Impressions of Rojava
===============================================================================

Rojava consists of three geographically non-contiguous cantons; we would see
only the easternmost one, Cezire (or Jazira), due to the ongoing war with the
Islamic State, which rages to the west, especially in Kobani. But everywhere we
were welcomed warmly…

After Tunisian and Egyptian opposition groups mounted insurgencies during the
Arab Spring in 2011, rebellious Syrians rose up too, initiating the civil war.
In the summer of 2012, the regime’s authority collapsed in Rojava, where the
Kurds had little trouble persuading its officials to depart nonviolently.

Rojavans ( …while they are mostly Kurds, they are also Arabs, Assyrians,
Chechens, and others) then faced a choice of aligning themselves either with the
regime that had persecuted them, or with the mostly Islamic militant opposition
groups.

Rojava’s Kurds being relatively secular, they refused both sides and decided
instead to embark on a Third Way, based on the ideas of Abdullah Ãcalan, the
imprisoned Kurdish leader who rethought the Kurdish issue, the nature of
revolution, and an alternative modernity to the nation-state and capitalism…
Drawing eclectically from sources in history, philosophy, politics, and
anthropology, Ãcalan proposed ‘Democratic Confederalism’ as the name for the
overarching program of bottom-up democracy, gender equality, ecology, and a
cooperative economy. The implementation of those principles, in institutions not
only of democratic self-government but also of economics, education, health and
gender, is called Democratic Autonomy.

A Women’s Revolution
===============================================================================

Under their Third Way, Rojava’s three cantons declared Democratic Autonomy and
formally established it in a ‘social contract’ (the non-statist term it uses
instead of ‘constitution’). Under that program, they created a system of popular
self-government, based in neighborhood commune assemblies (comprising several
hundred households each), which anyone may attend, and with power rising from
the bottom up through elected deputies to the city and cantonal levels.

When our delegation visited a Qamishlo neighborhood (Qamishlo being the largest
city in the Cezire canton), we attended a meeting of a local people’s council,
where the electricity and matters relating to women, conflict resolution and
families of martyrs were discussed. Men and women sat and participated together.
Elsewhere in Qamishlo, we witnessed an assembly of women addressing problems
particular to their gender.

Gender is of special importance to this project in human emancipation. We
quickly realized that the Rojava Revolution is fundamentally a women’s
revolution. This part of the world is traditionally home to extreme patriarchal
oppression: to be born female is to be at risk for violent abuse, childhood
marriage, honor killings, polygamy, and more.

But today the women of Rojava have shaken off that tradition and participate
fully in public life: at every level of politics and society. Institutional
leadership consists not of one position but two, one male and one female
official for the sake of gender equality and also to keep power from
concentrating into one person’s hands.

Representatives of Yekitiya Star, the umbrella organization for women’s groups,
explained that women are essential to democracy — they even defined the
antagonist of women’s freedom, strikingly, not as patriarchy but as the
nation-state and capitalist modernity. The women’s revolution aims to free
everyone. Women are to this revolution what the proletariat was to
Marxist-Leninist revolutions of the past century. It has profoundly transformed
not only women’s status but every aspect of society.

Even the traditionally male-dominated strands of society, like the military,
have been profoundly transformed. The people’s protection units (YPG) have been
joined by the YPJ, or women’s protection units, whose images by now have become
world famous. Together, the YPG and the YPJ are defending society against the
jihadist forces of ISIS and Al-Nusra with Kalashnikovs and, perhaps equally
formidably, a fierce intellectual and emotional commitment not only to their
community’s survival but to its political ideas and aspirations too.

When we visited a meeting of the YPJ, we were told that the fighters’ education
consists not only of training in practical matters like weapons but also in
Democratic Autonomy. ‘We are fighting for our ideas,’ they emphasized at every
turn. Two of the women who met with us had been injured in battle. One sat with
an IV bag, another with a metal crutch–both were wincing in pain but had the
fortitude and self-discipline to participate in our session.

Cooperation and Education
===============================================================================

Rojavans fight for the survival of their community but above all, as the YPJ
told us, for their ideas. They even put the successful implementation of
democracy above ethnicity. Their social agreement affirms the inclusion of
ethnic minorities (Arabs, Chechens, Assyrians) and religions (Muslims,
Christians, Yezidis), and Democratic Autonomy in practice seems to bend over
backwards to include minorities, without imposing it on others against their
will, leaving the door open to all.

When our delegation asked a group of Assyrians to tell us their challenges with
Democratic Autonomy, they said they had none. In nine days we could not possibly
have scoured Rojava for all problems, and our interlocutors candidly admitted
that Rojava is hardly above criticism, but as far as I could see, Rojava at the
very least aspires to model tolerance and pluralism in a part of the world that
has seen far too much fanaticism and repression, and to whatever extent it
succeeds, it deserves commendation.

Rojava’s economic model is the same as its political model, an economics adviser
in Derik told us: to create a ‘community economy,’ building cooperatives in all
sectors and educating the people in the idea. The adviser expressed satisfaction
that even though 70 percent of Rojava’s resources must go to the war effort, the
economy still manages to meet everyone’s basic needs.

They strive for self-sufficiency, because they must: the crucial fact is that
Rojava exists under an embargo. It can neither export to nor import from its
immediate neighbor to the north, Turkey, which would like to see the whole
Kurdish project disappear.

Even the KRG, under control of their ethnic kin but economically beholden to
Turkey, observes the embargo, although more cross-border KRG-Rojava trade is
occurring now in the wake of political developments. But the country still lacks
resources. That does not dampen their spirit: ‘If there is only bread, then we
all have a share,’ the adviser told us.

We visited an economics academy and economic cooperatives: a sewing cooperative
in Derik, making uniforms for the defense forces; a cooperative greenhouse,
growing cucumbers and tomatoes; a dairy cooperative in Rimelan, where a new shed
was under construction.

The Kurdish areas are the most fertile parts of Syria, home to its abundant
wheat supply, but the Baâath regime had deliberately refrained from
industrializing the area, a source of raw materials. Hence wheat was cultivated
but could not be milled into flour. We visited a mill, newly constructed since
the revolution, improvised from local materials. It now provides flour for the
bread consumed in Cezire, whose residents get three loaves a day.

Similarly, Cezire was Syria’s major source of petroleum, with several thousand
oil rigs, mostly in the Rimelan area. But the Baâath regime ensured that Rojava
had no refineries, forcing the oil to be transported to refineries elsewhere in
Syria. But since the revolution, Rojavans have improvised two new oil
refineries, which are used mainly to provide diesel for the generators that
power the canton. The local oil industry, if such it can be called, produces
only enough for local needs, nothing more.

A DIY Revolution
===============================================================================

The level of improvisation was striking throughout the canton. The more we
traveled through Rojava, the more I marveled at the do-it-yourself nature of the
revolution, its reliance on local ingenuity and the scarce materials at hand.
But it was not until we visited the various academies, the women’s academy in
Rimelan and the Mesopotamian Academy in Qamishlo, that I realized that it is
integral to the system as a whole.

The education system in Rojava is non-traditional, rejecting ideas of hierarchy,
power and hegemony. Instead of following a teacher-student hierarchy, students
teach each other and learn from each other’s experience. Students learn what is
useful, in practical matters; they ‘search for meaning,’ as we were told, in
intellectual matters. They do not memorize; they learn to think for themselves
and make decisions, to become the subjects of their own lives. They learn to be
empowered and to participate in Democratic Autonomy.

