In a 2020 interview for 1+1 EXPRESS, Zozan Pehlivan provides an in-depth analysis of ecological destruction, including deforestation, displacement, and the transformation of socio-economic structures. She draws parallels between historical events such as the 1925 Sheikh Said (Şeyh Sait) rebellion, the 1938 Dersim massacre, and the 1990s displacement of Kurdish villages, connecting them to contemporary environmental issues.

State’s Ecological Apparatus
An interview with Zozan Pehlivan by Anıl Olcan
21 September 2020, 1+1 EXPRESS

The foothills of Mount Cudi (Çiyayê Cûdî) have been grappling with relentless forest fires for weeks. Fires that cannot be controlled for days in Cevizdüzü (Cifane), Anılmış (Gundikê Remo), Üçkiraz (Nêvava) locations are destroying the habitat of animals and local people, along with trees and vegetation. Villagers desperately trying to protect their crops and animals are attempting to extinguish a vast area with their limited means. So, what do these unquenchable fires tell us? We hear about the ideological, historical, and political dimensions of forest fires from Zozan Pehlivan, a faculty member at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and The Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar (2020-21).

The forests on Mount Cudi have been burning for weeks. Why are these fires happening, and what are they leading to?

Zozan Pehlivan: When we talk about Mount Cudi, we are not talking about a very high and rocky terrain. The region is quite extensive and rugged. The dominant vegetation is oak. Oak grows very slowly; its roots go very deep. It holds on to the soil strongly. It prevents erosion and is very important for the richness and sustainability of groundwater. Besides oak, there are other tree species like walnut or wild fruit trees that vary according to altitude, soil type, and microclimate, and lower areas used as pastures and arable land. Mount Cudi and its surroundings, quite suitable for agriculture and animal husbandry, is a region where a large population tries to sustain their lives. Forest fires not only reduce biological diversity and trees but also eliminate all wildlife in the geography, affecting flora and fauna. On the one hand, while global climate change-induced drought is increasing, the increase in forest fires also damages underground water.

People living in the villages around Mount Cudi refer to these fires that are not extinguished for a long time as “practice.”

This is an interesting definition. Practice means “work done with a specific logic, strategy, and program.” The characterisation of these fires as “practice” is the result of experiencing systematic politics, and therefore environmental and temporal violence. The story experienced by those living around Cudi and what is reflected in the press are different. While the public perception is a “simple” forest fire news, it is a completely different experience for those living in the region. These people have different dimensions of their relationship with Cudi and its surroundings. On the one hand, they collect and sell wild fruits from the forest, and on the other hand, they collect their firewood for the winter season from dried trees. Collecting dry trees is a good thing for the health of the forest. Collecting dry trees prevents the forest from burning quickly in a potential fire. Also, the villagers graze their animal in the pastures on the outskirts of the forest. The villagers’ life is intertwined with the forest. The distance between the forest area and the villagers’ vineyard and garden is not much. Therefore, the permeability between the vineyard, garden, and forest is very intense. According to the World Forest Fires Database, between 2003-2016, it is seen that fires in the region generally intensify during the July-September period. The duration and affected area of forest fires vary from region to region. Fires lasting three to four days in some areas can last more than 20 days in others. Burning an area for such a long time means ecologically horrific destruction.

“Information from the region indicates that villagers trying to extinguish the fire on their own were hindered for ‘security’ reasons. In this context, we can say that most of the fires were started with a specific mind and imagination, as pieces of a larger ideological engineering plan.”

Is it normal for a forest fire to last this long? Is there no intervention, or can’t there be?

It is possible to answer this question in two ways. But first, we need to define the areas where forest fires intensify. Again, according to World Forest Fires data, the area where fires are most common in the region is the north-east and south-east rural area of Diyarbakır (Amed)-Batman (Elih)-Bitlis (Bedlîs) triangle. The second main area in terms of density is the vicinity of Siirt (Sêrt), Hakkâri (Colemêrg), and Şırnak (Şirnex). Some of these fires may be caused by natural conditions, some to clear agricultural land, and some may be started by security forces. The point to be discussed is how an area is allowed to burn for days. Information from the region indicates that villagers trying to extinguish the fire on their own were hindered for “security” reasons. In this context, we can say that most of the fires were started with a specific mind and imagination, as pieces of a larger ideological engineering plan.

What is the ideological engineering plan you are referring to?

The plight of the villagers victimised by the fires in Cudi and of those being disciplined through power cuts in Mardin (Mêrdîn), along with the violence they all endure, is interconnected. Endless dam constructions, power cuts and forest fires constitute different aspects of the same social engineering project that we cannot view in isolation; instead, they are intricately linked through complex socio-political relationships. This engineering is done by putting ecology at the centre. An incredible number of police stations, or as locally termed, “kalekols*,” have been built in the regions where forest fires have intensified over the last twenty years. Kalekols are built on dominant hills like medieval fortified castles. The forested areas around the hills where they were built were shaved. It was not enough; the forests and pastures around the kalekols were declared security zones, closed to civilian entry. This ideological engineering plan has two goals. The first is to expand the kalekols’ field of vision as much as possible. The field of view in a forested area and a deforested area is completely different. By burning the forest, you are not only clearing the field of view, but you are also eliminating the potential danger that may come from the other side. During the Vietnam War, the USA used heavy chemicals that caused the leaves of plants in forested areas to fall and dry. The second important point is to force migration by making it difficult, even completely preventing, the local population’s access to natural resources. Moreover, by burning the forest, you aim to increase security concerns among the local population, spread the politics of fear by destroying nature.

Are you saying that there is a hot war, a hot conflict environment in the region right now?

As far as reflected in the press, we are going through a period where there are no hot conflicts [in Turkey]. Despite this, forest fires are increasing. The vineyards and gardens of people who returned to their villages during the peace process and planted thousands of fruit trees or started viticulture have turned to ashes. All this picture indicates that what is happening is part of a serious engineering plan. I think one of the goals is to force these people to migrate again.

“Endless dam constructions, power cuts, and forest fires are a social engineering project that we cannot think of as independent of each other and interconnected through complex socio-political relations. This engineering is done by putting ecology at the centre.”

In the regions where the fires are occurring, villagers say they are forced to take their animals to other places to graze. What does this mean?

This is a significant risk. Grazing animals is based on knowledge specific to the local geography. Cudi and Gabar Mountain (Çiyayê Gabar) and Faraşin pasture were areas where Kurdish pastoralists grazed their livestock in the 19th century as well. The villager must know, understand, and analyse their surroundings very well. This is not knowledge that forms in three to five years. It’s a matter of transmitting knowledge accumulated over centuries. You need to know basic information like ‘Which land is less rocky, where the animal finds better grass, where there is a water source.’ Due to the fires that have been raging on Cudi Mountain for days, villagers are using different routes to take their animals to graze; if they are using rockier terrain, this carries a risk for the villagers. Especially large cattle do not have the ability to walk on rocky terrain. The animals that can walk on rocky terrain are sheep, goats, and mules. If a cow dies because it is forced to prefer rocky terrain, this is a significant economic loss for the peasant. Also, it’s very important to know if there are poisonous plants in the ‘marginal’ areas that could affect the animals’ lives. The herds of livestock that the villager is economically dependent on are pushed into great uncertainty and danger. Then, of course, there is the security issue. The villager does not know if the herd he takes to graze in the marginal land will be attacked by a pack of wolves or another predatory animal. When you feel insecure, you want to leave where you live. In the ‘90s, many people who were forced to migrate from their villages and lived in the outskirts of big cities, exposed to terrible labour exploitation in textile workshops, want to return to their villages. Some can return. Some of those who return are threatened. The areas that make the peasant economy possible are being destroyed by fires, with the aim of destabilising those regions. The fires are part of a modern depopulation strategy. There are many aspects to this…

What do you mean by the depopulation strategy?

By depopulation, I mean the systematic displacement of the local population from their homeland through a specific policy. The policy implemented today is quite different from the village-burning strategy of the 1990s. When you burn forests, you’re not just burning the forest. There is a whole life connected to that forest. The villager places bee hives in the forest, collects wood for heating. In late spring and summer, fresh oak branches are cut, bundled, and accumulated. These bundles are clustered and then covered with suitable material to prevent them from drying out in the summer heat. Oak leaves are a food source for animals in winter. In the local Zazaki language, this type of leaf is referred to as ‘velg.’ The remaining dry branches are used by villagers for cooking and heating, called ‘perçin.’ The forest is an important energy source for the local people. The areas where the fires occur are also grazing lands. Higher quality grasses in highlands are mowed with the spring months and given to animals in winter. The villagers let the animals graze on grass that is too short to be mowed in the field. When you burn these ecological areas, you are damaging animal husbandry, one of the most important sources of income for an agrarian household.

Does being unable to feed the animal mean the villager has to leave the village?

Being unable to feed the animal directly affects the villager economically, as well as in terms of health and nutrition. An underfed animal not only becomes weak but also become vulnerable to diseases. Serious declines occur in milk and meat productivity. Significant decline occurs in the villager’s income and nutritional sources due to fluctuations in milk production. Additionally, changes in the variety and type of nutrition, i.e., in protein and calcium sources, directly affect their health and physical capacity. In the 16-17th century, Europeans reaching present-day eastern Canada (Newfoundland and Quebec) could not believe the physical splendour of the First Nation [native Canadians]. These tall, strong, and agile natives make Europeans look like a frail and unhealthy race. The physical capacity of the First Nation Canadians is directly proportional to the diversity in their diet. The rich omega they got from seafood, along with the high protein from bison and buffalo, made them healthy and tall. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the average height of the natives, whose rich nutritional sources were destroyed, not only declined incredibly but this people became one of the shortest ethnic groups on earth.

“In the ‘90s, some of the people who were forcibly displaced from their villages are returning. Some of those who return are being threatened. The areas that make the village economy possible are being destroyed by fires, with the aim of destabilising those regions. The fires are part of a modern depopulation strategy.”

What are the different aspects of the depopulation strategy you mentioned?

Let’s look at the power cuts made by DEDAŞ (Dicle Electric Distribution Inc.) in rural neighbourhoods in Mardin at the beginning of July [2020]. DEDAŞ was privatised in 2013. After privatisation, prices are increased at very high rates. According to the data we obtained from the region, villagers are being billed high amounts without any electricity meter, so the amount of electricity used is not disclosed. It is not possible for the villagers to pay these exorbitant bills. Moreover, unpaid bills have been used as an excuse to block the subsidise packages the villager receives from the state through DEDAŞ. Electricity is vital for the villager both in agricultural irrigation and in providing water to animals. If the villager cannot access electricity, both the crops in the field will dry up and die, and the animals will die of thirst. Images of sheep that perished from thirst due to DEDAŞ did not supply electricity in the Mardin region have surfaced on social media. What can the villager do in this situation? They try to generate income by selling the surviving animals for a few pennies and abandon their land. This is a version of forcing the villager to migrate.

You also included dams in the said depopulation practices. Despite years of objections and efforts to prevent it, recently, Hasankeyf was submerged under the waters of the Ilısu dam. Is dam construction a frequently used practice in depopulation policies? How do dams affect the ecological balance?

This is a region where Turkey’s main water sources are located. Dozens of large dams have been built on all branches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers under the GAP (Southeastern Anatolia Project). The main goal of these dams is to irrigate the northern Mesopotamian plain within Turkey’s borders and open it to commercial agriculture. This is not an agricultural system that feeds the villager and small producer. It’s a system that aims to create industrial agricultural areas that started in the ‘70s and led to the destruction of Thrace under [Turgut] Özal’s leadership in the ‘80s. The state want to open all agricultural lands in the region from Urfa (Riha) to the Botan River to commercial agriculture. It is possible to say that the depopulation policy has transformed according to the global political conjuncture. While there were no such goals until the first half of the 1980s, rural depopulation began in the 1990s. I think that the recent depopulation policy is directly related to the Syrian Civil War that started in 2011. Today’s depopulation policy is also a policy of de-Kurdification of the region. We need to think about this together with the Syrian Civil War and the Rojava Revolution. During ISIS’s attempt to occupy Kobani (Kobanê) in 2015, there was tremendous solidarity on the Turkish side of the border. The governing faction perceived the burgeoning solidarity between two communities, who spoke the same language but were divided by contemporary borders, as a significant threat and chose to bypass it. Therefore, the reflections of the Rojava Revolution in Turkey are related to the strategy of depopulating the lands in the south [of the Turkish border]. After the depopulation policy is completed, I think it is aimed to settle the Syrian refugees, numbering four million, along the entire southern and eastern border from Urfa to the Botan River. Thus, a large agricultural labour force will be obtained, and a demographic barrier will be drawn between the Kurdish population isolated from each other by modern borders.

In your article titled “El Niño and the Nomads: Global Climate, Local Environment, and the Crisis of Pastoralism in Late Ottoman Kurdistan,” you touch upon the ecology of this region… What areas does the region you call Ottoman Kurdistan cover, and what are the features of its ecology?

The geography we refer to as Ottoman Kurdistan starts from the north of Lake Van (Gola Wanê) and extends to the east of Sivas (Sêwaz), and from there to the south of today’s Ras al-Ayn (Serêkaniyê). In the east, we are talking about a vast geography extending to the north of the plains of Hakkâri, Şırnak, Van (Wan), and Mosul (Mûsil). There are mountain ranges surrounding the region, but the entire geography is not mountainous. The eastern wing of the Taurus Mountains, which extend along the Mediterranean, connects to Iran via the Zagros Mountains (Çiyayên Zagrosê) over Hakkâri. The eastern side of the Taurus Mountains cuts through Kurdistan like a crescent. The section of the Taurus Mountains in Kurdistan is not like the mountains extending along the Eastern Black Sea. There are various plains and plateaus at different altitudes between the mountains, as well as many rivers such as Murat (Çemê Murat), Euphrates (Çemê Firat), Tigris (Çemê Dîcle), Batman (Çemê Bedew), and Botan (Çemê Botan), and the deep valleys created by these river beds. We must not forget Lake Van, the crater lakes on Mount Nemrut (Çiyayê Nemrud), and Lake Hazar (Gola Hazar) near Harput (Xarput). Due to the elevations of the Eastern Taurus Mountains, it has vast plains such as Muş (Mûş), Harput, Beşiri (Beşîrî), Palu (Palû), Urfa, and Diyarbakır. In higher areas, there are plateaus extending along the foothills of the mountains. Ahmed Arif says in his poem “Diyarbekir Kalesinden Notlar” (Notes from Diyarbakır Castle):

Açar, / Blooms,
Kan kırmızı yediverenler / Blood-red wild roses
Ve kar yağar bir yandan, / And snow falls on one side,
Savrulur Karacadağ, / Mount Karaca is swept away,
Savrulur zozan… / The plateau is swept away…

In Kurdish, “zozan” means “plateau.” The place Ahmed Arif refers to in the poem is the Diyarbakır plain, located in the lower regions. Since blood-red wild roses are blooming, spring has come to the plain. However, snow is still sprinkling on Mount Karaca (Qerejdax), southwest of Diyarbakır. These verses of Ahmed Arif describe the diversity of the region’s ecology very well. I define the nature of Ottoman Kurdistan as an ecological threshold.

What does ecological threshold mean?

When imagining this region, we should not think of only mountainous terrain. On the contrary, we are talking about a rich geography where plains, river beds, and plateaus coexist. By ecological threshold, I mean a region or geography distinctly differentiating ecologically from another. Ottoman Kurdistan is neither as flat as Central Anatolia nor as mountainous as Western Iran. There are significant differences in elevation between the northern and southern parts. In addition to elevation, we are talking about a region shaped by deep river valleys. The vegetation varies according to these elevations. Therefore, I define it as an ecological threshold.

“Dozens of large dams have been built on all branches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers under the GAP. The main goal of these dams is to irrigate the northern Mesopotamian plain and open it to agricultural production. This is not an agricultural system that feeds the villager and small producer. It’s a system that aims to create industrial agricultural areas, which started in the ‘70s and led to the destruction of Thrace under Özal’s leadership in the ‘80s.”

In the mid-17th century, [the Ottoman explorer] Evliya Çelebi, who visited the region, speaks of Van’s poplar trees and Bitlis’s grapes. How do the travellers describe the ecology of the region?

In the 19th century, the region was inundated with European travellers. There are many travellers who speak of Van’s gardens, Bitlis’ walnut trees, and Mardin’s vineyards. In “Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis,” a work translated and compiled by Robert Dankoff, the Bitlis section of the Seyahatname (Book of Travels) is presented. Within this, Evliya Çelebi offers a detailed description of Bitlis, and the surrounding areas. He later travels to other regions of Ottoman Kurdistan and in the fourth volume of the Seyahatname, he describes the geography, cultures, and languages of many of these cities, and the taste and abundance of the fruits and vegetables grown in the Hevsel gardens along the Tigris in Diyarbekir, in extraordinary language and at great length. He compares Hevsel to Egypt’s famous Faiyum Oasis. He explains in detail the importance of the Reyhan (purple basil) gardens in Hevsel, its scent, and colour. These areas are also where the famous Diyarbakır watermelons are grown. It is known that there is a very diverse ecological life in these gardens. They host a rich wildlife, from various bird species to foxes. The Hevsel gardens are not only significant agricultural areas that meet the city’s vegetable and fruit needs but also important summer resorts where the people of Diyarbekir spend the hot summer months.

You use both Diyarbekir and Diyarbakır; what does this difference in pronunciation correspond to?

Place names are important both historically and in terms of the memory of various ways people relate to geography. Until 1937, the name of today’s Diyarbakır was Diyarbekir. In earlier periods, it is also called Amid, Amida, Kara Amid. The Armenian name for the city is Tigranakert. When talking about the Ottoman period, I prefer to say Diyarbekir, and for the period after 1937, Diyarbakır.

Were there forests in the region, or has afforestation occurred later?

In the 19th century, Bingöl (Çewlîg), Dersim, Bitlis, Siirt, Hakkâri, Birecik, and the highlands of Tur Abdin were the areas where forests were most prevalent. The primary vegetation here is oak. The type and quality of oak vary according to elevation, climate, and soil type. In lower and drier regions, there are short oak trees, while in higher areas, there are more magnificent oak trees. We know from archival documents that there were forests in the highlands of Hakkâri, though rare.

Can the ecological diversity of the 19th century still be seen in the region today?

When we look at the geographical distribution of the forest in the region today, we can say that it is not much different from the previous century, with the exception of areas affected by large dam construction. These dams do not only store water and generate electricity. They have the capacity to directly affect the vegetation and precipitation regime of the areas where they are built. In the 20th century, the areas around Bingöl and Dersim were where the forests were most concentrated. There were forested areas in the highlands of Siirt, in Lice and Kulp to the northeast of Diyarbakır, in the countryside of Batman, around the Bitlis river, and along the Murat river, which we call Ottoman Harput. We know that there were large forested lands in the countryside of Hakkâri and Şırnak. In the southern parts of Van, there were weeping willows, and in Bitlis and Siirt, there are dense walnut trees. In the Cezire region, particularly near the Habur (Xabûr) and Zap (Zê) rivers, you’ll find a variety of trees including pine, walnut and poplar. Scattered among these are juniper trees, which thrive in certain areas. In the lower, marshy regions, poplar trees are especially common. These trees are not just part of the landscape; they are essential materials in the local construction and transportation sectors. The most eye-catching tree species in the Van gardens described by 19th-century travellers is poplar. Poplar is so common that in the Zazaki dialect of Kurdish, there are quite a few idioms related to the poplar tree. People who move in the direction of the wind like a poplar leaf are called “zey pele hevriri.”

“I think that the recent depopulation policy is directly related to the Syrian war that started in 2011. Today’s depopulation policy is also a policy of de-Kurdification of the region. We must think of this in conjunction with the Syrian civil war and the Rojava revolution.”

Was environmental destruction for security reasons a method used also in the Ottoman era? Does the recent “practice” of setting fire have a historical continuity?

Throughout the 19th century, great wars are taking place. In the 1820s with the Russians, the Bedirxan Rebellion in 1846, the Crimean War of 1854-56, the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877-78, followed by organised pogroms against Armenians in the 1890s, and then the World War I. The region is directly affected by all of these. War means finding food to feed a vast army. You need a large source of livestock to carry the army’s food, cannons, rifles, and equipment. Casting cannons and making cannonballs are directly related to the use of natural resources. Of course, there has been ecological destruction. But I have not come across an event in the archive documents where an entire region is set on fire, as is happening today. Of course, great destruction has occurred in conflict zones, but I have not encountered systematic annihilation. The roots of seeing nature as something that needs to be subjugated go back quite far. The 19th century is the golden age of man’s domination over nature. The apparatus called the modern state is the primary actor in subjugating nature. Especially the construction of dams, the draining of marshes, and the alteration of river beds can be read as significant processes of this domination policy. For example, the roots of Çukurova (Cilician Plain) being one of Turkey’s largest cotton production areas today go back to the 1830s. This region has a significant nomadic population. Opening the region to agricultural production could only have been possible with the transition of nomadic tribes to a settled life. Therefore, the nomads in the region were forcibly settled by Ahmet Cevdet Pasha’s Fırka-i Islahiye** (1865-1866) and its massive military campaign to forcefully resettle the region’s Turkish and Kurdish speaking pastoralists. This was a very bloody process. We know that with the Ottoman’s centralisation and modernisation process, pastoralists were forcibly displaced. This was because the settled agrarian life meant legibility in terms of conscription, taxation and surveillance. From the tax officer to the police, everyone had to know which village to go to. It is very difficult to establish state authority in a geography where communities are constantly on the move. For the organism called the state, nomads are always a headache and are seen as social groups that need to be brought under control. In addition to the nomads, from the middle of the century, there are Chechen, Circassian and Nogay refugees brought to the region. By settling Muslim refugees here, an attempt was made to create labour. Meltem Toksöz describes this tremendous environmental, economic, and demographic change and transformation process in Çukurova, how the population was affected by the draining of the marshes, and how the labour force and socio-economic relations were transformed, in her book “Nomads, Migrants and Cotton in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Making of the Adana-Mersin Region, 1850-1908” in an extraordinary language.

You said this transformation was a “very bloody process”; how did this process transpire, what has happened?

The tent is the home of the nomad. The tents of pastoralists that refuse to transition to settled life were burned by the Ottoman army. It is possible to make comparisons between the violence experienced by villagers whose houses were burned in the 1990s and the tribes that suffered the oppression of Fırka-i Islâhiye in 1865. After the Fırka-i Islâhiye army was formed, it was sent to the region under the leadership of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha in the spring of 1865, and the policy of forced settlement began. Those who resisted were subjected to great violence. With the increase in the population around and on the peripheries of the drained and undrained marshland, the number of deaths from malaria increases incredibly. Looking at Ottoman Kurdistan, I did not come across practices like burning tents in those days. However, from the newspaper reports of the time, we can read that two villages belonging to the Haydaranlı Tribe in Dersim were completely burned in 1909, and the army confiscated the villagers’ large and small livestock. In an article published in the 31st issue (2018) of the Kürt Tarihi (Kurdish History) magazine by Serhat Bozkurt, the details of how and why the villages belonging to Haydaranlı were burned are explained.

Can the early Republic’s practice of burning villages be considered a precursor to the burning of villages in the ‘90s?

Although the motivation for punishment may be similar, the parameters and targets are entirely different. After the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925, dozens of Kurdish villages accused of supporting the rebellion were targeted. Many villages in the Diyarbekir countryside were not only set on fire, but the male population was also executed by firing squad, and animal herds were confiscated. Of course, nature was also affected by the wave of violence. During this period, not only the centres of the villages were burned, but also the vineyards, gardens, pastures, and forested areas on the peripheries were set on fire. Small and large livestock left in the barns of the burned houses or in the pastures perished. In the journal of Toplum ve Kuram (Society and Theory, issue 9, 2017), Serhat Aslan’s article titled “Kürdistan’da Doğa/Ekoloji Katliamı” (Nature/Ecology Massacre in Kurdistan) provides details of a report describing a military operation carried out in the autumn of 1927. The report states that not only were people killed, but emptied villages were burned and destroyed, and large herds of animals belonging to the villagers were also confiscated. In 1938, a similar massacre occurred in Dersim, and the environmental impact of the bombardments by military aircraft lasted for decades. The geographical, economic, and political dimensions of the village burnings in the 1920s and those that occurred in the 1990s are entirely different.

“I think that after the policy of depopulation is completed, the goal is to settle Syrian refugees, numbering up to four million, all along the southern and eastern border from Urfa to the Botan River. In this way, not only will a large agricultural labour force be obtained, but a demographic barrier will also be drawn between the isolated Kurdish populations with modern borders.”

How?

In 1925 with Sheikh Said and in 1938 in Dersim, attacks were made targeting a specific geographical area. In the 1990s, the geographical scale was very different; in the ‘90s, the entire geography where the guerrilla movement fighting against the state was located was targeted, and the people of that geography were also targeted within a specific plan. The fundamental motivation was the thought, “We need to cut off the rural blood vessels that feed this movement.” What was attempted while cutting off the rural blood vessels was to sever the relationship that people had established with the geography. Here, we see how important “political geography” is. By targeting and destroying the resources and natural environment of the village economy, you are eliminating the conditions that make the villager’s life possible. Moreover, when you set fire to their pastures, forests, and gardens, you are also preventing any possible return there.

The destruction of humans and ecological devastation are inevitably intertwined, aren’t they?

Of course. Although humans see themselves as beings that rule over nature, they are a part of nature. A forest fire, flood or drought not only changes human life but also fundamentally alters political and cultural activities. In Turkey, from the early 1900s to the 1980s, thousands of village names in Armenian, Greek and Kurdish were changed. Not only village names were changed, but names shaping the public space, like station names, were also altered. This was part of the policy of Turkifying Anatolia. A person has a relationship of belonging with geography, with its trees, flowers, animals, and water, that is not merely economic but also emotional. When you lose this relationship, you begin to shed all the identities that make you who you are. The village evacuations in the ‘90s had a purpose like severing the relationship that the people in this geography had established with their own cultures and languages. Severing the relationship between the peoples and their own cultures and languages becomes much more challenging when they continue to reside in their native geography.

What were the economic consequences of this ecological devastation?

Diyarbakir, Palu, Muş, Beşiri, Silvan (Farqîn), and Harput plains were an economic centre that fed the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. It is known that significant amounts of grain, legumes and rice were cultivated in the region. Places where a serious amount of vegetables and fruits were produced, dried and brought to market. Viticulture is highly developed. We are talking about a geography where Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, Assyrian and some Armenian communities lived as nomads. These people had millions of animals such as sheep, buffalo, cattle, horses, mules, camels. There was a developed economy dependent on animal husbandry. This region was the breadbasket of the Ottoman East. Animals were exported to Syria, Egypt, wheat was sent to Baghdad and Mosul…

Turning our attention to the turbulent 1990s, a period marked by the forced evacuation of villages across the region. Various sources cite differing figures, with some reporting 2,500 and others around 3,300 villages being emptied. This practice had three distinct aspects. Firstly, some of these villages were entirely razed by fire. Secondly, the inhabitants were coerced into migration. Lastly, the areas surrounding the villages were systematically destabilised. The precise number of those displaced remains uncertain, with estimates ranging from two to four million people.

This mass migration had a catastrophic impact on the region’s economic life. Vital agricultural products such as grain, legumes, tobacco, and fruit were abruptly halted. Moreover, the migrating populace owned millions of livestock. Tevfik Güran, in his studies on the early republic’s economy, noted that Diyarbakir alone was home to several million small livestock, including sheep and goats. Between 1991 and 2000, Diyarbakir experienced a one-third reduction in its small livestock population, while in Dersim, the loss rate soared to around 70 percent.

The situation varied across different areas, with each district experiencing unique loss rates. Particularly alarming were the losses in Mardin Dargeçit (Kerboran), where 60% of cattle, 90% of sheep, and over 70% of goats vanished between 1991 and 2000. These staggering figures, highlighted in a 2012 article by Mehmet Gürses, signify a profound transformation in the region’s socio-economic classes, available capital, and production means.

Adding to the complexity of the situation were the animals that could not be sold, such as donkeys. Hundreds of these creatures were left without owners, and stray donkeys approaching police stations at night were killed by soldiers.

Today, our focus is on the fires in Turkey, beginning with the Cudi mountains and extending to Ayvalık, where a vast forested area is ablaze. These incidents are part of a global pattern, with massive forest fires continuing in California, and Australia experiencing weeks of relentless fires last summer. Some are even linking the Covid-19 pandemic to changes in the ecological balance. How do you see the connection between the pandemic, forest fires, and deforestation?

In addition to the forest fires lasting weeks due to global warming, as seen in Australia and California, significant deforestation is happening. This deforestation is driven by various factors, including agricultural land clearing, mining activities, quarries, and construction. An illustrative example can be found in Ayvalık, Turkey, where a fire affected an 80-hectare area. This fire broke out in a location considered for residential settlement or development. Though the cause of the fire is claimed to be related to electricity poles, we often encounter such fires being started with the intention of opening up land for construction. This trend has been increasing in Turkey over the last 15-20 years, closely tied to the construction economy and the relationships between construction companies and the state’s institutional structure.

The issue extends globally, with serious deforestation activities continuing in many parts of the world. In Brazil, the Bolsonaro government is daily converting the Amazon forests into pasture to establish cattle farms and export cheap meat. The loss of ecological diversity in the Amazon is a disaster for the Earth, and surrendering it to the Bolsonaro government’s policies would be a grave mistake. The destruction of the Amazon will have far-reaching consequences, affecting every living being on Earth, either directly or indirectly.

Along with deforestation, there will be a significant decrease in the population of vital creatures, from reptiles to bats. These creatures, whose natural habitats are destroyed, will not only venture into human settlements but will also spend more time in agricultural and livestock areas. This could lead to the introduction of viruses and bacteria from wildlife into human life. In our globalised world, a virus or bacterium can be rapidly transported to any part of the globe. The coronavirus pandemic is a clear example of this phenomenon.

(*) “Kalekol” refers to a specifically fortified type of military outpost or station constructed in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, especially in rural areas. It is a combination of the words “kale” (fortress) and “-kol” from “karakol” (police station). These structures are typically established not only for security control but also for surveillance activities in the surroundings.
(**) The Fırka-i Islahiye, or Reform Detachment, was a special military unit in the Ottoman Empire, established during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its primary purpose was to suppress local uprisings, maintain order, and implement “reforms” in various regions of the empire, including the forceful settlement of nomadic tribes.

The recent increasing price for diesel fuel and fertilizer has also reduced the production in agriculture in Turkey. As the weather is getting warmer, women farmers working in the Hevsel Gardens, which were added to the UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015, have already begun to plant vegetables; however, most of the fields in the gardens are left unplanted due to the high prices of diesel fuel and fertilizer. The women, who mostly plant vegetables such as lettuce, leek, onion, and leafy green vegetables, want a women’s market to be opened in the district of Sur [in Amed] in order to sell their vegetables at a cheap price.

They begin to work early morning

Züleyhan Sezgin, who starts to plant the seeds after hoeing and raking her field early morning, works with her children in the field until the evening. She told us that they sell the vegetables and take some of them to home to eat. This year, they plant leek and leafy green vegetables only for themselves because they cannot sell vegetables as before. They begin to work in the gardens in the spring and end working in autumn.

“Our fields remain unplanted due to high prices of fertilizer”

Züleyhan Sergin and her family plant only one of their fields this year because they couldn’t buy fertilizer due to its high prices. Stating that their incomes don’t meet their expenses, she said, “I don’t work only in the field; I also look after my children and bring them to the field. If I had my own field, I wouldn’t plant anything because our incomes really don’t meet our expenses. We are doing very hard work, but we don’t receive recompense for our work. Everything is very expensive, the diesel fuel and fertilizer are very expensive. We cannot employ workers because we cannot pay them. The government should give us fertilizer to us or they should support us.”

“We want a women’s market to be opened”

Züleyhan Sezgin stated that as women farmers, they asked the municipality to open a women’s market in the district of Sur, “But nothing has been done until now. If there was a women’s market in Sur, we would still sell our vegetables. But now we sell them to sellers.  They buy vegetables at a very cheap price from us but sell very expensive. Many women work in the Hevsel Gardens and we, as women farmers, want to have a women’s market to sell our products.”

The following video unfortunately does not contain English subtitles.

The World Heritage Site of Diyarbakir consists of an old fortress and the adjacent Hevsel Gardens, which lie between the fortress and the Tigris River. The soul of the site is the vibrant old city, a buffer zone-like area called Sur or Suriçi. With a past of 4000 years and its multilingual, multi-cultural and multi-layered character, the fortified old city hosts 600 cultural properties from numerous Eastern and Western civilizations. It was mainly the strong local civil society and municipalities, which pressured the Turkish Government to apply to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee (WHC). In 2015, the “Diyarbakir Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape” was inscribed as a World Heritage Site.

After the end of the 2,5 year-long negotiations between the Turkish government and the Kurdish opposition about a political solution of the unsolved Kurdish question, the civil war that started in 2015 also reached Diyarbakir city. After the declaration of several 24-hour blockades by the state, officially referred to as “curfews”, police operations were launched in Sur in the fall of 2015. With the involvement of the military and heavy weapons such as tanks, the 6th curfew started on December 11, 2015. The armed conflict officially ended on March 10, 2016, and led to the death of some hundred people, but to date this curfew continues in five of six affected neighborhoods of Eastern Sur. It is estimated that during the armed conflict 450 buildings were destroyed, either completely or significantly. The fortress, having been used by the Turkish military for its operations, also received some damages.

The main physical destruction in Sur happened after the official end of state operations. In the blockaded areas, governmental teams also systematically destroyed intact buildings, including monuments, by using heavy equipment. In Eastern Sur, the demolition continued until the summer of 2017. Debris has been continuously excavated so quickly and roughly to different deposit sites that no serious efforts have been done to rescue any authentic elements of monuments among the ruins.

Parallel to the ongoing destruction, the Turkish government issued an expropriation order of the whole old city on March 21, 2016. This decision aims to transfer even old mosques and churches to the government. To date, the expropriation has already been realized for a major part of the destroyed areas. All owners of the buildings filed suits against this enforced expropriation which foresees low compensation amounts.

Some of the complaints have been refused by the court when there were already 60 cases at the Constitutional Court. As jurisdiction is no longer independent in Turkey, the plaintiffs will take the case to the European Court for Human Rights. For the displaced people on rent, the government offered, with delay, almost no financial support. The main condition set for those in Sur, who could prove their residency, in order to receive a low amount of financial maintenance support for 1 or 2 years, was to move out of Sur. Although the Western part of Sur remained largely intact, Sur residents were not allowed to rent homes there.

After all municipalities in Diyarbakir city – all being in opposition to the government and the destruction in Sur – were seized by state appointed governmental trustees in the fall of 2016, based on a decree possible under the declared state of emergency, and after the co-mayors were arrested, the Urban Conservation Plan of Sur (Turkish: Sur Koruma Amaçlı İmar Planı) from 2012 was revised immediately in order to provide a legal basis for the destruction in progress. The revision argues also with a governmental “law on the transformation of risky areas” (numbered 6306)* from 2012 – which has not been discussed with the municipalities – on Sur, considering the entire old city as a risky settlement area. Despite all criticism by civil society, the court rejected the cases. In the security-led revision, for instance, schools were turned into police stations, but no alternative educational areas were determined. Most streets – remaining from Roman times – were widened so that military vehicles could pass. The chamber of engineers and architects (TTMOB) filed a suit against the revised Urban Conservation Plan of Sur, as well as against the expropriation decision from March 2016, which are still pursued by the responsible administrative court. As it became clear during the lawsuit that the government did not act on a legal basis, very soon the law from 2012 was changed accordingly.

At end of 2016 the government formed a “scientific commission” of uncritical experts, who justified the ongoing state-led destruction. Its main argumentation was that due to explosives placed in the buildings of the contested area, there was a need to destroy almost all buildings in five neighborhoods of Eastern Sur.

In May 2017, the Turkish government started with the complete destruction of the two neighborhoods Lalebey and Ali Paşa in Southwestern Sur, where no armed clashes have happened. After months of protests by the inhabitants and big parts of the civil society, the houses of thousands of people were demolished with heavy police presence. The official justification was a rehabilitation project from 2011, which the responsible municipalities had nullified in 2013.

Satellite images from May 2016, August 2016 and July 2017 show the progressive destruction of buildings and areas in Sur. While in Eastern Sur the number of completely destroyed and subsequently erased buildings was 832 (10.7 hectares destroyed) in May 2016, this number rose to 1,519 (20.3 hectares) in August 2016 and to 3,569 in July 2017. This is equivalent to an erased area of 46.3 hectares. If we add 806 destroyed buildings from Southwestern Sur, there are in total 4,376 destroyed buildings which meet 58 hectares, 40% of the old city area and home to approx. 23,000 people. In total, 170 monuments, i.e. architecturally registered and conserved civil and public buildings, were destroyed or damaged in Sur according to the satellite photo dated on August 2016. In detail: 89 monuments of civil and public value have been destroyed completely and 40 partially; 41 monuments have been damaged. Of these 170 registered structures, 13 are monuments. One of the destroyed monuments was located in the citadel, which is World Heritage propriety.

After the Regional Board for the Conservation of Cultural Assets abolished its conservation status as a result of governmental pressure, it was destroyed in order to build a park in 2017. For this purpose, excavations of two meters were done at several locations – an act violating the World Heritage Site Management Plan. The population left this area in 2012/2013 in order to do excavations under the ground where antique monuments, including a Roman amphitheater, had been detected.

In the spring of 2017 the construction of 60 new buildings was started in erased Eastern Sur. At end of 2017, Southwestern Sur followed with several hundreds of new buildings – 200 are completed. They are all built with reinforced concrete, with no typical courtyards and in big distance to each other, which is a strong violation of the historical old city fabric and the architecture of traditional Diyarbakir houses. The revised and extremely weakened Urban Conservation Plan opens the door for such new constructions. As the new houses will be several times more expansive than the expropriation compensation, the usually poor former inhabitants will be unable to move back to their neighborhoods.  A change of the demographic structure is expected.

For the new housing projects the government built basements and installed new pipes for water, waste water and electricity for which excavations of up to three meters have been done. As this area has a settlement past of at least 4,000 years and since houses in Diyarbakir have no basements, this work is destroying the widespread archaeological layers under the ground. Again, debris is excavated quickly and roughly with no effort to save any authentic elements of monuments. This is absolutely unnecessary. Sur had no serious challenges with water and electricity supply since 2002, when the municipalities carefully improved infrastructures. Parallel to this work in 2018 a double track road was constructed along the fortress in Eastern Sur, which was not even included in the revision of the Urban Conservation Plan of Sur. Before, there was partially a small road.

The destruction of the World Heritage site of Diyarbakir is not limited to the old city. The Ministry for Environment and Urban Planning put in action the “Tigris Valley Project”, which had been cancelled during the UNESCO application process at the beginning of 2015 – in fact, it had been a precondition for the inscription. It has also started to canalize the bed of the river. The existing large sand quarry pond in the river plain is allowed to be operated by a company – the legal status of this pond has been questionable for years. The mainly natural ecosystem of the suburban river stretch has been destroyed completely in the buffer zone. Because of a complaint by the chamber of engineers and architects, the aimed canalization of the river flowing as the boundary of the Hevsel Gardens, which are directly World Heritage property, could be stopped temporarily.

While in 2017 the government constructed some buildings in the unsettled buffer zone within the Tigris Valley, this approach dramatically changed in 2018 and now foresees widespread commercial locations. As the local elections are approaching (planned for March 31, 2019) the state appointed governor of the Sur district recently declared to create a 15 hectares “people’s garden” in the higher parts of the Hevsel Gardens at the fortress. Dozens of inhabited houses have already been destroyed and at least hundreds of trees were cut at end of 2018.

According to that which the governor has shared with the public, two entrances from the old city through the fortress are planned, which would amount to the physical destruction of World Heritage property! The operation of this “people’s garden” is planned to be held privately and with a luxurious gastronomy, which increases the risks to the World Heritage properties of the fortress and Hevsel Gardens.

As part of the governmental commercialization policy, the destruction of the two adjacent neighborhoods Feritköşk and Dicle with their 9,000 inhabitants, situated northwards in the buffer zone of the Tigris Valley, is planned. In August 2017, they were declared as “risky areas”. The aimed “urban transformation” is justified with poor construction conditions, which is partly true. As this area is of interest for investments, the planned new buildings will be sold at expensive prices and thus the current inhabitants, mostly poor, will not return.

It can be concluded that unfortunately no effort is being done for any rehabilitation of Sur according to the ICOMOS/WHC guidelines or with any participation of the civil society and affected people.

In summary, it needs to be stated that in almost half of Sur, apart from the destroyed buildings, the original street fabric and the insular-parcel integrity have been irreparably lost. Together with the forced exodus and forced expropriation, it leads to the eradication of the traditional-social life, trade forms and urban social memory, developed over thousands of years, the change of propriety, the change of the demographic structure and the interruption of cultural continuity. The ongoing “Tigris Valley Project” is another big threat to the Word Heritage Site Diyarbakir outside of the fortress, which should not be underestimated. If all planning of the Turkish government would be implemented, the World Heritage Site of Diyarbakir would completely lose its core values and its uniqueness. The result would be a new old city with a completely new population, which has no relation to the cultural heritage of Diyarbakir, and a big commercialized area serving only big investments and profit, while erasing the local culture.

Concerning the UNESCO World Heritage Committee (WHC)

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has asked the Turkish government for information on the World Heritage Site of Diyarbakir at the beginning of 2016, after the World Heritage Site Management sent its reports and after news were published internationally on the armed conflict and destruction in Sur. There was no initiative by the Turkish government to inform the UNESCO WHC/Center. The UNESCO WHC was kept satisfied with the information given by Turkey, which downplayed the destruction during and especially after the armed conflict. The decisions of the UNESCO WHC in 2016 and 2017 expressed concerns in a superficial way, but never challenged Turkey, while failing to stop the ongoing destruction of cultural heritage and livelihoods, following grave actions and projects.

The last decision of 2017 has given Turkey time until December 2018 for a new state of conservation report on Diyarbakir. Like the former state of conservation reports on Diyarbakir, only a short summary has been published. It does not contain any information on whether a Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA) for urban design projects or a Master Plan has been prepared in a proper way as requested by the WHC. It is clear that there is not much to say by the Turkish government as its distressing approach on the WH Site of Diyarbakir has not changed significantly.

In this regard, the following decisions are requested from the UNESCO WHC to take at its 43nd Session in Paris/France:

1) The WHC should make every effort to have the UN security ban over Diyarbakir lifted in order to send a Reactive Monitoring Mission to Diyarbakir without further delay. There is absolutely no security concern in Diyarbakir city as claimed by the Turkish government. This mission should meet also (non-)displaced people from Sur and all civil society organizations working on Sur.

2) The WHC should urge the Turkish State Party to immediately stop all activities in the World Heritage Property and its buffer zone, particularly the destruction of buildings and other structures, the removal of debris, the expropriation and displacement of local inhabitants, the construction of new housing projects, the revived “Tigris Valley Project” and the “Peoples Garden Project” until they have been assessed and approved by the Committee.

3) The WHC should urge the Turkish State Party to cancel its decision to expropriate  82% of Sur, dated on March 21, 2016, and the revision of the Urban Conservation Plan, dated on December 2016.

4) The WHC should request from the Turkish State Party that all further assessments, documentation and urban design planning have to be done with the direct participation of affected people, civil society (chamber of architects/engineers, unions, human rights organizations, cultural associations etc.) and independent scientists from different fields in an open and participative process, and with the WH Centre/ICOMOS in a consulting capacity.

5) The destroyed parts of Sur should be reconstructed according to the original Urban Conservation Plan (2012) and the WH Site Management Plan with a strong participation by civil society and inhabitants of Sur, including the displaced people. The latter should be able to return to their former neighborhoods with the financial support of the state and build new homes according to their needs and oriented at the traditional urban design of Diyarbakir.

6) In view of the ongoing massive destruction, well-documented by photos and plans, the WHC should inscribe the Diyarbakir Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape in the List of World Heritage in Danger; following the example of the destruction of the Historic Center of Shakhrisyabz/Uzbekistan.

7) The WHC should urge the UNESCO Director-General to invoke the UN Security Council over the case of Diyarbakir based on the UN Security Council Resolution 2347 (March 2017) on the destruction and smuggling of cultural heritage.

See original law: http://www.mevzuat.gov.tr/MevzuatMetin/1.5.6306.pdf

There are, after all, some things that mix quite well, like salt and pepper, and others that don’t mix at all, like fire and water. As an attempt to mix opposite qualities, is the market more like salt and pepper, or is it more like fire and water?

─Bertell Ollman, Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists

Following the capitalist restoration in the USSR from the 1950’s onward, coupled with the social democratic capitulation to neoliberalism, debates around the ‘Third way’ in the mode of production, a simultaneous rejection of the free market and private property, as well as public property and planning, have intensified. In the USA and the EU, where capitalism is at its most advanced level, discussions tend to revolve around participatory economy, economic democracy, and solidarity economies through micro-entrepreneurial models, whereas in Latin America there are efforts to implement a hybrid model under the name of ‘twenty-first century socialism’, incorporating both private and socialised property. On the other hand, in places where capitalist accumulation is relatively low, such as Rojava and Chiapas, we see that there are debates around the model of communal economy based on agricultural cooperatives, the agricultural economy, and self-reliance. The perspective of communal economy that the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan has been attempting to institutionalise as an alternative to capitalism (and socialism) has recently gained much attention in academic circles.

In this article, taking a historical materialist approach, I will argue that communal economy:

1) will be compelled to evolve towards either capitalism or socialism in a short time, since due to its eclectic approach to public property and planning, it cannot be a distinct mode of production,

2) that this is because it deviates from the main tenets of historical materialism and bends the stick too far in the direction of idealism,

3) and that despite this, communal economy has a progressive and populist program, and where it can take up a perspective of class struggle, it can provide preliminary practices towards the more advanced mode of production of a system of workers’ and peasants’ soviets.

My criticisms will be, unlike the ordinary ones on intra-communal and intra-cooperative democracy, focused on the relations between the communes and the cooperatives, or the macro-economic scale.

Öcalan and the Thought of Democratic Civilisation

Abdullah Öcalan’s perspective of communal economy comes through a direct result of his historical and social formulations. In the volumes penned in the İmralı prison and published under the title Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Öcalan expands on the thesis that the primary contradiction in history is the one between societies with states and democratic ones. According to this model, historical societies have shown characteristics of democracy, equality and solidarity.

These societies were suspicious of accumulation of property and money with the purpose of enrichment rather than the satisfaction of human needs, and redistributed this accumulation to those in need at the first opportunity. In fact, these natural communities have been ‘foreign to the idea of exchange value for a long time. This is not even considered, being seen as inappropriate. A valuable object is presented as a gift to the society and its members.’ (Abdullah Öcalan Sosyal Bilimler Akademisi, 2014: 8, All translations mine – OA)

As opposed to this democratic tendency, the tendency to monopolise and rule has led to an evolution towards a hierarchical and exploitative structure. Monopolisation has taken its harshest form in capitalism and the state, since, ‘Both are essentially forces that undermine the foundations of society through the expropriation of surplus-value’ (Öcalan, 2013c: 50). However, according to Öcalan, the tendency to monopolise cannot only be interpreted through an economic frame. The Marxist concept of base-superstructure is inadequate. Gender, family, ethnicity, religion, culture and other domains can also become points of monopolisation independently of economic exploitation and state violence (Abdullah Öcalan, Sosyal Bilimler Akademisi, 2014: 7). Thus monopolisation is furthered by the state, religious figures and practices of masculinity as much as capital, and these transform one another. For instance, there can be no such thing as capitalism without civilisation; alongside of the struggle to expropriate surplus-value there is also a culture that creates capitalism. What is essential for Öcalan is not the working class or female emancipation struggles on their own, but a struggle for a democratic modernity based on the axis of anti-monopolization as a whole (Öcalan, 2013b: 223, All bold lines in the original – OA).

The second focal point of Öcalan’s thought comes up in connection to this: life is a functioning of groups, and not individuals or states. Groups are a whole in cultural, religious and economic terms. Thus, contradictions do not take place between individuals or classes, but between the social bodies and groups that contain these (2013c: 223). In the same way that society is naturally made up of groups as opposed to individuals, democratic civilisation shall also be founded by groups. These groups will practice a directly democratic and gender-egalitarian perspective of ecological life, supported by a communal economy, and they will form federated associations between one another based on this perspective. How is the communal economy envisioned here?

The Communal Economy

The ideal shaping the communal economy is the necessity to collectively provide for local needs based on the local demand, planning and labour. Capitalism and socialism have stifled the local initiative, one of them monopolising it within the individual, and the latter in the state. Although for Öcalan, ‘the economy is the least nationalised and privatised social reality. The community is the basic fabric of collectivism’ (Abdullah Öcalan Sosyal Bilimler Akademisi, 2014: 11).

Öcalan does not regard capitalism in economic terms. For him, capitalism is in fact a structure that destroys the economy. It is not a market economy, since it has given rise to monopolisation that prevents trade on free and equal terms between individuals. Öcalan sees the economy as an activity of the local groups, communes and societies, instead of individuals (worker, boss, landlord, etc) or states (such as the nation-state or socialist state). This is also the condition for the efficient functioning of the economy (Öcalan, 2013c: 181).

The main units of the communal economy are the production cooperatives (Abdullah Öcalan Sosyal Bilimler Akademisi, 2014: 7). The property and administration of these cooperatives are entrusted to the communes and they should be governed according to democratic principles by their workers.

Both private and public property are rejected in this perspective. Group property is key. Capitalist production based on private property can only be transitory in the communal economy. At this point, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the way in which Abdullah Öcalan defines capitalism, the main adversary of natural society, only partially covers the personal capital that generates commodities and privatises gains in the form of surplus-value extraction. For instance, middle-sized companies are not capitalist institutions (Öcalan, 2013c: 98). However, basic needs such as nutrition, health, shelter, arts and culture should not be within the purview of activity by such companies. These are the concerns of communal life and the cooperatives (Abdullah Öcalan Sosyal Bilimler Akademisi, 2014: 91).

According to Öcalan, no social value, including commodities, are measurable since, ‘It is wrong to regard a product that is not only the product of live labour, but innumerable labours, as the value of one person’s labour, and this leads to expropriation and theft’ (Öcalan, 2013a: 136). Therefore, in the communal economy, in place of the exchange value that undermines labour by giving it a price, the use-value should be prioritised and accumulation should be prevented. (Abdullah Öcalan Sosyal Bilimler Akademisi, 2014: 88).

Öcalan does not reject the market and trade, but sees their presence as necessary. In fact, groups will freely trade with each other over the market in the communal economy. However, the measure here is not to set a basis for profit, but the facilitation of trade based on social needs. Production is made for need and not solely for sale. Money is not the goal nor the main vehicle of trade (2014: 93).

Consequently for Öcalan the market is not described as an unregulated and spontaneous relation. This is because, ‘No society or region, when creating their market, can make or enact decisions that concern other societies or regions’ (2014: 89). Here the democratic associations and councils will play a prominent role and prevent the intensification of exchange value and profit. The directly democratic councils that organise every aspect of life will ensure that private property does not prevail over group property, and that one group’s property does not prevail over another’s to an exploitative degree. The perspective of communal economy is being developed and concretised in the workshops and conferences of the Kurdish National Freedom Movement (KNFM). The cooperative organisation of vegetable markets, grocery stores and shops; creation of common supplies for the production of small scale companies; the conversion of the Hevsel Gardens in Diyarbakır [Amed] into areas of urban agriculture; the promotion of the idea ‘produce locally, consume locally’; the institutionalisation of barter markets; the foundation of non-profit credit societies that provide credit at low interest or deposit at high interest, are among some of the proposals for institutionalisation (Proclamations).

Clearing the Ground: Basic Concepts and Relations

Now, is it possible to found and sustain an economy where group property trumps individual or socialised property and small and medium-sized capital coexists with solidarity economy networks, centralising the market, yet with a high enough level of political organisation and consciousness to suppress excess profits and prioritise use-value? This appears to be impossible from many angles.

Groups and Property

Before discussing what it means for property to belong to groups, we need to question the necessity and validity of the concept of the ‘group’ as the main component of the economic model.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries─even including the first half of the twentieth century─we could have separated all societies in the world into capitalist and rural societies, and spoken of regions within countries that were relatively cut off from the outside: producing for need, culturally and traditionally varied and comparatively small in scale. However, in our day and age production is socialised, and with the improvement of the forces of production, there are large factories that can produce on a mass scale, disrupting small groups in villages, and creating an urban proletarian population. This shows that separating the centralised and intensified production is not possible at the level of production. ‘Otherwise, organisations of production, which are useful for the organisation of the economic organisation of rural areas, will signify the dissolution of socialised areas of production’ (Lenin, 1990: 441-5, Translation mine – OA). In the same way that production has left the point where it could have been broken up behind, it is not possible to speak of the masses of workers that are concentrated in cities and make up a class as ‘fragmented local groups’. In this context, groups can only be conceptualised as ‘workers’ towns’ or ‘large scale workers’ communes’.

Alongside the centralisation of production, sites of production have become interdependent as a result of the division of labour based on the market. Nowadays, the products that satisfy our mundane needs─even the physical factors required for their production (raw material, labour power, skills)─are provisioned from different towns, or even different countries, depending on the market-based division of labour. This means that apart from subsistence agriculture and simple construction and production activities, the complex economic domain is made up of mutually-dependent components. Therefore, the envisaged anti-capitalist production and property need to be grasped as not the rights of groups, but as the activity and right of the working class as a whole.

Let us suppose for a moment that this project envisages large workers’ communes grouped around socialised production. In this case, does Öcalan’s suggestion that, ‘No society or region, when creating their market, can make or enact decisions that concern other societies or regions’ imply socialised property and a planned economy?

The right to property is fundamentally the combination of two rights; to use and to transfer. Öcalan says that the rights of the groups over the means of production will be limited to use. This means that while these means cannot be bought or sold, the planning of what is to be produced and in what amount, along with its distribution, is mainly done by the groups. The clause ‘mainly’ refers to the legal limitations of this discretion. However, Öcalan’s group-based ontology and the emphasis on the self-governance and fair markets show that the right to use of the groups is fundamental. Thus, Öcalan’s suggestion does not advocate planned production and total socialisation of the means of production, but appears to be a semi-ethical, semi-legal stance on the need for the independent groups, who plan production, to behave in an understanding and solidaristic manner when exchanging products with other groups through political semi-structures, such as the councils.

Now, what will this exchange be based on? To what extent do the concepts of the market and use-value overlap, and how does this semi-legal principle inform the structure of production?

Surplus Product, Market, and Value

Use-value may be prominent in self-enclosed and small communal groups, where the level of development of the forces of production does not allow for a surplus product and necessities are produced and distributed with a natural harmony and simple division of labour. Based on this, is it possible to contend that in the modern communal economy, there will not be a production of surplus, while there will be an emphasis on fundamental needs, and thus the exchange value generated in the market will not create a serious risk of accumulation?

Firstly, it should be noted that basic needs are not met and satisfied at once, but they develop continuously. Criticisms of today’s consumerism do not change the fact that needs are ontologically dynamic. Consequently, a perspective that defines basic needs and attempts to stabilise them as ‘natural society’, while depending on an essentialist mythology, will have to say that the forces of production are frozen in time and that people have ceased to improve their physical conditions. On the contrary, the dynamic nature of needs will always foster a motivation for surplus product. In this day and age, the main problem of capitalism is not the surplus product, but that this production is not made for society, but for capitalist class interests.

In a social structure where the forces of production are highly developed, production has reached extensive levels, been socialised through the division of labour, and autonomous producers sell one another the surplus products they have produced for the use of the rest of the society and care only for their own livelihood, the primary value will inevitably be the exchange value, rather than the use-value. The reason for this is that since there is no planned production, the independent producers that have the right to use the means of production will need an objective measure, or an ‘objective abstraction’, for the circulation of their surplus product that may or not match the social need.¹ For the consumer there is not a single group, but an entire market made up of many groups, so the value of their products will not be determined according to the groups’ subjective use-value, but according to the objective exchange value. There seems to be no other way. The obtained surplus products will be amassed in certain hands in the form of trade profit as a result of the competition in the market, depending on factors such as access to resources, efficiency and openness to external markets, and the increase in the volume of production will create the foundation for the division of labour and capitalist profit mechanisms. Just as trade capital came about as a result of basic commodity production in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, followed by a transformation into industrial and financial capital that dispossessed producers and ultimately proletarianised them, a market economy based on group property and exchange value will also go through the same phases.² The only thing to change will be the replacement of individual capitalists with collective ones.

That said, in a communal economy where a controlled market is advocated, and the voluntary association of producers taken as the basis, how would councils prevent such negative outcomes? To put it more accurately, can they prevent them?

The Limits of Redistributive Justice

Model 1: Full Communal Economy

Firstly, let us assume that all production and distribution takes place democratically between the communes and cooperatives. Undoubtedly, the directly democratic network of people’s councils and the economic assemblies would facilitate the groups’ interaction, mutual understanding, and coordination. However, these councils will not be more than instruments of redistributive justice that seek to intervene in productive and distribute relations.

At any given point, the right to use the means of production (on what and how much to produce) will be transferred to units that are smaller than the society, and in the last instance, independent of each other. This will mean there will be a compulsion to allow the realisation of the logic of profit through competition and capital in circulation. As a result, the appearance of competition will lead to the gradual control of the supply of commodities by specific groups, the increase of accumulation by way of surplus-product trade, a development of a debt-based relationship between the groups who have become richer this way and those that are impoverished, internal and external alliances between them, as well as the risk of these alliances influencing the system of councils in favour of group alliances. This is not a risk that could be ‘tolerated’ and its impact will vary depending on the unequal distribution of the forces of production and the administration of key sectors, uneven inter-sectoral and intra-sectoral development and the aggression of global capital.

It is true that we would be able to prevent uneven development if we were to initially distribute the means of production, quality and quantity of raw material and the specialist cadres equally, ban foreign trade and limit the groups to rights on usage. However, such an egalitarian distribution and its maintenance would take a very high (or even an impossible) level of centralized planning which neither Öcalan nor the KNFM aim to achieve. What is at question, at any rate, was the autonomy of the groups.

Let us suppose that this was indeed the aim, and that the forces of production were distributed equally and this would be maintained over time, while foreign trade was not allowed and groups were limited to their rights on usage. Even in this scenario, the total output and its quality per group will begin to differentiate based on 1) the available raw material and land, and efficiency of the use of means of production, thus the internal working discipline of the groups, their organization and initiatives in developing their techniques and 2) their stockpiling preferences. This is because the cognitive and social-organizational dynamics are part of the forces of production and the historical, geographical, social, biological and countless other factors cannot be equally allocated or maintained. Therefore, there may be a retardation of asymmetrical development but it cannot be stopped. There will be a differentiation in the level of profit and accumulation since the output will belong to the groups instead of the society, and presented to the market.

In other words, all forms of property apart from the social property will turn uneven development into a force antagonistic to society.³ The measures taken in the political infrastructure will always have to adjust to the relations of production determined by the exchange-value, and thus they will be relegated to a determined rather than determinant position.

This does not mean that solidarity between the groups cannot develop, but it means that the surplus value exchange will primarily depend on the exchange value. The main reason for this is that as a biological species, humans will primarily seek to guarantee the reproduction of their living conditions, and the physically direct way to satisfy their material needs is by increasing the productivity of their group. The primary things that groups have responsibility for, custody over, and directly control of, are their own productive forces and accumulation. In other words, this privilege arises from the economic independence of each group, which arises from the principle of autonomy, or the fact that they are not integrated into the wider society.

We can see the destructive results of the efforts of communes, cooperatives and regions to prioritise their survival and get a ‘piece of the pie’ through control over their own budgets, social-economic planning, and investment, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and the late period of the USSR. The SFRY implemented market socialism based on the workers’ self-management of communes, cooperatives, regions and federations, but it had inherited the uneven accumulation and productive forces of the past, which led to the emergence of core and peripheral regions (as well as stronger and weaker communes and corporations within them). The federal state, as the ‘common’ superstructure, had a policy of diverting resources to underdeveloped regions and corporations, but this resulted in disagreements at the political level, where the political representatives and ideologues of the developed regions claimed that this would be ‘irrational’. Ultimately these representatives prevailed, and redistributive justice gave way to an increasingly decentralised system with the reforms of 1956 and 1965, finally culminating in a restoration of capitalism in the socialist republic (Sancaktar, 2009; 259-69). The capitalist restoration of the USSR also took place as a result of the introduction of a similar regime of economic self-management. The Socialist Industrial Enterprise Law of 1965 had granted decision-making autonomy to corporations, which shortly led to the formation of counter-revolutionary sectoral blocs in heavy industry and other sectors, and their interests began to shape the political infrastructure.

As the internal logic of the mode of production and historical experiences show, a commune or a cooperative is more likely to pursue its own enrichment directly through competition in the market─or at least an effort to remain on an equal footing with the rest─than to partake indirectly in the political superstructure of the popular councils. This contradiction would be sharper at points where the interests of the group collide with those of society.

Model 2: The Mixed Communal Economy

The construction of the communal economy does not only involve communes and cooperatives, but also small and medium-scale capitalist companies. Here, it is necessary to remark that the claim that small and medium-scale capitalist companies are less ‘harmful’ than monopolies does not recognise that the issue is not the scale but the operating principle. All of the medium-scale capitalist companies of today are candidates for monopoly. The solution cannot solely be the dispossession of monopolies by the political superstructure, since due to the nature of capitalist accumulation, the emergence of new monopolies is inevitable.

One of the direct consequences of markets where the medium and large bourgeoisie are present is the development of competition between companies and cooperatives. Insofar as capitalist companies can produce products like those of the cooperatives, the latter will be at a loss. The primary reason for this is the reality that higher exploitation of surplus product will have an advantage in competition. Owing to their past accumulation from the exploitation of surplus product, private companies can invest more heavily in fixed capital, and sell their products at lower prices by utilising high-efficiency technologies. In monopolies, this advantage will be immeasurably higher. In order to find a share in the market against capital, but lacking the same accumulation and scale of production, cooperatives will have to release workers, take loans to increase investment, or lower wages in order to remove expenditure on labour. On the other hand, those that cannot reduce prices, as in the example of the Kazova Textile cooperative that sells knitwear for 95 TL, they will have to rely on ‘solidarity networks’, but this will not be an economic model on its own.

Once engaged in price competition, workers’ wages will, at best, return to the levels of the capitalist companies. For workers who are keen on preserving the democratic character of the cooperatives and to take on administrative tasks outside of their working hours, this will be unsustainable. The first thing that cooperatives will sacrifice to avoid bankruptcy will be democratic and ecological principles. Capitalist competition pushes medium-scale enterprises to use brutal exploitation methods, since they lack advantages such as advertising, technological research, and mass production that large enterprises have. They can only gain an upper hand by exploiting nature and labour.

As a matter of fact, this is exactly the situation at the Mondragon Corporation, the largest cooperative federation in the world, based in the Basque Country and employing nearly 75,000 workers in industry, finance, retail and information sectors. The workers who have an input in the administration receive wages that are higher than the market levels and which are level with each other, yet due to competitive pressures, as capitalist monopolies do, they have resorted to subcontracting production to capitalist companies at home, and shift their locations to countries with an abundance of cheap labour such as Egypt, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, Thailand, and China. At this point, the number of paid workers without cooperative membership employed on a full-time, part-time or temporary basis has reached one third of the total. This situation is neither a ‘temporary’ nor an ‘unintended’ one, as member workers extract wage-profits through (absolute or relative) exploitation of the surplus-value created by non-members. In other words, capitalist competition has increasingly compelled Mondragon to exploitation of surplus-value, or an ‘exploitation outflow’.

Ultimately, cooperatives that wish to preserve their democratic quality and remain buoyant will have to produce for alternative markets that do not have a vital function for social reproduction. That is to say, in advanced capitalist countries, competition will quickly marginalise cooperatives towards sectors that are not harmful to the system.

After all, industries such as steel, railroads, and machinery, which are the lifeblood of capitalist production, require the organisation of cooperative labour at the national scale to be reconfigured along cooperative production lines. Thus, making the state redundant through a democratic reconstruction of the economy, away from the purview of the state and the bourgeoisie, is untenable. This is because targeting a field away from the state and the bourgeoisie will mean relinquishing the production of basic commodities required for mundane life (such as energy, durable consumer goods, machinery, weaponry, means of communication, textiles, and chemistry) to the bourgeoisie, and what is built will not be an ‘economic model’ but, at best, a solidarity network confined to alternative markets.

At this stage, if the task of the politically successful federation of people’s councils is not to expropriate the expropriators, but to constitute market ‘justice’ by limiting exchange-value; to prevent dumping and excessive pricing, or impose strict taxes on capitalist and developed communes and cooperatives, while encouraging disadvantaged groups, it must be remarked that this is not very different from the redistributive (in)justice─and consequences thereof─of capitalist nation-states.

The evolution of redistributive justice towards more progressive forms makes bourgeois belligerence inevitable. For instance, in 1970’s Sweden, a peak of social democracy, a plan was underway to transfer company taxes to the Share-Levy Producers Fund run by the workers/unions in place of the state, to turn the structure of capital in favour of workers. However, this was shelved irreversibly with intense funding and lobbying from capital and its representative right wing parties (Wright 2009: 162-4).

In sum, no matter how democratic the political superstructure, if the economic system is vulnerable to assaults from the capitalist companies and their logic, inequalities will re-emerge, as history and science have repeatedly shown. Democratic production processes will be marginalised and revert to the so-called ‘democracy’ of capitalist modernity.

Academies and the Return of Repressed Materialism

As directly democratic as they are, Öcalan undoubtedly did not set up the network of people’s councils on bourgeois principles of representation. We can see this from the value he attached to the academies founded on anti-capitalism and tasked with the creation of the ‘new person’, along with education and culture in general. The people’s councils are not solely voting mechanisms, but are also meant to be a school for the masses.

Creating a system is the creation of a culture, morality and a ‘new person’, this much is true. In this sense, it would be daft to say that such institutions have no impact on the transformation of the mode of production. However, it is one thing to utilise education to indicate the contradictions that the mode of production creates, or materialise a political goal, and another thing to see it as the sole lever of the transition to a new mode of production.

If we look at the role of the academies in the communal economy project, we can see that an equation has been made between the effectiveness of the material conditions in which people live their lives, with that of the intellectual field. This creates a quasi-idealist ontology, as the latter arises from the base of material conditions, just as with the people’s councils in the political field. The revolutionary superstructural institutions are seen to be independent of, and even determinative of, the contradictions that arise from the mode of production.

If you charge academies with the duty of preventing the logic of competition and profit from being installed in an area where a capitalist or more regressive mode of production is dominant, yet allow the capitalist mode of production to objectively reproduce itself through group property and the market, it is inevitable that you will be disappointed. Books, seminars, and ethico-ideological education would not be able to prevent asymmetrical accumulation of groups that are in unhindered competition.

In the same way that the ‘objective condition’ for the changes in primitive communal societies was not simply the will to political power, but the appearance of surplus product, the underlying cause of capitalist inequality is not the lack of morality and education, but the mass production of cheap and varied commodities with the revolution in productive forces and the dispossession and proletarianisation of the masses. Consequently, the way to transcend capitalism is not primarily based on morality and education, but the transfer of the right to use all means of production to society as a whole in order to overcome the inability of capitalism to develop its forces of production.

Thus, the questions we have listed, the predicaments we have indicated and their proposed solutions, are reservations that have been raised in the conferences and workshops where the perspective of communal economy is discussed. The conclusions of the last three activities touch upon the wage-relation as the basis of capitalist assault, and the need to prevent this through ‘social regulation units’; the fact that small and medium enterprises are places where the exploitation of labour takes place at intense rates; the obligation to socialise resources such as land, water, energy, transportation, shelter, education and land that cannot be left to communes or companies; the gradual deviation of solidaristic cooperatives from their initial goals; the decrease in popular support, and the risk of group privilege.

Group Property to Social Property, Market to Planned Economy

In summary:

1. In conditions where surplus product and group property exist without planning, the market will prevail, and along with it, the exchange value as opposed to use-value.

2. As it is impossible to allocate and/or develop productive forces in an absolutely egalitarian manner, the groups’ economic development will be asymmetrical.

3. Redistributive justice needs to assume that the distribution is unjust.

4. As per the principle of economic self-governance, every group will be entitled to prioritise and guarantee its own improvement, therefore the enriched groups will prevent the radical redistribution of wealth by the superstructural political mechanism. The existence of the bourgeoisie will only aggravate this issue.

5. Today, the bourgeoisie has nearly reached its full productive potential, and cooperatives will not be able to access sectors with generalised production due to their scale. In other areas, they will be unable to compete with capitalist companies and will remain confined in positions relatively insignificant to the reproduction of daily life.

6. Education is a superstructural institution. With respect to the conditions of reproduction in daily life, it is not determining but determined in the last instance. Arguing that education can transform the economic structure from its roots is idealism.

The results obtained from the logical conclusions of the principles of communal economy and local discussions show that there is a need to prioritise central planning over the market, and socialise all means of production to build an economy based on use-value. Thus, the communal economy needs to take on socialist characteristics, otherwise it will return to capitalism. Put differently, all problems that arise from the individual or group ownership of the means of production will have to be solved with measures that further socialise property and these practices lead us to a centrally-planned socialist economy. Only socialism can end the overproduction resulting from the drive to accumulate more profits and the planned economy will ensure that all surplus product can be fairly produced and distributed by the entire society. In such an economy, the overproduction in one area will not lead to deficient consumption on the other and signal a loss in market share, so potential differences in productivity will not have a destructive, but rather a beneficial effect.

That being so, what prevents the theory of communal economy from seeing this? If you can forsee that conditions of distribution, or relations of production, can continuously reproduce injustice, what could be the reason for limiting yourself to the politics of redistribution and the field of ideological education?

The reason that the communal economy thesis cannot display a determined model lies in the destructiveness of the desire to transition to communism without a socialist phase. In other words, the ‘ideal’ and the strategic are wrongly juxtaposed and the importance of the latter is downplayed within the former. Ultimately, while a stand is taken against capitalism as a tool for accumulation and exploitation, along with surplus-product, Öcalan’s criticism of the Soviet Union as a ‘state monopoly capitalism’ positions him against centralised planning and social property, and in favour of group property and the market.

However, without expropriating the expropriators and smashing the exploiters that hold social accumulation with determined organisation, it is clear that the attempt to build communism will be doomed to failure as a utopian idealism. Additionally, the organisation of social life in communes in order to increase participation and dispel the bureaucracy-society contradiction is not necessarily mutually exclusive to the idea of socialist central planning. The approach that pejoratively uses the idea of centralisation in the economy makes the mistake of reading self-governance as the autonomy of communes, rather than the equal participation of communes in decision-making mechanisms. Conversely, every effort for mutualism is a practice of centralisation. In this sense, what contradicts the notion of the commune is not centralisation, but bureaucracy.

“If the proletariat and the poor peasants take state power into their own hands, organise themselves quite freely in communes, and unite the action of all the communes in striking at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, and in transferring the privately-­owned railways, factories, land, and so on, to the entire nation, to the whole of society, won’t that be centralism? Won’t that be the most consistent democratic centralism and, moreover, proletarian centralism? (…) Like all philistines, Bernstein pictures centralism as something which can be imposed and maintained solely from above, and solely by the bureaucracy and military clique.” ─Lenin, 2014: 66

Surely, the social structure can be organised around communes, where all economic decisions and planning are deliberated, centrally, democratically and dynamically determined and revised by a soviet council formed of delegations from the communes, as opposed to the bureaucratic class. How this can be achieved today is the topic of a different discussion. All things considered, no discussion of democratising production can create an alternative to central planning and social property.

Communism, as the pattern where distribution is carried out in terms of use-value, can only be realised in conditions of prosperity and a real democracy that detaches people from capitalism; where a socialist revolution has improved the forces of production to a level where long working hours are no longer a necessity, and the social stratifications that creates the hierarchy and distribution of labour are effaced. The first step of this process is clear: ‘The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Lenin, 2014: 45).

PKK and the Parting of the Ways

Considering these realities, are we going to say that the perspective of communal economy is a ‘vain hope’? If it does not present an alternative to capitalism and socialism, is it condemned to the dustbin of history? Currently some factions of the socialists of the oppressive nation take this view to trivialise the KNFM and justify their chauvinism. Such an inference would be ahistorical and detached from objective conditions and given power relations. Above all, the perspective of communal economy is a populist and progressive programme. This perspective has been developed in a geography of harsh financial, economic and military repression, and includes the Kurdish middle bourgeoisie as a progressive force on the side of the oppressed nation, and deserves recognition for its strategic-tactical value.

Moreover, this programme is valuable for the oppressed classes in Kurdistan. In rural North Kurdistan and Rojava where the development of productive forces and capital accumulation are limited, this approach provides guidance for implementing democracy and organisation at every level, and prepares a more advanced mode of production in the system of worker and peasant soviets by facilitating production for society.

The producer and consumer cooperatives of the communal economy, along with their trade relations and political organs such as the people’s councils, can serve as schools of solidarity for the unification of the leading force of the revolution, the proletariat, that is created through the workings of capitalism in the metropolitan areas of Turkey and North Kurdistan, supplemented by the petty bourgeoisie.

Besides, even within the frame of a socialist program, complete socialisation of the means of production is not possible, thus the cooperatives can play a crucial role in collectivising small-scale production in the metropolitan areas of Turkey and North Kurdistan. Also, a public sector built by cooperatives would provide an opportunity for those left unemployed to take initiative and seize the reins of industry if the bourgeoisie attempts to block production. From this perspective, the model of communal economy provides both political and economic opportunities for organisation, and aims to fend off colonialism. Even so, espousing this as more than a tactical-strategic move would mean ignoring class struggle, and a project of cooperativism without the aim of a socialist regime would be confined to a very limited area in Turkey and quickly get absorbed by the capitalist system.

At the same time, compromises with capital and increasingly prosperous groups will create pressures on the social base in North Kurdistan, and could lead to confusion in the KNFM in terms of reading class composition and class demands. In the final analysis, there are two paths for the economic emancipation of North Kurdistan, a colony of the Turkish bourgeoisie: The founding of a national capitalist economy with the Kurdish bourgeoisie at the helm─which is a democratic right per the right of nations to self-determination; or the foundation of a socialist economy─with the right to form a separate state retained─on the foundation of a union of soviet republics. There is no middle ground. It is clear that the fledgling Kurdish bourgeoisie is pushing for the first road. It can be said that the PKK rejects this as the political representative of Kurdish workers. Although, the proposal of PKK sits uneasily with the economic realities of contemporary society, and this strengthens the hand of the Kurdish bourgeoisie.

References

Abdullah Öcalan Sosyal Bilimler Akademisi. (2014) Demokratik Komünal Ekonomi, Aram Yayınları.

Proceedings of Demokratik Özerklik Çalıştayı (12/08/15), DTK Ekonomi Çalıştayı (06/02/16), Demokratik Ekonomi Konferansı (14/10/2014).

Engels, F. (2010) Anti-Dühring, Sf. 359 – 379, Sol Yayınları.

Lenin, V.I. (1990) “Kooperatifleşme Üzerine”, İşçi Sınıfı ve Köylülük, Sol Yayınları

_______ (2014) Devlet ve İhtilal, Bilim ve Sosyalizm Yayınları.

Marks, K. (2003) Kapital, Cilt 1, Sol Yayınları.

Öcalan, A. (2013A) Demokratik Uygarlık Manifestosu, I. Cilt, Aram Yayınları

_______ (2013B) Demokratik Uygarlık Manifestosu, II. Cilt, Aram Yayınları

_______ (2013C) Demokratik Uygarlık Manifestosu, III. Cilt, Aram Yayınları

Sancaktar, C. (2009) Yugoslavya’da Sosyalizmden Kapitalizme Geçiş: Özyönetim Uygulaması (Doktora Tezi), Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, İstanbul Üniversitesi, İstanbul.

Wright, E.O. (2009) Envisioning Real Utopias, Verso.

“Kurdistan provides fertile ground for capitalism”

What does the intensification of the economic crisis mean in relation to Kurdistan?

Azize Aslan: The crisis the capitalist system is going through today is intensifying, and in this situation of crisis, Kurdistan plays an increasingly important geographical role. In periods of crisis, capitalism is looking for new territory to exploit again. Because of the global crisis of capitalism, and specifically the crisis capitalism is going through in Turkey, capitalists have now ascribed an important role to Kurdistan.

What makes Kurdistan profitable?

A.A.: After the coup d’état in 1980, the new regime used exports–that is, the opening of the national economy to global markets–to stimulate industrialization. How could Turkey hold its ground in international markets? Through its cheap work force. But now, the work force in the west of the country is not as cheap as before, and that is why new, cheap workers have to be found elsewhere in the country. Kurdistan is the region of the desperate, on the one hand because of unemployment, on the other because of all the wars. As a result, the workforce is especially cheap here. The idea of a “Sinicization of Kurdistan” is sometimes mentioned. If we look at the politics of the Turkish state and the dynamics of how capitalism spreads, it is not false to make this analogy.

In 2012, an economic stimulation plan was prepared in which Turkey was divided into six regions. The sixth region, also the most underdeveloped one, is North Kurdistan. The goal of this plan was to develop the fifteen Kurdish provinces, and regional and sectoral strategies were developed for this. The sectoral strategies seem more important to me: here you can see exactly that Kurdistan is desired as a source of cheap labour. The sectoral strategies involve the shifting of labour-intensive activities to the sixth region. The most labour-intensive industry is the textile industry. This industry is not only labour intensive, it is also informally structured, usually the beginning and the end of working hours are not controlled and overtime hours are not counted. Women constitute the majority of the workforce. Agriculture, which is also very labour-intensive, is another industry for which the sixth region has been selected.

“The businesspeople will make a big profit with low investment”

What exactly does the shifting of the sectors to Kurdistan mean for the capitalists?

You see how state and capital act together in this project. The state courts the capitalists with discounts: ”if you invest in this region, 40% of your taxes will not be raised for the ten next years”. The employers get a discount on their insurances and the possibility to receive cheap credits. They only have to pay a worker 634 Lira a month, which is much lower than the national minimum wage. That means they are creating a de facto regional minimum wage. This way, capitalism and a profit-oriented mentality are trying to take over in Kurdistan. Democratic economy in this context means the coming into being of an ”economy of resistance”.

State and capitalists are telling Kurdish workers, ”Go back to your villages, we have created employment there for you now.” In reality they mean: ”We will exploit you in your home region from now on”.

The untouched Kurdish region will be looted. The Hevsel-gardens, for example, will now be handed over to the agricultural industry [These ancient fruit and vegetable fields at the foot of the Amed city walls were saved from commercialisation and were registered by UNESCO as world heritage in 2015—Ed]. State and capital exploit both workforce and nature in Kurdistan under the guise of development and employment.

Why is the “peace period” seen as important by business and capital? [The “peace period” refers to the ceasefire that was in place between the Turkish state and the PKK from 2013 until 2015—Ed]

Capital welcomes the peace negotiations, because in war times there can be no word of safety or stability, both of which are prerequesites for business. A disputed territory, or any type of territory where there is a civil war going on, is not seen as a safe space for capital. Apart from the peace period, what also plays a role right now is the fact that capitalism has had international experience in how to counter resistance from local populations.

Is that why economic autonomy is important?

What is important to understand with economic autonomy is that the community has a right to have a say in any economic matter in its region, its city or its villages. The community will decide whether any one farmer cultivates tomatoes or maize, or if she or he breeds cattle instead. What in capitalism is called the “surplus value” of goods shows that these goods were produced for the market, an entirely profit-based mechanism. Society produces not for itself, but for the market. In such a market-oriented economy, society cannot decide about anything; we cannot even decide about our own employment. We work for very low salaries, but we still keep on working. We work in informal branches, are not insured and not organized, but we still keep on working. Because we do not have control of our own activities.

On the other hand, the question comes up as to how far a region can control its own resources. In the current system, we are denied the right to have a say about resources like oil or coal, etc.

Economic autonomy is important in and of itself for all these reasons, but it is also important with a view to creating democratic autonomy later on. Economic autonomy is the most important prerequisite needed for democratic autonomy. A region which does not control its own economy cannot possibly become politically autonomous.

“Trade Unions are incapable of organizing the Kurdish workers”

The degree of organization of the working class is low in Kurdistan. Is that partly a fault of the trade unions?

The number of workers who are members of trade unions is still low in Kurdistan, compared to the rest of Turkey. Yet we gave the trade unions a space in this conference and let them become a part of the process, because they are also working for democratization. The workers who are organized in unions will later be able form their own communes or organize together. On the other hand, we also have to deal with a rigid definition of “worker” in the unions. If you want to put forward a labour agreement at a company, you have to organize the majority of workers. But in Kurdistan, there are many workers that are not registered; the informal sector is bigger than the formal one. There are many possibilities to find yourself outside of the formal sector. A strong organization inside the unions paves the way for a lot of practical problems. Unregistered workers are also not insured, neither do they have the possibility to become trade union members. That means the trade unions do not politically fight for these people either.

On top of this, repressive behaviour still predominates in trade unions. Some elements in them want to deny the existence of the Kurdish question and of the Kurdish freedom struggle. This means these unions are not capable of organizing Kurdish workers. I know an example from an oil refinery in Êlih [Batman]; there is a trade union there. At the plenary meeting, the trade union members from Düzce [in the West of Turkey] attacked the members from Êlih. They cannot all work together in the same trade union because they cannot find a common political line.

Will the model of economic autonomy also relieve unemployment?

In the end what unemployment really is, is a result of the capitalist system. It is also a well-used instrument to put pressure on employees. The slogan, “We reduce unemployment” makes no sense, because we have to realize that unemployment stems from the system itself. If we shape life in an anti-capitalist way, unemployment will disappear by itself.

If communes and cooperatives produce together and according to their needs, unemployment will disappear. Once communes and cooperatives have been set up, it will become clear that unemployment is a product of the capitalist system.

“An economy without dominant male language and mentality”

Do women have a place in the current economy?

There is a misconception about women and economy: the idea that women do not participate in economic life… Actually women participate in the entire process of production and they do that with incredible vigour. We can say that the work that women perform in their homes, in the village and on the fields, is not being seen. Take for example the work of cooking and cleaning. Women are also being employed within the capitalist system, but then as supplements. An example for this are jewellery or weaving workshops. The salaries the women receive are not seen as having to secure someone’s livelihood, but merely as an extra; while the low wages the men receive are seen as being enough to sustain an entire family.

We want all the “invisible“ work done by women to become something social, beginning in the home. Why shouldn’t there be creches for children and communal kitchens? Why should women have a washing machine in the home, why can’t there be launderettes in the village? These type of questions should be discussed. Dominant male mentality has put in place the ideas of “women’s work” and “men’s work”, and by making work more communal we can make these concepts disappear. A good illustration for how the gender roles are understood are statements like, “Women are good teachers” or, “Work during the night is not for women”. Men constantly want to decide what activities are “appropriate” for women.

People say, ”Investments must come, and the textile industry must also come to Kurdistan, so that our women can work”. But women are not being asked whether they want to work in the textile industry—and then for such low salaries. Women are being excluded from the decision-making processes surrounding production. Men decide about who is being employed and about the employees’ position in the production process. If we want to found an alternative economy, women have to be given a position of power. We think that women can organise themselves and produce by themselves, and in this way, women’s communes can come into being. We are talking about an economic way of life in which male language does not dominate with its mentality of ”performance” and ”quality”.

We know that creating communes and a communal economy is not easy. Creating communes in the countryside is not the same thing as creating them in the cities. But it is just as important to integrate women into the economy and into economic activities in cities .

What is the difference between the rural and urban areas?

In the countryside, the relations between people, and the production processes themselves, lend themselves more readily to the creation of communes. There, people can cultivate fields, make the harvest communal for consumption by everyone in the commune and then put the surplus onto the market via cooperatives. But in cities, there are no fields. In terms of the means of production, there are only factories, and there is no obvious way to go about setting up a commune. In industry, setting up communes and cooperatives creates more difficulties—but that does not make it impossible.

Why must there be separation of women and men?

Let me continue where I left off with the other example: In big cities there are also women and they also have to be integrated into the economy. The first problems already arise when companies or cooperatives are being founded. Women don’t have any property. It’s mostly men who are owners and the mechanisms for managing funds develop from there on, everything starts with property.

There is also the fact that pregnant women often get laid off, or are not employed again after having given birth. Taking care of children is a reason to be laid off.

Literacy rates are lower among women than among men, and that, too, is a reason to separate the sexes. We must create possibilities for women to express themselves, to develop themselves and to realize their potential.

Is there an “ethnic perspective“?

The economist Mustafa Sönmez recently reviewed the conference about democratic economy. He thinks the conclusive statement will be prepared from an “ethnic perspective”…

Azize Aslan: I was present at the conference all the time, but I didn’t hear once that an alternative economy was only for Kurds. We want all ethnic groups who live in the region and wish to participate in this alternative economic form, to develop it and create a new lifestyle in this way. If we look at the poverty in the region, we can see that it is not only the Kurdish ethnic group that is affected by it. Arabs are also concerned, they sometimes even live under starvation conditions. There are also many people from Syria of various religious groups present in North Kurdistan. It is difficult to integrate them into the system. We have not developed a mechanism for that yet, but we propose economic autonomy as a model, a paradigm for the whole of Turkey and the whole world.

We have defined the “democratically autonomous regions” this way: what we call North Kurdistan is not one big region, but consists of several democratic regions that are divided according to different criteria. We believe we can create self-government and autonomy in this way.

As far as local people who have migrated to the west of the country are concerned, our intention is not to say to them, “Come here, our economy is good”. The idea is that society as it is gets organized at the place where they are living.

We have invited Mustafa Sönmez to the conference, but since he lives abroad, he could not come. Approaching things with a “logic from Ankara” does not make sense, but that’s what he does, he tries to understand things here looking through “Ankara-glasses”. It is not possible to plan things without taking into account the regional specifics.

The role of the municipalities

Are the municipalities the main actors in a communal economy?

There appears to be a misunderstanding here about the terms “democratic autonomy“, “democratic economy“ and “communal economy“. These processes are not going to be carried out by the municipalities. We are speaking about a system here, in which societies themselves are the ones making decisions. The municipalities are a big part of the democratic economy, but they are not the only actors.

Why?

Municipalities are subject to Ankara, which means they work according to a system of predetermined rules. The administration in Ankara defines laws and statutes which follow a certain political line. The municipalities’ administrative and financial parameters also align with this. Ankara still imposes its will on them.

So how will the municipalities be integrated into the new economy?

We do not strive to increase our capital, or to strengthen measures that will increase it; we use the capital solely for the welfare of the people. We have to work with the following ideological restriction: we increase the capital not for the bourgeoisie, but for society as a whole. Our municipalities work towards this direction too, but the system is not quite yet working very well. The representatives of the municipalities, who want to be re-elected during the next round of votes, have to create something for those in their constituency. They commission outside companies for services like cleaning, catering or security for this. We propose that they hire cooperatives instead, because the companies mostly pay their employees minimum wage.

There are parks in every city, and the municipalities auction off who gets to open a tea house or restaurant in them. This needs to stop. We propose opening tea houses, not restaurants; places where people can eat simit [sesame rings] and which are accessible to everyone, all while keeping up the standards of these places. The extortionate prices put in places by the municipalities have to stop. These parks are opened with public funds, but the public cannot make full use of these parks right now.

Furthermore, we now observe that the new “city laws“ have had negative effects in three large cities and a few smaller towns. The infrastructures have been affected. Investments are made primarily in the cities now, and the surrounding countryside is neglected. The network of services must be extended there, too. Goods produced in the surrounding villages can reach the cities via a network of cooperatives, for example. The resources must be divided equally between cities and countryside. If we look at the budget of the municipalities, a lot of it is being spent on asphalting the roads. They could work on expanding the railway network instead. Or they could promote the use of bicycles and provide a factory for bicycle-making, which would be run by a cooperative.

The municipalities are also an important mechanism for women. We propose opening centres for women in all rural and urban areas. The budget of the municipalities should be spent with both genders in mind. We don’t think there should be a special budget for women, but the effects on women should be kept in mind when the money is spent. If the municipalities apply this and other proposals we have, they can help us set up the alternative mechanism we are trying to build.

“Shopping centres morally corrupt people, they damage human relationships and they hold people back from thinking freely”

What’s the alternative for shopping centres?

I can talk about this issue by quoting David Harvey: in shopping centres there is “compressed time and space“. We do a lot of things in that restricted space of the shopping centre, but all these things are very tiring. Shopping centres, as well as supermarkets, are the strongholds of capitalism, that’s the classic definition. We have to support small groceries and corner shops instead.

In North Kurdistan, we have caravansarays and bazaars in traditional shopping arcades, with carpet and jewellery sellers. Let’s take for example the arcades in Riha [Urfa / Şanlıurfa], there is a shop run by Mr. Mehmed who has been there for forty years. My mother and grandmother shopped there. The man is well respected and his shop has a long-standing good reputation, in this way it is very much a part of the old town. Shopping centres are not like that. Maybe in shopping centres the lighting is good and so is the whole presentation, but the employees change a lot. Those who work there now get fired the next month because the working conditions are unbearable. Shopping centres morally corrupt people, they damage human relationships and they hold people back from thinking freely. When a person enters a shopping centre, they are going to feel poor. The lighting in there is so lurid and the products are flaunted with such extravagance their own clothes seem like rags compared to what they have in front of them.

Small shops need to resist the shopping centres. There are ways of doing that. People should privilege local shops that sell products from the region. Consumption can be organized via cooperatives. Thirty cooperatives can be founded, the products can be collected from these cooperatives and then sold on the market. In this way we can successfully resist.

Ali Barış Kurt, Ankara, ANF 21.11.2014