesopotamia once again, from Sinjar to Kobane, Raqqa and Afrin (the latter of which is occupied since March 2018 by the Turkish army and its affiliated jihadists).