How My Father’s Ideas Helped the authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Kurds Create a New Democracy and his Islamist party.

By Debbie Bookchin, New York Review of Books
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/15/how-my-
fathers-ideas-helped-the-kurds-create-a-new-democracy/ Kurdish state. It sought to unite the Kurds, whose
One mild spring day in Vermont in April 2004, my
father, the historian and philosopher Murray Bookchin,
was chatting with me, as we did almost daily. We’d talk War I. In the decades that followed, it has often seemed
about everything and everyone—friends, family, and
thinkers from Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi (whom he
admired) to then-president George W. Bush (whom he
did not) and George Smiley, the fictional John Le Carré violence to which these “new” nation states have
character whom he identified with and was fond of. He
paused, and out of the blue disclosed what seemed an
odd piece of news: “Apparently,” he said, “the Kurds
have been reading my work and are trying to implement 1984, when the PKK initiated an armed struggle, some
my ideas.” He said it so casually and off-handedly that it 40,000 people have been killed, most of whom have
was as if he didn’t quite believe it himself.
My father, eighty-three years old at the time, had spent
six decades writing hundreds of articles and twenty-four
books articulating an anticapitalist vision of an
ecological, democratic, egalitarian society that would
eliminate the domination of human by human, and bring
humanity into harmony with the natural world, a body
of ideas he called “social ecology.” Although his work
was well-known within anarchist and libertarian left
circles, his was hardly a household name.
Unexpectedly, that week, he had received a letter from
an intermediary writing on behalf of the jailed Kurdish
activist Abdullah Öcalan, head of the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK). As its co-founder, sole
theoretician, and undisputed leader, Öcalan had a larger-
than-life reputation—but nothing about his ideology
seemed in any way to resemble my father’s.
Founded in 1978 as a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist
organization, the PKK had for thirty years been waging
an insurgent war on behalf of the roughly 15 million
Kurds living in Turkey who have suffered a long history
of violence. For decades, Turkey has prohibited Kurds
from speaking their own language, wearing customary
dress, using Kurdish names, teaching the Kurdish
language in schools, or even playing Kurdish music.
Kurds have routinely been arrested and tortured for any
expression of their cultural identity or opposition to
Turkey’s one-flag, one-people, one-nation ideology,
which originated in the early twentieth century, found
full expression in Kemalism, and has endured under the
Like other national liberation movements of the 1970s,
the PKK was originally founded to win an independent
homeland of five millennia, a swath of land known as
Kurdistan, had been arbitrarily parceled out between
Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria in the aftermath of World
as if these four countries were competing for the
distinction of which could inflict more suffering on its
Kurdish population. The spasmodic, pogrom-like
subjected Kurds has included chemical gassings,
bombings, forced relocations, ecological devastation,
and the razing of entire villages. In the decades since
been Kurds. For all those years of struggle, Öcalan has
been the PKK’s ideological and organizational leader.
In 1999, Öcalan was captured in Kenya after he had
been forced out of Syria, where he’d lived for twenty
years. Transported to the remote Turkish island of
Imrali, in the inland Sea of Marmara, Öcalan was tried
and convicted on treason charges. His death sentence
was commuted to life imprisonment because Turkey
was then trying to enter the European Union, which
opposes capital punishment. Since then, Öcalan has
been confined to a prison cell on Imrali, watched over
by hundreds of guards, with few, if any, other prisoners
on the island. Despite his isolation—he has not been
seen since April 2016, and has been denied access to his
attorneys since 2011—Öcalan remains the guiding light
of the Kurdish liberation movement in Turkey and
Syria, and for its many supporters in the Kurdish
diaspora.
When Öcalan’s intermediary, a German translator
named Reimar Heider, wrote to my father in 2004,
Heider told him that the Kurdish leader had been
reading Turkish translations of my father’s books in
prison and considered himself a “good student” of my
father’s. Indeed, Heider went on:
He has rebuilt his political strategy around the vision of
a “democratic-ecological-society” and developed a
model to build up a civil society in Kurdistan and the
Middle East… He has recommended Bookchin’s books
to every mayor in all Kurdish cities and wanted
everybody to read them.
~It turned out that following his arrest, Öcalan was
given access to hundreds of books, including Turkish
translations of numerous historical and philosophical
texts from the West. He was granted these books as he
tried to devise a legal strategy for his own defense
during his treason trial and subsequent appeals: he
aimed to explain his actions as a revolutionary by
examining the Turkish-Kurdish conflict over the
twentieth century within a comprehensive analysis of
the development of the nation-state, beginning in
ancient Mesopotamia. Öcalan began writing what would
become a multi-volume history, in which he sought to
propose a democratic solution to the “Kurdish Question”
that would not only free the Kurdish people but also
establish a harmonious relationship between Turks and
Kurds and, indeed, among all peoples of the Middle
East.
During the course of this work, Öcalan was influenced
by a number of thinkers, including Ferdinand Braudel,
Immanuel Wallerstein, Maria Mies, and Michel
Foucault. In addition, Öcalan had listened to, and
nurtured, the voices of a generation of Kurdish women
led by Sakine Cansiz, a PKK co-founder and a
legendary figure who survived years of unspeakable
torture in Turkish prisons in the 1980s and was
encouraged by Öcalan to write her memoirs. (Cansiz
was assassinated by a Turkish agent in Paris in 2013,
along with two other Kurdish female activists.) Cansiz
influenced hundreds of Kurdish women in prison and
PKK training camps, including the recently arrested co-
mayor of the Turkish city of Diyarbakir, Gültan
Kişanak, who had also been tortured in prison in the
1980s. Impressed by the sacrifice and independence of
women like these, Öcalan had already begun, in the
1990s, to initiate a dramatic transition in the PKK from
a militant, patriarchal organization bent on seizing state practice in three “cantons” in Syria, Cizre, Kobani, and
power along Marxist-Leninist lines to an organization
that emphasized feminist values and sought a form of
socialism very different from that associated with the
former Soviet Union. Yet many of the defining features
of the political philosophy that Öcalan began to espouse
in the 2000s are firmly rooted on my father’s idea of
social ecology and its political practice: “libertarian
municipalism” or “Communalism.”
My father saw ecological problems as inherently social
problems—of hierarchy and domination—that had to be great challenges, which include a doubling of the
solved in order to address the environmental crisis.
“Perhaps the most compelling real fact that radicals in
our era have not adequately faced,” he wrote, “is the fact Turkey to the north and Iraqi Kurdistan to the East,
that capitalism today has become a society, not only an
economy.” Social change, he insisted, would have to
address capitalism’s plundering of the human spirit and
the environment by dismantling hierarchical human
relationships and decentralizing society so that
grassroots democratic forms of organization can
flourish. This social theory of Bookchin’s, absorbed and
amplified by Öcalan under the name “democratic
confederalism,” is now guiding millions of Kurds in
their quest to build a non-hierarchical society and local
council-based democracy.
As the Syrian civil war enters its eighth year, most
Westerners are familiar with images of the Kalashnikov-
toting men and women of the Kurdish People’s
Protection Units, known respectively as the YPG, which
is mostly male, and the YPJ, the all-female units. These
militias have fought and died by the thousands across
the battlefields of Syria as the leading units of the Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF), the multi-ethnic force
supported by the United States in the campaign against
ISIS. Less often acknowledged is what they are fighting
for: the chance to achieve not only political self-
determination but also a new form of direct democracy
in which every member of the community has an equal
say in the popular assemblies that address the issues of
their neighborhoods and towns—that is, democracy
without a central state.
Because of repression in Turkey, these ideas have come
to their fullest fruition in the historically Kurdish
northeast of Syria. In 2012, the Syrian government
troops of President Bashar al-Assad withdrew from this
region to concentrate on fighting insurgents elsewhere.
The Syrian Kurds had been watching their brethren
implement some of Öcalan’s ideas in largely Kurdish
towns and cities like Diyarbakir, across the border in
southeastern Turkey; and they had been preparing for
their chance. They began to put the same ideas into
Afrin, which are home to an estimated 4.6 million
people, including 2 million Syrian Kurds, as well as
smaller populations of Arabs, Turkmen, Syriacs, and
other ethnic minorities. In these cantons, multi-ethnic
neighborhood assemblies hold sway, and the prevailing
ethos emphasizes an equal division of power between
women and men, a non-hierarchical, non-sectarian, and
distinctly ecological outlook, and a cooperative
economy built on anticapitalist principles. The people of
these cantons have made these reforms in the face of
population in the form of war refugees from other parts
of Syria, and embargoes on food and supplies from
where the Kurdish tribal leader Masoud Barzani has for
more than a decade overseen a capitalist statelet that
depends on Turkey for trade.
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In 2014, the three cantons established their autonomy as
the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, which
became commonly known as Rojava, the Kurdish word
for “West” (Syria being the most western portion of
greater Kurdistan). Though still known informally as
Rojava, the Kurds officially dropped the name in 2016,
in recognition of the multi-ethnic nature of the region
and of their commitment to freedom for all, not just the
Kurdish people. The Democratic Federation (or DFNS)
is founded on a document called the “Charter of the
Social Contract,” whose Preamble declares the
aspiration to build “a society free from authoritarianism,
militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious
authority in public affairs.” It also “recognizes Syria’s
territorial integrity and aspires to maintain domestic and
international peace”—a formal renunciation by Syrian
Kurds of the idea of a separate state for their people.
Instead, they envisage a federated system of self-
determining municipalities.
In the ninety-six articles that follow, the Contract
guarantees all ethnic communities the right to teach and
be taught in their own languages, abolishes the death
penalty and ratifies the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and similar conventions. It requires public
institutions to work toward the complete elimination of
gender discrimination, and requires by law that women
make up at least 40 percent of every electoral body and
that they, and ethnic minorities, serve as co-chairs at all
levels of government administration. The Social
Contract also promotes a philosophy of ecological
stewardship that guides all decisions about town-
planning, economics, and agriculture, and runs all
industries, where possible, according to collective
principles. The document even guarantees political
rights to teenagers.
Among the many challenges the Democratic Federation
faces is that its experiment is in a war zone. The town of
Kobani and surrounding area were heavily damaged by
US airstrikes against ISIS before the YPG and YPJ
defeated the jihadist militia there after a six-month battle
in 2014. The US and its allies supply military aid to the
SDF but no humanitarian aid, and the reconstruction of
Kobani, and many other parts of the Federation
devastated by war, has been very slow. While the
utopian aspects of Rojava have attracted a couple of
hundred international civil volunteers who are working
on environmental waste issues and planting 50,000
saplings in an effort to “make Rojava green again,” the
region suffers from a water shortage inflicted by Turkey,
which has built enormous dams that have deliberately
slowed the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a
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trickle, as well as flooded historic settlements on the
Turkish side of the border.
Against the backdrop of an entire society mobilized for
the war effort, there have been contested complaints of
child soldiers, uprooted Arab villagers, and other human
rights violations in the Kurdish-controlled areas.
Internally, there is the challenge of resisting the
ideological rigidity that often befalls movements with a
charismatic spokesperson when elites claim the leader’s
mantle at the expense of dissenting views. Perhaps most
crucially, it remains to be seen whether Turkey, which
has stated its desire to obliterate the Rojava project, will
be brought to heel or given the green light by some
combination of the three world powers—Russia, Iran,
and the US—vying to exert control over Syria. The
Social Contract’s intention, however, is clear—to build
a grassroots-based, democratic, decentralized society of
the kind my father and Abdullah Öcalan both
envisioned.
Born in the Bronx in 1921, Murray Bookchin’s earliest
influence was his grandmother Zeitel, a Russian
revolutionary who emigrated to the US in the aftermath
of the 1905 Revolution. As my father later described the
struggles of his grandmother and her comrades to me:
Under these red flags, dreaming of human emancipation,
they had the ideal of a classless society, free of
exploitation, and that was their myth, vision, and their
hope. Also living in this pre-industrial world where
families were basically extended families, with mutual
sense of trust, you had an intense community life
marked by mutual aid, marked by a strong cultural
sensibility, marked by a radical cultural vision.
The Bookchins had struggles of their own. My father’s
mother had been abandoned by her husband when
Murray was a young boy; after his grandmother’s death,
when he was nine, they were often impoverished.
Around the same time, in 1930, he became a member of
the Young Pioneers of America, a Communist youth
organization. At thirteen, he was “co-opted” into the
Young Communist League. Even the youngest party
members “were treated like we were adults,” he
recalled. They were expected to have read The
Communist Manifesto and many other texts; they were
sent into the streets to sell the party paper; they
supported labor union efforts. The Great Depression
intensified my father’s “class consciousness” and his
commitment to social change—more than once, he and
his mother were evicted from apartments in the Bronx.
As a young radical, he honed his oratory skills in the
debating crucible of Crotona Park. My father later
recalled that time in the 1930s as “a deeply tumultuous
period”:
It’s very difficult to give you any idea of the extent to
which almost every day one felt something new, [that]
something politically exciting and in a sense dangerous
was happening. For example, we had continuous street
corner meetings and I would go from one street corner
meeting with my friends to another. And finally I began
to actually speak from what you’d call soap boxes
today. In the meantime I tried to earn my livelihood
selling newspapers and carrying ice cream on my back
in Crotona Park in a huge kind of insulated box—being
chased by the police, incidentally, because it was illegal
in those days to sell ice cream—that was the privilege
mainly of little stands and concessions that the park
department gave to people. So even from the age of
thirteen and fourteen, as a worker, I began to earn my
own bread and cheese.
Though rigorously schooled in the finer points of
Marxist theory by the Communist Party, he was never
bound by orthodoxies; leaving the Communist Party
after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he took a turn
first as a Trotskyist, and then became an anarchist—
which is what he remained for nearly four decades
between the 1960s and 1990s. Eventually, he cast aside
that term, also, arguing that anarchism too easily
devolved into a politics that focused on the personal
exercise of freedom at the expense of the hard work it
takes to build political institutions capable of achieving
lasting social change.
My father never attended college, and as an autodidact,
he perhaps never felt confined by any particular lane of
intellectual enquiry. His reading ranged widely and
deeply, from subjects like biology and physics to natural
history and philosophy. His experience of industrial
work—commuting to Bayonne, New Jersey, to pour
steel in a hot foundry—only confirmed his sympathy for
the socialist project. Later, though, his stint as a union
organizer for the United Electrical Workers taught him
that the American proletariat, concerned as it was with
bread-and-butter issues and piecemeal reforms, was
unlikely to be the revolutionary agent Marx had
predicted. He began to take issue with other tenets of
Marxism, including its emphasis on centralized state
authority and its insistence on the “inexorability of
social laws.”
It had also become clear to him by the late 1940s and
early 1950s that capitalist development was in profound
tension with the natural world. Air and water pollution,
radiation, the problem of pesticide residues in food, and
4
the impact on cities of imperious urban planners like
Robert Moses called for, he argued, a re-evaluation of
the effects of capitalism that took account of
environmental as well as economic concerns.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bookchin was
discussing ecological devastation as a symptom of
deeply entrenched social problems, ideas he elaborated
in a ground-breaking 1964 essay called “Ecology and
Revolutionary Thought,” which established ecology as a
political concept and made saving the environment an
integral part of the project of social transformation. In
contrast to Marx, who believed that it was the scarcities
of nature that led to human subjugation, Bookchin
argued that the notion of dominating nature was
preceded by, and stemmed from, the domination of
human by human and that only by eliminating social
hierarchies—of gender, race, sexual orientation, age,
and status—could we begin to solve the environmental
crisis. He argued, against Marx, that true freedom would
not be realized merely by eliminating class society; it
entailed the elimination of all forms of domination.
“Tragically,” he would later observe, “Marxism
virtually silenced all earlier revolutionary voices for
more than a century and held history itself in the icy grip
of a remarkably bourgeois theory of development based
on the domination of nature and the centralization of
power.”
My father first began to elaborate these ideas in a series
of articles in the mid-1960s with titles like “Post-
Scarcity Anarchism,” “Toward a Liberatory
Technology,” and “Listen, Marxist!”—essays that
guided a young generation of antiwar activists toward a
deeper understanding of the social ills that they felt
demanded a new social order. During this period, he
debated with and influenced many significant figures on
the left, from Eldridge Cleaver and Daniel Cohn-Bendit
to Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord. He pressed the
French revolutionaries of the May 1968 events not to
succumb to the efforts of the Communist Party to corral
the student movement; he pushed Black Panther Party
leaders like Cleaver and Huey Newton to abandon their
adherence to the Maoist dogma that revolutions are
made by disciplined cadres guided by a centralized
leadership; and he met with Marcuse to urge the veteran
Marxist critical theorist to embrace a deeper ecological
awareness.
Over the years, some of Bookchin’s theories about
affinity groups, popular assemblies, eco-feminism,
grassroots democracy, and the need to eliminate
hierarchy were taken up by the antinuclear campaign,
antiglobalization activists, and eventually the Occupy
movement. These groups incorporated my father’s
ideas—often unaware of their origin, perhaps—because
they offered ways of acting and organizing that
prefigured the social change they sought. By the 1980s,
his work was influencing Green movements in Europe.
Today, a “municipalism” movement based on his ideas
is gaining momentum in cities around the world. Before
Rojava, though, Murray Bookchin’s name was rarely
mentioned in mainstream news reporting.
My father moved from New York’s Lower East Side to
Vermont in 1971. He was fifty years old. He and
Beatrice, my mother, had divorced after twelve years of
marriage, but he continued to live with her for many
years and she remained his political comrade and
confidante for the rest of his life. In Vermont, he
became active in the antinuclear movement, while she
led the opposition to the efforts of Burlington’s then-
mayor, Bernie Sanders, to put a huge commercial
development on the Burlington waterfront. Together,
my parents started the Burlington Greens, one of the
first municipalist movements in the US. And it was in
their Burlington home that he wrote his magnum opus,
The Ecology of Freedom, published in 1982 and
translated into Turkish twelve years later.
In it, my father traced the emergence of hierarchy from
prehistoric times to the present, examining the
interaction between what he called the “legacy of
domination” and the “legacy of freedom” in human
history. Alongside the trend of human civilization to
become more socially stratified, which created vast
inequalities and gave nation-states undue power, he
argued, there existed a rich tradition of freedom, from its
first appearance as a word in Sumerian cuneiform
tablets, to its use by philosophers like Augustine and its
appearance in the anti-statist, radical utopian thought of
thinkers like Charles Fourier. That legacy of freedom
provides a parallel vision of humanity’s potential
development that challenges the accepted wisdom of
Marx that the state and capitalism were “historically
necessary” for the advancement of society toward
socialism. Not only were they unnecessary, my father
argued, but the classic Marxian belief in the
“progressive” historical role of capitalism had hindered
the formation of a truly libertarian left.
Öcalan read The Ecology of Freedom, and agreed with
its analysis. In his own book In Defense of the People,
published in German in 2010 (forthcoming in English),
Öcalan wrote:
The development of authority and hierarchy even before
the class society emerged is a significant turning point in
5
history. No law of nature requires natural societies to
develop into hierarchical state-based societies. At most
we might say there might be a tendency. The Marxist
belief that class society is an inevitability is a big
mistake.
Illustrating the examples of egalitarianism and mutual
aid that characterized early societies, my father argued
that capitalism was not the inevitable end-product of
human civilization. He suggested that a recovery of the
impulses toward cooperation, mutual aid, and ecological
sustainability could be achieved in a modern society by
building a moral, ecological economy based on human
needs, fostering technologies that can decentralize
resources, such as solar and wind power, and building
grassroots democratic assemblies that empower people
at a local level.
My father’s emphasis on hierarchy became a signature
aspect of Öcalan’s efforts to redefine the Kurdish
problem. In The Roots of Civilization, Öcalan’s first
published volume of prison writings, he, too, traced the
history of early communitarian societies and the
transition to capitalism. Like Bookchin, he celebrated
the formation of early societies in greater Mesopotamia,
the cradle of civilization and birthplace of art, written
language, and agriculture. He reminded us that the
powerful kinship ties that remain a fixture of Kurdish
family life—the traditional relationships of extended
families, and folk culture—can provide a foundation for
a new ethical society that melds the best aspects of
Enlightenment values with a communal and ecological
sensibility.
Öcalan goes further than Bookchin in the significance
he places on patriarchy. My father had examined how
hierarchies originated from the need of the elders in
society to preserve their power as they aged by
institutionalizing their status in the form of shamans,
and later priests—a process that included the domination
of women by men. Öcalan, though, sees patriarchy as a
defining characteristic of human civilization. “The
5,000-year-old history of civilization is essentially the
history of the enslavement of woman,” he wrote in a
pamphlet titled “Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution”
(published in English in 2013). “The depth of woman’s
enslavement and the intentional masking of this fact is
thus closely linked to the rise within a society of
hierarchical and statist power.” Undoing these
entrenched institutional and psychological relationships
of power will, in Öcalan’s view, require a new vision of
society—and a profound personal reckoning on the part
of men.
Öcalan’s interest in women’s liberation preceded his
time in Imrali, and was never simply a theoretical
matter. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kurdish
women from both Syria and Turkey, where they were
suffering particularly harsh repression at the hands of
the Turkish state, were joining the PKK in growing
numbers. Leaving their villages and towns to travel to
the PKK training camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon
and the Qandil Mountains of Iraq, these women helped
to swell the ranks of PKK fighters to 15,000 by 1994,
with women comprising an estimated one third of the
force. In keeping with the PKK’s stress on study and
education, these women, while they trained as guerrillas,
also read feminist and other radical texts. Öcalan, who
had already been reassessing the problem of the
“dominant male” personality in the PKK, supported
their demands for equal rights, a separate militia
organization, and their own institutions. As Meredith
Tax explains in her recent book A Road Unforeseen:
Women Fight the Islamic State, the creation of all-
female PKK units was crucial to “giving women the
confidence and leadership experience to make the leap
to a fully separate women’s army.”
Like Bookchin years earlier, Öcalan had also become
disillusioned with state socialism. “Do not look at the
Soviet Union as the God of Socialism and the last God
at that,” he told an interviewer in 1991. “The dream of a
socialist utopia is not just Marxist-Leninist. It is as old
as humanity.” Increasingly persuaded that the state itself
was the problem, he began to reframe his movement’s
goal not as a Kurdish nation but as an autonomous, self-
ruled democratic entity within a federation that gave
similar autonomy to all its subject groups—a type of
political system very different from any that now exists
in the Middle East or almost anywhere.
“The nation-state makes us less than human,” Bookchin
wrote in his 1985 essay “Rethinking Ethics, Nature and
Society.” “It towers over us, cajoles us, disempowers us,
bilks us of our substance, humiliates us—and often kills
us in its imperialist adventures… We are the nation-
state’s victims, not its constituents—not only physically
and psychologically but also ideologically.” Öcalan
came to share this view; in 2005, he issued a
“Declaration” that “the political root of the democratic
nation solution is the democratic confederalism of civil
society, which is not state.” Rather, it must be based on
the “communal unit,” an ecological, social, and
economic construction that does not “aim to make
profit” but rather meet the collectively determined needs
of the people living there. The document served as a
vision that he hoped would be embraced by all of
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Kurdistan—including the 6 million Kurds in Iran and a
similar number in Iraq.
Here, Öcalan echoed my father’s program in The Rise of
Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (later titled
Urbanization Without Cities), which Öcalan had read in
prison and recommended to the mayors of Bakur in
southeast Turkey. In this volume, my father traced the
history of the urban megalopolis, from Athens to the
Paris Commune and beyond, in an effort to “redeem the
city, to visualize it not as a threat to the environment but
as a uniquely human, ethical, and ecological
community” that could be reclaimed as the locus of a
new politics of assembly democracy—an “art in which
every citizen is fully aware of the fact that his or her
community entrusts its destiny to his or her moral
probity and rationality.” “The city,” he wrote, must be
“conceived as a new kind of ethical union, a humanly-
scaled form of personal empowerment, a participatory,
even ecological system of decision-making, and a
distinctive source of civic culture.” And he argued that
by practicing a radical municipal-based politics, people
can, in effect, create a new democratic society within the
shell of the old, wresting back control from the central
state.
These “Communalist” ideas have been put into practice
in the cities and towns of the Democratic Federation of
Northern Syria. An elaborate system of council
democracy starts at the “commune” level (settlements of
between thirty and four hundred families). The
commune sends delegates to the neighborhood or village
council, which in turn sends delegates to the district (or
city) level and ultimately to the region-wide assemblies.
Citizens serve on committees for health, the
environment, defense, women, the economy, politics,
justice, and ideology. Everyone is entitled to a say. And
in keeping with Öcalan’s ideas on matters relating to
women, the women’s councils have the power to
override decisions made by other councils when the
matter specifically concerns a women’s interests.
Although the PKK remains the leading opposition force
for most Kurds who oppose the policies of President
Erdoğan of Turkey, there have been divisions within the
movement, notably in the mid-2000s when Öcalan
began to implement democratic confederalism in
earnest. Yet it is a testament to the character of his
leadership, which has endured nearly two decades of
imprisonment, that a great majority of Kurdish people
have followed the path he laid out. Despite all this, the
PKK remains on terrorist blacklists maintained by the
United States and the European Union, and the Western
media inexplicably persist in calling Öcalan and the
PKK “Marxist-Leninist” more than a decade after that
ideology was formally renounced, both in practice and
in thousands of pages of Öcalan’s writings.
By the time of Turkey’s June 2015 election, the PKK
had declared a unilateral ceasefire and the evidence of
its commitment to grassroots democracy was in full
bloom in the Kurdish cities and towns of southeastern
Turkey, where women were working as co-mayors and
serving in all areas of city administration. In the
election, the Kurdish-led HDP party won 13 percent of
the vote, making it the third-largest party in Turkey’s
parliament. Summarily, Erdoğan halted the peace
negotiations that had begun with Öcalan in 2013 and
launched a sustained assault on the Kurdish region. The
military campaign and PKK resistance led to the deaths
of hundreds of people, with thousands more
imprisoned—among them, Selahattin Demirtaş, the
charismatic leader of the HDP who is now running for
president from his prison cell in the snap election called
by Erdoğan for June 24.
On May 24, the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’
Tribunal, which was established in 1979 to continue the
work of the Russell Tribunal (which had investigated
war crimes in Vietnam), determined that the PKK was
not a terrorist group but a combatant in a “non-
international armed conflict,” and declared Erdoğan
personally guilty of war crimes against the Kurdish
people for failing to adhere to the Geneva Conventions
over an eighteen-month period between June 2015 and
January 2017. In a decision announced at the European
Parliament in Brussels, the tribunal also found Turkey
guilty of false-flag operations, “targeted assassinations,
extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances,”
destroying Kurdish towns and displacing as many as
300,000 civilians, and of “denying the Kurdish people
its right to self-determination by imposing the Turkish
identity and by repressing its participation in the
political, economic and cultural life of the country.” The
Tribunal urged the immediate resumption of peace
negotiations with the Kurds in Turkey, and also called
on Turkey to halt all military operations against the
Kurds in Syria.
Turkey’s insistence that the Syrian Kurds, too, are
“terrorists” because of their ideological affiliation with
Öcalan has forced the US to walk a fine line—
supporting the YPG and YPJ as part of the Syrian
Democratic Forces, and denying their ties to the PKK,
while maintaining that the PKK in Turkey is a terrorist
group. The result has been that while US military
officials vocally support the Kurds as “our best partners
on the ground” in the fight against ISIS in Syria, the
7
State Department has turned a blind eye to Erdoğan’s
unrelenting human rights violations, echoing his rhetoric
that the PKK must be destroyed, a policy that the
Kurdish people say amounts to tacit approval of a war
on all Kurds. This US policy, together with the near-
silence of American and European leaders about the
Turkish government’s assault against its Kurdish
citizens between 2015 and 2017, may have emboldened
Erdoğan to send his forces and the militias of former
Free Syrian Army—including jihadists and former ISIS
fighters—into the canton of Afrin in Syria on January
20. An estimated 170,000 people have since been
displaced from Afrin; many are homeless and sleep in
the open air. What was once a haven of peace and
multiculturalism, a place where women held 50 percent
of the public offices, is now under siege. There have
been reports of abductions of women and girls, of
Kurds’ being evicted from their homes and businesses,
and of the partial imposition of Sharia law. In this,
Turkey has received tacit support from the US, which
has refused to stand up to Erdoğan on behalf of its
Kurdish allies. The resulting devastation has been
woefully under-reported by American media.
My father died on July 30, 2006, at the age of eighty-
five, about two years after Öcalan’s intermediaries had
contacted him. Arthritis had made it impossible for him
to sit before a computer and type, so his correspondence
with Öcalan ended after the exchange of a couple of
letters from each side. In his last letter, my father sent
his best wishes to Öcalan and wrote:
My hope is that the Kurdish people will one day be able
to establish a free, rational society that will allow their
brilliance once again to flourish. They are fortunate
indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan’s talents to guide
them.
Upon Murray Bookchin’s death, the PKK issued a
two-page statement hailing him as “one of the
greatest social scientists of the twentieth century.”
“He introduced us to the thought of social ecology,
and for that he will be remembered with gratitude
by humanity,” the statement’s authors wrote. “We
undertake to make Bookchin live in our struggle.
We will put this promise into practice as the first
society which establishes a tangible democratic
confederalism.” Had my father lived to see his
ideas enacted in Rojava and southeastern Turkey,
he would have been profoundly moved to know
that his revolutionary spirit had been reborn among
a generation of the Kurdish people. He would have
taken heart that Rojava was one more historical
instance of the desire for freedom that he himself
felt so deeply and to which he dedicated his life.