Reflections on 2023 Turkish Elections, Post-Earthquake Bakur and the Kurdish Movement
The following is an interview we conducted with Katka and Hazel, who both live in the UK and were recently back from Bakur, the portion of Kurdistan within the borders of Turkey. For 2 hours the guests speak about the political violence from Erdogan’s ruling AKP, suppression of the Kurdish movement, electoral strategies, democratic confederalism, political prisoners and the F-Type prisons in Turkey, the earthquakes from earlier in the year, widespread corruption and other topics. We hope you enjoy this conversation,. A transcript of this interview will be available in the near future. You can reach the guests at BakurDelegationUK at riseup dot net
A few links related to the chat:
- Heyva Sor a Kurdistanê – Kurdish Red Crescent : https://www.heyvasor.com/en/
- The Kurdish Women’s Movement by Dilar Dirik (we interviewed in 2014: p1, p2)
- The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics book
- 14th July film about resistance in Turkish prisons (requires youtube signin): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw64OUb2pkU
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Transcription
Hazel: I’m Hazel, and I’m from England. I’m based in Scotland. I use pronouns she/her. And I’m an internationalist connected to the Kurdish freedom movement and an organizer in other contexts.
Katka: Hello, I’m Katka. I use pronouns she/her. I live in Bristol. I’m a lecturer in politics at the University of Bath, and I organize with Kurdistan Solidarity Network and BASE, which is a base for anarchy and solidarity in Easton.
TFSR: Great, thank you so much. We’re going to be speaking somewhat about the political situation in Southeastern Turkey, the region of Kurdistan known as Bakur, and the recent Turkish elections there. First, would you tell us a little bit about your relationship and interest in the area and the scope of your recent trip that you were on?
H: Yeah, so maybe I’ll just start saying what drew me to the Kurdish movement. I actually primarily was really inspired by how patriarchy is conceptualized as a more than 5,000 year old power system, and there’s a very, very rich theory and ideology behind it that actually expands into, not just how to analyze one system of power, but how to analyze all systems of power and also organize life according to, in my opinion, a very beautiful politics that I think has quite pertinent lessons for our own context. Also as a movement it’s one that’s very welcoming to internationalists and since the beginning has always been an internationalist movement as well as being now quite a critical revolutionary struggle across the world as well as this continent that we’re living on. Yeah, I’m very inspired by the movement and the ability to be able to connect to it. I’ll pass over to Katka now to mention a bit about herself too.
K: Yeah, so I got in touch with the movement and organizing with that because of the political project. I’ve always been fascinated in my activism but also academic work with how should we structure democracy, what is rational democracy, and when I started learning about Rojava and the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and looking at “wow, someone is really trying to put into practice all these wild political fantasies that we have.” I was quite hooked. This is where my journey started. We started doing these delegations to Bakur. Hazel will say more about it. And that’s how I joined. And also a personal thank you to Hazel because she’s one of the people who helped me to join.
H: So, on this trip that we just did, we joined as international observers for the elections that just happened in May. We also joined the campaign of Yeşil Sol Parti, which means Green Left Party [in Turkish], and they’re like a continuation of another primarily but not exclusively Kurdish party in the region called the HDP. They, every year, call for election observers to try and record the anti-democratic practices of the state. So we joined these, and I was there for five weeks and witnessed various forms of intimidation, anti-democratic, for example, military intimidation, and this kind of thing which we can talk a bit more about later. Alongside all of that we actually joined a very interesting grassroots campaign spread into local villages and towns and also cities in the southeastern region of Turkey, which is in Northern Kurdistan. This is generally called Bakur, which also means “North.” We might use some of these words interchangeably during the podcast.
TFSR: That’s very helpful. This is an anarchist show, and we rarely discuss the outcomes of elections, but I’m interested in this conversation so I can learn more about the ramifications for Democratic Confederalist projects in the area. Listeners to this show may be familiar with organizing in the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria, or Rojava, but maybe haven’t heard much about what’s been happening across the border in Turkey, where you just were on this trip. Could you give a quick and dirty explanation of the Bakur roots of the Rojava revolution and the entities that are often put in relation, the PKK and the KCK?
H: Sure, so this is a really amazing question and also an enormous one because the history of that area in relation to the Kurdish Freedom Movement, not just the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party) but the entire struggle. That area in particular is actually where it was born, so we’re talking in a narrow sense of 45 years of history. But actually we’re talking of hundreds if not thousands of years of history that we can’t create a clear starting or endpoint in terms of how things relate to each other. But I will do my best to explain at least the last 100 years in a very quick rundown.
To give a little bit of context to the conditions that gave birth to the PKK but also the wider movement itself, which is not just a party. Firstly, we can start from the fall of the Ottoman empire and how Kurdistan itself is split into four different nation-states. We’re talking about the area that’s inside Turkey but also in Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The border with Iran has actually been ongoing more or less unchanged for about 400 years whereas the other borders have all changed a lot in the last 100 years. There’s around 20 million Kurdish people in Turkey, but we can’t say exactly how many. And the formation of this nation-state was basically created in 1923, well, through a process of a few years in that period. Between Western and Russian imperialist powers, we basically navigated the end of the empire and the integration into the nation-state world system. The Treaty of Lausanne, which actually had its 100 year anniversary of the signing on the 24th of July, so just a few days ago, is kind of the legislative formation of this, and we can see that the nation-state building process happened very harshly in this period as it has also everywhere in the world. That means one language, one flag, one nation. Religion, culture is extremely homogenized and centralized into one acceptable format which of course creates at best extreme inequality and at worst, and more commonly the case, genocides and extermination of ethnicities, religions, etc. Just preceding the Treaty of Lausanne more than a million Armenians were killed in the genocide that directly preceded the creation of the state. Actually that treaty created the conditions to never have to acknowledge or be accountable for this genocide.
If we focus again on the Kurdish resistance, since the beginning of the Ottoman empire actually, the Kurdish people but also all people that were not able to be homogenized into the identity of Turkish-ness resisted very strongly against this form of oppression. And in the 1920s and 1930s there was quite a lot of tribal, clan-based resistances against the state military and against the massacres that they inflicted upon people. Actually some of the clan leaders who led these uprisings are even today very famous and important figures in this history of resistance against state policies of extermination. These were primarily in the Kurdish areas. So also, for example Sayîd Riza 1 in Dersim in the 1930s, he is a really important Alevi/Zaza person who led one of the uprisings and paved the way for a lot of the not just the practical format of struggle but the spirit of resistance, cultural, and political consciousness that is ongoing for generations.
Then for a couple of decades there was much less resistance, very harsher conditions all over the country for all peoples. In that period up until the ‘60s people in the movement say it’s like the lost years of Kurdish consciousness, up until the ‘60s and ‘70s where all across the world there was a huge uprising of the struggle for socialism. This particularly took place in the form of national liberation movements against colonialism, against capitalism. And the main ideological formats that took is Marxism-Leninism and also Maoism. That is the case across most the continents, so actually the Kurdish struggle came out of the Turkish left which was massively influenced by those ideologies. They inherited a lot of their practical and ideological DNA from those forms of socialism. With the PKK specifically, I want to say it wasn’t the only party that was being formed in that period. There was a lot of different Turkish left groups also that Kurdish people, Laz people, Armenians were also involved in. And some of those groups are still active today. It was mostly young people, students, people who went from very rural areas into cities, and they formed armed groups and had an anti-imperialist lens. A lot of the way that these groups would be organized was through a centralized format. So a party, military, and united front strategy basically. Which, actually, for some decades also is the format the PKK used. So in the 1970’s, off the blowback of the 1968 student movement, the founding members were mostly university students coming out of the Turkish left. There was a huge power struggle within Turkey in general at the time as a state. There were huge armed fascist forces, there was extreme economic upheaval, there was a kind of fragile political power in terms of the state itself. A lot of different groups – a socialist group then actually could have taken power. There actually was a possibility of a regime change.
In those days, the early members of the PKK, before it was officially formed, learned from this Marxist-Leninist ideology. And going back to the rural areas people came from and going basically door-by-door, talking to families, talking to their own community members and also many, many people they didn’t know—hundreds, thousands of people—and learning about the conditions that people actually face. What actually were the problems, what were the conditions that people were living in under the colonization of the Turkish state. And a very radical idea at the time formed, which is that Kurdistan itself is a colony. At the time, the Turkish left also conceptualized itself in opposition to the Western imperialist forces. So Turkey was seen as a kind of anti-imperialist force, but to say that then Kurdistan was a colony… It was like a colony within a colony. And this caused actually a lot of friction within the left and a lot of splits, but even from the very early days the PKK itself, when it formed in 1978 and just before that, was always internationalist. So for example Kemal Pir who was one of Öcalan’s closest friends and organizers was called Laz Kemal because he came from the minority ethnic group of the Laz people. And Haki Kara actually was Turkish, and Abdullah Öcalan was Kurdish. So we can see that in the very, very early days that it’s not just an ethnically homogenous national liberation project but something that already had a broader and participatory, liberatory ideology. But we can definitely say that it organized according to this democratic centralism.
In 1980 there was a military coup which was a very harsh time for all of the left wing and the entire population. About half a million people were imprisoned, quite a few people were executed, and all forms of non-Turkish culture were completely banned. That would include national dress, language, dancing, saying that you’re not Turkish if you’re a Turkish citizen. All of these things were very, very, very harshly criminalized. They were already criminalized before this, and people already faced extreme assimilation policies and genocide, but this was a kind of fracturing of the political structure where the military coup also symbolized a desire for parts of the establishment to actually go more in line with the IMF and the World Bank because they wanted to have a more neoliberalist economic policy, and they wanted to open up Turkey as a big export market for the rest of the world. During this period in the 1980s, the movement, the PKK basically split into three directions. The vast majority of people went to prison, like the vast, vast majority. A smaller group went to Beqaa Valley, which is in Lebanon. And the PKK early guerrilla fought against the Israeli occupying forces in the Palestinian refugee camps alongside the PFLP and the DFLP. Also a small percentage of the PKK cadre at the time went to the mountains.
In this period as well, one of the biggest ideological, practical, political threads of the DNA of the Party [PKK] and also of the entire movement is prison resistance. Because most of the cadre of the time were imprisoned, they learned how to resist in a very harsh prison condition, and a lot of the prisons were replaced by military rule. So rather than civilian prison officers they would have soldiers there. People were tortured very, very harshly, sometimes to death. This would go all types of torture, not just physical, to try and break the spirit of the people and also their organization. So this also included the restriction of outside materials, contact with family members, as well as very, very harsh forms of physical torture. There was a lot of resistance against this. People self-immolated, there were hunger strikes, death fasts. But also there was a lot of collective organization. So for example, any outside material that could be gained, some of which was gained through the struggle, such as being allowed magazine or newspapers. There would be then collective forms of discussion, political education, and self-organization of basic necessities. Some of the things that are still remembered today, not just in the PKK but actually also in the society, is for example the self-immolation of some of the prisoners. This is really symbolized by Newroz, which is the start of the new year, it’s actually the spring equinox. This is a fire festival, anyway traditionally, and one of the leading at the time PKK kadro [cadre in Kurmanji Kurdish] self-immolated on that day. Through these very harsh conditions… It lasted through the ‘80s, but also the ‘90s many people were still imprisoned.
Outside of this, outside of the prisons, many family members got involved in the struggle though this process. In 1984 it was the beginning of the armed struggle against the state and against the collaborationist class of the Kurdish clans as well. I think this is very important to point out that it was never only against the ideology of that state itself, but also against the people that betray values of freedom and are in collaboration with the state. This was the start of a protracted people’s war. In the ‘90s there was between 3,000 and 4,000 village burnings in the area of northern Kurdistan, but this also happened extensively in the ‘80s and ‘90s in Başur, which is the Iraqi part of Kurdistan. This was basically like a scorched earth strategy and a forced displacement. This was obviously a purposeful strategy by the state to try and break what they called the separatist movement and also to force the predominantly rural and agriculturally reliant people into a forced urbanization. And this would break the family bonds, the connection to place, identity, and also as we can still see today many military bases were set up in these areas as well, on top of hills in the mountains. And as this kind of really extreme form of penetration of the homeland of people by the occupying forces. The military still intimidate people now, as we saw. And also throughout this period the women’s resistance really grew.
Since the beginning there’s always been women members of the PKK, and Sakine Cansız is the most famous woman who co-founded the party and led a lot of resistance in the prisons and in the guerilla. In the ‘90s thousands of women joined, and they had autonomous military units and created the first women’s congress. But at this point the movement was primarily focused on the military, although of course there was a lot of family support, thousands and thousand of young people were joining the struggle. The older generations also, although they may not necessarily have joined in that way, there was a huge support of the movement that was growing every year. There were many famous people who were killed by the state, women as well as men. Their death often led to further actions. The development of the philosophy of the organization developed here. It wasn’t just “how to we organize effectively militarily” but also a philosophy in terms of the question of how to live. In this period a lot of the mass movement began, in the ‘90s still, a lot of mass uprisings especially at the funerals of the martyrs, the people who were killed in the struggle. These would often cause huge uprisings because the state would come and attack the funerals. They would attack the people carrying coffins, they would attack the funeral goers, and some state institutions were even burned down in the struggle when that would happen. A lot of legal and cultural associations also began, so television broadcastings and Kurdish media for example. And also the development in terms of “what is the primary contradiction that we’re being faced with within this whole system of this world order, within capitalism. What is the primary contradiction.” Because Marxist-Leninist ideology is based on class as the primary contradiction, that is how the PKK had been formed up until that moment. But then women’s position began to be shifted into the center of the struggle. But there was never exclusion of one category for another, and even then there’s this constant analysis of class, industrialism, the city, clan society, the role of women, revolutionary organizing in society, the family, religion, etc. This would generally be also through political education, not just of the Party but also within society. In the 1990s we also saw the fall of real socialism, of the USSR, and this was one of the factors among many others that created this very deep period of change in the PKK and this restructuring. And also in that period, Abdullah Öcalan, who is the ideological, philosophical leader of the movement, was captured through various international states’ cooperation. He was sentenced to death in prison… sorry, a death sentence. Then it was transmuted to life in prison since the death penalty was abolished. Since then he’s been in solitary confinement on a prison island, İmralı, and many, many, many people say that the isolation of Öcalan is the isolation of all of Kurdish society which we can also see with how the prison system is developed. But we’ll get to that later.
Through his imprisonment he wrote many books which he… Well, he wrote defenses in court which later were written by legal professionals when he was in court defending himself, and that was created, it was reproduced as books. From these writings, as well as all of the previous experiences, contradictions, struggles with the state mentality, patriarchy, dominance, and centralism, all of these things have been experienced within the Party and within the movement more broadly, the contradictions with society, and Öcalan kind of condensed them and gave a series of solutions through a huge paradigmatic shift in the ideology. Through that is where the more well-known ideas around democratic confederalism and also democratic nation and democratic autonomy have come about. To briefly try to break down some of that jargon: Democratic confederalism is basically like the governance structure. Democratic nation is kind of like the social spirit, maybe we could say, with which these things should be carried out, the way to conceptualize a “people.” And also democratic autonomy is the analysis of the necessity for freedom and how to break down this contradiction between for example the individual and the collective or between… It’s the kind of individual spirit for trying to find freedom and truth in all forms of life can be in harmony with a much bigger apparatus or coordination between many different points.
Through that KCK is basically the congress structure or is basically like the political organ through which those things can be organized. Through the early 2000s there were a lot of neighborhood communes being developed, which we’ll get to a bit later, a relative flourishing of civil society organizations in the region and the setting up, for example, of a more organized form of people whose family members have been killed by the state, prisoner confederations within the prisons and outside of the prisons, the media, and also political, like parliamentary, parties also existed throughout this time period as well as another bit in the ecosystem.
Then in the mid 2000s there was a peace process, a dialogue between Erdoğan [head of the Turkish state] and the ruling party, the AKP, and [on the other side] Öcalan and also the wider different democratic structures of the movement that were proliferating at the time. So there was an easier form of organizing. In 2012 HDP, which we just mentioned as a parliamentary party, was created, and they were quite successful in the following years. In 2015-16 we have the period of city wars, where a lot of the youth across several different cities and towns in Bakur rose up against the constant military and police harassment and attacks that were happening in their neighborhoods. They tried to create autonomous areas. They were digging trenches to try and stop the armed military vehicles and tanks from coming into their neighborhood, and they defended it with arms. And unfortunately this was very brutally suppressed by the Turkish state, and close to half a million people were displaced, more than 3,600 people were killed, and entire neighborhoods were destroyed in a lot of areas, which we can also see now, for example, in Amed or Diyarbakır [Turkish language name for the city]. The area of Sur is being really exploited by different companies—capitalist gentrification in the most extreme and disgusting way. Many extremely horrific things happened in the city war period, like people couldn’t take their family members who were killed in the streets because there were snipers that would have shot them, basements where hundreds of civilians were sheltering were burned by the soldiers, a female guerilla’s body was dragged naked and posed with by the Turkish soldiers… like, they stripped her naked then took photos with her dead body. Really disgusting patriarchal, colonial attacks.
In the same period there was an attempted coup, not by PKK or actually anything to do with the Kurdish movement, but by a different part of semi-state, semi-non-state actors. Intense waves of repression followed this, where thousands of dismissed teachers, lawyers, state workers of various kinds were forced out of their work, imprisoned. Many people left the country. Since then this repression has continued, and there’s been this long struggle and survival through really repressive conditions that break down the solidarity between people, try to stop all forms of organization. That’s a kind of summary, we could say.
TFSR: How has the ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP, of Erdoğan, how have the policies of that party engaged in Bakur? You sort of mentioned already that the government, over the decades, but also more specifically with the current regime, has taken the opportunity of disaster capitalism to, in instances where there’s a disruption like that attempted coup, consolidate power or taken the war that they’ve engaged as an opportunity to also gentrify and internally displace Kurdish and other parts of the population in Bakur. Could you talk a little bit about that party’s policy and in particular in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes that happened in February there?
H: Yeah, so AKP has been in power for more than twenty years now. The policy and approach has changed massively in the last 20 years. The earlier rhetoric was much more focused on a moderate conservatism, and they benefitted quite a lot politically and economically from… They did like massive infrastructure projects, they adopted this peace language, they also said they were a party for the Kurds at the beginning and they had the peace process, all these things. But that has changed a lot into what is now a very, very repressive and increasingly conservative and also religiously conservative government. For example, one thing that we didn’t cover earlier is that in the last eight years of AKP rule, every time the HDP would win local elections, and they would have mayors, especially in the southeastern regions of Turkey, they would be automatically replaced by what is called kayyım, which is like a trustee, basically, a state appointed trustee. There’s been huge records of misuse of funds, of millions and millions, by these kayyıms. Local people who were actually elected would then just be not even allowed to go into their office, a lot of the time.
A lot of the time these mayors would also be arrested, imprisoned. Sometimes MPs also, although there is parliamentary immunity, plenty of MPs have also gone to prison and are still carrying out sentences today, including the former leaders of the HDP. HDP now has a closure case. The state has tried to completely make it illegal and say that it’s a terrorist organization, that it has links to the PKK, that its members therefore must also be terrorists, etc. It didn’t release the funds for HDP, and around 4,000 members are imprisoned. It made it almost impossible really for that parliamentary party to continue its work, which is why Yeşil Sol Parti came up and took the reins, basically. AKP has shifted more and more toward extremely misogynistic approaches, so just an example: the Istanbul Convention in 2011 is something that was signed by many European states and Turkey, and it basically provides a legal framework for the bare minimum of women’s rights in terms of domestic violence, in terms of there being vaguely state-supported resources for them to use in these types of conditions, and this type of thing. They actually have left that agreement despite the fact that Turkey was the first country to ratify it in Istanbul. We can see that the LGBTQ discourse, that Erdoğan has very outrightly said that LGBT people/movement is against the Turkish people. We heard that during Covid the mosques would blast a message at some point blaming LGBT people for Covid. There’s a lot of different propaganda that happens. Turkey is already, in all of Europe and what is considered Western Asia (there’s a kind of ridiculous distinction between how to even classify Europe but we won’t get into that now), it’s the second worst country on the Rainbow Index for LGBT rights. We can see massive media capture by Erdoğan. The vast majority of the media is very closely linked to AKP, not just the state but specifically AKP itself. That has happened over the course of his rule, more and more, where they would buy up larger shares or make larger political deals with the main media channels. We can see on the media itself that there’s this constant stream every day of “Terrorists killed in operation. 12 more terrorists killed,” and this is always related to the PKK. There’s this extreme demonization of guerrillas and Kurdish people in general and extreme nationalist rhetoric that has ramped up and up and up. We can see that the free press in terms of all independent media is also massively attacked. This not just Kurdish media, it’s any free press. There are many, many journalists imprisoned. At different points that I’ve been in Bakur sometimes there’s been two dozen journalists arrested at one time in the country in armed morning raids. Year-on-year the Turkish state is one of the highest jailers of journalists worldwide. We spoke to Jin News, a women’s independent media outlet by the Kurdish movement, and they are on their 41st iteration of their website because it’s constantly banned by the Turkish state even thought the actual media outlet is not proscribed. There’s always raids on their publishing houses, production companies, etc.
We also need to emphasize that this constant, increasing repression is not only against Kurdish people, although there is a very deep anti-Kurdish rhetoric that is essentially to the Turkish state’s integrity at this moment it seems, in terms of its nationalism. AKP is against anyone who is in opposition to it, anyone who is against the dominant regime or who they could conceptualize as undermining their hegemony from any political angle at all. It’s illegal to criticize the president or criticize the state. We see this extreme autocracy that’s increased just through these things. We also saw how the nationalist platform is so important, now more than ever possibly, and how it was so critical for the elections. In general, nationalism for all nation-states is a really important ideological platform to navigate and manipulate power, and to reproduce the integrity of itself, like with it’s flag, homogenous language, identity etc. Terrorism is also related to statehood in some way, like the two things exist in relation to each other with how they are defined, how they are conceptualized. These “terrorists,” as AKP calls them are generally speaking teachers, lawyers, journalists, shepherds, rural workers, students. We’re not just talking about guerrillas, we’re talking about really anyone who might possibly be conceptualized as being critical of the state.
We saw in the elections themselves how Erdoğan ran on this nationalist platform, which we already knew would happen, but actually the opposition [did so] as well. At first he was saying “yes, I’m in an alliance with Yeşil Sol Parti, with the Kurds. I want this more like equality, social democracy.” Then Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, he switched from this chill grandfather to basically a fascist overnight, on the 14th, where he then was like “Yes, we’re going to expel all the refugees immediately. We have to get rid of terrorism, etc”—a very, very fast turn in his rhetoric because they were like “Okay, we have to appeal to the nationalist voters.” And that’s through this propagation of how the media itself, how the judiciary… It’s through the manipulation of the population through those channels that nationalism is itself so important and such a pillar of people’s consciousness. Of course this is not just the case in Turkey. This is something that happens everywhere, but it’s very intense there. I’m gonna pass to Katka.
K: I think it’s important to say explicitly that unfortunately Turkey is like a standard authoritarian regime. Now when we do our reporting, for instance, about elections and Erdoğan won, it might make it seem like we know from western democracies that there will be elections or parties in the way we known them in Western democracies. But that’s nothing like it. It’s like a normal authoritarian regime. Even if you look, there’s no dispute about it even according to standard measures. There’s like this Freedom House Index that measures regimes across the world, and Turkey is classified as “not free” out of three categories that are “not free,” “partly free,” and “free.” When you think about it, let’s not forget that even though we’re talking about elections and parties and stuff like this, this is in this context, so basically it’s like a facade. Erdoğan does it, and his regime does it for all these examples that Hazel named. But I would like to also mention one interesting thing: how the Turkish state runs this authoritarian machine, which basically functions through this mechanism of what is called state capture, which is basically like networks between private people, politicians, businessmen, and they use these networks, connections and power and businesses to exploit the country, to exploit the public policy and use it for their own goals. In literature Turkey would be used as a primary example case where this is shown as like being done to perfection, how they do it. That on one hand is massive corruption, exploitation of the state. On the other hand also is not just like for the oligarchs and politicians to become privately rich, but it serves the purpose of the political machine as well. It’s the way how also money gets back to the system and allows the AKP and the regime to stay in power.
It’s not a surprise that also Turkey scores one of the worst in terms of the corruption indexes and probably even worse because it’s really hard to capture that because the system, how they do it, it’s also that they actually legalize a lot of things they do. So it’s tailor-made laws that are put into the system, and everything kind of looks legal on paper, so all this oppression and persecution of the opposition or abuse of the public funds. This whole system, how they run the machine on paper is kind of legalized, so it’s really difficult to name even and to go after it. This, in fact, is— really… oh, maybe we shoulds top here. Should we answer the earthquake now?
TFSR: Yeah, I think that would be great. I think contextualizing all of that and the… this isn’t the term that you used, but the term crony capitalism feels like a similar term to the way the Turkish state is operating in this manner. But yeah, if you could talk a little about not only how they reacted to the earthquake but some of the connections between the state capture and the way the AKP has been operating for the last 20 years and how the level of devastation from the earthquake, based on policies around construction quality and what companies were doing the construction, that would be great to tie in.
K: Yes, and this state capture machine is really a catastrophic testimony of the situation with the earthquake and shows how the regime operates because actually the construction business is the primary of example of how and through which arena this operates. The Erdoğan regime is mainly built on the construction business. The government from 2002, they bought… The economic growth that they had since this that time, not now and in recent years but before that, was mostly done by the investment in construction. This was done in this, as you can imagine, nepotistic, oligarchic networks of massive companies being connected to Erdoğan’s regime. They’re sending public money to have this massive construction work being done in different areas across Turkey, including Kurdistan. Once consequence here is that they would do this massive displacement of people, so they would tear down the existing settlements and replace them with new, really expensive apartments. It gives an opportunity to spend the public money and feed the machine.
The second problem here was that even though people say that there were laws at place and measures and policies to insure that it should follow the earthquake things that need to be done when you construct in those areas, because that’s it nothing new that an earthquake was happening in that area. There’s a history of earthquakes happening in the region of Turkey and in that area in general. So this was well known, this was at place, but because of this corruption state capture machine this was a lot of the time totally not taken into account and intentionally not done. What I’ve heard from people for instance was that they used cheaper, lower quality concrete to build this and that because thats what we want to do, boost the capitalist system of growth and start construction and building. So this came in turn back and backfired when the earthquake happened because a lot of these construction works were not done properly. Also, no one is probably going to be legally responsible for this because, as I said before, these tailor-made laws make it in a way that you basically can’t complain to anyone. So no one is legally responsible, accountable to those situations. There have been in the past some attempts to take to the court people who were responsible for the mismanagement and the mis-building of these construction buildings, but nothing happened and it goes nowhere. Another point that is really important here to mention related to the earthquake and how the regime operates is what is known as the Earthquake Tax. It was a tax that Turkey started collecting in 1999 in response to another earthquake that had already happened before that in Izmir. What they basically did is they introduced a new tax on the internet and mobile phone services to generate funds and build a huge fund in case something like this happens in the future. After all of these years collecting this money—and after adjusting it, some estimates say it went close to like £30 billion or something like that—they should have had been in a position of having plenty of money and being ready to provide help and act accordingly if something like this happened. As we saw nothing like this happened at all because now there was no money in this big pocket of earthquake tax money that the regime— And this is not like any secret information. You can just Google it, and it’s like the former finance ministers or employees from the Turkish government which talk about it. They used the money for different purposes. They used the money for infrastructure, they used the money to pay IMF their loans and things like this. When the earthquake hit, it really exposed how the regime functions and what it does badly and how it’s corrupt and how it really in a very cynical way affects the lives of people on an everyday basis. What we saw at that moment when the earthquake happened was that the Turkish regime did not react. We can speculate whether it was intentional to send help or whether it was powerlessness and incompetence on their side, but, yeah… The help was not the there.
The other thing that we saw was, on the other hand, massive help from the society. I heard from different people that it was across political lines. So the grassroots help and the help across Turkey was really massive, and people would really send money or travel to help in the earthquake areas. And they would not politicize it. But when the AKP came on the picture a few days after, people told us “They showed up four days later, but they had cameras with them, and the first thing they cared about was that they’re shooting how they’re shaking hands with the victims.” They would also… The AKP regime would politically abuse the situation.
What is happening currently now as far as we know is that people from those locations are safe. They would go to family, with friends, or travel to different places. The society is very much still communally running, so these people are somewhere. But the restructuring and rebuilding hasn’t started, and it hasn’t been done in those places. And we don’t know if there are any plans to do that. My worry is that if this will happen it will go again in the same spirit, how that they had done it in the past, that it will be used by the regime to generate money, generate support and also further do these politics of displacement and demographic manipulation of the region, how Hazel talked about it already before. That’s a long term thing they’re trying to do to change the demographic composition of the locality, and the earthquake only contributes to that. So if there are refugees are coming from this location, they are really trying hard that these people are not returned back and, for instance, a military base or military group somehow appears there and starts living in that region. And we also saw that when we were there doing the election monitoring, that people were shocked when they would see on the list like 50 new names of people who’ve never lived in their village. And that was those people who were installed by the Turkish regime that appeared there through this process.
Hazel do you have something else?
H: Not in like a big picture way. Just I don’t know if we should give a very short bit of context so that listeners know what actually happened with the earthquake. I’m sure most people probably read the news but otherwise for time we can also move on.
TFSR: I mean if you quickly had the stats to throw out the numbers or like a few instances of like “the water supply in this area was…” But if you don’t have that we could move on and just put some links in the show notes to some articles.
H: Yeah, I can say a really brief bit of context because I spoke to a couple of people who volunteered there directly after the earthquake and what the situation really was. This earthquake was really unimaginable in terms of the actual destruction. More than 50,000 people were killed. The official number within Turkey is given as 50,000, but the people who live there say that actually the number was much, much higher. A lot of people did survive under the rubble, but they weren’t pulled out in time. And they couldn’t be pulled out because they needed heavy machinery or specialist equipment which didn’t come. And so actually thousands and thousands of people froze to death because it was in the middle of winter. The earthquake, the biggest one, the epicenter was in Elbistan, which is also a mountainous area, and it’s quite cold especially in winter. It can be -20°[C]. And the other earthquake happened closer to the Syrian border, in terms of the biggest ones. Because of the lack of response from the state or more than just local people and families who tried to dig out their relatives, thousands were unnecessarily killed. The friends who we spoke to said that there was this huge… There’s a huge migration towards the cities within Turkey. Mostly people are internally displaced. They didn’t leave internationally, but we saw people flying from all over the world to find their families. Most people lost a family member if not entire families being killed because if you think of fifty years of war in the region, the official toll of how many people killed in that war has been around 45,000. And there’s at least 50,000 people that were killed in the earthquake in the matter of a couple of days. When the bodies were still underneath the rubble the state, after a period of time, they then came with larger equipment and cleared away the house rubble but without taking out the bodies. Many people still haven’t recovered their relatives. They don’t know where they are. They can’t identify them or bury them. And as was said this is also actually part of a demographic change process. A lot of the areas were Alevi, which is a minority religion in the region.
The Alevi areas have also particularly faced a lot of really deep discrimination by the state, a lot of war and a lot of depopulation. Of course Syria was affected too. People are still dealing with the after effects of this in a very, very hard way.
TFSR: Despite the terrible reaction by the government by the last 20 years of cronyism that appears to have been developing that people seem aware of, Erdoğan’s AK Party are celebrating a huge victory in national elections this year. What does this mean for Kurdish and other minoritized populations within Turkish border? By this I mean you can speak to religious groups, to ethnic, linguistic groups, to what has been termed sometimes gender minorities. Can you talk a bit about how other parties other than the AK did in the region, such as the HDP (Democratic Peoples’ Party) and their coalition partners of the YŞP (Party of Greens and the Left Future)?
H: Yeah, so HDP didn’t run in this election because they have a huge closure case by the state. More than 100 HDP politicians are being criminalized and sentenced to in total hundreds and hundreds of years in prison. Although that hasn’t actually gone through yet. And because of the harsh repression by the state, a new party was formed—Yeşil Sol Parti. Actually this has happened many times before, many different parliamentary parties have been banned and then a new one has spring up to take its place. They existed in a coalition also of other left parties, and to be honest because of the really harsh conditions we can’t see the election just as the day of voting itself. We have to look at the election in terms of “what were the conditions that produced it.” It wasn’t at all free or fair, and whilst we were there for example on one day about 130 people were arrested in dawn raids, mostly people who were active in the Yeşil Sol Parti campaign. I think this was April 24th or 25th. They were journalists, lawyers in particular, campaign workers, cultural workers, and also directly before the second election 182 campaign workers and friends of Yeşil Sol Parti were arrested in armed dawn raids. So this is a constant condition for the movement broadly, for especially any type of Kurdish organization. Because of this the Yeşil Sol Parti didn’t get so high as HDP had done previously. They still did quite well considering this party was one month old, basically, at the time of the elections. There’s a lot of different conditions where people can’t run if they’ve had some kind of case in the courts. And years of the trustee process, the kayyım destroying that connection between the local administrations being able to implement… HDP couldn’t ever implement its policies in areas in a local sense because the trustee process cut that connection between people and the administration. Despite this, they still managed to get quite a sizable percentage in the parliament. The local elections are also next year, so we’ll see how that goes. It was really very, very tough conditions for people.
TFSR: How do parties, like left parties, actually relate to the Kurdish movement?
K: Yeah, so we can… I wanna use HDP or Yeşil Sol Parti interchangeably. The first thing to realize is that HDP, their aim in not to take power and reproduce nation-state power. The understanding of why the movement has the actual party, so to say, is that it’s not seen as the forefront for the struggle of Kurdistan freedom movement, but it’s more of a pragmatic, strategic tool that is a part and product of a bigger struggle. So the end goal is not to go to the national parliamentary politics and to do laws, policies, like sit in the government. But it’s basically the reason why the Kurdistan freedom movement has it is to stop the Turkish state from intervening in the Kurdish autonomy and all these horrendous like repression and genocide and the things that Hazel has talked about. So it’s very utilitarian, but interesting it’s not like a cynical approach either. The campaign, or being HDP or Yeşil Sol, is at the same time very genuine. And what I was personally shocked to see is also that we’ve seen it’s really like a grassroots party campaign type of politics. This also fits the general and broader movements vision of free communal life, self-governance, how we fight and how we struggle. What we basically saw is not like what we know like this professionalized party machine. We were in a very informal environment, movement-list type of things. It was composed from a lot of local activists. It wasn’t like this dehumanized professional electoral machine. Very much kind of like a DIY. It didn’t have like necessarily hierarchies. It was like, I dunno… One of the candidates was running, so for the time being her cousin was the driver for the campaign trail. And these things like that.
That would be another point, that even though it’s seen as a practical, pragmatic tool it’s still done in a genuine way. Another point is that I think it’s important to mention is that the party is really in the society. It really comes from the locality, from Bakur, from this region, but also from the Kurdistan freedom movement. A lot of activists and the MPs or the people who run for the party are people with a history of working in the community, so they would be community organizers, people who were involved in democratic confederalist structures in the past when they were still allowed before the city wars in 2015 that Hazel talked about. It would be people who work with NGOs, who work with women’s organizations, who were known from village XYZ that they were doing this type of communal work there. So it’s really people coming from the society. And when… We were there campaigning with them for almost three weeks. When we came to the villages with the campaign trail, what we saw was people super happy seeing old friends kind of type of feeling, that they were cheering, they were like shaking hands saying hello, sharing tea. There was not much like propaganda or persuading going on. It really seemed like “Oh yeah this party is growing out of what we’ve already been through, what we are struggling for.” So it really felt as an integral part of the Kurdish society.
H: Yeah, in terms of how HDP and Yeşil Sol Parti relate to the wider movement, as Katka said, they are just like one other piece within this huge ecosystem that exists with so many different forms of organization but also actually a really common spirit and a really common deep feeling of resistance. For example when we’re driving along the campaign trail, on convoys through villages, kids would run out of the houses super excited, and they would be making the victory sign, like the two fingers like a peace sign. This is an important symbol of the anti-colonial resistance, and little kids en masse would be doing this, shouting. And of course we’re not saying all people support HDP or Yeşil Sol Parti. There’s a lot of people who don’t as well in the region. But they are also seen as like an actual representative of the people in many was. I think that’s something that… I want also actually use an example from a currently unpublished interview that was made with Ceylan Akça who is a parliamentarian. She was just voted in this recent election. I think this is a really beautiful quote because, how HDP or Yeşil Sol Parti, how this parliamentary element fits within the broad struggle. it’s also through generations and generations of very strong resistance in many different conditions and through many different formats. Many people have lost somebody in the struggle, many people have had family members or friends imprisoned, and this is a kind of constant condition that people are living in. And she was asked in the interview that “something we’ve witnessed is that people continue to struggle despite the conditions, that there is still hope, one that’s grounded in absolute determination in resistance.
After these elections we saw a lot despair in the streets. Where to people find the source and power to continue?” And Ceylan said, “I see my grandmother as a source of inspiration. She’s been in the movement since the early ‘70s, and one story in particular is an inspiration to me. So one day, she was detained from her house in the village in the ‘90s. They took her to a torture chamber in Diyarbakir prison that was notorious at the time. Electrifying her, beating her, pulling her nails out, interrogating her. Then, they thought she was dead, so they threw her off a bridge and dumper her body in the mud. Later some shepherds found her and put her in a horse-drawn cart. She spent two weeks in intensive care, and when she opens her eyes the police came back and detained her again. They take her back to the prosecutor, and she goes back to jail for two years. Now, she’s 82, and she has a broken back, totally. She’s really bent over. And she’s strong like the first day. She goes to every rally, to every meeting in the village. If my grandmother didn’t give up, then I can’t give up, none of us can give up. Because we’ve had worse. We’ve all had worse, you know, each one of us has to find our own motivations. I’m driven by my grandmother’s fight, and I’ll keep using that. And also I think of my friends in prison, what could I do to get them out? Yeah, I think of prisons, that we should continue until we can’t and that others will take the reins. That’s how resistance goes. It’s just a perspective. If you look at the course of human history, nothing happens quickly. It’s just a process of tiny accomplishments that accumulate to something bigger.”
TFSR: You had mentioned or sort of given a generalized history of democratic confederalism as a philosophy and just a little bit of how it’s intertwined with the Kurdish movement. My understanding is that at some point at least HDP as a party had been engaging in some democratic confederalist structures, including co-mayors or co-representatives. I wonder if you could talk about that practice. Is that still an ongoing practice, or are there things related to democratic confederalist structures that the HDP’s engaging… or the other left parties?
K: Yeah, so HDP is involved in and was involved in that process as being one of the actors in the movement, but they are not the ones who are driving it. Even now when we ask people, when there was the vision for victory, “how do you see this coming true?” people would automatically say, “HDP is not the one who is going to bring democratic confederalism. This is what the people will do.” And HDP, they have a different role. But in the past they have been involved in it. I don’t know if this is commonly known, but the region of Bakur had a democratic confederalist structure somewhere in the 2000s, officially starting in 2004 until the 2015 city wars that have been talked about. And that was something that the HDP was involved in, but they were involved more at this level of delegate structure at the level of the region or the level of city and the high levels. But basically, democratic confederalism at the center, in the heart of where this is happening lies in the communal structure. So that lies in the local community and what in the structure is called “local communes” which are geographically existing communities that make sense, like a few streets of people who come from the same region or a similar ethnicity or “we are divided by a river” or “we are a village.” That would be the local commune, plus some autonomous groups that live in that commune, like this autonomous organizing of women or autonomous organizing of youth. All women or all youth are automatically embedded in those autonomous structures. The core of the democratic confederalist structure happens here at this local level, and here we don’t have really… we have people coming in as like “yeah, I’m here for this party” or “I’m here to talk to you for the regional government or for the city,” but the core decision making and the main platform where the politics happens are in these local structures. We can imagine there’s this grassroots participatory democracy that happens at this level. There was this structure of people’s houses that HDP or the other party that is known as a movement party that helped support this process is called the Democratic Regions Party. They would somehow support this process, but this would happen in the community. They had like people’s houses that the party may have helped to build, but it would be like a community space where the locals would meet and do the local democratic grassroots democracy decision making and political participation. They would talk about all kinds of policies, how they want to decide things. The core idea is like what was already mentioned: democratic autonomy. Basically the logic of “This is our life, this is our community. We decide for ourselves, not only decide but also implement and make it happen for ourselves.” So there is nothing like waiting for someone from above or from somewhere else who will come to help us or at the same time oppress us.
This is what was happening there as a grassroots participatory democracy. The confederalist bit comes on top, where we see that these communities somehow coordinate with one another. That’s where you would have delegates from those structures, from those local communes, who would be delegates not representatives. They would meet at the higher level of assembly of the region or district in a city. And then you would have a higher one that would be a city level, and there would again be delegates. And this would go higher, higher, higher, higher, and then eventually one day we can end up with broad democratic confederalist structure in this logic. What is important here to keep in mind is that there will never be these higher structures making any decisions or speaking for those super local structures, for the communes. The role of HDP in this complex picture is that they come into play as one of the political groups, and you would have also social movements, civil society organizations, women’s groups, environmental groups. And they would come into play at the city or region level of communication. They would put through their suggestions, but they would never impose something on anyone else at these local communes. In this perspective I think it’s important also to imagine that sometimes people would talk about democratic confederalism in the logic of like how we know a little bit from the US constitutions, checks and balances and vetoes and things like this. If you really take it seriously we see this is not really what is happening or is needed because there is no higher level concentration of power. These checks and balances are there to protect the representative from usurping the power of the state, but here we don’t really have the state. There is no big player above these local communities, so we don’t really need anything like this, like checks and balances. We don’t have the need to, you know… that someone “watches the watchman.” I think that’s really like a true anti-hegemonic system of self-governance and grassroots democracy that was implemented there.
And in this sense it functioned like this. What is important, and what you are saying… and this is important to mention, that the coordination with the city and the elections, and especially regional elections and city level elections are really important in that and have been in the past. There will be local elections next year that will be really important as well. What is important is the coordination. This is another vehicle that helps to support this. At that point in time, there was a lot of resources and support coming from, for instance, the Mayor’s office. But HDP/The Democratic Regions Party would run in those elections, they would… how to say it… appropriate and use the city resources and infrastructure and the budgets to help democratic confederalism. The logic of how it would function then would be that they meet in the city assembly, so there would be these delegates of these local communes, and then for instance the elected mayor for the party would come to the assembly as well, but not as the head of that assembly or someone who would be deciding something because he’s in this elected position, but as another actor who plays a role in that. And actually the assembly would be the one who decides what’s going to happen with, I dunno, these types of funds. Then the mayor’s office would be one of the implementation tools that would be used to make the decisions happen.
H: And in all of these structures, and the ways that this is laid out, running through all of it there’s this very, very comprehensive ideology about how to build and reproduce a self-governing moral and political society that really runs on the principals of women’s liberation, an ecological society and this type of democracy that we were just talking about. And that is a process. It never reached this final point of like “Ah, democratic confederalism was truly actualized, and life was free” and blah blah blah. It’s really still in this process of struggle to create those things.
K: Yeah, that’s great point Hazel. We don’t understand it in the way, “Oh, we copy/paste these structures on decision making, and then we have democratic confederalism.” It’s much more that there is the ideology and the other things around that make the mechanism work.
TFSR: That’s really interesting. It seems civil society took the space that was left in a vacuum during a period of active war between ceasefires and started actually creating structures that could resolve representation issues and allow for some administration. And it sounds like the political parties that have been operating recently in some ways are not an afterthought but as said before are maybe just like a placeholder or something to push back on the escalations of violence by the state. I think we’ve all had experiences where people from social movements end up joining in with the power structure and are easily co-optable so that instead of speaking the words and ideas that are handed to them by the movement, they then start speaking of behalf of the movement and then on behalf of power to the population and the movement. And it seems like the structures are a byproduct of the activity of people getting together and communicating what their needs are and then finding ways to express those to larger and larger areas and other groups of people, as opposed to an ideological model of representation that… Sorry, I’m having a lot of trouble trying to frame this, and maybe I just don’t need to.
K: No, you’re totally getting into the point that I like.
TFSR: Well, just skipping all this stuff that I said because I think you said it better…
So, political parties are this pivot point of this relationship between society or movement and the existing power structure (in this point oftentimes represented as a colonial military and state apparatus), and the nature of political power is to centralize authority and wealth and political force or violence. And so not to say that Bakur has examples, as Hazel says, it’s not like it reached the apex and suddenly was perfect and everyone was free… But how does the movement or civil society keep the politicians that are in these parties that are helping to make this space from selling out democratic autonomy and just overwhelming or trying to make moves to overwhelm democratic confederalist structures? I guess since they’re so dispersed and made up of neighborhood councils and all that you can’t really populate those with your own people to have them make the decisions that you want to see or that power wants to see. Are there any notable examples of recallability for people in those political parties if they start acting in opposition to concepts of democratic autonomy?
K: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question and always a question that I had when I was talking to people. So I think the first part of the answer is that, as Hazel said, it’s mostly the ideology. So I think it’s kind of this western Positivist perspective on the governance structures, that it needs to be something predefined, right? And there are the rules and then we fill the positions. But trying to get rid of this feeling… It’s the other way around, right? There’s no preexisting ordering of how things are. People just come together and make decisions. Going back to what Hazel said, that’s the ideology, that’s the spirit, and people have that spirit. Autonomy as a spirit is everywhere present, and it’s the core principal, how they navigate, according to which people navigate everything else. This idea of this multitude of people that are constantly politically engaging intersectionality of people in that local community. And that’s what’s the lived reality and the normal conceptualization of politics in that region. So no one even thinks about that we should have these static people represented by someone, whoever, because people are like “Why would I speak for you?” this kind of like “Why would I get into your business? That’s your business. You deal with that.” So that’s a very internalized and natural way how to conceptualize the life around in the region, so that’s one thing I think that really helps. This will override all rules, all principles that we can put… don’t have to put in place because they can always be abused. And the ideology of self-defense and struggle in the movement, that’s exactly this type of thing. Because if someone has a problem, has a grievance, think they need to do something, self-defense is the answer. You are the one who will empower and free yourself, no one can do it for you. That’s the main leap in this, and this helps I think very much culturally for the bad things not to happen that you described.
The second answer is that there are a lot of practices that people in the movement will do. What I heard from my respondents would be also, “Yeah, they just do protests against one another.” At the beginning where the party took the municipality, one of the respondents told me “There were some deals that the previous mayors made with big corporations. We did not like them. They were campaigning some environmental cause. We did not like them.” The movement mayors were saying, “We can’t change it.” So they would just stage a protest. And they kept protesting, and they kept pushing, and this kind of permanent revolution inside as well. And they said it worked: “We pushed enough, and they changed, and they reversed.” There is not this naive idea of “and now everything will work perfectly and everyone is great and no one will ever abuse power.” Knowledge of that, and expecting that and being ready to raise your voice and stand up, is really high in the movement or in the communities. That’s seen as something normal, like opposing, criticizing. The ideology of the movement has in-built structures of criticisms, of self-criticisms as one of the important mechanisms of how these things happen.
The last thing, the last resort of things is that also these parties are being elected. They would run these elections for the local municipality, you know, according to the Turkish law as well. If they don’t get votes, they lose the votes as well. There are different ways this power abuse or power capture that we try to prevent from happening in that community. What I think is interesting and important and crucial for protection of individuals… sometimes we hear this “What if you happen to live in a local community that is very oppressive,” and you might be a person whose lifestyle does not fit into that local community. That’s the moment where this intersectionality of this autonomous organizing of women or youth… or it can be anything else, of the underprivileged, politically oppressed historically, groups comes into play. At this local level you would have the local commune, but then you would have the separate autonomous organizing of women, but then these women are also at the general structure. So if you happen to be a woman, you basically can have, in our type of language, three votes. You are there three times. That’s the mechanism how, through this self-organizing and self-defense, is that you can also protect yourself from the fact that you happen to live in a community that is anti-women or something like that.
TFSR: Hazel, do you have anything?
H: Maybe just briefly. I think Katka just said it. It’s this thing of like… There’s a lot of up-and-down power dynamics, and it’s not only within HDP, although it’s present there, but within the entire movement. There’s a lot of tensions. These can be reproductive tensions as well. But there’s like a general organizational culture of, although you may be a representative or have some political power in that sense, actually that could turn upside down in a second because there are organizational methods that have been refined over a very long time to try and deal with these things internally. But also because of the values of what it means to organize together and collectively, and how people can check each other and how one element of the movement only really exists in relation to all of the others. So the parliamentary party can only be effective or really represent the people as far as it actually xists in relation to Yeşil Sol Parti members.
And this isn’t like a cynical thing. They were going to the vigils of people who were disappeared by the state in the ‘90s, and this a thing that many of the politicians do because their own family members were disappeared in the ‘90s. Or, you know, they might visit the graveyards where the martyrs are and this type of thing, which they will later be charged with terrorism for probably. But that’s not just a cynical way to maintain their power but it’s like no, people are coming from those communities. It’s from their villages that people were killed or their families that people were killed. This is also how these things can be checked. And that these power dynamics exist in relation to other very strong power dynamics, like clan society where you can have very, very large, quite hierarchical power dynamics in clan societies that in many ways can protect it from the capitalist state form of assimilation. There can be a lot of benefits and a lot of beautiful things in clan society, and it can be quite repressive in different ways as well. It’s not a binary between the two things. It’s obviously very complicated. But there’s many other dynamics of self-governance in the clans. Also there’s a collective form of economy in different ways, and there’s collective values in different ways. So a political party will actually only exist in relation to all of these other things anyway.
TFSR: Incarceration is a common tool of counterinsurgency wielded against social movements and disenfranchised populations, including ethnic populations, for instance in the USA against Black and indigenous populations, as well as leftists, in China against Uyghur populations in Xinjiang, and in the Occupied Territories against Palestinians generally and activists in particular by the Israeli government. Can you talk a bit about what mass incarceration looks like among Kurdish communities or other minoritized populations, in Bakur in particular, and movements in so-called Turkey? And are there comparisons to be made between Supermax prisons in the US or UK and the F-type high-security prisons that are in Turkey?
H: Yeah, so this is a really important questions because this shapes the political terrain so deeply in Turkey. I want to start by talking about how isolation… This is really related actually to the F-type prison system. But isolation is really a strategy that’s critical to the state’s repressive approach, and we can see that crystallized in the F-type introduction. Firstly I just want to say how the prison system is just one element of a kind of domestic securitization policy and approach by the state because that also includes the military, it includes the police more broadly, it includes surveillance, propaganda, it includes economic and judicial punishments that are not carceral in the same way or don’t involve detainment but the thousands of people banned from working, like as teachers for example. There’s a lot to say about how rights are allowed or taken away, and all of these are important when considering how the state exerts or maintains its power. This is also very important about how we talk about the legitimization of politics and what is true, how we conceptualize truth, or something that is not true, especially when it relates to terrorism, which is the main charge that is levied against the Kurdish people and the Kurdish movement more broadly. That could be membership of a terrorist organization, financing, propaganda, anything related to terrorism. We also can talk more on that later because it’s such a big topic. It’s so deeply tied to how we emotionally, psychologically, intellectually understand something that’s political or how leadership can be allowed in a legal framework or not. In general for the movement short detainment is a common thing. Many people are arrested and then released pending the investigation. But it’s also really not uncommon for people to go to prison for like 7, 14, even 30 years, or life. I’ve met honestly countless people that have been imprisoned for very long sentences. You know, three or four years is quite a short time there for politically active people. Most people have at least one martyr in their family and at least one person who’s imprisoned or who at least has a case or had a case. Many people actually have even more than ten cases against them by the state.
The movement really grew up out of a prison resistance. This isn’t something that’s stopping it, but of course it’s having a very difficult and brutal effect on people who are trying to organize. When we’re talking about isolation, first, just even thinking “Where are the prisons?” Very, very often prisoners are placed in prisons that are incredibly far from their family members, from their towns or cities. They could be literally on the other side of the country. They could be moved frequently. And this is very difficult for people to visit their family members, so the isolation is already existing there. More broadly, we can see this increase in isolation policy, not just in Turkey but also in the West, this development of the architecture from a ward system where maybe there’s 8 or 30 or even 50 prisoners that can hang out, basically be together on some level and organize their life collectively. In so-called Britain there’s been a change especially after the ‘70s and ‘80s towards a much more segregated form of a prison system. This is off the back of a lot of prison uprisings across many prisons in the ‘70s and ‘80s in England and Scotland. It makes sense that the state, to further its control and punishment over the lives of prisoners, would then segregate people from each other to break any form of solidarity that people can have with each other. In Turkey the rate of incarceration has increased fivefold since 2000, so it went from 73 incarcerated people per 100,000 in 2000 to 392 per 100,000 now. They’re building at least 39 new prisons that are specially designed to isolate prisoners from each other.
Although we’re going to talk about the F-type a bit more specifically, it’s not the only type of prison that segregates prisoners. There’s also the S-type and a few others as well, which all have thousands in their capacity. The F-type has around 5,000 people imprisoned in it, at least. It was introduced in 2000, and the political prisoners knew straightaway that this was a form of warfare against them. So there was a huge resistance against this introduction, and masses of people went on death fasts, and hundreds of people died in this resistance against F-type prisons. The military actually broke through the walls of prisons to destroy and attack the resistance. People lost limbs in this process and were injured and were killed. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture agrees with the F-type introduction, which isn’t surprising because it’s already been utilized in Europe as method of control. We can see that this is directly tied to Öcalan’s isolation as well. He’s on literally a prison island with only a few other prisoners who are all completely separated from each other. For 27 months he’s had no contact with his lawyers, no contact with family, nothing. There is also a lot of agitation, understandably, in the movement because people don’t know what is his situation. There’s no way he can communicate with the world, and there’s this complete block. This type of isolation strategy is often… People often say that İmralı, this prison island, is like a laboratory for the other prisons. These different methods of control get tested there and then utilized in the prisons in Turkey on the mainland, and then that is used also in society as well to isolate the politics of the Kurdish movement.
There’s a quote actually of Besime Konca who was imprisoned for 16 years in Turkey, and then she was elected in 2015 as an HDP MP in Suruç, which is also in the Kurdish region. And she said, “Prison is the material manifestation of the state holding society hostage. Ideologically, a prison’s mission is to render people meaningless, corrupt, and absurd. We view the prison as a space of enclosure by the state, a controlled and surveilled environment deprived of creativity and spontaneity.”
In Turkey now there’s about one million people who have conditions… so they might have to go sign at the police station every week or every two weeks or something like that. There are literally dozens of arrests if not hundreds every single month. There’s a general creation of an atmosphere of fear and control, and that also counts for infiltration of the movement, etc. Unfortunately only family members can really be in contact with prisoners a lot of the time, so except through letters or through lawyers, in terms of who can send prisoners money only family members can or else people can have cases and investigations opened against them. So there’s also Kurdish prisoners from Iran (Rojhilat, which is the eastern area of Kurdistan) who have nobody to support them because of these rules. This is the case for all prisons everywhere. It’s a method not to just punish prisoners but also society. I want to also mention there’s 10,000, political prisoners, Kurdish political prisoners specifically, who are being supported by a prisoner solidarity TUHAD-FED [the Federation of Law and Solidarity Associations for the Families of Detainees and Convicts] which is also part of the democratic confederalist structure in the region. This punishment is trying to break the solidarity not just even between prisoners but actually in society. How many parents will never see their children again for thirty years, or people who had kids and then will never see them grow up, who will never fall in love, who will never get married? These are very, very long sentences for thousands and thousands of people. It’s the point of prisons around the world to try and restrict and limit the scope of life without actually ending it. We can see that this is part of a mixed warfare strategy because in other areas there’s this very explicit destruction of leaders. There’s been assassinations in Rojava [Syria] and Başur [Iraq] continuously with drone strikes, with targeted MIT assassinations by the secret services against Kurdish leaders in civil society and also in the armed forces. Just the other day there was an administrator in Qamişlo who was killed by a drone strike on purpose. This is a very physical form of the destruction of leaders in society, but actually the prison system as well… it also tries to destroy the leaders because it cuts them off from their ability to exist in society and for people to be in contact with them and to drain the life and freedom of that person from them. This has a very harsh effect on HDP but also on all forms of civil society organization.
K: Just a minor point… The movement turns this into a positive thing as well, not saying that prison is something good or romanticize it, but use a terrible situation of what exists as best they can. It has an important role in the propaganda and the politicization. So in the past, and what Hazel talked about, in the ‘80s, people would talk about prison as the best university and best political education they could every get. They try really hard not to separate the prison from the society. It’s a lot work done in not seeing them as someone being on the margin or someone out of society. But, really, prison is really a part of everyday life. It’s very politicized. It’s connected to this anti-state struggle, relates to transformative justice conversations as well. It’s very creatively used in the struggle and recruitment. In the ‘80s it would be like, “Look, in [the] seemingly impossible situation of solitary confinement, of being in prison, the movement still found a way to fight, how we can struggle.” So it gives this like, “Even if it seems no one has done it before, or it seems super desperate, there’s always some way we can fight and how we can flip it and turn and continue fighting in a situation like prison.”
H: The effectiveness of prison as a terrain of political organization and how this would create universities for political consciousness is also the reason the state rapidly introduced and proliferated the F-type and S-type prisons and isolation regimes. The majority of prisoners in Turkey are still held in the T-type or ward systems. But F-type is particularly used for political prisoners. Unfortunately their capacity is growing.
We often see people take a place in an organization still when they return. Even after ten or twenty years of prison, they might go right back into organizing. People also advance the language in prison. Kurmancî is not a standardized language. It’s been very often unwritten because of the state repression and assimilation policies. Often prisoners are some of the people who have the most advanced level of understanding and developing the language as well.
TFSR: I really appreciate that and how you’re talking about this as an important terrain of struggle. It’s not only the opposite of what the repressive colonial forces want to happen to people when you put them into these sorts of dire circumstances, pulling them out of their at-home communities and relationships and careers and what have you, whether it be into the dorm- or ward-style circumstances in the T-style prisons or into the more isolated methods. If the purpose is, as you said, to break up community then it’s not only the work of the people on the inside to continue to stay connected as best they can with each other and with the outside movement, but the work on the outside of keeping them connected and welcoming them back and helping them work through the traumas they’ve experienced on the inside is how you have a multi-generational culture of resistance. That’s beautiful.
K: Yeah, totally, and even look at what Öcalan does when he [was] put one man on one island. You know, he doesn’t go and cry and be desperate: “I’m in prison for life.” He actually uses that time to write most of his publications and do the ideological development for the movement and changes the whole paradigm of the movement through that. This is also an astonishing type of work or approach, how to conceptualize the prison.
TFSR: Yeah, and it’s okay if he does cry because that’s a terrible, terrible circumstance for him to be in. But Öcalan’s writing, which PM Press has been publishing a lot of translations of that, which is great, couldn’t exist without the cooperation of the wider movement that’s getting access to that information, that’s putting it into publication, that’s spreading it. The whole ecosystem of it I think is really beautiful.
K: Yeah totally.
TFSR: A couple of weeks ago, the KCK declared an end to the ceasefire it declared after the earthquakes in February as the Ankara government under Erdoğan continues to escalate assaults in Bakur. Did you get the impression as you were touring around the elections that the escalating and continued conflicts, the election outcome and the violence that was associated with the process of election season, or the lack of support for recovery following the earthquakes have or will impact a flow of refugees from Bakur into the international diaspora?
H: I don’t think so. I think from what I’ve heard it’s mostly internally displaced people. The economic crisis is driving much more migration I think. So today, and I’m sorry I didn’t look at the dollar, but I looked at the pound and the lira, the Turkish lira to the pound. So one year ago it was one pound to twenty Turkish lira. Now it’s one pound to 32 Turkish lira. In 2021 the lira lost 40% of its value. So I don’t know what it was in 2020, but it’s lost an incredible amount of its value over and over and over again. Inflation peaked at around 86% a few month ago, but unofficial and independently researched forms of measuring inflation said it was actually at its peak around 180%. In terms of how people, especially young people, see their opportunities of how they can survive (and this is for all people in the area but it most impacts working class people) it’s a very difficult situation now economically, and I don’t know how that will play out. I don’t think any of us know exactly what will happen, but this was one of the hopes people had with Erdoğan if he had lost, and as soon as he was re-elected the lira plummeted again.
Shall I say something about the escalations as well?
TFSR: If you like. And when you’re referring to internally displaced people, does that fall under similar dynamics to the increasing urbanization of the population? Does that fall under the push to get out of the rural areas, or is that something running in parallel and measured separately?
H: That is related actually. I don’t think we can say it’s the same as the ‘90s which was very much a counter-revolutionary war method by the state to really drain the population from the rural areas. It’s having this effect in areas that have already been depopulated, with people that are already suffering the effects of war. A lot of people moved both west and east in Turkey and in Kurdistan to stay with their families and this kind of thing. And rent prices doubled and even tripled in some places, including in Amed which is Diyarbakır. In terms of escalations more broadly, we don’t know. We can’t say for sure what happened, but unfortunately a lot of the people who we met will probably have many of court cases from the election campaign. This repression is certain to not stop or massively decrease at any point.
The day after the second election a couple dozen people were arrested in dawn raids in Hakkâri [Colemêrg in Kurmancî] which is a very very southeastern region in Bakur. And someone was beaten to the point of hospitalization in that. This is just one example of the type of policy that AKP already does. It’s not like a new thing, but these types of attacks—the drone strikes in Rojava, attacks in the mountains in Başur, setting up military bases, trying to destroy the civil society organizations, political organizations—these things will undoubtedly continue, and they will undoubtedly be resisted as well. Otherwise, HÜDA PAR is a Kurdish very far-right Islamist organization who has an active wing of Hezbollah, but it’s not related to the other forms of Hezbollah that are active in other countries. This party aligned with AKP and Hezbollah. You know they had an active part in the counter-revolutionary activities with the secret services in the ‘90s where many, many Kurdish movement people were assassinated in the rural areas, in cities, many journalists were shot and assassinated. Hezbollah is being welcomed into local administrations by AKP and alliances. And this is also seen as the shift toward a much, much more conservative social policy. As I mentioned earlier, the withdrawal from the Istanbul convention and stuff like that and anti-LGBT propaganda. [It’s] quite a worrying development. There were more than fifty Hezbollah members that were convicted for murders in the ‘90s. They were released in the last 3 years after Hezbollah, after HÜDA PAR, made these political agreements with HDP. Of course Erdoğan will want to invade Rojava, but whether or not he can we don’t know yet. Already a large region has been occupied by the Turkish state, and there’s a large amount of demographic replacement there as well. Essentially world geopolitical relationships really mediate people’s lives in a very horrible way. So whether Russia, Israel, the US, Britain, whether these nation states will allow Erdoğan, we don’t know. It’s unlikely because of the oil extraction, basically. I wish there was more I could say… I know we’re talking about the escalations, but it’s very, very bleak. It is a really unfortunate and very scary reality for people that it is five more years of Erdoğan.
Because of the economy being so destroyed by his policies… I mean, maybe he can’t survive for five years as a politician. We also don’t know.
TFSR: So just a brief aside, I know that one of the things over the last four of five years that the AKP has been doing in terms of Rojava has been cutting off water access. Is there a relationship there between that policy of allowing water to [be] cut, to cross the border into Syria and access to water coming into Bakur?
H: Yeah, so there is a relationship there. So for example a lot of the dam building projects, they are actually in Bakur. So these things that are colonial and capitalist actions by the state in Bakur have these longer downstream effects in Rojava. For example when Hasankeyf was flooded, it’s a very historic site that was thousands of years old. There’s many different projects that it doesn’t necessarily have the same effect because the water scarcity in Rojava is very severe. Whereas in Bakur it’s a different situation. It’s not as dry in many places. It’s also incredibly hot, and there are many ecological issues. A lot of the actions have either further downstream effects, or there’s cultural-historic destruction that takes place: destroying these ancient sites or flooding a lot of areas that people are living in in Dersim (which is also called Tunceli in Turkish) which is a very, very strong area of resistance, historically and presently. This is a predominantly Alevi area as well, which means that a lot of sacred sites were connected to trees and places in nature, and a lot of these places have been destroyed and there’s been huge dam building projects there. Local organizations and the movement have been struggling against these type of ecocidal projects with mixed success. They have managed to stop some of these. The effects are a bit different, but it is connected.
TFSR: Turkey is a member state of NATO, which also includes the USA and UK, in case anyone didn’t know. The PKK is a proscribed group according to the Terrorism Act of 2000 in the UK. It’s also on a list of terrorist organizations held by the State Department in the US. Obviously the PKK isn’t the only element of the Kurdish freedom movement, but I wondered if you can talk a little bit about what happens with people who organize in the Kurdish diaspora in the UK or with organizations that the Turkish state considers oppositional like the HDP.
H: This is also a very big topic. We can see through the use of the Terrorism Act of 2000 and specifically the use of Schedule 7 how this alliance between these colonial international forces can utilize the laws to exchange data. It’s not so often used to prosecute people, but actually this is a very important harassment and surveillance tool. And mostly schedule 7. So this is a thing that’s used at borders in Britain. It’s like a special counter-terrorism law that means if you enter you can be stopped, detained for up to six hours without a right to silence, so you can’t say “no comment” or anything like that because you’d be breaking the law then. The state has a right to all of your technology and also the passwords to your technology or else you could be prosecuted, which could have a two year jail sentence. It’s mostly used to collect data, but i’s predominantly used against black and brown people and diasporic communities. It’s been criticized many times by different organizations, different community organizations. In April a Labour MP in the UK said that… He tabled a motion in Parliament that called for “an urgent review to ensure that Schedule 7 powers are not being abused to suppress democratic and human rights and criminalize political dissent in the UK or overseas.” There has always been a use of this law, but actually in the last few months we’ve seen this increased against internationalists. It’s very commonly used against the Kurdish diaspora.
I want to step back and again look at terrorism and the concept of it in this broader political context around delegitimization. I was stopped under Schedule 7 when I returned, and they asked me questions for hours about many things, about my life, politics, this kind of thing. They took my technology which they haven’t given back. They also asked me “what do you think about Abdullah Öcalan,” and they asked me what do I think about the PKK, what do I think about all these different things, what do I know about the HDP, and this kind of thing. They looked at my notebook which has a list of Kurdish vocabulary in it, and one of the things they asked me about was “Oh, public prosecutors court. Hmm, that’s very specialist language isn’t it?” And I was like, “Well, not really.” Because, you know, HDP actually calls for international delegations many of whom are actually parliamentarians who attend these. And HDP is being criminalized and made illegal in the court in Turkey, by the public prosecutors court. So it’s not really specialist if you look at it like that. It kind of reminded me of how even the Kurdish language itself… somehow they’re trying to relate it to terrorism itself. It’s very, very messed up. Still in Turkey Kurdish isn’t an official language by the state, and it’s still brutally suppressed.
In terms of why Schedule 7 might be used in this context, we have to look at Britain and Turkey’s relationship. They do have very close political ties, usually people in Europe might say Turkey and Germany have close political ties which is also true. Britain in general tries to support Turkey and AKP in any way that it can. They have quite a lot of trade. They have a possible ten billion arms deal on the horizon that hasn’t been secured yet. I think it’s much more significant to think about the political power that both states are trying to utilize for their own benefit. Turkey is positioned importantly in Europe, in the Middle East, between Russia and the West like in the Ukraine war. Significantly, it is the biggest host of refugees worldwide. There’s about four million people there as refugees, and the British state has given at least 3 million pounds (but actually it’s much more) for securitization of the eastern border with Iran. So in the last few years they’ve built this huge border wall. They have specialist equipment, like sensing/surveillance equipment. They’ve trained their militarily in relation to this securitization practice as well. This is the kind of thing that western imperial states do very often around the world. It’s not the first time. We can see this type of policy and practice around securitization, how this can span from the political desires of one side of the continent to the other. Turkey gets a lot of money from the EU for hosting the refugees, and Erdoğan is always using people’s lives as a bargaining chip. He once threatened to “open the gates” (in relation to the people who claimed asylum there) to Europe if they didn’t support his invasion of northeast Syria.
Schedule 7 is used for many different political alignments, not just one. But we can see this as one method within this broad securitization strategy, especially how borders are this quite important crystallization of state power.
K: It’s not surprising for any of your listeners, probably, but just to keep realizing the paradox of it, how this counter-terrorist and terrorist language is totally flipped upside down. Before we went there Hazel and I were joking that… imagine, like Turkey, an authoritarian state, they have opposition that’s like the democratic opposition. They call them terrorists, and because of all these other things that Hazel mentioned all the other NATO countries start calling them terrorist as well. We were joking, “imagine if there was a lot of oil in Bakur.” We would see [a] completely different development, right? US would be invading Turkey and putting down Erdoğan as this terrible authoritarian leader and would be trying to co-opt the Kurdistan freedom movement and grassroots democracy as something that’s aligned with the democratic values of the world and blah blah blah….
TFSR: Well that does raise an interesting question if you have a response to it. The US government has had a relationship with the administration in Rojava, at various points working militarily or offering to have advisors or providing some armaments or air support at times during the battles against Daesh (ISIS). And there is in some western leftist’s framework of how they view the world, they view that any sort of tie with a government like the UK or the US becomes an uncomplicated situation where they must therefore be a tool or a stooge of imperialism. I dunno, you may not want to talk about it, but I wonder if that’s a thing that’s worth pushing back on or just ignoring.
H: I personally usually don’t engage with it because one thing I see a lot with the Kurdish movement in western leftist circles, but also beyond that, is people project a lot of different things onto it. So you have people who are like, “The Kurdish movement is just a Stalinist, tyrannical dictatorship by Öcalan.” And then you have people that are like, “The Kurdish movement is an anarchist paradise.” And then there’s people that say “Well, actually Rojava is a proxy for Assad,” and then people say “Well, Rojava is just a proxy for the US.” I’ve seen all of these things a lot and more. I think that they’re all wrong. I’s a very, very complicated dynamic of power relations, and of course the US is a huge imperialist colonialist state that tries to maintain its hegemony however it can in any part of the world. We know that, of course, and the movement knows that too. The movement doesn’t idealize the US or think that the US is like a true democracy and it’s true friend. That’s just not the case, and it’s quite sad that people can’t really see the corner that the movement is in there in terms of the non-state existence of it and therefore complete nonexistence in a legal framework and like protection sense, surrounded by hostile nation states and very powerful armies. People know that the US is hungry for oil in the region, and that’s what they’re doing. But also Rojava is at like constant threat of being destroyed. We say Rojava because it’s like saying the place, but it’s actually millions of peoples lives in the region that want to live a peaceful life. I think it’s quite shitty when people try to project this assimilation into that imperialism that I don’t think exists.
K: I think you said it nicely. For me personally, I know these are some difficult things to go through and the complexities . What I learned from the Kurdistan freedom movement in my own organizing is the pragmatism, that it’s two separate things. And strategy and pragmatism is one thing, another thing is like the principals and the revolution. And they constantly need to negotiate where the thing’s at. An example of like me as an animal liberation vegan person, there’s some indigenous struggle, and those people are not vegan, so am I not going to support them? Or a similar type of question. Or in this case I think it’s like, yeah, a lot of positivist western idea of purism and perfectionism and asking for a movement like this for our purist perfectionist ideals. Now you want to put a stop to the practical living alternatives that they have? Okay, you want to erase “this” because the world powers are like “this”?
I think people don’t think that through, really, when they suggest something like [only the pure ideals should exist]. But I’m also guilty myself of these things. What I’m personally learning from this is the pragmatism in political struggle. And we can disagree and agree with specific steps, but it’s something that is also ideologically in there in the Kurdistan freedom movement as part of the reality that we live.
H: I also want to add that there’s so many different contradictions and pragmatism that have to be made that actually are very, very challenging for people in the movement because there’s many examples of honor killings happening within a community and some of the local communes maybe or women’s civil society organizations becoming involved in these processes of accountability and justice. That for many people of course is a red line. There’s many different things that can be politically incredibly challenging and completely against the ethics that the movement has. People exist, the society exists, we all exist already in a context that’s fraught with tough contradictions. We can’t just decide to be in an ideal. The movement only exists from the society anyway, within it and as it. It’s not an elite few people. It’s something that’s always working in this pragmatic framework trying to move through these contradictions. Öcalan’s ideology, his theory and philosophy, places capitalist modernity as the worst, most extreme terrain of inequalities and oppressions that humans have ever existed in. He certainly sees the western and also US, etc positions within that to have created that and perpetuated that. But it just doesn’t stop there. It’s not only these states that are the actors in it, but there’s many long trajectories of power and resistance that he highlights.
TFSR: Thanks for letting me jump that question on you all. I really appreciate the candor and the quality of the information that you’ve shared. Are there any English-language sources on organizing that express and translate the work of folks and the thoughts of folks who are in Bakur doing work in the Kurdish movement that you’d suggest pointing people to?
H: Yeah, there’s a few books, and we can send you the links as well to put in the show notes. One of the best ones is Dilar Derik’s book The Kurdish Women’s Movement. In my opinion this is the best English-language resource that exists to learn about the Kurdish freedom movement’s ideology and practice and history broadly. Also, especially about Bakur, there’s a book that was recently released called The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison, and it’s edited by Gültan Kışanak and is available online in the US and also in the UK and hopefully internationally. She has letters from women who have worked in the political field in Turkey and Bakur. Most of them are HDP MPs or mayors and that kind of thing. They speak about their processes through politicization and their activites. It’s a really, really amazing book. Also, I recommend Öcalan’s books actually. Although he’s not talking like about the recent history of Bakur, I think they’re really worth reading. Some of them are quite long, but there are also the booklets that are available for one or two pounds and also online as free PDFs. I recommend reading Democratic Nation or Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution for getting the background information on some of the stuff that we spoke about. Otherwise there’s a lot of conferences that are organized by the movement, and we can send some links to put in the show notes. People can go to protests that have been organized by the diaspora or the internationalist organizations in your city if they have some basis there. And there’s also a few different films. An important one is called 14th of July (14 Temmuz in Turkish) which is about the prison struggle in Diyarbakir prison in the military coup era, and there are English subtitles for it. It’s in Turkish, but it’s got English subtitles. Most importantly organizing and struggling in your own locality is the kind of thing I would suggest. It’s not a resource but in terms of how people can support the movement this is one of the best ways to do it.
K: When we went there and asked people how we can help, oftentimes the answer was “Go have a revolution back home.” Go ahead and let’s do the work to have a revolution in our localities. There are other ways people can actively support. There are campaigns where you can support the struggle and defend the Kurdistan revolution. We will put links to that. There’s a campaign called Delist the PKK and it’s like a petitional campaign that’s been going for years and other things around that as well. Another campaign is Freedom for Öcalan which is a campaign where you can sign it. It’s international, and there will be a link to that as well. If people have money and want to support with donations then we would recommend that you would send your money to Heyva Sor [Kurdish Red Crescent] which is locally helping organizations who were victims of the earthquakes. They have an international account, and you can send money to them, and we can be sure that the money will go to the regions that are in need of support, and the money will support the victims of the earthquake in the region, especially Bakur.
TFSR: Katka and Hazel, thank you so much for having this conversation.
H: Thank you for having us here.
K: Thank you so much for having us. One last thing, we will post a contact for us. We’ve also written a report and have other sources. If people want to get in touch, have ideas, criticisms, want to talk, get involved, please contact us and we will be super happy to be in touch. Thank you.
1 referred to as Şêx (Sheikh when transliterated) Sayid in Kurdish media.