'Democratic Confederalism'

Chapter 11 Unpacking the ‘Democratic Confederalism’ and ‘Democratic Autonomy’: Proposals of Turkey’s Kurdish Movement Cengiz Gunes I Introduction The political settlement in the Middle East following the demise of the Ot- toman Empire resulted in the division of Kurdistan – the historic homeland of the Kurdish people – among the states of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, and the Kurdish question has been an important political and security concern in the region ever since. The Kurds resisted the new states that came into being in a series of revolts but their attempts have ultimately failed. In Turkey, the category of universal national rights was assigned only to the Turkish nation, and the Kurds’ subsequent articulations of their group-specific demands were considered illegitimate.1 Nevertheless, Kurdish political activists determinedly continued their advocacy of Kurdish rights and their nascent movement began to attract the attention of the Kurdish public from the late 1960s onwards. The subsequent repression that the Kurdish political activists experienced, espe- cially during the military regime between 1971 and 1974, led to their radicalisa- tion and their efforts led to the establishment of Kurdish left-wing groups or clandestine political parties in the mid-1970s.2 However, except the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (pkk), which was one of these parties that was established in this period, the Kurdish political parties and groups were crushed by the repression by the military that the coup of 12 September 1980 unleashed. The pkk’s initial political programme was structured around the objec- tive of unifying the Kurds in an independent and socialist republic and from 1984 onwards, it began its guerrilla campaign.3 However, the revolutionary 1 Derya Bayır, Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law (Ashgate 2013) 145–154. 2 For a detailed discussion see Cengiz Gunes, Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Pro- test to Resistance (Routledge 2012) 65–80. 3 For a detailed discussion see: Cengiz Gunes, ‘Explaining the pkk’s Mobilization of Kurds in Turkey: Hegemony, Myth and Violence’, (2013) 12(3) Ethnopolitics 247; Cengiz Gunes, ‘Kurd- ish Mobilisation in Turkey during the 1980s and 1990s’ in Gareth Stansfield and Mohammad Shareef (eds), The Kurdish Question Revisited (Hurst and Co. 2017). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��9 | doi:�0.��63/9789004405455_0�� <UN> Unpacking ‘Democratic Confederalism’ & ‘Democratic Autonomy’ 247 overthrow of the Turkish state that the pkk’s insurgency sought to achieve began to seem unlikely from the mid-1990s onwards and as a result the pkk began to emphasise the need for a political solution to the conflict and the Kurd- ish question. In order to facilitate a political solution to the conflict, it declared three ceasefires during the 1990s. In 1999, after its leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured by Turkey, the pkk began to undergo a more radical ideological transformation that has significantly altered the movement’s long-term objectives and the demands for the Kurds.4 In this period, Öcalan was able to direct the pkk’s ideological transformation through the texts he produced as part of his legal defence submitted to the Turkish and European courts that heard his case and through his instructions via his lawyers. The democratic solution that Öcalan’s defences seek to develop aims at a radical transformation of the whole of the Middle East through the develop- ment and deepening of democracy. In formulating his new proposals, Öcalan draw upon a diverse number of radical intellectual traditions including ‘the libertarian social ecologist Murray Bookchin, feminist political theorists, such as Judith Butler, and leftist Foucauldians and critical Marxists’.5 Currently, the pkk’s democratic solution is conceptualised around the interlinked proposals of ‘democratic confederalism’ and ‘democratic autonomy’. Democratic confederalism is developed as a project of national self-determination for the Kurds but does not involve the creation of a separate Kurdish state. Democratic autonomy aims at realising Kurdish self-governments in the existing states with a Kurdish population. The other major political movement that represent the Kurds in Turkey is the pro-Kurdish democratic movement, which came into being when the People’s Labour Party (hep) was established on 7 June 1990, and has been represented by various political parties since then. Due to the nature of the political demands it has been raising, such as the constitutional recognition of the Kurdish identity, it has been facing severe repression and is considered as a political outsider. The pro-Kurdish parties were represented in the Turkish parliament during the early 1990s and from 2007 onward but the state repression resulted in the closures of several of the pro-Kurdish political parties during 1990s and 2000s. The current representative of the pro-Kurdish political movement at the national level is the Peoples’ Democratic Party (hdp), which 4 Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden, ‘Confederalism and Autonomy in Turkey: The Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Reinvention of Democracy’ in Cengiz Gunes and Welat Zeydanlıoğlu (eds), The Kurdish Question in Turkey: New Perspectives on Violence, Representa- tion and Reconciliation (Routledge 2014) 186. 5 Klaus Happel, ‘Introduction’ in Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings: The Roots of Civilisation, Klaus Happel (transl.) (Pluto Press 2006) xv. <UN>.

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