In the second part of this interview, former co-spokesperson of the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement and ecology activist Güner Yanlıç spoke to ANF about  environmental destruction in Kurdistan, and whether the landscape preferences of local governments are ecologically sound.

The first part of the interview can be read here

Many people talk about adopting cats and stray animals. That’s of course important, but it also raises a problem: is there a kind of discrimination at play? On the one hand, people adopt street animals, while on the other hand, forests are being burned. If we focus specifically on Kurdistan, we see forest fires every year. But it’s not just trees burning, entire ecosystems, entire living communities are being destroyed, and there’s no outcry. How do you interpret this?

Particularly in Northern Kurdistan, and actually all the way from the north to the south, down to the Persian Gulf, there is an endemic species called the Euphrates softshell turtle. This species exists only in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Despite the threat of extinction, no protection or conservation efforts are being made. Because the system can still exploit those areas, no action is taken even when extinction is a risk.

Recently, there’s been a boom in owning cats and dogs, supported by a large pet industry. There are pet shops that sell them, stores that sell their food, and clinics that provide healthcare. An industrial market has developed around them, so cats and dogs are protected.

But if we turn back to, say, the wild goats of Dersim, an endemic species, their habitats are regularly taken away each year due to conflict, war, and so-called “security” operations. Despite facing extinction, there’s no concern or action for these animals.

So we don’t accept or believe in the sincerity of a mindset that claims to care about polar bears while ignoring all others. If you only protect cats, dogs, and polar bears and ignore the millions of other species, then you’re practicing a particularly extreme form of speciesism.

If you build little houses in parks for cats and dogs, but remain silent while thousands of animals burn alive in Şırnak forest fires, and instead raise a fuss when cat or dog shelters aren’t cleaned or refilled, you are participating in a huge deception. That’s not right. That is precisely speciesism.

From the perspective of social ecology, this is where we stand. If you make such distinctions, if the system supports cats, dogs, or other species, and you embrace only them, then you’re safe. You won’t be seen as an opponent. But if you fight for the lives of animals lost in forest fires in Şırnak or Dersim, then especially in Turkey, the state criminalizes you and obstructs your work.

We established an Ecology Union covering all of Turkey six years ago. Through the Ecology Union, we explained that there is no difference between a tree burned in Şırnak and one burned in the Kaz Mountains. And we did a good job of explaining this. We built solidarity from us to the Kaz Mountains, and from there to Şırnak, Cudi, and Dersim. We managed to clearly convey, at least to the environmental and ecological movements, that issues like the criminalization of trees in Şırnak or the terrorization of trees in Dersim due to conflict are political tactics.

Another topic I’d like to ask about is the alignment between local governments and social ecology, especially when they’re engaged in projects like landscaping or road construction. Let’s take sand quarries as an example. There are many sand quarries being built in Kurdistan. First, I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.

Amed has a history of at least 7,000 years. Its streets, avenues, and structures are all made from local and natural materials and have stood for thousands of years.

Now look at the Zerzevan Castle. It was built 2,000 years ago, using stones taken from a nearby quarry. So, when we have such local materials and resources, if you claim to oppose the deaths caused by these so-called death quarries, where 3 to 5 people die every day, and claim to be against sandpits that destroy wetlands and health areas, and if you say flora and fauna are disappearing, and when we add the labor and environmental exploitation on top of the dust caused by cement factories… then what’s the point of paving roads or parks with interlocking paving stones?

That’s a complete contradiction. You say you practice ecological municipalism and oppose sand quarries, yet, on the other hand, you use paving stones produced by dozens of those same quarries, even though they don’t match the local texture of the city.

For years, we’ve worked with local governments. As the ecology movement and Ecology Union, we’ve been explaining for years what ecological municipalism means. We continue to explain. In every election cycle, we collaborate with strategic committees on this issue.

Yet somehow, before elections, all candidates seem to adopt an ecological consciousness. But once they come into local power, which, in the eyes of the state, is still a form of governance, there’s no actual ecological progress. Everything continues as before. There are no additions or subtractions related to ecology. Even if they do a few token things, it’s superficial and goes nowhere.

We say we’re against fossil fuels. We argue for a lifestyle not centered around cars. We advocate using bicycles. But if everywhere is being paved with asphalt and interlocking stones are being laid, there’s no way to justify that from an ecological perspective. You can’t even justify it by saying it’s a public institution.

It might be an ugly example, but Rome built roads still in use today, 2,000 years ago. After all this time, money, resources, and labor, if you’re still laying paving stones in villages, either you lack ecological awareness or you’re just throwing water into a mill with a bucket.

If a municipality has good intentions and is working on this, I don’t know, because they haven’t communicated it. But from what we see in the media, for instance, pine trees native to Bursa [very far away, in western Turkey] were recently planted in Şırnak.

Yes, on the one hand, forests are being burned and nature destroyed. This is a long-standing and deliberate policy by the state. On the other hand, trees are  planted by local governments, but they are usually pine trees. Or in landscaping projects, instead of local flowers native to Kurdistan, imported species are used. What are your thoughts on that?

For years, after forest fires, we collected and distributed acorns from native oak trees in the region to the burned areas. Not once. We did this at least 3–4 times. After every fire, as a large-scale effort, we planted oak seeds in Dersim, Şırnak, Wan, Amed, mass plantings.

What’s wrong with planting? What we can’t explain is the military or state mindset of bringing in invasive or foreign pine species to replant. If someone can justify that, let them. Either they’re incapable or they simply say “we didn’t know.” These local governments have been under our administration for over 10 years.

Of course, I don’t want to be unfair, considering the appointed trustees, but we’ve been actively campaigning, writing, informing, organizing meetings, and continuing awareness efforts in this field. The state appoints trustees, and they use landscaping projects to enrich their allies by planting flora completely incompatible with Kurdistan’s vegetation in cities and towns like Amed and Wan.

But even democratic local governments, despite all our education efforts, choose to plant pines instead of oaks without considering the region’s ecosystem. This is incomprehensible. Either no one listened to us, or they verbally accepted the ecological paradigm but did not prioritize it in practice.

There’s no ecological approach! I don’t want to speculate too much about intentions, but if you still “don’t know,” we’ve been explaining this for 10 years. As the Mesopotamia Ecology Movement and Ecology Union, we’ve probably sat down and explained this to at least 5 out of 100 municipalities. We’ve also explained it to many municipalities in Turkey. When other municipalities don’t follow through, we say, “Well, that’s a system municipality.” But when a municipality you’ve worked with for years behaves like a system municipality, it’s really difficult to understand. At least for me, it makes no sense.

Let me ask one last question. Recently, in addition to hydroelectric plants (HES), solar power plants (GES) are being built in Kurdistan. For example, there’s a GES project in Pasur, and there’s resistance against it. What do you think about these? How ecologically sound are they?

Actually, we are just as opposed to GES projects as we are to dams. If we oppose dams and sandpits but still lay interlocking paving stones, that’s not right. Similarly, if we oppose dams, we must also oppose GES projects. The reason we oppose solar plants is that their commercial lifespan is only 20 years. They contain dozens of toxic chemicals harmful to both human and non-human life. And after 20 years, in capitalist terms, they become “solid waste.” Even the costs of disposal or recycling after 20 years aren’t covered by their benefits.

But the state is using these projects as a way to reach areas it can’t directly access—allowing capital, especially energy capital, to take over mountains, hills, rivers, land, and village pastures. If energy is not produced communally, and if there’s exploitation of nature, people, women, and children, then it cannot be considered “green.”

In Kurdistan, especially in places where the state couldn’t previously enter, there’s been a rapid influx of capital, particularly through mining operations. More recently, through solar power plants, lands, plots, and pastures are being seized. And in the long run, this is a policy aimed at forcing local people to migrate from their lands.”

Amed- The fire that sparked by an electrical fault in an area between Mardin’s Şemrex (Mazıdağı) district and Amed’s Xana Akpar (Çınar) district on June 20,2024, killed 15 citizens and hundreds of animals. The people living in the villages affected by the fire are going to file a lawsuit against the Dicle Electric Distribution Company (DEDAŞ).

NuJINHA spoke to Hatun Esen, board member of the Munzur Environment Protection Association, and Semra Mamut, member of the Amed Ecology Association, about their observations in the area.

 ‘Only the sky witnessed their screams that night’

“The people of Kurdistan have always healed their wounds alone,” said Hatun Esen. “Only the sky witnessed their screams that night while some again remained silent against their screams. During our visits to the villagers, we saw that the fire did not only kill 15 citizens but also hundreds of animals. For us, the soil is sacred and all living creatures have the right to life.”

‘The suffering of the people has been ignored’

The villagers told Hatun Esen that the DEDAŞ had cut off power to the villages for days before the fire. “The villagers had often suffered from power outages before the fire. Due to the power outages, all the electrical appliances of the villagers had been damaged or burned. After the fire, the DEDAŞ repaired power cables in order to cover up its fault. The mainstream media also played ostrich. The suffering and the losses of the people have been ignored.”

‘This plunder should not be the fate of this region’

Hatun Esen called on the government to declare the area as a disaster area. “Our mountains were bombed, our forests were burned and our trees were cut down. We were not even allowed to extinguish those fires; we were forced to watch the fires from a distance. In the region, mountains, forests, living creatures have disappeared. Our water has been cut off by dams. Recently, the region has been suffering from fires. This plunder should not be the fate of this region. We should raise our voices together to stop this plunder of nature. Doesn’t this country have a helicopter to extinguish the fire? They just watched the fire.”

 ‘The environmental degradation continues systematically in Kurdistan’

Upon the call of the Mesopotamia Ecology Movement, ecologists from many parts of Turkey and Kurdistan went to the area affected by the fire on June 20. Semra Mamut, member of the Amed Ecology Association, was one of them. “We went to the area to be in solidarity with the people. In the interviews, villagers told us that fire had erupted due to negligence.”

Speaking about the late response to the fire, she said, “We face a mentality that never accepts responsibility and supports the policies of capital and companies. Unfortunately, the environmental destruction and the massacres continue systematically in Kurdistan. The people and animals were abandoned to their fate in the fire.”

The recent fires and tree cutting are a part of the policies of depopulation being carried out in Kurdistan, Semra Mamut emphasized. “Neither human life nor animal life was taken into account. Their living spaces were destroyed. Before the fire, people had often suffered from water and power outages. This shows us that a policy of depopulation has been carried out in Kurdistan.”

Politics of drying out the region, attacks on agriculture, occupation and forest fires in whole Kurdistan. These are some of the topics that had been discussed during the first Ecological Conference of NES.

Dr. Pinar Dinc, Dr. Lina Eklund, Ercan Ayboga, Marcin Skupinski and many others highlighted, with their research works, the different sides of the ecocidal warfare that the Turkish state is carrying out in Kurdistan. Naming the crimes that the Turkish state is carrying out in the region, such as depleting the land, drying and polluting the rivers. These undermine the growth of local crops and force changes in the ways of life of the people. All of this aims to obstacle the continuation of traditions, culture and values, which are the basis for democratic identity and resistance.

After this, Prof. Joost Jongerdan, the Mesopotamia Ecological Movement, and many members of the local institutions and organizations, spoke about the ecological resistance carried on by the population of North-East Syria who organizes itself within the Autonomous Administration.

Problems and possible solutions have been discussed, and the relations between the different participants came out stronger than before with this conference. The perspectives for the ecological work in North-East Syria are more clear and solid now. Steps have been made to bring the ideology and practice of social-ecology together. We report here some of the very meaningful points included in the final declaration of the conference.

• Building up of communes and people’s councils on the basis of a communal and ecological economy
• Organization of educations by ecological academies, for all the institutions, in order to strengthen the ecological consciousness
• Continue and increase the effort in reforestation projects, with a special mention to the right of self -defense of all the living beings and ecosystems
• Researches to improve the current irrigation systems, and to increase the use of alternative and cleaner sources of energy, moving away from the use of fossil fuels
• Support the restoration of local herbs and the use of local seeds, against the industrialized monoculture introduced in the past by the regime
• Strengthen the existing cooperatives and foster the creation of new ones, especially in the agricultural field

Berivan Omer, co-moderator of the conference, and member of the Autonomous Administration, said “There have been some important discussions on the topic of occupation and ecology, how much colonization politic are also politics against ecology.”

“We discussed eco-feminism, how women who were vanguards of the Rojava revolution can also become vanguards in creating an ecological life in North-East Syria.“

As the Zapatista movement would say “Caminar preguntando” (“Walking while questioning”), this conference shows the will of learning from the experience of the past years, to constantly improve. It represents an important step in the consolidation of the ecological struggle in North-East Syria.

Watch the video for the full interview here.

Ecological destruction and exploitation in Kurdistan

With the widespread introduction of capitalism to Kurdistan in the 1950s came a systemic and destructive exploitation of nature. The four colonialist states – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – started to plan large energy, mining, agriculture, infrastructure and other investment projects whose implementation led to exceedingly grave ecological destruction and exploitation[1]. This is caused, amongst other factors, by the capitalist economic model, respectively low ecological and social standards in the implementation of the many projects as well as by the simple fact that Kurdistan has the de facto status of a quartered colony. While keeping the colonial status, the hegemonial states introduced step by step, using economic as well as military measures, capitalist relations into the societies of Kurdistan. In the 1970s the construction of numerous large projects – particularly dams, oil-drilling and mining – had been realized through the exercise of the hegemonic power of the highly centralized states in the four parts of Kurdistan under the pretext of progress. After the first preparation work in the 1960s, agriculture started to be industrialized in the 1970s, particularly in West Kurdistan (Rojava) and North Kurdistan (Bakur), later in South (Başur) and East Kurdistan (Rojhilat).

One result of these policies was that communal and solidarity-based relations became weaker in the society of Kurdistan. The infrastructure projects and investments were designed and implemented with absolutely no consultation of the local population and through an authoritarian approach, were in the interest of the colonialist states and the colonialist and collaborative Kurdish upper classes and aimed a profit maximization through capitalist modernization, oppression and a deepening assimilation. While this development was still slow in the 1950s and 1960s, it took on a accelerating character in the 1970s. As a result of the implementation of large infrastructure projects in rural areas and the consequent displacement of hundreds of thousands; the industrialization of agriculture; the continuous economically-driven migration of rural people; rapid urbanization;  industrialisation; and the colonialist wars against the population as from the 1980s; society has lost for a big part its characteristics of solidarity and communality. The main characteristics of the pre-capitalist societies were  communalist approach and solidarity on decision-making, economy, sociality, culture and others issues, but different intensity of feudal and conservative forms were also present. Since the 1990s, the number of implemented large projects, as well as the livelihoods of people and economic relations, experienced grave changes. The surviving elements of the subsistence economy and local circles of economy were marginalised and Kurdistan became fully part of the “national market” of each state and entered the neoliberal global market.

The former times were certainly full of hierarchy, patriarchy and discrimination, but the transition to capitalism was a brutal break in the social and historical development and in a certain way it has even deepened societal sexism and patriarchy. To understand what has been diminished in these decades, the following approaches and characteristics of communalism and solidarity were eroded between the 1950s and 1990s. Typically:

• Although usually not inclusive concerning sex and age, many villages had in practice a kind of assembly of mostly older men and sometimes of some older women which gathered if necessary and took decisions.
• Solidarity on economical issues was common. For example, when a family or a household wanted to build a new house, the whole (or most) of the village joined the construction for at least several days which were crucial to building work proceeding significantly.
• It was usual that the animals of all households have been grazed together in appropriate locations. This was managed in turn by all households.
• When a household had a bad year of harvest, the others in the village supported the affected family by supplying them with the basic foods.
• When a household lacked yeast for cooking bread or milk, the neighbors shared it without hesitation or any discussion. In the following days the supported household put the same amount in the front of the house whose family gave the support.
• When a household had a large harvest of a certain product (like walnut), it was often the practice to share some of the surplus with others in and around the village.
• Solidarity on social affairs was also common. For example, when one or two parents of a family died or were forced to migrate in search of work, then the others in the village took care of the children who could not support themselves.
• There was cultural solidarity. In the evenings often people gathered in one of the houses and shared stories, myths, poems and songs among each other.

Kurdistan belongs worldwide to the countries where until recently capitalist modernity[2] was weak and solidarity and communal structures in the societies were still existing in a significant way. Today the older generations of Kurdistan remember quite well how life was until the 1960s or 1970s.

There is no objective to romanticize the life several decades ago, but nevertheless there was a significant solidarity and sharing in the society and not everything was valued monetarily; life and commodification[3] was not materialized as it is the case today.

Start of discussion on ecology

After two decades of freedom struggle in North Kurdistan, in the 1990s the Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM) started to discuss the ecological question on a Kurdish and global level. The discussion took place against the background of the systematic destruction in Bakur through the Turkish State’s war on Kurds; more than 2,5 million displaced people were confronted in a brutal way with the urban and capitalistic life while Turkish state forces destroyed up to 4000 villages and torched huge forested areas in Bakur. The majority of the displaced people had been living before in a mainly subsistence economy with regional product circulation and limited ecological damage. Particularly between 1992 and 1995 large areas were depopulated and many cities in Bakur often doubled their population without being prepared in any way and without support from the Turkish government or others.

In the 1990s especially the political leader Abdullah Öcalan of the Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM) questioned the emergence of neoliberal capitalism, with new analyses in general and notably in relation to neoliberalism’s impacts on nature. Particularly the concept of growth, and the increasing disconnection of profit from production has been criticized in Öcalan’s writings and speeches. In this sense, he is speaking against the growing number of large investment projects because of the huge and irreparable destruction of nature they cause. Here he included also the climate change which, among others, he considered as an acceleration of ecological destruction by capitalism. To destroy nature for the interest of central governments and profit of companies means usually to destroy the basis of life of millions. The massive ecological destruction affects seriously human life. Often large projects displace a large number of people and/or exploit the land and surrounding areas which they are forced to leave. Öcalan also discussed the disconnection of people to nature and what kind of impacts this could have on people’s minds and the relation of people to each other. In a fundamental way the alienation of people has been put in relation to the disconnection of people from nature. At this point Öcalan connects the discussion on ecology with institutionalized hierarchy which has its roots in patriarchy.

But ecology had not found a place at the core of the ongoing discussions in the 1990s. It was new, not yet theoretically strongly developed and in the shadow of the ongoing brutal war of the Turkish state. The central theoretical discussion at that time focused on highly important topic of women´s liberation. At that time, it was most urgent for the Kurds to discuss the liberation of women as it was the main tool for overcoming conservative and hierarchical structures in society. However an important part of the revolutionaries and political activists within the KFM took note of the discussion on ecology of the 1990s. It influenced in the following years the minds of thousands of politically engaged and interested people. Öcalan’s discussion showed a strategic approach as it was a discussion which was ahead of the times in comparison with all other left(ist)-democratic groups and movements in Kurdistan and Turkey. Öcalan was rather at the same level with some global discussions and movements which had started to discuss the ecological contradiction.

Municipalities in Bakur – Challenge to develop an ecological practice

Shortly after Öcalan has been kidnapped through an international plot under the coordination of the USA and delivered to the Turkish state in 1999, the armed struggle of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) stopped, and a new and broad discussion on means and perspectives of the freedom struggle started while giving priority to the political-civil struggle. The aim to set up a “Kurdish state” has been given up finally. In the same year in the local elections several important municipalities had been won by HADEP, the People’s Democracy Party, the legal party of the KFM at that time. The gained municipalities – among them Amed (Diyarbakir), Batman and Wan (Van) – became essential elements of the freedom struggle of the Kurds. This coincided with decreasing repressive conditions mainly because of the stop of the armed struggle. This facilitated the space for the municipalities, HADEP and other organizations of the KFM to spread their own political ideas and to get better in contact with new and not politically organized parts of the society. What has been claimed for years, namely that the KFM has better and much more democratic concepts, could be implemented at local level through municipalities and other political organizations. But at the same time the dynamic created by the armed struggle did not exist anymore. A shift in the way of thinking and acting became necessary.

Between 1999 and 2004 HADEP administered 37 municipalities and has been challenged to prove to the population that it is capable to govern better and more socially-responsibly than all other authoritarian and corrupted political parties of the hegemonic system. After taking over of the municipalities the state repression never ceased, but it was much less than in the 1990s. Rather the State’s approach was to give some space, but to bring the HADEP (replaced in 2002 by DEHAP, 2004 DTP, 2009 BDP and 2014 HDP/DBP) municipalities with certain imposed policies, including challenging frameworks like neoliberalism and administrative centralism, to a point where they would fail, thus lose the following local elections and finally lose their attractivity.

The HADEP municipalities, and in broader terms the Kurdish Freedom Movement, have the declared political goal of creating a democratic-ecological society by the year 2000. It was expressed publicly that the approach to nature would be respectful; natural sites would be conserved and developed within the cities and their surroundings would be more clean and green; and the investments projects would not be implemented at the expense of nature. The practice had to be significantly different from municipalities ruled by other parties which in Kurdistan did not care in any way for ecological life.

These first years were the time when thousands of political activists and other politically-interested people in Kurdistan and Turkey started to read articles and books on ecology and particularly social ecology, including Murray Bookchin. This brought forward the discussion how an ecological life should be developed and what that could mean in long-term and short-term politics. It affected also some employees and politicians in the municipalities. This was important as the difference can be observed sometimes in the details. It should be considered that in the whole state of Turkey the discussions on a more ecological or “sustainable” country were quite new, and political campaigns against destructive and exploitative developments and projects were rarely carried out. But it was also the time when in several regions struggles against large investment projects came up. In Bakur two struggles became widely known. One was against the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris which is planned to flood a large part of the Tigris Valley and the ancient town of Hasankeyf. Another one was against several dams on the Munzur River in Dersim where mainly people of the Alevi faith live. Both struggles gained big support amongst the Kurds. The Kurdish society started to discuss for the first time issues of rivers, dams, energy, cultural and natural heritage and development in relation to each other on a broader scale that contributed to an increase of a critical awareness on these issues.

However, in fact the gained municipalities in their first period (until 2004) showed a practice which was by far better than the others from an ecological point of view. The cities became cleaner and healthier with improvement of the waste system, also in the poorest neighborhoods which had been neglected for decades. The drinking water supply and sewage management was improved significantly in several cities within few years. The green area per person increased too. The sites of cultural heritage got more attention and accessibility for the public. More public spaces like squares or market places had been build up. The public transport had been developed to all settled areas and for a comparatively low price. Some designed large projects with problematic social and ecological impacts had been canceled or changed by the municipalities or not followed up. The life conditions in the poor quarters had been improved also by paving the streets, building social infrastructure like social centers or washing centers for clothes and the neglection of unpaid water bills. Efforts to include civil society groups in the decision-making process on many projects and even city planning became day to day reality. We can state that in the very beginning there were many urgent works in the field of basic services that had to be undertaken. The living quality in most cities was under a big threat – a stress that was exacerbated by the situation of those displaced by conflict in  the 1990s.

Although these positive developments occurred, there was lack of an overall consensus  as to how to develop a further and future ecological policy and the bigger ecological context could not be explained well. Almost all mayors and policy decision makers of the municipalities and other structures of the KFM did not consider the ecological perspective as one of the main strategic approaches and it remained often secondary if other aspects prevailed. The ecological consciousness of such people stayed limited with the pragmatism of parliamentarism. This was not very surprising as the general political movement stayed weak in the field of ecology and the discussion was quite new for the movement in general and particularly for the broader society. There were no strong actors within society who claimed a stronger ecological policy by the municipalities. In these years the fore-mentioned ecologist movements against dam projects concentrated their efforts on the dam projects; and the new “environmental” associations and civil organizations that were emerging in the cities, including organisations of engineers, architects, lawyers and medical doctors, did not yet demand strongly enough ecological criteria to be included in urban development.

There were two other aspects of relevance. The first is that the society was only just emerging from an extended period of intensive systematic state terror and was still in a phase of basic recovery. The political focus of the KFM was mainly on the human right violations of the 1990s and the demand for Kurdish identity in Bakur to be accepted with basic autonomous rights within the Republic of Turkey. The second is that capitalism in Kurdistan became very strong after the crisis of 2001. In 2003-2004, the official economic growth rate achieved up to ten percent, the money in the economy accumulated significantly and everywhere new and larger investments were done. Many more people started to earn big amounts of money through trade and investments. This created an intense pressure also on the cities in Bakur and approaches to open space for private investors affected almost all municipalities which suffered from structural financial low income. These were the years when neoliberalism entered Bakur.

In Bakur and also in Başur (with the US occupation in 2003) and Rojhilat, the development of extractive industries (mining, oil and gas) became very dramatic in these years. Investment projects in all fields had become widespread. In this sense the rural areas had been confronted with the following projects: all rivers should be transformed by hundreds of dams into artificial lakes or dried out by diversion dams; thousands of licenses had been commissioned to companies for test mine drilling; all main roads started to be broadened; mega coal plants had been constructed in several provinces; one of the world´s largest cement factory had been constructed; Bakur had become a hot spot for fracking; and finally the whole agricultural land – even the mountainous areas – faced fast change according to capitalistic market rules. The state planners started to consider each square meter in terms of financially exploitable land and prepared or approved thousands of projects. The AKP government under Erdogan attracted with such policies the interest of global capital. Only the cities administered by the KFM resisted for a big part this development. That is why the government could not implement the most planned policies in half of the cities of Bakur.

In a period when the society of Bakur started to develop quickly an ecological awareness, the neoliberalized capitalism started to make the largest historical ecological (and thus social) destruction and exploitation in Bakur. The destruction of nature and overcoming of most of remaining social-traditional elements in the society was much more intensive than during the  war of the 1990s. Only the mountainous areas with difficult access for humans could recover after 2000.

Ecology within Democratic Confederalism: the theoretical concept

On Newroz 2005, Abdullah Öcalan declared “Democratic Confederalism” as the new political-theoretical concept of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Thereby the writings and discussions of the prior years and the whole experience of 30 years of struggle could be summarized and put into relation to each other in a systematic way. Without doubt Democratic Confederalism cannot be considered disconnected from the discussions and critics after the collapse of the “state/real socialism” around 1990 and the new leftist and libertarian social and political movements all around the world. The outcome was a critical, inclusive and radical thinking with new perspectives for the Kurds in relation with other people in the Middle East. The new political concept is being expressed with a paradigm based on three pillars. An ecological approach to the life was stressed as much as radical democracy, which goes beyond parliamentarianism, and gender liberation with a focus on women liberation. To repeat the obvious: The pillars and the whole concept are expressed with the aim to achieve a liberated, emancipated, equal and solidarity-based society in harmony with nature.

Radical democracy and women´s liberation had been stressed and developed strongly among the Kurds already for many years before. But actually each of the three pillars of Democratic Confederalism cannot be thoroughly developed without links to the other two. However the initial starting point is women’s liberation.

Prior to 5000 years of women’s oppression and exclusion evolved the Neolithic period when a complete communal social order was created around woman which can be also called matricentric society. Öcalan emphasizes that this social order saw none of the enforcement practices of the state order and existed for thousands of years. It is characterized by equality and freedom, was viable because the social morality of the matriarchal order did not allow ownership and it had a harmony with the nature. It is this long-lasting order that shaped humanity’s collective social consciousness; and it is our endless yearning to regain and immortalise this social order of equality and freedom that led to our construct of paradise.

Öcalan states that with the overcoming of matricentric society by patriarchy, institutionalized hierarchical structures had emerged and spread among human societies which characterized the upcoming states until now. Long before explicit social classes came into being, the first oppressed and exploited class are women. This has been followed in the following centuries and millenia by the oppression of children and man. This political-ideological formation led also to the domination and destruction of nature by humans during the different periods of human history. The ecological exploitation and destruction must be analyzed basically from such an approach.

Today the conservative and reactionary approaches of existing states is experienced in the first instance by society through the oppression of women. Another important point is that women as an oppressed gender have a stronger relationship to nature than men; in all patriarchal societies men are usually more attached to power and thus are more alienated from nature than women. Thus, the struggle for an ecological and liberated society means in the end also the struggle against patriarchy and liberation of women or, to put it another way, without the liberation of women there cannot be an ecological society.

As the oppression of society starts with patriarchy, it is logical that the KFM has started to focus more and more on the liberation of women which at the same is the liberation of all kind of genders and the whole society. Within the KFM, this consciousness came out to top in the beginning of the 1990s and thus an intensive and widespread discussion on women’s liberation started which became more deep and systematic after the halt of the war in Bakur in 1999 and additionally more with the development of Democratic Confederalism.

Discussing more in depth the approach of the KFM on nature, firstly it has to be stated that the KFM views nature as the body of all living beings, including humans. Humans are part of nature and do not stand over it or any species. Like in the Neolithic Period it is regarded as alive and animated, no different from themselves. All living beings are part of one common big ecosystem which offers enough opportunities to live for everybody. Nature was omnipresent, there was for the significant majority of people always in the daily life a strong connection with nature. Öcalan describes this as follows: “This past awareness of nature fostered a mentality that recognized a multitude of sanctities and divinities in nature. We may gain a better understanding of the essence of collective life if we acknowledge that it was based on the metaphysics of sanctity and divinity, stemming from reverence for the mother-woman.” Today there are still some beliefs where in nature are a multitude of sanctities and divinities, one of them is the Alevi belief. Consequently for spirituality and inspiration among humans, nature was and is the main source.

Based on thorough adherence to ecological principles, nature should be treated respectfully and not as a resource for profit. Nature was and is the source of food, housing and all other material needs of life. Under capitalist modernity, humans living in urban centers are usually weakly connected to nature and understand less the relation and connection to nature. Nature had and has a multidimensional meaning in life, and is essential for the development of culture and identity as well as spirituality. Due to the alienation between human beings which contributes significantly to the alienation between nature and human beings, nowadays nature is overexploited. Despite everyone experiencing the impacts of grave ecological destruction in the next decades, the destruction of nature seems to continue. The current approach of human driven capitalist modernity is a state of betrayal of humans to nature, to their body.

In this sense, if human beings would meet only their needs[4], nature would not experience serious destruction and the ecosystems would have the capacity to recover. At this point, the question ‘What is the real need of people today?’ is not easily answered and should not be left only to biologists or economists. Rather, it relates to the question of democracy, i.e. whether a society can take decisions under broadly democratic conditions free from imposed exploitative-extractive economic policies. We assume that in a liberated, solidarity-based, radical-democratic and ecological society there will be no pressure to over-extract “elements”[5] from nature.

Do not forget that humans are not only physical or material organisms, they have strong and deep immaterial feelings and metaphysical needs in their life. Although humans cannot express them, they do not think and act only in a rational way. For thousands of years, people have sought inspiration and motivation following different methods, including retiring from their surroundings to nature. With the exponential increase of urbanization, asphalt application, cultivation of landscape and investment projects all over the territories, less areas are suitable in this sense and so it becomes always more difficult for inspiration by nature in capitalist modernity, particularly for poorer people from cities who have less financial capacity to experience nature directly. In connection with that, this also affects physical reproduction and recovery activities for people from urban centers.

Communities far away from the urban centers, industry and industrial agricultural areas are closer to nature and have more spiritual connection with the environment. The less there is capitalist modernity, the more natural and spiritual the life can be. If such communities in non-urban areas belong to oppressed groups like the indigenous peoples of Latin America, the Adivasi from India and Alevi Kurds, then the connection to nature may have an additional importance because the oppressed peoples express themselves also through nature. In this sense the nature is a very essential part of their oppressed identity. Accordingly the destruction or misappropriation of nature by the colonialist force is an elimination of their identity. This is often not much understood by people in the capitalist and big urban centers where life no longer has has a strong relation to nature.

In the ideology of the KFM, the ecological perspective is considered of strategical importance and as a tool to create awareness in the whole human society and all human linked activities and processes from a nature conservation, anti-capitalist and holistic perspective. In doing so, the approach is that the dimensions not covered by gender liberation or radical democracy would be expressed with ecology. In this sense, the emphasis on ecology within Democratic Confederalism can be understood also as the completion of the two other pillars.

However, it should be underlined that nature conservation and even nature restoration by humans is a strategic goal. From the very beginning on, the KFM stressed that each living being has the right to exist due to its natural occurrence. The life of animals and plants must be protected actively by humans. Regarding nature conservation, the goal to limit and stop anthropogenic climate change is a crucial topic, as in the next decades it could affect in a much more dramatic way everything on our planet – actually Kurdistan and the Middle East have already been affected for almost two decades due to decreasing precipitation. Climate change is no less important than “nature conservation” (projects/policies to conserve species, habitats and areas of high biodiversity) or the reverse, as some environmental organizations or politicians prioritize in their discussions, they are mutually dependent and should not be treated independently from each other. Climate change cannot be limited to exclude the conservation and restoration of forests, vegetation, rivers, water cycle, soil, air etc. For the KFM, climate change is part of nature conservation and a reason why in this paper climate change is not mentioned specifically.

Thus it is concluded that each struggle against ecological destruction is very essential and a necessary step to re-establish a relation to nature for many people, but in the long-term is not enough to protect the contested natural area and related human society. Not enough, because the related investment project as well as all other destructive projects are caused by the dominant political-economic system. This dominant system will never step back to implement all designed and planned projects.

That is why being ecological means also to criticize all processes in the society, particularly the way of producing and consuming, feeding, housing, mobilization, organizing leisure etc. The KFM rejects categorically the way these models are implemented by capitalist modernity and the direction they take today – KFM’s insistence on communal life is an expression of such a rejection. The current level of consumption is without doubt too much for the earth. Going on like this would end in the dramatic destruction or significant deterioration of all existing ecosystems and the loss of the most biodiversity. If there is no deceleration in the short-term and significant conceptional change in the mid-term, nature’s destruction and climate change will continue and the basis of life will become much weaker, with grave impacts for the ecosystems, biodiversity, animals, plants and billions of humans. The worst affected people would be mainly people, communities and states with weak socio-economic capacities.

To achieve a considerable change of these models, the basic approach must be to reduce consumption of energy and material by at least 80% in industrial states in the medium-term and to find a new balance where each human has the same amount of energy and material for use. One important criteria should be to allow degraded ecosystems and biodiversity to recover.

At this point, it should be emphasized that each destruction of nature or ecosystem has serious impacts on humans and is thus a social destruction – several factors determine the level. Each investment project, like dams and mining, has the high potential to destroy nature as well as to violate the basic rights of affected people. So ecological destruction must be understood also as the violation of political, social, cultural and economic rights of people. This connection is still not made by many critical activists or analysts in our world.

Going one step further, the KFM is aware that with capitalism – even without neoliberalism – the ecological destruction can never be stopped, never mind the reversal [of destruction], i.e. the renaturation of nature and restoration of climate balance. If capitalism dominates the global economy and capitalist modernity, the political sphere, there will be an intense pressure to have “growth” in the capitalist sense and (almost) no space to develop other forms of living, for democratic decision-making processes and a communal and democratic economy. Over centuries and decades, capitalist modernity has conquered the brains and behaviors of billions of humans in a subtle way. It cannot be overcome with a concept based only on new social and economic goals as “real/state socialism” intended to do. Hierarchy, state and capitalism is firstly an ideological development.

Capitalist modernity has started to deepen at an accelerated tempo the alienation of humans from humans and from nature; and this much more than the former hierarchical political systems. Particularly in the last 200 years, each area of the world and each community has been affected by capitalist modernity. Nowadays, all people – except the rich – have been put under pressure with neoliberalism. Through displacing people from their natural environments by physical or economic force to cities, humans lost their culture of living in much more natural surroundings. And when territories are under threat by such destructive investments in areas where people are oppressed on the basis of their identity, the displacement of people by nation-states contributes to the assimilation of cultures under threat and pressure. Small or marginalized oppressed cultures are particularly affected by such policies. The Kurds are one important example for that.

People in cities do not only consume, they are also disconnected from their strong social and cultural heritage and thus are lost fish in the sea, easy to catch. Disconnected from their cultural past means, among other things, to be open for extreme individualistic and isolated ways of life where a healthy balance between individuals and society does not exist. People alienated from nature and communal and solidarity-based relations are much easier to become instruments of exploitation in industrial production, consumption, reactionary thoughts and establishing of authoritarian political systems. Urban people do not know usually any more the name of most plants and animals and how in practice processes in nature function, or how humans can benefit from them sustainably as our ancestors have done it for thousands of years. So humans in cities do not live the nature on a daily basis. In other words, humans do not feel soil, plants, water, sun and air, and start to lose a deep understanding for them and their context. They may know it, usually in theory, like biologists. In cities, more now than ever before, everything is organized with money, while villagers still can produce some of their needs, exchange goods among themselves and support each other with self produced goods. People in rural areas are usually less affected by capitalist modernity and reproduce a thinking and lifestyle less connected to capitalism and state hegemony. In cities, on average humans are faced with more psychological and social trauma than in rural communities, and these traumas are transferred to their children. The traumas of displaced people from rural areas are maybe the worst. Actually, today the majority of our societies live under heavy psychological conditions.

Capitalist modernity creates people offering their labor force to private companies or public organizations without producing any of their needs as their ancestors did in villages. Thus, from their salary they have to buy all their needs. These people are put under hard and stressful working conditions. Working people under permanent pressure did not care much about the ongoing ecological destruction in the first period of industrialization when working conditions and salaries were in the center of their interest. Although strong trade unions did not develop an ecological approach until recently, after generations more and more people in almost all parts of the world have started to think about ecology and alternatives to the capitalist way of living. While in the older industrial states, most people start to learn facts on nature and an ecological life from zero, in the newly or hardly industrialized states there are much more characteristics and remnants of non-capitalistic relations, processes and thinking on which critical people can build up. The recovery can be realized in an easier and faster way, as for example critical people can benefit from the experience of their grandparents, or even parents. Kurdistan is such a geography.

While above the connection between ecology and women´s liberation has been introduced, there is still the connection between ecology and democracy to be described. In order to defend nature and ecological relations, destructive and exploitative projects need to be stopped and the models of housing, production, consumption, mobility, etc have to be altered radically. All this can be done only if democratic decision making structures are dominant in the society, i.e. radical democracy is developed, and no more small circles in the society can influence via lobbying the political decision. Only when there is an economy based on solidarity and communality can the big ecological destruction be prevented in the long-term. Summing up, it can be analyzed that the connection between ecology and democracy is realized particularly via the sphere of economic relations.

The KFM has developed over the years some new terminology with the concept of Democratic Confederalism which may be of interest. Many movements do this, but within Democratic Confederalism some more words have been created. It starts with the name of the concept. Some definitions are a combination of words like “democracy” and “autonomy” or “democratic” and “nation” which are widely used. The theory of Democratic Confederalism also follows the line of occupying existing crucial definitions like “nation” or “modernity” and to give them also a positive content in a certain framework. From an ecological perspective within Democratic Confederalism, the terms “ecological industry” and “communal life” are of higher relevance. Ecological industry may be controversial as industrial activities have led to a big part to the destruction and pollution of nature and continuously concentrate economic and political power. But, at the same time, the human societies have achieved a point of life and economic relations which cannot be maintained without industry. For the KFM “industry” is understood as the production of goods in a systematic and concentrated, i.e. by mechanized processes, way. It needs some expert skills and higher technologies. Actually, primitive forms of industry existed for a long period in human history. The current level of industry, with its negative impacts, was not inevitable; history could have taken a different turn. However, nowadays it is extremely challenging (almost impossible) to de-industrialize societies, which would have incalculable risks. Thus, the question is how to reorganize the industry in terms of technology, capacity and management from an ecological perspective and break with the existing concept of economic growth. Democratic Confederalism has on this topic yet no well-developed concepts, but rather basic ideas.

Role of the Guerrilla in the growing ecological awareness

The increasing ecological awareness is related also to the guerrilla of the PKK, the People’s Defense Forces HPG, which never ceased to exist widespread in the mountains of North and South Kurdistan since the 1980s. The HPG has thousands of guerrillas in huge areas of Northern Kurdistan, and in a broad stretch of 250km in South Kurdistan; thus must be considered as a geographically and highly important political factor. When not fighting with the Turkish Army, the guerrillas spend their time in a mix of military and political education. In South Kurdistan, the focus is even more on political discussion and education.

The guerrillas discuss the entire range of social and political issues in their political educational program. Since the 1990s when Öcalan started to discuss the ecological crisis, the guerrilla included ecology in their discussions. The manner in which it discusses ecology and all the other topics differs from people and organizations in the broader Kurdish society, which makes the discussion itself more independent. The guerrillas are not part of the hegemonic political system and have no narrow individual expectations from the state or others. In contrast, people and organizations from the “normal” society are influenced continuously by concerns and personal limitations. Even if they struggle intensively to get rid of influences by capitalism and statism, there is always a remaining part.

The difference with the guerrilla is that since its emergence in the beginning of the 1990s, the life conditions are exceedingly difficult, but completely communal, based on solidarity and far away from capitalist modernity. There is almost no private propriety existing; money and material interests play no role in the relations among humans; decisions are taken sometimes on a democratic basis; and a system of criticsm and self-criticism is implemented systematically.

Concerning ecology, it is also very crucial that the guerrilla lives in harmony with the nature. There is almost no negative impact by the guerrilla on plants, animals and ecosystems; rather in the last years they care more than ever on this issue. The life is oriented strongly alongside ecological criteria. It follows that the existence of the guerrilla in many mountainous regions leads to the prevention of widespread hunting, and to the preservation of many forests through calls or bans on the start or continuation of numerous destructive infrastructure projects of the Turkish state or the Kurdish Regional Government in South Kurdistan.

The discussions and proposals for overcoming the ecological crisis are often practiced in the guerrilla areas on a small scale and as much as possible in the lives of individual guerrillas and as a community. So there are not solely theoretical outcomes, there is also a dimension of practice. Through this practice in some cases the guerrilla can adjust their first theoretical assumptions.

The ecological practice of the guerrilla can be explained with the following examples: It is absolutely forbidden to throw away waste like plastic or metal in the environment; trees are cut only under exceptional cases; animals are hunted not much and only in a way so that no species would be endangered in a certain region – some species could recover; a few dozen small diversion dams for electricity are built in South Kurdistan which divert usually one third of the flowing water (most states divert between 2/3 and 90%); as much as possible food is produced by the guerrilla’s own means in the mountains.

The results and developed approaches of the guerrilla reflect the material conditions with the strong characteristics of solidarity, communality and ecology; and they challenge the other parts of the society – particularly the part of the population which is physically and politically close to them. The reason is that criticsm is much more profound and ideologically justified, the claims are higher and there are less “realistic” elements which could limit thinking. Thus the guerrilla accept fewer compromises and thus fewer spaces for capitalism. The approaches of the guerrilla are closer to harmony with nature and request stronger and broader communal structures.

Developed approaches and proposals on ecology – like with the other fields – can be connected and transferred quite easily to the broader society of Kurdistan, as there is a strong relation of the guerrilla with the Kurdish society. Consider that each year hundreds of thousands of people meet and discuss with guerrillas. Coming from the capitalist modernity and meeting revolutionaries who share communal life affects these people and beyond, especially young ones.

However, in all fields two basic approaches within the Kurdish Freedom Movement – one represented mainly by the expressed ideas of the guerrilla – collide often in a strong way. Not all proposals are approved one to one by political activists or politically interested people in the broad society who live in different material conditions. There are aspects which the guerrilla does not consider in their discussions as they live far away and in different and extraordinary conditions. Generally, the approaches of the guerrilla are closer to what is considered more democratic, communal, gender liberated and ecological.

The synthesis must have been in the majority of the cases the most correct way, as the KFM managed to survive and to get stronger in the last years. We can say that the mountain-city relations of the Kurds have created over the years a specific dynamic which is beneficial for the whole KFM.

How the contradiction creates a dynamic

The Kurdish Freedom Movement has been winning the local elections in an increasing number of cities in North Kurdistan since 1999, and they have acquired some important knowledge on how local governments can transform the society to be more social, gender liberated and ecologically oriented. It is only since 2010/2011 that the reasons to transform life ecologically were grasped substantially. Previously, the approach and the discourse of ecology were rather shallow, as described above.

There are basically three reasons for that. First, capitalist relations continued to advance quickly in North Kurdistan in the second part of the 2000’s and the ecological destruction reached seriously concerning levels. Second, the concept of Democratic Confederalism has encouraged and strengthened ecologists in Bakur to deepen and broaden their struggle. Third, the critic and resistance against the ecological destruction and exploitation increased in an organized way, gathered some serious experience and even small successes.

The book “In defense of a people” by Öcalan published in 2004 and the declaration of Democratic Confederalism in March 2005 contributed definitively to the better systematization of the ideas and discussion on an ecological society in Bakur and other parts of Kurdistan. In the first months after the declaration of Democratic Confederalism, there was a controversial discussion among many political activists within the KFM or those close to it, about the pillar of ecology. While for the activists who already incorporating ecology in their activism and discussions this was very encouraging and supportive, the others either did not take it into account seriously or raised concerns and considered it premature to emphasize ecology or “not fitting to the reality of Kurdish society”. However, in general, the political structures of the KFM welcomed the pillar ecology and started to discuss it – even it was still only superficially. At least it opened the mind for ecological discussions, campaigns and requests.

Just in this time the Ilisu Dam and Hydroelectric Power Plant, the largest dam project in planning or construction in Bakur and Turkey, came again on the agenda after the Turkish government started a new effort to build it – the first attempt had failed in 2001/2002. Between 2006 and 2010 the struggle against this dam project, which would have huge grave impacts on social structures, cultural heritage and the Tigris ecosystem and destructive consequences for the local society, was continuously on the agenda of the Kurds and got support by many Kurdish organizations, activists and media. Coordinated by the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive this campaign was an expression of the increased ecological and cultural awareness among the Kurds. It contributed at a new level to the questioning of energy, water, agriculture and development policies of the Turkish state and exceeded significantly the discussions during the first round of struggle on the Ilisu project between 1999 and 2002.

In the following years, there was a steady increase in the number of groups and people working on issues concerning nature conservation, the impacts of big infrastructure and energy projects, food production and social ecology theory. Associations and initiatives opposing dams, mining, coal plants, environmental pollution, urban development, commercialization of life etc. have been initiated or strengthened, for example in Amed, Dersim, Çolemerg (Hakkari), Batman, Qoser (Kiziltepe), Wan and Riha (Urfa). Although in these years the diversity of contested project types broadened, dams were still the main challenge for the ecology movements. These were the years when each square kilometer of Bakur and the whole Turkish state territory have been considered by state planners and big companies as a source of profit – internationally this approach started to be discussed as “extractivism”. Capitalism was spreading to all niches of the society of Bakur. The capitalist modernity unfolded its maximum destructive forces, the AKP government did everything to enable investments in the region. The need to form a coalition of groups and activists with a strong ecological and critical awareness in Bakur became important in these years.

Considering these growing protests and the need to act in a comprehensive way against the encroachment of neoliberal capitalism, the coordination of the Mesopotamian Social Forum, which was organized for the first time in 2009 in Amed, decided to organize an Ecology Forum. At this forum in January 2011, with the contribution of activists by all struggles of Bakur, researchers, representatives of different civil organizations and movements and activists from Turkey and other countries, ecological struggles and approaches were discussed in Kurdistan in a broad and organized way for the first time in history. As a consequence of the forum, “ecology activists” started a discussion to form a network of groups in Bakur. It took more than one and a half year to achieve the first meetings of about ten groups and a decision to form the “Mesopotamia Ecology Movement” was taken. The theoretical basis from the very beginning on was Social Ecology and Democratic Confederalism. Although the name described it as a movement, in the first years it was rather a network.

In these years, capitalism also started to strongly affect some political structures and thinking of activists in the KFM, including municipalities and activists in small towns. Due to the fact that there was still a lack of system and depth in the discussion of ecology regarding all decisions and actions within the KFM, it is not surprising that some people and structures acted contrarily. The impact in the practice was that, among other things, the behavior and approaches of political parties and organizations of the existing hegemonic system did not change significantly for many activists of the KFM. Decisions like city planning did not really brake with capitalist-statist prescriptive practices; some mayors were co-opted by local entrepreneurs to get tenders; and competition far away from solidarity relations between organizations and activists partly increased. These challenges may always come up and become dominant in the case of a not very well developed and accepted radical democratic structure with transparent and inclusive decision-making processes. The KFM had only started in 2007 to set up a completely new political structure which takes the paradigm of Democratic Confederalism as its basis. The Democratic Society Congress (in Kurdish: KCD; in Turkish: DTK) as the umbrella structure of the KFM for the new people’s councils from the neighborhoods, civil society organizations, social movements, professional organizations, municipalities and political parties was quite new and still in the process of finding a way to function properly given the big diversity of above-mentioned structures.

In the initial stage, the Mesopotamia Ecology Movement (MEM) was challenged to find ways to bring the member groups together around subjects, campaigns and discussions and set up a permanent and reliable working structure. If this could be realized, the struggle against the numerous destructive and exploitative projects and policies of the state could be confronted better and within the KCD the struggle for ecological discussions, thinking and approaches would get more political weight. In confronting the government’s projects and objectives, a continuously rising number of people started to question the state policies in other areas. Not only the policies on Kurdish identity, collective rights, education, women’s rights, and militarization, but also those on economy, energy, agriculture and related issues in Bakur became more and more a focus of the political struggle. Each economic decision or investment project started to be perceived more critically.

At the same time, the municipalities governed by the legal party of the KFM came under a critical focus by the MEM because municipalities acting against the political goals of the general movement would harm the whole struggle, including the ecological dimension. The demand was that municipal politics had to be changed comprehensively along ecological principles, developed by the MEM, and the self-administration of people’s councils. The aim of the state is clear: it wants to dominate, oppress and exploit the society in close cooperation with big companies, and in Bakur also with medium-sized companies. In this struggle, the KFM municipalities had to make a clear stance against the state policies. Although municipalities are according to Turkish law in the end an organ of the central government, they have limited capacities and freedom with which they could challenge state policies. While on the one hand they are forced to act in compliance with Turkish law, on the other hand the municipalities should do everything in their powerto support radical democratic structures in the society, i.e. particularly the people’s councils, women’s self-organization and a communal economy, as well as taking as stance against the gentrification of urban areas and bringing equitably services to the entire population. But the reality in these years was often only in part like this. Capitalism has put the municipalities of Bakur under the pressure to follow the neoliberal AKP municipalities as a development model through the domination of discussions about urban development. It was a time – up until 2011 – when economic growth in Turkey was high, the social contradictions in Turkey and Bakur were significantly less and the AKP government was still not very repressive: hence, the criticsm by the KFM against capitalist modernity did not go down well in Kurdish society. Another pressure was systematic financial discrimination by the Turkish national government: since 1999, KFM municipalities could not benefit from many governmental funds, unlike other municipalities. Obstacles were also often created in the approval of big projects (each big project usually needs approval by the governor, who is directly appointed by the Turkish government) and the KFM municipalities have not been supported with experts and skills like the other municipalities. This latter discrimination was not very surprising, as the Kurds have been oppressed since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. It is a subject with which a struggle is needed.

However, what was more concerning for the MEM was the lacking stance of the municipalities on capitalist development. In this respect, one case became important for the ecology struggle in Kurdistan. It is about the hill “Kırklar Dağı” in the outskirts of the city of Amed where a housing project was announced in 2009. As a historical and natural area at the south edge of the city of Amed, Kırklar Dağı is very known among the population and thus a sensitive location. When the physical preparation for the housing projects started in 2011/2012, which actually was not in line with the master plan approved in 2006, the MEM and some other civil organizations requested an immediate stop and cancellation. After long discussions and negotiations, the two involved municipalities of Amed rejected this demand. So, when the construction started fully in 2013 a demonstration by the MEM with thousands of people was organized. Although the project did not stop, the demonstration was a novum for the KFM: a civil organization criticized publicly in a sharp way a municipality from their “own political movement” because of an urban project. However, this had some long-term impacts. In the following years, the Democratic Regions Party (DBP, the party of the KFM and member of the HDP) municipalities started to act more carefully when they planned any housing or bigger projects. This case showed that thinking and acting ecologically needs activists to consider also their own side and not the other side, the state and big capital. Apart from the case of Kırklar Dağı there are many other projects in the cities, which are the object of capitalist transformation and need to be regarded much more critically.

Another criticsm of the MEM targets the big shopping malls which have been constructed in the last years in each city. These are private projects and of course supported by the AKP government, but there were some cases where the DBP municipalities have not intervened and in a few cases even welcomed them. Some of the shopping malls could have been prevented, or at least delayed. The Turkish law allows the central government to take over city planning whenever it considers necessary. So, the question is how to resist this legal unfairness; even if it not possible to impede in the long-term the non-wanted projects, at least they should be delayed and subject to public debate. After intensive criticsm by the MEM and other movements like the women’s movement in 2014, a much more critical approach has been implemented by the DBP municipalities.

These two cases show that the ecology struggle in Bakur shouldn’t only focus in rural areas, but also in urban areas, because capitalism started to seek for profitable investment projects everywhere many years ago. 2013 was the year when an ecological awareness and criticsm started to express itself much more openly, accompanied by public actions, and this not only through the MEM. The youth movement, women´s movement, professional organizations (particularly architects, engineers, medical doctors), and trade unions achieved a qualitatively new level in their approach as to how society might be conceived from an ecological perspective.

At this point, it needs to be stated that within the concept of Democratic Confederalism, one field – in Bakur society is organized by the Democratic Society Congress (DTK/KCD) into 14 fields (also branch or sector), like women, justice, health, education, diplomacy, beliefs, ecology, municipalities, youth, self-defence – is usually promoted by one movement or organization, but it is not only limited to this organization. Actually, it is favored that activists from other fields also deeply discuss ecology, women’s liberation or communal-democratic economy. For this, the connections between the fields become important. In parliamentarian systems, ecological/environmental NGOs and movements usually act on their own for the objective to stop certain projects and/or to change the laws or society in ecological sense. In the new system of Bakur – and Rojava – the social movements struggle for their objectives, but do it within a democratic and inclusive system. This comes from the perception that society is one whole and has been divided by capitalist modernity so much that the different social and political groups and genders do not act in balance with each other: one group always tries to dominate the other one. In capitalist modernity, usually the groups with big financial capacities or weapons dominate over the others. This is a significant difference, which has been brought by Democratic Confederalism.

An example of how the different movements can work successfully together and how much the different fields are interrelated, are the relations of the MEM with the economy movement. The economy movement was formed in 2013 after broad discussions by dozens of activists from different struggles and critical economists from Bakur and Turkey. Among these people were several activists from the MEM. Since then, there has been a good connection and exchange between the two branches. The good relationship has brought the two branches together into cooperation on certain projects; projects which are related to both fields of ecology and economy. One example is the long-discussed construction of a bank for local organic seeds. A dynamic, cooperative and critical relation with the new upcoming economy movement, which wants to develop a communal and democratic economy in Bakur, is crucial for the aim of developing an ecological society. All that is discussed and developed among the MEM is aimed to be implemented in cooperation with the economy field as well with as the municipalities. Without considering communal economy, an ecological society is impossible, as described above.

The Mesopotamia Ecology Movement

In 2014, a new discussion among the activists of the MEM about its restructuring with the aim of becoming a real and broad social movement started. After many discussions, this resulted in the formation of councils in each province of Bakur, which offered space for political activists working on ecology and for newcomers. All previous and new initiatives and associations and activists working on ecology, but also other civil society organizations, professional organizations, unions, municipalities and the people’s councils of the KCD in the urban quarters and rural regions were invited to participate. This form of representation intends to include as much as possible of societal playors and to establish something which in short and medium term should build a society that is more ecological, and thus, more just and democratic.

The main work of the MEM is done in the different commissions which are established according to the needs and emphasis defined by the provincial councils. Every activist in the MEM joins at least one commission in their province. Apart from the commissions, which exist in nearly every province, there are some specific commissions. For example, in the province Dersim, there is one commission for forests, and in the metropolitan area of Amed, one for animal rights. There are also a few commissions at the Bakur level, like those for diplomacy, law and organising. The coordination at provincial level consists of the two co-spokespersons – one woman and one man. The co-chairs are elected periodically (3 or 6 months) by the provincial assembly, which gathers at least twice a year (sometimes 4 times each year). Each provincial assembly elects annually several (around 6) delegates based on a gender quota for the assembly at the Bakur level, which meets twice a year. The coordinations at the provincial level elect two delegates, one woman and one man, for the Bakur coordination, which meets more often than the Bakur assembly. As it can be determined within the MEM, each structure has a gender minimum quota of 40% for its delegates. The MEM itself has a 50% quota.

Since this restructuring, the MEM is now represented more strongly in the KCD through the actions, projects and campaigns it is realizing. The MEM can better bring its content and requests to the coordinations of the KCD on provincial and Bakur level, and to the KCD general assembly. The stronger the MEM is, the more it can impact on the KCD as a whole, and on its activists. For example, it is crucial to work towards those municipalities which have no good practice on ecology as well as on other issues.

The MEM is connected quite well with many ecological movements and NGO’s outside of Bakur within the Turkish state. Since 2015 there have been several common actions, delegations (like on forest fires) and discussions. In this sense, it is part of the ecology council of the People Democratic Council (HDK). The HDK is the turkey-wide supra-structure of all structures of direct democracy, thus also including the HDP. In other words, HDK is equivalent to KCD while not being comparatively strong like the KCD.

Since its start, the MEM had to struggle with a low awareness for ecology in society, which has its impacts in the different organizations of the KCD. Although there is a meaningful change in the last years, ecology is still considered by a big part of the society as something elitist and far away from real life and is associated with focusing on the conservation of some species, or important natural areas, or having healthy but expensive organic food. Moreover, the terminology used still does not make much understandable what the activists are seeking. That is why practice has become so crucial in order to attract more people for the movement. Considering that even a large number of people with an academic background are interested less in theory and more in practice, projects on the ground can motivate and activate many and can make better understandable what is aimed for with an ecological society. Projects like common gardening and traditional construction, which all interested people can join, also have the impact that the MEM can validate and develop its theoretical approach based on the outcomes of such projects. This should be considered also in the light that the KFM starts with the general approach in most fields of society and substantiates its approach in a protracted process of practice and discussion. Projects on the ground offer collective work and give back the feeling of community and solidarity to people, particularly from cities. One successful project was the collection of local and organic seeds from different areas of Bakur in the winter of 2015/2016 and their reproduction in 2016 in seven provinces. The reproduction has been done mostly with the local people’s neighborhood councils, which is a good example of how the different fields of the KCD can work together. This campaign on seeds received interest by many parts of the society. Considering that humans are rational as well as emotional beings, touching soil, water, mud, plants and wood can create a big synergy. A further result such a practical approach can have is that in times of repression and war it can hold people together and allow them to come through politically difficult periods, like the one started with the war in the summer of 2015, which worsened with the state of emergency in summer 2016.

In the autumn of 2015 the MEM conducted a half year discussion on the eight main political fields (agriculture, energy, water, health, communal economy, forests/biodiversity, ecological cities, eco-technology) for what working groups at the Bakur level had been established. At the end of these processes, papers were prepared and later approved at the first MEM conference in April 2016 in Wan. These policy papers have become the guidelines for the future work, which cover a broad span, and are linked to other political fields like women’s liberation, economy and health. This challenging work may help to find initial answers on the question as to which direction the MEM should take, strengthening without doubt the commitment to the struggle, and prividing tools for successfully struggling against the state and companies, as well as within the KFM.

Remarks

1) It needs to be stated that the heavy political repression in Bakur on all levels of political engagement, which started in summer 2015 and achieved an extreme level with the state of emergency declared in July 2016, has also strongly affected the MEM. Since then, most activities of the MEM have been limited, halted or changed. However, the activities have undergone some important changes. In this paper, the period after the state of emergency has not been considered. Rather, it has aimed to describe the development of the consciousness and discussion on and the struggle for ecology in Bakur before the current repression.

2) The discussions and practice of Rojava has not been included in this paper as there are very different frameworks (no state any more, much less capitalism, etc.) although the political concept is the same.

1. In recent discussions also described as “extractivism”.
2. The KFM uses the definition capitalist modernity in order to describe the current hegemonic political-economic system. According to that, capitalism covers mainly economical activities, while capitalist modernity is a system which includes the political and ideological (for example, mentality, human relations, social behavior) dimension of the developed hegemonic system.
3. Change from use value to exchange value
4. Often “basic needs” is used in such discussions. But it’s quite difficult to differ between “needs” and “basic needs”, thus here it is foregone to use “basic”.
5. Instead of “resources”, which is used widespread nowadays, here “elements” is preferred. “Resources” assumes that they exist or wait to be extracted and exploited by capitalist economy.

The Mesopotamian Ecology Movement announced that it had launched a campaign to plant seedlings throughout the month of April. The campaign, announced with a written statement, also called for support, MA reports.

“The result of endless wars in the Mesopotamia Region is the genocide of peoples, the rape and systematic torture of hundreds of thousands of people, especially women and children, and the irreversible destruction of the entire habitat. The geography of Mesopotamia is apocalyptic. As a result of the destruction caused by the war, water assets are destroyed, forests are burned and looted, millions of hectares of agricultural land become toxic and barren.” the statement said.

The activists of the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement also drew attention to the destruction of nature caused by the military operations launched by Turkey and other countries in the region and the companies which benefited from that.

“Reeds are destroyed in Iraq/Basra, Lake Urmiye is dried up in Iran and forests are bombed in Syria. The direction flow of rivers are being changed on the grounds that the states need energy which leaves many other people deprived of water. With dams and Hydroelectric Power Plant’s (HES) built on top of the Tigris, Euphrates, Aras and Munzur rivers, valleys, agricultural areas and settlements were flooded.”

The statement continues:

“Trees are cut down for the sake of quarries in Ikizdere, while ‘safety’ tree cuttings continue in Cudi, Lice and Bingöl regions of Turkey. Construction work has been done in forest areas for the benefits of tourism and energy companies. In this century when the climate crisis is deepening, the destruction of habitats and cultural values is unacceptable.”

The campaign to plant seedlings

The activists concluded that throughout April, they would plant saplings in order to protect nature.

“In the face of these, we are launching a campaign to plant seedlings throughout April. We call on political parties, non-governmental organizations, workers, women, young people, children, in short, all segments of society and the public. Wherever you are; We invite you to participate in our campaign regardless of place, from the garden of our house to our balconies, from to streets to school gardens, from our villages to the plains and mountains.”

Would you briefly introduce yourself and explain how you came to deal with the topic of “ecology and war”?

My name is Kamuran Akın, I am a Kurdish political refugee and activist scholar in Berlin. I am doing my PhD at Humboldt University and writing my thesis on the colonial rule of the Turkish state in North Kurdistan. If we only look at the recent history of the Kurds, there has been a war in North Kurdistan for 40 years. But if you look at the history of the Kurds, you can say that this state of war or struggle for existence of the Kurds has actually been going on for 100 years. And I am investigating the destructive effects of this colonial endeavor on the geography and ecology of North Kurdistan through the HPP (Hydroelectric Power Plants), Kalekols (military high security checkpoints), and forest fires. So, in a sense, I am examining how Turkish colonialism affects the geography and ecology of North Kurdistan.

Wars can cause severe environmental damage. Throughout history, it has not been uncommon for drinking water to be contaminated, agricultural land to be burned, or soil to be rendered infertile by salinization. Dams and levees have also often been targeted. How do you evaluate the environmental damage caused by the current war operations in Kurdistan?

It is a reality that has been known for centuries that geography is used as an instrument of war, including ecology. If we look at the example of Kurdistan, we see that in the past, for example, in the Kurdish-Alevi province of Dersim, dams were built for the purpose of repression and counterinsurgency, and military outposts were built on the most important hilltops. A similar policy is being implemented today in almost all Kurdish cities under the guise of the security discourse. And in my thesis, I insist that these geopolitical infrastructure projects (such as Hydroelectric Power Plants HPP, Kalekols and also forest fires) are carried out with colonial intention. Today, these geopolitical infrastructure projects not only serve as a security strategy in the war against the guerrilla, but they also mean the irreversible destruction of the geography of Kurdistan as they are still being expanded. We can already foresee the enormous scale of ecological destruction that began immediately after the completion of the Ilısu Dam, which was built in what was the historic Heskîf (Hasankeyf) and the Tigris Valley. According to official documents of some state institutions, many HPPs built in Kurdistan, especially the Ilısu Dam, are considered `security dams`. Under their concept of “security” we can understand that the local residents and the people of the region, who had returned full of hope to their villages that had been burned down in the 1990s, are irrevocably forced to migrate. In the reports published by ecological activists of the Mesopotamian Ecological Movement (MEH-Mezopotamya Ekoloji Hareketi), there is statistical data about the ecological disaster caused by these dam constructions. For example, cutting off the water supply to Rojava in the summer months, discharging dirty sewage into the agricultural areas of Rojava, and siltation of areas are only the most well-known of the ecological war tools used by the Turkish state in recent years. I don’t want to repeat anything, but share some notes from the interviews I did for my PhD thesis. Today, cancer cases are increasing in Dersim due to gold mining activities involving the use of cyanide. The retention of water by weirs and changing the direction of the natural course of rivers, the ambiguity of seasonal transitions due to the effects of the global ecological crisis have caused the degradation of the ecosystem existing in the region and a noticeable decline in biodiversity. Dams, kalekols and security roads built along a line in Şirnex (Şırnak) and Colemêrg (Hakkari) are turning the nature of Kurdistan into a concrete desert. Burning down all the surrounding forest areas to protect the respective Kalekols, tells us the following: The aim of the Turkish state is to use these three interlinked geopolitical measures as a means of ecological warfare to eliminate the possibility of a future life for the Kurds in an autonomous Kurdistan.

How are resources used as weapons today? For example, why is it geostrategically important for NATO to have control over water resources?

In a war situation, weapons can be anything used against an enemy or to gain a strategic, material, or mental advantage by one group, state, or organization over another. Interestingly, the term “weapon” is not formally defined in international law or treaties regulating the use of force. Since the end of the Cold War, researchers have increasingly explored the links between natural resources, security, and conflict. They distinguish several arguments in the literature for possible interactions between violence and natural resources. According to this, the first possibility is that natural resources contribute to the escalation of events and to violent conflicts. Although the biophysical environment is rarely the sole cause of conflict, natural resources may indirectly contribute to the escalation of violence or be part of a broader political strategy. When coupled with political instability, scarce natural resources can fuel conflict over access to shared transboundary resources between competing states, e.g. the Turkish state uses dams to impede the flow of water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to neighboring countries such as Iraq and Syria, using water as a threat. It is worth noting that the main factor behind the desire to establish hegemony over neighboring states with water policy, despite existing international conventions, is the presence of the PKK in the region. A second possibility is that the biophysical environment becomes a direct or indirect target in violent conflicts, either as a weapon, victim, or beneficiary of the conflict. For example, it may be “weaponized” and used by one of the parties to the conflict as a direct means of exerting violence against the opposing party. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a well-known example of a conflict in which water scarcity plays a role and is used by various parties as a means of exerting pressure. If we again take an example from North Kurdistan, as I am investigating in my doctoral thesis, the construction of hydroelectric power plants with the help of water blockage or the burning of forest areas can be shown to be means of war. Even though the occupation of Rojava (West Kurdistan) by the Turkish state is tolerated or ignored by NATO members and European Union member states today, everyone knows the extent of the ecocide taking place there. For example, we learn from reports of the international organizations what kind of war crimes and natural massacres are taking place in Efrîn today. Let me end the answer to your question with a personal remark. There are two well-known reasons for the way NATO members, especially the U.S., seize natural resources in war zones. The first is the war for hegemony they are waging as a continuation of the Cold War against Russia and Iran. Second, there is the support of terrorist organizations such as IS and al-Qaeda, especially in the Middle East and African countries, only to then act as problem solvers to end the destruction wrought by these terrorist organizations and gain control of natural resources. In short, Capitalist Modernity continues to exploit the people of the region so that they continue to be dependant, and it is turning the geography of the Middle East, especially Kurdistan, into a dumping ground by war.

How is the ecological paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement being implemented? And what is war doing to this understanding of ecology? What does self-defense mean in terms of ecology?

The revolution is based on an ecological ethic, and there is a reason for that. The nation-state and Capitalist Modernity have deprived society of its own resources and made it dependent on the state and often on the benevolence of the state. We see, for example, in North Kurdistan, a systematic plunder and genocide of the environment. The attempts of the states to prevent any environmental sustainability in Kurdistan are part of the broader war against the Kurds and their revolution. Indeed, the relationship between capitalist nation-states and the environment is more severe than ever before. We have a global ecological crisis, and states are still thinking about their short-term profit, which is causing the destruction of our environment, but also migration flows, war over natural resources, famines, etc. War means destruction. The ecological paradigm is based on the idea of sustainability despite the problems caused by nation states and war policies. For example, the ecological paradigm wants to find solutions from within society, and develop approaches for society to organize itself to solve problems such as water scarcity, desertification, and dependence on oil production, etc. Resilience and strength comes from within society and its own resources. This is something that the revolution in Rojava has shown. Abdullah Öcalan has stressed many times that one must not wait for mercy from one’s oppressors. One must not demand something from the state when the state is acting as an oppressor. He has emphasized that all solutions to society’s problems lie within society. Rojava is a good example of the fact that self-defense does not only mean taking up arms against the enemy, such as the so-called Islamic State, but that self-defense means being equipped with an ideology that allows one to build one’s own system, find one’s own solutions to the problems, maximize autonomy, and make the political system self-sufficient, resistant to attacks, and a role model for the world and other oppressed people.

Women’s liberation plays a central role in the paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. How is the solution of the ecological question related to women’s liberation?

I am responding to your question as someone who is still going through self-reflections on his own masculinity, so the following can only be read from this perspective and with these limitations. The liberation of women is central to the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s understanding of the liberation of society. Nothing can be regarded separately. Liberation is an organic process and must involve all aspects of life and society. Öcalan refers to women as the first colony and has coined the term “housewife marriage” in which men have systematically deprived women of their freedoms. Again, if we understand nature as a colony, then we see how the liberation of women from patriarchy is similar to the ecological question. In this sense, for example, Jineolojî is an essential component. Even if you have enough organizational and ideological power, it turns out that you are insufficient in defining the sociological foundation if you cannot reflect it in the society. Jineolojî grounds the paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement in a scientific field. She regards science neither as a power nor on a positivist ground, but as a definition of life based on a regime of truth. She does this with serious concerns and honest ambitions. Above all, Jineolojî, born from the struggle against all the destruction caused by the male principle embodied in the male state – the representative of patriarchy – proposes a new model of life under the leadership of women. In this sense, women’s self-decolonization will be a dynamic force in decolonizing all colonial practices, especially ecological destruction, in the geography of Kurdistan. Women’s empowerment and autonomy is also linked to the strengthening of women’s abilities to be self-reliant, financially, socially and environmentally. Currently, we have a great example before us: the armed and political movement of Kurdish women. We have the Rojava Revolution as a great source of inspiration, and there are new life practices that are being promoted by women. In this context, there is the establishment of women’s co-operatives such as Eko-Jin and KED (Woman-Labor-Nature) in North Kurdistan. Or as an example from Rojava: Jinwar, a village built by women for women, including reforestation, planting, irrigation systems and collective principles.

How can the paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement be a solution to this global problem?

Let me try to answer such a seemingly simple but difficult question by standing somewhere between hope and desire, but also with my sympathy for a liberation movement that has high aspirations and its founder as an ideological leader. Against all the creative-destructive policies that capitalist modernity has pursued in its 300-year colonial history, a 45-year-old freedom movement that emerged in a geography like Kurdistan, which is extremely fragmented and oppressed, is challenging this modernity and building Democratic Modernity against it. And it is trying to do so in all areas. This is not a simple task. It is a movement that is fighting and building at the same time. I think that is the difference from classical revolutions. The movement does not say that we will first make a revolution and later build a new life. The paradigm of a self-renewing movement that aims at revolution and sees this goal as a path on which to move forward is attracting attention all over the world today. While a paradigm and an alternative model of life that seek to destroy the entire accumulation of Capitalist Modernity to date is being implemented and further developed in Rojava today, this is fundamentally disapproved of by the capitalist states. While the paradigm of Democratic Modernity is growing stronger and is spreading all over the world, attempts are being made to criminalize it, war is being imported into the geography of Kurdistan, political and ethnic genocides and occupations in Kurdistan are being supported directly or indirectly, and hypocrisy is taking place. To complete my words, maybe we don’t have much time left in such an era of global catastrophe, now we should abandon the critical revolutionary approach and see our shortcomings and accelerate the constructive revolutionary approach by taking care not to repeat old mistakes while building the alternative. In the effort to increase the proportion of freedom in society, we must constantly realize our own alternative and ensure the victory of freedom by having a strong aspiration. The despotic and destructive policies of the fascist and bourgeois governments, which have increased all over the world in recent years, require a hard struggle of all other social movements, especially of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. The only alternative against this colonial order is the adoption and promotion of the methods and means of a continuous struggle for the construction of a new life, as well as the struggle against the destruction by capitalism.

This article was first published in the May/June 2021 edition of the Kurdistan Report.

These are the opening lines of the declaration signed in 2012 by Iraqi sheiks gathered in the ancient town of Hasankeyf, a 12,000-year-old historical settlement in south-eastern Turkey at risk of being flooded upon completion of the Ilisu Dam – one of the many branches of the Turkish GAP hydropower project. The statement went beyond solidarity: community leaders from the Arab marshlands downstream and Kurdish activists upstream stressed a common heritage in need of protection. In an ethnically composite and politically fragmented region, terminology is never neutral. The use of the toponym “Mesopotamia”, literally the land between the two rivers of the Fertile Crescent, underscored belonging to a historically distinctive area along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and a collective memory encompassing multiple cultures, thus diluting ethno-national separations and unifying socio-environmental struggles against manmade threats to shared waterways. 

Rather than being a one-off initiative, that early declaration gradually inspired the blooming of a counter-narrative to nationalist policies. In April 2019 civil society organizations of the four riparian countries (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran) met in Iraq, in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, to hold the first Mesopotamian Water Forum under the umbrella of the Save the Tigris Campaign and the slogan “water knows no border”. In line with environmental campaigns worldwide advocating for the principle of free-flowing rivers, the activists assembled at the University of Sulaymaniyah rejected the use of water as political tool and took a stance for the equitable sharing of waterways. Rather than climate change, emphasis was put on the damage inflicted through negligence or self-interest by riparian governments, thus underlining their non-compliance with international law, and in particular with the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, in order to make countries accountable for misuse of the riverine ecosystem.  

By shifting attention from water shares to water rights, the Forum was relevant in a twofold sense: first, disengage water issues from the zero-sum game of geopolitical struggles regional countries are mired in; second, posit a bottom-up model of environmental governance that is attentive to the direct involvement of local communities. Beyond that, however, the innovative message of the mobilization lies in the re-articulation at the ideological level of Mesopotamia as discursive marker. “Mesopotamia” is devoid of sectarian and factional connotations since it recalls the glorious past of pre-Islamic empires and civilizations that are lost in history. It pre-dates the modern-day state system. “Mesopotamia is not sensitive to anyone”, explained an organizer of the forum, “It’s not Arab, or Persian, or Syrian. Everybody wants to be part of it”. 

Not by chance, the re-imagination of Mesopotamia owes much to the transnational Kurdish liberation movement. Known as the largest stateless nation in the world, Kurds have drawn on it to legitimate claims for autonomy in their host states and wish for the overall political reconfiguration of the Middle East. Starting with the prison writings of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan, in recent years a wide repertoire of actions and frameworks was developed. Most notably, the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement was formed during the 2011 Social Forum in Diyarbakır, the major Kurdish city in Turkey. The revolution unfolding in Rojava, the Syrian side of Kurdistan, is also guided by the principles of ecology and political pluralism.     

Back to water politics, the reference to Mesopotamia as common space brings to the fore an inclusive understanding of security that goes beyond the state-centric territorialization of international rivers, which misconceives water resources as a feature of sovereignty. Historically, the emergence of nation-states and central administrations led to the partition of water bodies into national segments. In so doing, waterscapes are constructed as integral parts of the homeland: not only a strategic resource, kept inside sovereign borders, but also a figurative element belonging to the national community. Through this process of material and symbolic territorialization, which breaks the hydrological continuity of transboundary basins, water becomes a hardly negotiable resource. Water is seen as something to “be appropriated, annexed, secured” by state actors that compete for dwindling resources. In a region endowed with less than 1.5% of the world’s renewable freshwater supply, scarcity comes to be a byword for conflict. 

Despite impetus in UN policy circles on integrated planning and management across different jurisdictions, nationalism runs deep into predominant formulations of water governance. It is therefore not surprising that diplomacy has fallen short of securing peaceful solutions to looming water deficits and the potential conflicts that may arise. Tellingly, the Tigris-Euphrates basin is not governed by any multilateral agreement between riparian countries, thus leaving water issues at the mercy of unilateral actions. Relentless damming in Turkey and Iran at the expense of Iraq is a case in point.

Against this background, the path-breaking call for a Mesopotamian identity goes towards de-escalation of disputes and promotion of a rights-based decentred approach to water governance. The myth sustains an environmental vision surmounting the arbitrary lines of ethnicity, class, religion, and political affiliation. This holistic view also stresses a key balance between environment and society: biodiversity and sustainability are thought to be inseparable from multi-ethnic and multi-cultural richness. This connects in principle all cases of environmental injustice across the basin, from the flooding of Hasankeyf in Turkey to the depletion of the spring of Khani Bil in Iran. In other words, historical and ecological connectedness is central to the framing of a common identity, upon which inclusive and participatory arrangements within the transboundary water system may blossom. In light of recent protests sparked in Iraq and elsewhere in the broader region, hopes for democratization also run through its historical rivers and the ways these are governed.

Since the beginning of 2015, “Mesopotamia Ecology Movement”, which was formed in 2011, has entered an important process of restructuring itself. Under a new structure and with profounder political claims, more and more people are getting involved for a more ecological society, producing a new dynamic which will have short- and long-term positive effects on Northern Kurdistan.

Origins of the movement and first structure

In the beginning of 2011, a discussion started at the ecology forum (organised by the Mesopotamian Social Forum, MSF) in Amed (Diyarbakır) on how the various initiatives, organisations and other social movements from Northern Kurdistan working against ecological-social destructions caused by neoliberal investment projects, could form a common structure or movement. The years prior to this had seen the emergence of several initiatives and associations in some provinces of Northern Kurdistan which had started campaigning against destructive water dams, diversion (hydro) plants, coal mining projects, coal burning power plants, cement mining etc. Of these were best known at that point of time mainly the campaigns and protests against the Ilısu dam, which had been going on since 1999, and water dams in Dersim (Tunceli); but also new protests gained regional publicity, such as against large-scale cement mining in Bazarcix/Gurgum (Pazarcık/Maraş), the operation of a coal burning power plant hazardous to health in Silopi/Şirnex (Silopi/Şırnak), or antisocial developments in urbanisation. Beside these social movements consisting of initiatives there were several classical environmental associations in cities such as Êlih (Batman), Qoser (Kızıltepe), Wan (Van) and Amed, which raised awareness of several problematic situations and developments and conducted activities, albeit on a low level.

However, it took as long as until the 2. Mesopotamian Social Forum in Amed in September 2011, to at last tackle the establishment of working structures. This delay was caused, amongst others, by most initiatives and associations in Northern Kurdistan mostly possessing weak structures and little capacities; ecological awareness in society being hardly existent; and by the fact that until then, no experience in bringing together social movements and associations/NGOs existed.

In the following one to two years a structure was established which initially could be termed a network rather than a movement. This coordination, working on a basic level, was carried by a handful of activists from Amed. Altogether eleven initiatives and associations met regularly, albeit not frequently, to agree on positions and prepare common activities, campaigns and statements. The structure, based solely on voluntary efforts, managed to bring several topics to the regional public from time to time. Statewide mainstream media foreseeably did not take notice of the Mesopotamia Ecology Movement (Mezopotamya Ekoloji Hareket MEH); only some leftist media reported on activities in a few cases. All in all, common activities seldom took place, but common statements were spread to a greater extent. The few activities were concerned with the Ilısu dam, test drillings for planned fracking processes, and refusal of construction projects in Amed. MEH did react to new destructions, the announcement or begin of investment projects in almost all cases. From 2013 onwards MEH was able to slightly intensify their activities, a development which benefitted from the suspension of the war in Northern Kurdistan through a bilateral defacto ceasefire. Thus, information on several destructive or exploitative investment projects was collected and exchanged, articles written, actions conducted against new forms of investment projects (such as fracking, forestry, dams solely for military purposes) and the agenda expanded to e.g. include agricultural seeds, forests, gentrification).

The years between 2011 and 2014 in the provinces saw either several groups (initiatives and associations) and activists working parallelly while seldom together, or one group/activists working alone. The first case meant that the already weak forces were dispersed, and it was common for two or three groups to work on the same topic, but independently (best examples are Dersîm and Êlih). In the second case, these few activists rarely managed to mobilise larger parts of society for a topic, so they remained on the margin. About ten or fifteen years ago, the political structures in the provinces, also organised under the Congress for a Democratic Society (DTK), on a local level hardly possessed any awareness for the preservation of nature. Despite praising it, it was also seen as an element to be exploited, thus creating jobs. The theoretical approach of the Kurdish freedom movement in this question did not help much. But, the larger a city was, the more people existed who eyed every investment and lifestyle critically.

Besides these examples for the limitation of activities, there were a few provinces or districts where despite ecological devastation no protests evolved. These regions were as a rule particularly conservative, rural and/or economically weak.

As from 2012, after MEH was set up, it was represented with delegates in the Democratic Society Congress (DTK-KCD), this being the superstructure of all political structures of the freedom movement in Northern Kurdistan. Due to it’s recent initiation and general weakness it was represented to a much smaller extent when compared to other movements such as the women’s, youth or language movement. Leaving numbers apart, topics explicitly related to ecology were seldom discussed in the DTK General Assembly in these years, even though the Kurdish freedom movement’s paradigm drafts a “democratic, woman liberated and ecological society”. Establishing an ecology commission within the DTK in 2013 did not help much to change this either. The biggest reason is mainly to be found within MEH itself; they were not really good at making it comprehensible to other activists and large parts of the population how destructive-exploitative investment projects are related to the social structure, politics, culture and economy of Kurdistan. They did not fight vigorously enough for their own purposes within the Kurdish freedom movement and failed to find appropriate means. Nevertheless, MEH or rather, the struggles and discussions which were led, have in these years contributed to a not unsubstantial change in ecological awareness.

Restructuring the ecology movement

Despite a broader base and deeper discussions in 2013 and 2014 both within the Mesopotamian ecology movement and the public in Northern Kurdistan, and a heightened ecological awareness, the political practice of initiatives, associations and MEH was not able to do justice to this. In order to escape this always perceivable dilemma, a new and comprehensive discussion was started in autumn 2014. The aim was to establish a larger societal base for MEH and heighten it’s political effectiveness.

This discussion included the aims of MEH, which were to be newly discussed, updated and substantiated. The aims formulated before demanded in general “a more ecological society” which respects the rights of nature and rejects capitalist utilisation logic. A more detailed description was out of place. This was in part caught up on in the last discussion. Hence, material and service production should be aligned with fundamental requirements and consumption regularised accordingly; the growth paradigm should be questioned more openly, more value should be attached to ecological non-industrial agriculture, and it should be recognised that use of energy and material goods basically has to be be reduced on a large scale. The stress on anticapitalism was reinforced.

In order to pursue these goals, undoubtedly demands to the Turkish government will continue to be made, but also municipal governments will be held responsible more than ever. This is actually more important in order for alternatives on a local level to be put into effect. That is why MEH on the one hand wants those municipal governments close to them – especially those governed by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) – to join a concerted struggle against destructive-exploitative investment projects. For in the past, HDP municipal governements had not only in a few cases acted uncritically and supported several projects of the central government, simply uncritically assuming that investments would create jobs. On the other hand, the municipal governments were needed in some cases for the implementation of alternative projects in certain locations.

The discussions were led over several months and resulted in a distinct restructuring of the ecology movement. In January 2015, a defined measure was at last finalised, embracing all initiatives and associations of MEH as well as newcomers, which was to be put into effect immediately. It’s core are the ecology councils (Meclîsa Ekolojî), which in every province are to be put on a very broad base. All previous and new initiatives and associations, individual activists, but also professional organisations, municipal governments and the people’s councils of the DTK in the urban quarters and rural regions should participate in them. This form of representation intends to include every social dynamic and to establish something which in short and medium term should devise a society more ecological, and thus, more socially just and democratic.

The ecology councils of the provinces, once they are established in the provinces of Northern Kurdistan, are to convene in altogether five regions – Botan, Serhat, Amed, Dersim and Euphrat. Then, MEH is to be organised through delegates on the level of Northern Kurdistan. This structure is adjusted to that of the DTK. Most commissions or constituent parts are organised on these three levels. This new structure aims at a much stronger representation of MEH in the DTK than before. Besides, every provincial ecology council will send one to two delegates into the ecology commission of the People’s Democratic Congress (HDK). HDK is the turkey-wide suprastructure of all structures of direct democracy, thus also including the HDP.

Restructuring MEH started practically on February 28, 2015, by founding the ecology council of Amed province. To this plenary meeting all interested individuals and groups in Amed province had been invited, and participants discussed the objectives and afterwards formed a coordination which is open to every interested person to be active in. There are no elections to it, only if the majority objects to somebody’s participation, will it be denied. Thus, all in all 29 people formed the coordination of the ecology council of Amed, which elected in their first meeting two co-speakers for the duration of three months. For then the next plenary meeting took place, where the coordination was expanded to 40 people. The coordination is the element which keeps the ecology council of a province alive. It meets and forms commissions as and when required. The ecology council of Amed acted and still acts as a model for the establishment of ecology councils in the other provinces.

To date, ecology councils have been established in four provinces after several months’ efforts: In Amed, Dersim, Êlih and Wan. In more than ten provinces, voluntary commissions are preparing the establishment of an ecology council. In Amed, after several months of political work, the need for additional ecology councils in the single districts of the province was formulated. They are fitter to articulate problems and alternatives in their districts. For the ecology council of Amed is very much focused on the province capital and single major projects in the province, and it has proven to be difficult for people from the district towns to be able to regularly attend the meetings of the coordination.

The four ecology councils already established and the preparation commissions in the other provinces of Northern Kurdistan have already formed a coordination and are meeting regularly. They collectively discuss problems of the various provinces and also work out proposals for perspectives.

Challenges to the new ecological movement

A number of challenges to be met result from MEH’s new structure, some foreseeably so and some which the activists were barely aware of. But also the path has been opened to unfold a new dynamic through this structure, which is unique in the world, and build a strong ecological movement in Northern Kurdistan.

The first major challenge is to integrate, as planned, municipal governments in the ecology councils of the provinces, for until 2015, MEH consisted only of individuals, initiatives, associations – that is, social movements – and now actors from the municipal government level are to be involved. Although they are tightly limited by laws and practical constraints through the central government, they carry a certain responsibility for their actions and possess a certain scope of action on the municipal level. Let us remember that in recent years, MEH activists have in some cases directed their criticism against municipal governments as well. While municipal government representatives’ standards are rarely very high, this in contrast is much more often the case with the other actors of MEH.

In an international perspective, there are many social movements and civil networks worldwide fighting destructive-exploitative investment projects. But the activists in Kurdistan would not know of structures which resemble their own. Worldwide, either single and probably big social movements or statewide networks/alliances lead campaigns against one or several investment projects, or against one or more certain laws. Some social movements would sometimes form alliances with single municipal governements concerned with the projects criticised. But it is not normally the case to systematically include municipal governments into social movements. Likewise, structures such as the ecology councils in Northern Kurdistan, where all eco activists of a region work together, seldom exist. Since Northern Kurdistan goes different ways, there are no experiences MEH could resort to.

Should it get organised in all provinces and a large number of people become active, questions of organisation and decision making would become acute. It remains to be seen then whether the middle level of the MEH structure represents a solution. There may be other ways. It would be more important to create councils in all respective districts in order to let people in rural areas and small towns partake in activities.

The question arises for a number of groups who work in the ecological field and are part of MEH, as to how they themselves will be recognised, i.e. whether and how they as groups will continue to act. Amed ecology council respectively MEH of course do not request any group to conduct their specific activities only in the name of MEH. But the establishment of the ecology councils has led to many protests and campaigns being organised in the name of the respective MEH ecology council. Especially those who started their activism as individuals when the ecology councils were founded, do not think of their own group simply because they hadn’t been part of one before.

With the organised groups the result has partly been that less activities of their own took place. But there are groups conducting their own activities, partly adding MEH to their own name. This is especially the case in Amed and Êlih. Most groups are still discussing this aspect and only more months of practice can lead to further results.

MEH’s strengths are manifold. The coordinations set up in the ecology councils of the provinces are diversified and open for all ecologically committed people, which is why they were able to include many of them. The second strength is decisions being taken in consensus. Many long discussions taking place sometimes does not change the fact that it works well so far. Consensus decision making is relatively new to the Kurdish freedom movement and it has not existed in MEH until then; presently the political self-organisation of ecological activists is collecting unique and essential experiences in this. In part, the fast rotation of co-speakers in every ecology council results in the political work not weighing on few shoulders alone, but rather many activists taking responsibility.

Another important claim of MEH is to link up with the existing people’s councils of the DTK system in the different urban quarters and small towns. They are invited to join, and so far most of the coordinations’ meetings have taken place in the centres of the people’s councils on the level of urban quarters. Thus, an increased sensitivity of activists for the urban quarters’ problems from an ecological point of view is created; and equally, the urban quarter council activists can acquaint themselves with he concept of ecology and subsequent claims.

To conclude, it is of high importance that the society in Northern Kurdistan takes MEH more seriously now that the ecology councils have been created, and that MEH can introduce, via the DTK, their issues and demands better to the existing political structures. The activities conducted by various groups in the past fifteen years (mainly against dams) were of course a precondition so that in that part of society which is highly politicised, ecological claims could be filled with practical content. The restructuring of MEH which is taking place right now is an expression of deepening discussions about destructive-exploitative investment projects and about a more ecological society.

The 1st Mesopotamian Water Forum was held on April 6-8, 2019 in Sulaimani (Sulaymaniyah) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. More than 180 water activists from the Mesopotamia region and other countries gathered for the 3-day forum at Sulaimani University.

Several civil society organizations from all over Mesopotamia – in particular members of the Save the Tigris Campaign – organized this water forum, which consisted of several plenary sessions and nine workshops. It was an open space to give voice to civil society of the region, too often excluded from decisions on water. The forum was accompanied by a photo exhibition on the upper Tigris River.

The activists denounced the grave impacts of dams and other water infrastructure on social structures, river ecosystems, cultural heritage, and local economies. The lack of democratic, decision-making mechanisms was highlighted. Another important aspect that was critiqued is the use of dams as weapons of hegemony by upstream states and powers against downstream communities. Strong alternative approaches were proposed to counter these developments.

After a vibrant discussion of the final declaration, it was decided to organize the 2nd Mesopotamian Water Forum in Diyarbakir (Amed).

Water for Life and Water for Peace!

Below the final declaration in English.

“Water is Under Assault in Mesopotamia” – Final Declaration 1st Mesopotamia Water Forum

Declaration 1st Mesopotamian Water Forum (MWF)

University of Sulaimani,
Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region of Iraq 6-8 April 2019

Over-extraction; the draining of marshes and wetlands; deforestation; too many irrigation projects, poorly-drained land; pesticides and fertiliser run-off; contamination by poorly or often un-treated discharges from industry as well as households; the widespread building of large and cascade small dams; the increasing exploitation of groundwater aquifers; stream channelization; inter catchment water transfer schemes; and the ravages of fossil-fuel-induced climatic change have variously disrupted hydrological cycles and created conditions of severe local and regional scarcity. For human and non-human beings, such physical scarcities have been exacerbated by policies aimed at commodifying and/or politicising water, denying access to the common good of water.

Taken separately, each of those assaults would be cause for grave concern. Taken together, they pose a threat to the collective survival of humans and non-humans alike. Defending water and the right of all forms of life to access to water, in Mesopotamia, is now a critical civic duty: without water, there can be no life.

Water is a crucial element of our culture and spirituality. Many legends, myths, songs, poems, prayers, and dances are centered on water. This has been the case since humans settled in Mesopotamia up to 13.000 years ago.

Within Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran – the four states through which the rivers of the Mesopotamian Basin flow – the multiple crises affecting water are no accident. For the past century or more, governments, business interests and the military have recklessly pursued policies that have polluted and degraded the region’s rivers and ecosystems.

Hundred of thousands have been forcibly displaced from their homes to make way for dams and water transfer projects. The riverine environment has been severely degraded, threatening the survival of many species of flora and fauna; the health of citizens has been put at risk; and economic and social inequalities have increased.

None of this has gone unchallenged. Throughout the Mesopotamian region, vibrant movements for environmental and social justice have long sought to exercise their constitutional rights to campaign for access to clean and safe water. In many instances, they have been met by arrest, imprisonment or worse.

Committed to working for peaceful, sustainable and equitable solutions to these multiple injustices, over 150 water activists from the region, together with like-minded colleagues from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, gathered at the University of Sulaimani in the Kurdistan region of Iraq from 6-8 April 2019 to participate in the first ever Mesopotamian Water Forum.

We met in the spirit of solidarity and mutual learning. We interrogated the many causes of water scarcity, exploring the complex ways in which demand for water is mediated through economic and social systems. We learned how the intensive construction of dams and other water infrastructure schemes have created water scarcity.

We explored alternative ways of managing water in the interests of the many, not the few. We heard of new initiatives, notably in the Rojava/Northeastern region of war-torn Syria, to evolve new participatory approaches to water governance, involving all citizens – regardless of ethnicity, gender or religion – in bottom-up, consensual approaches to decision-making.

We people of Mesopotamia – and the allies present at the Mesopotamian Water Forum – affirmed that, despite our diverse cultural, social, political and environmental realities, our struggles are one, and we expressed our solidarity with all those who struggle for water justice in the region and internationally.

We resolved to:

1.Challenge destructive and exploitative water policies in the region, recognising the particular burden on women and other oppressed identities, and addressing their underlying causes.

2. Mobilise support for negotiated agreements under legally binding international law that would ensure the equitable sharing of water of the Euphrates and Tigris for the benefit of all life, both human and non-human, in the region;

3. Stand against the use of water as a weapon for hegemony and to work to ensure that water is a tool for cooperation and sustainable peace. Upstream states in Mesopotamia must ensure the rights of people downstream to water.

4. Call for an end to the recent cutting of water flows by Turkey and Iran to Syria and Iraq.

5. Call to prevent the flooding of the 12000-year-old city of Hasankeyf caused by the Ilisu Dam and to preserve the unique natural and cultural heritage of the Iraqi Mesopotamian Marshlands from degradation.

6. Build alliances, nationally, regionally and internationally to evolve policies and practices that would democratise water management.

7. Ensure that water is used in ways that prioritise the collective right of all, rather than the few, to survival;

8. Considering that most diverted water goes to irrigation, the following points are crucial: For farmers in a subsistence economy, clean water is vital, which is why in areas close to water no chemicals should be used. As hybrid seeds and GMO seeds require too much water and harm the ecosystems, local seeds should be used. Animal shelter should not be built close to water so that no serious harm is caused to waters. The water used in agriculture should not be contaminated by industry. Irrigation close to the water course is feasible, but no water should be transferred to areas far away from the water course. Thus, instead of transfering water to plants, plants appropriate to the climate and precipitation regime should be cultivated.

9. The pollution and destruction of the Tigris River starts in an intensive way far upstream. One reason for this is that the river has no river status in the upstream stretch until Bismil city. We call for an international campaign to declare the river status for the upper-most stretch of the Tigris River.
10. To strengthen the Save the Tigris Campaign (STC) as a network through which water activists in Mesopotamia can exchange information and analysis, explore commonalities and differences, prepare common statements and reports and organize common activities/campaigns.

11. Develop the Mesopotamian Water Forum as an open space for advocating for new decision-making processes at municipal, national and regional levels through which environmentally and socially just water policies can be inclusively formulated and promoted.

12. Implement the specific recommendations made by workshops at the Forum.

13. We have committed to organise the 2nd Mesopotamian Water Forum in Diyarbakir (Amed) / Turkey in the near future.

Main contributing organizations:

Save the Tigris Campaign (STC)
Humat Dijla (Tigris Keepers), Iraq
Mesopotamia Ecology Movement, North Kurdistan
Iraqi Civil Society Solidarity Initiative (ICSSI), Iraq
Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive, Turkey
People’s Campaign to Save the Kind Zagros, Iran
Waterkeepers Iraq, Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Make Rojava Green Again Campaign, Rojava/Northeast Syria
Ecology Union, Turkey
Mountain Watch, Iran
DOZ international, Northeast Syria
KAREZE Environmental Organization, Iran
Mlakawa Organisation, Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Nature Kurdistan, Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Ecopeace, Middle East
Lebanon Eco Movement, Lebanon
Rivers Without Boundaries, East and North Asia
Movement of Defence of Water, Land and Environment (MODATIMA), Chile
Un Ponte Per, Italy
Corner House, UK
International Rivers, USA
First Ecosocialist International, North America
Water Grabbing Observatory, Italy
Italian Forum of Water Movement, Italy

*****

For any inquiries, contact coordinator.en @ savethetigris.org

Editor’s Note (March 29th, 2018): An earlier version of this article incorrectly described MEM as operating in Rojava. In fact, MEM only operates formally in North (Turkish) Kurdistan, though its goals and principles are also being pursued by groups in Rojava, including the Internationalist Commune of Rojava.

In the predominantly Kurdish regions of Syria and Turkey, known respectively as Rojava and North Kurdistan, a groundbreaking experiment in communal living, social justice, and ecological vitality is taking place. Devastated by civil war, the Middle East is often seen as a place where little more than a cessation of hostilities can be hoped for. But Rojava and North Kurdistan have set their sights much higher. What started as a movement for political autonomy has blossomed into an attempt to build a radical pluralist democracy on the principles of communal solidarity — with food security, equality for women, and a localized, anti-capitalist economy at its core.

The Mesopotamian Ecology Movement (MEM) has been at the heart of the region’s democratic revolution since its inception. Though it only maintains a formal presence in North (i.e. Turkish) Kurdistan, its principles and platform have led to a growing informal movement for ecological resilience in neighboring Rojava as well. MEM grew out of single-issue campaigns against dam construction, climate change, and deforestation, and in 2015 went from being a small collection of local ecological groups to a full-fledged network of “ecology councils”. Its mission, as one of its most prominent founding members, Ercan Ayboğa, says, is to “strengthen the ecological character of the Kurdish freedom movement [and] the Kurdish women’s movement”.

It’s not an easy process. Neoliberal policies, war, and climate change have made for an impressive roster of challenges. Crop diversity has been undermined due to longstanding subsidies for monocultures. Stocks of native seeds are declining. The region has been hit by trade embargoes from Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, and villages have been subject to forced displacement and depopulation. Groundwater reserves are diminishing, and climate change is reducing rainfall. Many wells and farms were destroyed by the self-described Islamic State (ISIS), and many farmers have been killed by mines. Much of the region is without electricity. And there has been an influx of refugees from southern Syria, fleeing civil war.

As MEM sees it, the solutions to these overlapping problems must be holistic and systemic. Ercan gives an impressive rundown of MEM’s priorities: Decreasing the Kurdish regions’ dependence on imports, returning to traditional water-conserving cultivation techniques, advocating for ecological policy-making at the municipal level, promoting local crops and livestock and traditional construction methods, organizing educational activities, working against destructive and exploitative “investment” and infrastructure projects such as dams and mines — in short, “the mobilization of an ecological resistance” towards anything guilty of “commercializing the waters, commodifying the land, controlling nature and people, and promoting the consumption of fossil fuels”.

In 2016, MEM published a declaration of its social and ecological aims, and it is a thing of beauty. “We must defend,” it says, “the democratic nation against the nation-state; the communal economy against capitalism, with its quick-profit-seeking logic and monopolism and large industries; organic agriculture, ecological villages and cities, ecological industry, and alternative energy and technology against the agricultural and energy policies imposed by capitalist modernity.”

Getting children involved in all of this is critical. For example, schools in Rojava teach ecology as a fundamental principle. In 2016, with the support of Slow Food International and the Rojava Ministry of Water and Agriculture, MEM helped build a series of school gardens in villages around the city of Kobane, Syria, in order to provide a ‘laboratory’ for children to learn about the region’s biodiversity and how to care for it. These gardens are growing fruit trees, figs, and pomegranates, instead of corn and wheat monocultures. Some have been planted on land that was once virtually destroyed by ISIS. For MEM, even cultivation can come inherently infused with a spirit of resistance. As the MEM declaration says, “Bringing ecological consciousness and sensibility to the organized social sphere and to educational institutions is as vital as organizing our own assemblies.”

“We grew up on this land and we haven’t abandoned it. As a people of farmers and livestock breeders, we have always tended the crops using our own techniques, which are thousands of years old.”

— Mustafa, a teacher whose school was one of those to receive a new garden in 2016

The spirit of resistance is as alive in the realm of society and economics as it is on the land. In Rojava, the co-operative economy is booming. Michel Knapp, a longtime activist in the Kurdish freedom movement and co-author of the book Revolution in Rojava, observes that most co-operatives in Rojava are “small, with some five to ten members producing textiles, agricultural products and groceries, but there are some bigger co-operatives too, like a co-operative near Amûde that guarantees most of the subsistence for over 2,000 households and is even able to sell on the market.”

The local government of the Kurdish regions of Syria and Turkey is democratic and decentralized, with residential communes and local councils giving people autonomy and control over decisions that affect their lives. Municipal-level government bodies are often systematically integrated into the operations of MEM, in a one-of-a-kind partnership between the public and nonprofit spheres. And the prison system is being radically reformed, with local ‘peace committees’ paying attention to the social and political dimensions of crime in passing judgment. Most cities contain no more than one or two dozen prisoners, according to Ercan.

And to top it all, women have taken a leading role in every facet of the revolution. Women’s co-operatives are a common sight, as are women’s councils, women’s committees, and women’s security forces. Women’s ecovillages have been built in Rojava and Turkish Kurdistan, aimed at helping victims of domestic violence and trauma. Patriarchy is just one more aspect of the neoliberal program being cast aside here, on the road towards building what MEM describes as “a radical democratic, communal, ecological, women-liberated society.”

Dig deeper into Rojava, North Kurdistan, and the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement on the following pages:

• ‘The revolution in Rojava: an eyewitness account’. Article published by ROAR Magazine; October 2016. https://roarmag.org/essays/revolution-rojava-pluto-book/
• Final Declaration of the First Conference of the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement; April 2016. http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/mesop-ecology-mvmt/
• ‘Kobane: An eco-challenge for humanity’. Article published by Slow Food International; December 2016. https://www.slowfood.com/kobane-an-eco-challenge-for-humanity/
• The official website of MEM (in Turkish): http://www.mezopotamyaekoloji.org/

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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

Come learn about the ideological, political and programmatic similarities between the Jackson-Kush Plan and the radical democratic movement in Jackson, Mississippi and the Charter of the Social Contract, which serves as the Constitution of the Rojava Cantons, guiding the revolutionary transformation of Syrian Kurdistan. Learn more about their experiment with radical democratic confederalism amongst the various peoples and ethnicities of Syria, their work to build an anti-capitalist solidarity economy, to liberate women, and to restore the ecology.

Given the widespread violence and suffering in Syria, it’s not unreasonable that outsiders look at the situation as unrelentingly awful. And while the reality of the devastation is undeniable, there is reason for hope in at least one small pocket of the nation: the cantons of Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan, wherein the wake of war people are quietly building one of the most progressive societies in the world today. Revolution in Rojava tells the story of Rojava’s groundbreaking experiment in what they call democratic confederalism, a communally organized democracy that is fiercely anti-capitalist and committed to female equality while rejecting reactionary nationalist ideologies. Rooted in the ideas of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, the system is built on effective gender quotas, bottom-up democratic structures, far-sighted ecological policies, and a powerful militancy that has allowed the region to keep ISIS at bay. This first full-length study of democratic developments in Rojava tells an extraordinary and powerfully hopeful story of a little-known battle for true freedom in dark times.

For decades, three million Syrian Kurds have lived under brutal repression by the Assad regime, their identity denied, access to education and jobs refused, imprisonment and torture a way of life for those who dared object. Yet resistance has grown. By developing organisations, after the Arab Spring arrived in Syria in March 2011, the Kurds seized the moment to create a pioneering, democratic revolution. The liberation of northern Syria—Rojava—began at Kobanî on July 19^th 2012, and the global history of social and political revolution would never be the same again.

In May 2014, three Kurdish solidarity activists from Germany and Turkey decided to visit Rojava. ‘I wanted to see it, to learn from its practice’, says Michael Knapp, ‘to understand the contradictions and research the system’s difficulties. Because we can learn a lot from it for revolutionary projects in Western countries.’ With their combined language skills, contacts, and extensive knowledge of the movement, they were able to do close fieldwork and interview many people.

Upon their return, they compiled their observations into a book, Revolution in Rojava, which has just been published in English.

One of the three authors, Anja Flach, was particularly interested in studying women’s role in the revolution. Twenty years earlier, Flach had spent several years the Qandil Mountains of Northern Iraq, where she participated in the Kurdish women’s guerrilla army, the PAJK. There, she focused on political education and struggle. She observed, ‘it’s part of everyday life, in between military training, to do political analysis, to read and discuss together’. Inspired, Flach came home and immediately began to write about her experiences.

Only with the defense of Kobanî in late 2014, however, did the world finally became aware of the existence of Kurdish women fighters and commanders, equipped only with light weapons, yet successfully running IS out of the city at great risk.

But what were they actually fighting for? Little was known, says Flach, about the wide-reaching system of gender-equality that they were defending. She discovered that the implementation of these principles had been successful throughout the revolutionary society. Across the stateless democratic self-administration and throughout political organisations, leadership is dual (male-female) for every speaker position, and every committee and meeting has a forty percent gender quota. Indeed, Flach recognised these principles from her years in the Qandil Mountains. Polygamy and underage marriage have been banned, and women’s cooperatives are being constructed throughout Cizire canton, to give women economic independence, usually for the first time in their lives.

Flach found that the women in Rojava are determined to remake gender relations throughout northern Syria. She saw ‘a women’s committee in every street, and in every neighborhood a women’s council, a women’s academy, women’s security forces, and armed units’. These indefatigable activists go from house to house, informing the women at home that they have access to women’s institutions. ‘The women’s movement would like to win over and organise every woman,’ Flach says, ‘regardless of whether she is a Kurd’. Syriac women too are forming autonomous councils and military units.

For Flach, visiting Rojava was like a dream come true. ‘It was what we had been fighting for all
those years—a free society that administers itself.’  Most astoundingly, ‘in Rojava I came across many of my onetime fellow fighters again. As young women they had left Rojava to join the PKK, and now they’ve returned to defend the revolution.’

Ercan Ayboğa, a Kurd living in Diyarbakir, works with the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement in North Kurdistan, Southeastern Turkey, and is a key organiser against the construction of a dam at Hasankeyf, a site of major historical, ecological, and cultural importance that is poised to be flooded by the dam’s reservoir. In Rojava, with his ecologist’s eye, he was shocked by the lack of trees and biological diversity in agriculture, for example, the crops in Cizire canton were a wheat monoculture. Trained as a hydraulic engineer, he was appalled by the water crisis: ‘All the rivers were dry—even in May—or else very polluted.’

In Rojava, Ayboğa studied the communes-and-councils structure, which was set in motion by the revolution’s chief organizations: the MGRK (People’s Council of West Kurdistan), the Democratic Society Movement (TEV-DEM), and the PYD (Democratic Union Party). Shortly before the 2012 liberation, he says, they instituted a system of radical democracy that combines council and grassroots democracy. ‘On the ground are the communes, which are organised in the residential streets of cities and villages. Above them are the people’s councils in three other levels. The lower level is represented in the higher level through its coordination. At each level are nine commissions that cover the whole life like defense, women, civil society, diplomacy/politics, economy, education, and health. This system has empowered hundreds of thousands of people in a very effective way; people have started to govern themselves and to make decisions about their lives.’

As the Kurdish forces fighting IS liberate numerous villages, this system of democratic self-administration is spreading farther into northern Syria. ‘TEV-DEM activists go the villages and cities and describe themselves and what they’ve done in the past few years,’ says Ayboğa. ‘They propose that the people organise themselves in communes. We have dozens of new communes, very soon hundreds of them, with a mainly Arab population.’  He was greatly impressed by the will of the many political activists, including young people and women, hoping that their struggle be successful, overcome all challenges, and build up a new society.

The group’s third member, Michael Knapp, is a veteran of the German left since the 1990s. He describes himself not as a solidarity activist but as part of the movement for radical democracy. He took great interest in Rojava’s ‘social economy’, based on the understanding that a democratic polity requires for its existence democratic control over the economy. In contrast to neoliberalism, and to state socialism where the state administers the economy, Rojava’s social economy administers production through the democratic self-administration: the economic commissions are accountable to the communes and councils at all levels.

The revolution demands that new enterprises should be organised as structured cooperatives. ‘Cooperatives exist in all sectors of society, even the refining sector’, says Knapp. ‘Most of those the enterprises we visited were small, with some five to ten persons producing textiles, agricultural products, and groceries. But some were bigger, like a cooperative near Amûde that guarantees subsistence for more than 2,000 households’. Under the regime, Northern Syria was not industrialised, instead it is maintained as a source of raw materials and foodstuffs. However, the social economy is planning future alternative industrialisation built around ecological and communalist principles.

However, this process hasn’t yet been possible because of the war. Moreover, Rojava is under an economic embargo, imposed by hostile Turkey to the north, the Turkey-dependent KRG to the east, and the murderous IS and other Salafi-jihadist groups to the south.

Yet Rojava survives, says Flach, partly because the people have no alternative but to fight, and partly because of their organisations and their ideological background. Rojava needs international support, especially from doctors, midwives and engineers willing to go there. Financial support is also crucial, as is political support. But most importantly, says Flach, is for sympathisers to learn from the Rojava model and organise in their own countries. ‘War and industrialism, and the social and ecological disasters connected with it, are destroying the foundations of life,’ she says. ‘It is urgently necessary to organise and to construct an alternative to the capitalist patriarchy. The survival of humankind depends on it.’

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Janel Biehl is a writer, editor and translator. She was Murray Bookchin’s copyeditor for the last two decades of his professional life. Her most recent work is Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (2015, Oxford University Press).

Michael Knapp is a historian of radical democracy, Cofounder of the Campaign Tatort Kurdistan and member of NavDem Berlin. His research focuses on the Kurdish issue and the construction of alternatives to capitalist modernity. His research has taken him to the Middle East, where he has studied the Kurdish Liberation Struggle and the PKK.

Anja Flach is an ethnologist and member of the Rojbîn women’s council in Hamburg. She spent two years in the Kurdish women’s guerrilla army and has previously published books about her experiences.

Ercan Ayboğa is an environmental engineer and activist. Formerly living and co-founding the Tatort Kurdistan Campaign in Germany, now he lives in North Kurdistan and is politically involved in the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement, particularly in water struggles.

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Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan is available to buy from Pluto Press here.