Here’s an excellent summation of what’s happening in Syrian Rojava and Kobane by Dr Kamran Matan, a Senior Lecturer on International Relations at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research, University of Sussex, England, as posted on a blog called The Disorder of Things.
What stuck my fancy:
With regards to the discomfort of the left with the idea of western military support for YPG/YPJ the important preliminary point to be made is that the Kurds have repeatedly claimed that they do not want or need direct military intervention by either coalition forces or Turkey. They’ve repeatedly said that they only need anti-tank weapons, ammunition and the opening of a corridor for fighters, food and medicine to reach Kobani. This request has been echoed by the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, who warned of a repetition of the fate of Srebrenica in Kobani if such a humanitarian corridor is not established.
Also, this:
Together with PYD, PKK now advocates a form of libertarian socialism in which the Kurdish national question is solved through the system of ‘democratic autonomy’. Democratic autonomy involves a rejection of nation-statism, which could ultimately lead to what Frantz Fanon described as ‘nationalisation of the robbery of the nation’ and leave oppressive hierarchies of class and gender intact. By contrast, democratic autonomy begins from a radical decentralisation of existing states through the establishment of a gender-egalitarian and eco-protective confederated system of self-management based on popular communes as the basic organs of the exercise of direct democracy. The idea of democratic autonomy has been the theoretical lynchpin of formation and administration of three cantons of Afrin, Jazira and Kobani in Syrian/Western Kurdistan or Rojava, which were established by PYD after the retreat of Syrian military from these regions following the militarisation of Syrian revolution and the outbreak of the civil war.
In a nutshell, what’s happening in Rojava and Syria is the largest libertarian socialist (read anarchist) experiment since the Spanish Civil War.
