Why are world leaders backing this brutal attack against Kurdish Afrin?
"Islamist militants – with Turkish army support – are wreaking havoc with a pocket of peace and sanity in the Syrian war
Three years ago the world watched a ragtag band of men and women fighters in the Syrian town of Kobane,
most armed only with Kalashnikovs, hold off a vast army of Islamist
militants with tanks, artillery and overwhelming logistical superiority.
The defenders insisted they were acting in the name of revolutionary
feminist democracy. The Islamist fighters vowed to exterminate them for
that very reason. When Kobane’s defenders won, it was widely hailed as
the closest one can come, in the contemporary world, to a clear
confrontation of good against evil.
Today, exactly same thing is happening again. Except this time, world
powers are firmly on the side of the aggressors. In a bizarre twist,
those aggressors seem to have convinced key world leaders and public
opinion-makers that Kobane’s citizens are “terrorists” because they
embrace a radical version of ecology, democracy and women’s rights.
The region in question is Afrin,
defended by the same YPG and YPJ (People’s Protection and Women’s
Protection Units) who defended Kobane, and who afterwards were the only
forces in Syria willing to take the battle to the heartland of Islamic
State, losing thousands of combatants in the battle for its capital,
Raqqa. An isolated pocket of peace and sanity in the Syrian civil war,
famous only for the beauty of its mountains and olive groves, Afrin’s
population had almost doubled during the conflict as hundreds of
thousands of mostly Arab refugees had come to shelter with its original,
overwhelmingly Kurdish population.
At the same time its inhabitants had taken advantage of their peace and stability to develop the democratic principles embraced throughout the majority Kurdish regions of north Syria, known as Rojava. Local decisions were devolved to neighbourhood assemblies
in which everyone could participate; other parts of Rojava insisted on
strict gender parity, with every office having co-chairs, male and
female, in Afrin, two-thirds of public offices are held by women.
Today, this democratic experiment is the object of an entirely
unprovoked attack by Islamist militias including Isis and al-Qaida
veterans, and members of Turkish death squads such as the notorious Grey Wolves,
backed by the Turkish army’s tanks, F16 fighters, and helicopter
gunships. Like Isis before them, the new force seems determined to
violate all standards of behaviour, launching napalm attacks on villagers, attacking dams
– even, like Isis, blowing up irreplaceable archaeological monuments.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, has announced, “We aim to
give Afrin back to its rightful owners”, in a thinly veiled warning to ethnically cleanse the region of its Kurdish inhabitants. And only today it emerged that a convoy heading to Afrin carrying food and medicine was shelled by Turkish forces.
Remarkably, the YPG and YPJ have so far held off the invaders. But
they have done so without so much as the moral support of a single major
world power. Even the US, the presence of whose forces prevents Turkey
from invading those territories in the east, where the YPG and YPJ are
still engaged in combat with Isis, has refused to lift a finger to
defend Afrin. The British foreign secretary Boris Johnson has gone so far
as to insist that “Turkey has the right to want to keep its borders
secure” – by which logic he would have no objection if France were to
seize control of Dover.
The result is bizarre. Western leaders who regularly excoriate Middle
Eastern regimes for their lack of democratic and women’s rights – even,
as George W Bush famously did with the Taliban, using it as
justification for military invasion – appear to have decided that going
too far in the other direction is justifiable grounds for attack.
To understand how this happened, one must go back to the 1990s, when Turkey
was engaged in a civil war with the military arm of the Kurdistan
Workers’ party, or PKK, then a Marxist-Leninist organisation calling for
a separate Kurdish state. Whether the PKK was ever a terrorist
organisation, in the sense of bombing marketplaces and the like, is very
much a matter of contention, but there is no doubt that the guerrilla
war was a bloody business, and terrible things happened on both sides.
About the turn of the millennium, the PKK abandoned the demand for a
separate state. It called a unilateral ceasefire, pressing for peace
talks to negotiate both regional autonomy for Kurds and a broader
democratisation of Turkish society.
This transformation affected the Kurdish freedom movement across the
Middle East. Those inspired by the movement’s imprisoned leader,
Abdullah Öcalan, began calling for a radical decentralisation of power
and opposition to ethnic nationalism of all sorts.
The Turkish government responded with an intense lobbying campaign to
have the PKK designated a “terrorist organisation” (which it had not
been before). By 2001 it had succeeded, and the PKK was placed on the
EU, US, and UN “terror list”.
Never has such a decision so wreaked havoc with the prospect of
peace. It allowed the Turkish government to arrest thousands of
activists, journalists, elected Kurdish officials – even the leadership
of the country’s second largest opposition party – all on claims of “terrorist” sympathies, and with barely a word of protest from Europe or America. Turkey now has more journalists in prison than any other country.
The designation has created a situation of Orwellian madness,
allowing the Turkish government to pour millions into western PR firms
to smear anyone who calls for greater civil rights as “terrorists”. Now,
in the final absurdity, it has allowed world governments to sit idly by
while Turkey launches an unprovoked assault on one of the few remaining
peaceful corners of Syria
– even though the only actual connection its people have to the PKK is
an enthusiasm for the philosophy of its imprisoned leader Öcalan. It
cannot be denied – as Turkish propagandists endlessly point out – that
portraits of Öcalan, and his books, are common there. But ironically
what that philosophy consists of is simply an embrace of direct
democracy, ecology, and a radical version of women’s empowerment.
The religious extremists who surround the current Turkish government
know perfectly well that Rojava doesn’t threaten them militarily. It
threatens them by providing an alternative vision of what life in the
region could be like. Above all, they feel it is critical to send the
message to women across the Middle East that if they rise up for their
rights, let alone rise up in arms, the likely result is that they will
be maimed and killed, and none of the major powers will raise an
objection. There is a word for such a strategy. It’s called “terrorism” –
a calculated effort to cause terror. The question is, why is the rest
of the world cooperating?
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