World’s silence on Afrin assault baffling
Militants — with Turkish army support — are wreaking havoc with a pocket of peace and sanity in the Syrian war
hree 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 fighters vowed to exterminate them for that very reason. When Kobane’s defenders won, it was widely hailed as the closest one could 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 (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 Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), 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 Daesh and Al Qaida veterans, and members of Turkish death squads such as the notorious Grey Wolves, backed by the Turkish army. Like Daesh before them, the new force seems determined to violate all standards of behaviour, launching napalm attacks on villagers, attacking dams — even, like Daesh, blowing up irreplaceable archaeological monuments.
Not lifting a finger
Remarkably, the YPG has 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 United States, the presence of whose forces prevents Turkey from invading those territories in the east, where the YPG is still engaged in combat with Daesh, has refused to lift a finger to defend Afrin. The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, insists 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 regimes for their lack of democratic and women’s rights appear to have decided that going too far in the other direction is justifiable grounds for attack.
In the 1990s, 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. About the turn of the millennium, the PKK abandoned the demand for a separate state. It called a unilateral ceasefire, pressing for peace talks. This transformation affected the Kurdish freedom movement across the Middle East. Those inspired by the movement’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, began calling for a radical decentralisation of power.
The Turkish government responded with an intense lobbying campaign to have the PKK designated a “terrorist organisation”. By 2001, it had succeeded and the PKK was placed on the European Union, US and United Nations “terror list”. Never has a decision wreaked such havoc with the prospect of peace.
Those 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, the likely result is that they will be maimed and killed.
The question is, why is the rest of the world cooperating?
David Graeber is professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and author of Debt: The First 5000 years. He was involved in the Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street.