Dear comrades, dear friends,
We write to you in these times of historical resistance and above all we want to remind you once again of all the freedom fighters who gave their lives to defend the revolution. We would like to remember Şehîd Amara Renas, Şehîd Dayê Aqîde and Şehîd Hevrîn Xalef, who represent the will of the fighting women, as well as Ş. Ceren Güneş from Turkey and Ş. Andok Cotkar from Germany, who defended the value of internationalism with their lives. We will never forget all the other thousands of beautiful personalities who fought for humanity and against the brutality of fascism and capitalist modernity. In these times we must deal more than ever with the heritage of our martyrs, it reminds us to continue fighting, reflecting and improving our struggle. This is the truth behind the success of our struggle for freedom and dignity.
We greet all the fighters on the front line in the ranks of the people’s and women’s defense units who resist the war of aggression, all the mothers who take care of the fighters, all the young people who oppose the occupying forces with stones and Molotov cocktails, all the doctors who save lives every day, all those who continue to organize, agitate and live with society the democratic self-administration and self-defence, all the journalists who make the historical resistance visible to the public.
We greet all those who resist relentlessly in the state prisons, on the mountains of Kurdistan or on the streets of the metropolises.
We also greet all those who have agitated, organized and carried out actions all over the world in the last weeks.
With thousands of actions, from special banner drops and mass demonstrations to actions of civil disobedience and more militant actions, we have attacked the profiteers of this war and shown them that we will no longer accept Turkish fascism and its international plans against the freedom-seeking peoples. We have set a great sign of international solidarity and shown the world that we stand behind the values and martyrs of this revolution.
We have also seen the legacy of 7 years of revolution, which cost the lives of 11,000 friends and left more than 20,000 injured, and the results of many years of all our efforts and common struggle. This has been shown above all by the reactions of feminist, ecological and youth movements, which are on the streets every day in many places, with slogans like “All together against fascism” “all together against patriarchy” and “Long live the resistance of Rojava”. Also in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Chile, Bolivia and Hong Kong people are in revolt against the system of theft, oppression and exploitation logic. The attack on Northern Syria is one of many direct attacks on all of us, so they will have to face our broad global resistance.
We would also like to recall that this war is just another step by the imperialist forces, first of all NATO, which is using the Turkish fascist state and its jihadist forces against the societies and women in the Middle East. The basis of this war is the patriarchal and capitalist mentality and also this attack mainly aims at the philosophy of Rêber Öcalan and the free will of the Kurdish people as well as at democratic socialist and feminist values all over the world.
When the Kurdish liberation movement continued its struggle with a new paradigm of socialism after the collapse of real socialism and especially after the unexpected revolution in Rojava with the pioneering role of women, the world of the capitalists, who had declared the end of history, was seriously shaken. While the state forces cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, blinded by their dirty profit interests, Rojava has become a shining light of grassroots democracy, women’s freedom and social ecology.
Dear friends,
We, who today as internationalists in Mesopotamia stand shoulder to shoulder with our Arab, Kurdish, Armenian and Syriac friends for the cause of freedom, really feel that in this existential resistance we are also fighting on behalf of all humanity. The philosophy of Rêber Ocalan and the practice of the Kurdish liberation movement, as well as the democratic-confederal revolution in Northern Syria has become the voice of the oppressed societies of the Middle East. The legitimacy of this struggle is no longer under discussion today. With the war against ISIS, new standards of freedom and dignity rose under the pioneering role of the women’s movement, which at the same time exposed the Western hypocrisy of democracy, human rights and peace to the whole world.
The mask of the profit-seeking, murderous and destructive illusions of the rulers was torn down and the whole world sees their croaking ugliness. Here we try our best to share the beauty of a society in resistance and self-determination with the world.
But the reality of the enemy is something we should never underestimate. Just as in this period the resisting societies have moved a little closer together, the state forces have united and each and everyone has been given a special role in their war against society. As a revolutionary movement we are forced to take all our steps in consideration and knowledge of the enemy, to breathe, live, reflect and fight according to this consciousness. Without knowing the reality of the enemy, all our revolutionary attempts will always remain inadequate and unsuccessful. Therefore, it is a fundamental responsibility to properly analyze the enemy, calculate his next steps, and make preparations accordingly and let the enemy run into emptiness. That is why we will live 24 hours a day in the certainty of the enemy attacks and improve our work and our revolutionary attitude and pace without pause and prove our spirit of resistance. So we say, no foot width to the fascists, we will leave no place for you on this earth.
But today we are in a huge war with this enemy all over the world and especially here in Kurdistan. This war is not only military. Against our fight for dignity and freedom a war of extermination is waged. Heavy military, cultural, social, economic and psychological attacks are taking place. It is a war that is led not only, but especially by NATO. NATO’s mission has always been, and continues to be, solely to protect Western capitalist interests and dismantle communist, socialist and progressive movements throughout the world. Just as NATO supported every fascist coup regime in the 20th century without exception, they stand behind the Erdogan regime again today.
The Turkish fascism tries to attack from Bakûr (Northern Kurdistan) to Rojava, from the Medya defence areas to Mexmûr and Sengal and their leader Erdogan has sworn to occupy all regions of Kurdistan with his neo-Ottoman dreams from Afrin to Bradost. Many cities are still in a state of emergency after hundreds of civilians were massacred in 2016 in urban resistance and burned in cellars. Especially with secret service methods and military high technology the Turkish army tries to beat the guerrillas, which frightens the Turkish state and also gives the population the courage to resist fascism. The systematic war crimes and attacks on civilian infrastructure and targeted executions as well as bomb attacks by support of ISIS sleeper cells in the current war of aggression on Rojava aim at urging the population to flee and carry out ethnic cleansing and demographic change.
Women in particular are the target of attacks by the capitalist system, of which the atrocities of the IS are only the most brutal examples. The targeted murder and rape of Rojava’s organized women is an attempt to break society as a whole, and the values of women’s freedom are opposed to Sharia law. Cultural attacks are also continuing. The Kurdish language, songs and dances, the history of Kurdistan is denied, banned. In Hasankeyf, 12,000 year old Kurdish culture is sunk and in Afrin cultural heritage is destroyed or sold and also the historical Sûr of Amed has been razed to the ground. And the genocide of the Armenians, Yezidis and Suryoye 100 years ago is repeated today exactly in the region where the survivors of that time fled. The oldest peoples and cultures of human history are to be exterminated in order to make way for Islam and neoliberalism. In the Dersîm mountains, forests are burned and overexploited, thousands of dams have completely destroyed nature and left the population of Rojava without access to water, and the war with its billions of tons of explosives and chemical weapons has contaminated the entire region. Wherever the hands of fascism reach, all Kurdish culture and once intact ecosystems are plundered and robbed.
Thousands of political prisoners are in prison, Mafia-like forced administrations are being set up everywhere, the right to vote is practically suspended and the Democratic Party of Peoples (HDP) is about to be banned. Public people who do not support the war will be harassed and those who speak out for peace will be imprisoned. All media institutions are forcibly aligned by the state and the national education plan now carries the jihad instead of the theory of evolution. And the economic crisis, intensified by military policy, is driving many people and entire families to suicide.
It is important to repeat that the Turkish state is pursuing the same policy as in Rojava in Bakur (Northern Kurdistan). The occupation of Rojava also takes place in Bakur and Başur (South Kurdistan). Therefore we should not concentrate our resistance only on Rojava but put a focus on the smashing of Turkish fascism in Bakur and Turkey in order to find a solution. If the campaign of extermination against democratic forces and especially the Kurdish society in Bakur is stopped, this also means to prevent massacres in the other parts of Kurdistan. Conversely, lack of resistance leads to the strengthening of fascism and intensification of attacks on the other parts. In order to avert the threat against Rojava and Başur, action must be taken against the attacks in Bakur. Also the resistance in Europe can play an important role.
The source of strength and faith of every revolutionary movement is society, this is especially the case for the Kurdish people. Revolutionaries who do not rely on the power of society will be marginalized or fail completely. Therefore society is the locomotive of revolution and at the same time revolution is always the achievement of societies. Since the fascist Turkish state knows this exactly, it tries to smash the revolution with all imaginable methods, to spread fear and terror and with pure force or with bio-power methods to fragment society and force it to obedience. Fascism wants to oppress every free breath of the population and give it the feeling that nobody can resist it, it wants to destroy every believe and hope. Its aim is to spread a psychology of defeat and submission and to establish the legitimacy of its rule in people’s minds. The social spirit, revolutionary feelings and resistance are consistently fought with repression and isolation politics. At the same time the Turkish state tries to hide its reality full of greed for profit, plunder, exploitation, massacre, rape and genocide from the world with the most hypocritical, manipulative, dirty and unethical special war methods.
The list of undignified outrages of the Turkish Republic and the capitalist mentality behind it is endless. Not without reason was its founder Kemal Atatürk and his politics a great role model for fascist leaders like Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. It is not without reason that even today authoritarian government leaders and profit-greedy states support his successor Erdogan. The statement that the PKK is worse than the IS, by Donald Trump or that Turkey is an important ally, by Heiko Maas, clearly shows who is on whose side. ISIS is kept alive and supported by the Turkish state itself, which in turn is a NATO partner. The whole world knows this today. Now it is left to the world itself to draw a lesson from the fascism of the 20th century and to oppose the international conspiracy. This is where the struggle between capitalist modernity and democratic modernity, which Rêber Öcalan sees as the basis of today’s Third World War in the Middle East, becomes concrete.
But to think that the war is limited only to the Middle East and that peace prevails in Western countries would be a great fallacy. If a society cannot self-govern itself on the basis of its own ethical-political institutions, then this means moral-social alienation and political foreign domination. Since this can only be achieved through state, power and violence, this state means war against society. The only thing that remains for society is legitimate self-defence or peace can only find true meaning through self-defence, everything else is surrender and submission. Peace without self-defence, which liberalism imposes on peoples and societies today, especially the play of “stability and democratic conflict resolution”, is ultimately nothing other than the concealment of the one-sided rule of the bourgeois class and colonial power armed to the teeth.
Capitalist modernity tries to assert and expand its hegemony through the leadership method of bio-power. This method not only relies on the exploitation of social surplus value through industrial production, but aims to transform all areas of social life into sources of accumulation of capital. Life itself becomes a commodity, subjected to the logic of capital, and an individualistic and egoistic way of life is forced upon society. The system creates a consumerist anti-communal culture and liberal lifestyle forced careerism and opportunism. All people are in competition with each other. At the same time capitalism manages to blur the hostility against the actual oppressor by liberalism.
The word peace was misused in such a way that the Turkish state even calls its war of aggression “source of peace” and also the USA and EU constantly speak of peace operations, but as they emerge they create the exact opposite, war and chaos. The Iraq war, which took place in the name of democracy and peace, killed 1.5 million people and was a breeding ground for the so-called Islamic state. Therefore a correct understanding of a dignified peace is essential for us. Only a free Kurdistan in a democratic Middle East can guarantee the peoples a life with diversity of identities, democratic autonomy and freedom of women. This is not granted by states, but is created by social self-organization and fought for through democratic politics. Rojava is the best example of this.
Dear friends,
To transform this war into the struggle for our liberation will not be easy and has and certainly will require many sacrifices and efforts. The people here in any case do not want to accept the world of the rulers any longer in such a way and therefore all people here participate in the revolutionary people’s war in most various ways. So it is now up to us to take our decision. We say, either a fight for life in freedom and dignity or no life.
For us as revolutionaries this struggle starts with our own personality and demands a radical attitude from us. A personality who keeps a clear head in this situation, reflects on himself daily, always on the lookout, progresses with passion and curiosity, defends himself against the attacks of the liberal way of life and fights persistently for a solution to the end and in doing so drags everyone with itself. To understand the political world situation and our paradigm correctly, to develop our organization, the right language, the right form of convincing – and in this sense to organize our life correctly. If we strive for good practice in this respect and also give proper meaning to the efforts of our friends and the fallen, we will be able to implement everything that the situation demands of us.
We are convinced that one of the most important responsibilities is to spread the writings and ideas of Rêber Öcalan, which represent a clear solution to the Kurdish question and a global democratic perspective. This also means a serious engagement with the paradigm of the most advanced revolutionary force and other progressive forces and militant societies about the potentials and dangers of the current situation and the role of internationalism. We need to gain a sense of this moment of freedom in which we can choose to become the conscious force in this ongoing war. The large network, which was created by the international sharing of experiences gained in Kurdistan and worldwide, can be developed into a new internationalist alliance.
If we really want to break the shackles of the enemy, if we want to become a force capable of responding to the attacks of a global system of rule, we need strong connections with allies and a deep international organization. The chaos of the Middle East and the social crisis of the West make the perception of the struggle for a dignified life important. Through ideological education, new organizational connections and diplomatic defense of the revolution in Kurdistan and elsewhere, a new democratic socialist force can emerge. We can already see today that the resistance spirit of Kurdistan is spreading, taking root and inspiring self-confident social forces.
Create one, two, many Rojavas. For every commune that they destroy through their attacks, we will organize ourselves in many new communes. For each cooperative they destroy, we will self-sustain ourselves with many new cooperatives. For each council they destroy, we will come together in new self-governance councils. For each academy they destroy, we will create new academies and educate ourselves. It is self-determination, democracy and the unity of diversity, the essence of society against which they wage war. With the leadership of the women and youth movement, the spirit of Democratic Confederalism has long since spread globally and has become the hope of the peoples. They may kill us, but they will never destroy the hope.
The memory of the International Brigades in Spain and the flow of internationalists to Latin America in the 70′-80s is still alive among the liberal forces of Europe. The participation in the resistance in Kurdistan is also the task and responsibility of the youth of Europe and elsewhere. For the defense of the revolution of Rojava and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria many internationalists gave their lives. Defending the values they have created and continuing their struggle is our responsibility.
Down with Turkish fascism!
Long live Internationalist Solidarity!
Resistance is life!