It's going down: TQILA-IRPGF Speaks from Rojava. Anon.The situation of the Kurds in a drastically changing Middle East has received little attention in academia and less in the media despite their growing impact on regional and international politics. The biggest stateless people living in the Middle East are on the verge of a new status, not only in Iraqi Kurdistan, where a referendum for independence takes place on September 25, 2017, but also in Syria and Turkey. The stories of Iranian Kurds and the conditions they live in are the least known, not only by the international community but also by fellow-Kurds living in three neighbouring countries, due to an intense isolation. And then, in this closing contribution, there are 'the intersecting modalities of power.' This week’s short series looks at current political struggles of the Kurds in four neighbouring countries or in a country that does not exist on the world map but in the hearts and mind of 40 million people. Mehmet Kurt, series editor.
The establishment of “The Queer Insurrection and
Liberation Army”
(TQILA) on 24 July 2017, under the International Revolutionary People’s
Guerrilla Forces
(IRPGF) in Syria, has attracted considerable global interest.
This interest
has become manifest in two distinct versions. One response has been the intense excitement and
support elicited from some parts of the left and various LGBTI+ activists. The
other has been one of critique and scepticism, especially towards the western
liberal discourse surrounding TQILA. Razan Ghazzawi’s piece “Decolonising
Syria's So-Called 'Queer Liberation,'” published on Al
Jazeera, is a noteworthy expression
of this second reaction.
Keeping
these ideas at the core of my argument, in this piece, I want to suggest that
Ghazzawi however unintentionally reproduces the colonial gaze on Kurds and the
organized Kurdish struggle.[1] I want to elaborate on what we risk missing in
the political sphere because of these flaws, and in the process try to extend
the ground of the critique towards the decolonial approach that Ghazzawi
espouses.
Sharp turn
Ghazzawi
begins the piece by giving a brief background to the establishment of TQILA and
its depiction in the west, associating the group with the “war on terror”
narrative, along with the organized Kurdish struggle in Rojava, Syrian
Kurdistan.[2] Bringing non-normative sexualities into the discourse itself
opens up a site of resistance vis-à-vis complex power relations that constantly
regulate bodies, geographies, and ideologies in various ways.
Ghazzawi’s
piece is a sound effort to reveal these intersecting modalities of power.
However, when it comes to the Kurdish struggle in Syria, the piece reproduces
the colonial framework by making Kurds’ history of resistance, memory of
colonialism, and oppression under four different states invisible. Concisely,
Kurdish geography was divided into four parts and Kurdish people were
distributed among Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey as a consequence of the Treaty
of Lausanne in 1923 by imperial powers. They were subjected to various
atrocities, varying from cultural assimilation, to epistemic violence, to
massacres, in each of these countries.[3]
Ghazzawi’s
critique is levelled against not only at colonial/white use of queer struggles,
but also the Kurdish struggle in Syria. The sharp turn the author makes from a decolonizing
queer perspective to an anti-Rojava narrative renders the intention of the
piece ambiguous. Instead of subverting the colonial form of knowledge that is
criticized in the piece, the author redirects the colonial gaze towards the
Kurds. Eventually, the piece itself becomes, quite unfortunately, a
stereotypical anti-Rojava treatise hidden in an otherwise well argued
decolonial queer text. The political unfairness, in addition, distorts the
power of the decolonial argument and transforms it into a condemnatory
iteration, cementing the epistemic violence against the Kurds.
Silenced Kurds
In the
piece, the strategy and existence of Kurds’ organized effort – despite its
historicity – is utterly reduced to being part of “war on terror.”[4] This
presentist argument only becomes possible when the motivations, emotions, and
history of the Kurdish struggle are silenced. This also reinforces the
stereotype historically attributed to the Kurds, in four parts of Kurdistan: they collaborate with imperialism,
they are not civilized, and they have a secret agenda. These stereotypes
historically legitimized the rule over the Kurds.
For example, the discourses of
“backwardness” and “tribalism” when it came to the Kurdish issue were reference
points for the Turkish Republic’s modernization and westernization ideals.[5]
In a report, the first Inspector General Avni Doğan asserts: “The Republic's
settlement in the East is like the settlement of the civilized nations' in
Africa."[6] Similarly, according to Lieutenant
Muhammad Talab al-Hilal’s report of Jazira, dated 1963, “the Kurdish people did
not exist because they possessed neither ‘history nor civilization; language
nor ethnic origin.’”[7] This “security report” formed the basis for
anti-Kurdish policies in Syria.
When this discourse surrounding the
Kurds is evaluated starting with the stereotypes attributed to them, and then
their results, the need for a layered understanding of decolonization becomes
visible. A hastily put together decolonial argument can become the most useful
tool for the very colonial mechanisms it intends to criticize.
Critical engagement
Kurdish
scholars and activists have long criticized the western
media depiction of Kurdish women fighters, as this depiction
actively and purposefully overshadowed the history, ideology, and the politics
behind them. These critiques, which have also come from
inside the Kurdish armed movement, dismantle western colonial
fantasies and resonate well with Ghazzawi’s concerns about anti-colonial
struggle. It is noteworthy, though, that Ghazzawi chooses not to reference any
of those women’s voices. Instead, the author concentrates on western
depictions, erasing the agencies, knowledge production, and histories of local
women’s struggles and with a dismissive gesture, conveniently chooses to
situate these women within the “war on terror.”
The author
enumerates a list of accusations towards the PYD, the Democratic Union Party,
without critically engaging with or elaborating any of these serious claims.
Ghazzawi gives ten links in two very short paragraphs, accusing the PYD without
including even a single statement given by the PYD or a single bit of counter-evidence
against these accusations. As an example of such counter-evidence, the Independent International
Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic’s report denies that the PYD/YPG forcibly evacuated Arab and Turkmen
civilians, as is claimed in Ghazzawi’s piece:
Though allegations of “ethnic cleansing” continued to be
received during the period under review, the Commission found no evidence to
substantiate claims that YPG or SDF forces ever targeted Arab communities on
the basis of ethnicity, nor that YPG cantonal authorities systematically sought
to change the demographic composition of territories under their control
through the commission of violations directed against any particular ethnic
group.[8]
We should
indeed take these claims seriously, but the absence of critical engagement
provides a tool for surrounding authoritarian powers that oppose organized
Kurdish existence. Ghazzawi’s claims about the PYD are disturbingly very
similar to those of the Turkish state, whose role in Syria’s current destabilization,
and its decades-long war on the Kurds, are well known. This similarity lends
unintentional support to the colonial domination of the Kurds and tends to
reproduce the status quo.
Our paradise or their theatre?
Ghazzawi
cites a Kurdish queer transwoman, Ziya Gorani, without giving any background
information on their [Gorani’s] experience, other than three paragraphs of
selected narrative supporting the author’s argument against the PYD and Rojava.
In addition, Ziya Gorani says: “They’re a bunch of international fighters with
YPG, trying to sell an image that LGBTQ people can wander the streets of Rojava
without being discriminated against – that’s a lie. That’s not how things are
in Rojava.” With genuine respect to Gorani’s experience, nobody – neither the
internationalists, Rojava’s grassroots activists, nor the PYD – has ever argued
nor can argue that Rojava is an LGBTI+ paradise.
On the
contrary, that is why a queer struggle is necessary – without putting
struggles’ into a hierarchy – just like it is necessary everywhere else, in
different contexts and forms. We, as Kurdish LGBTI+ individuals and activists
in four parts of Kurdistan and in the diaspora too, know our societies’ reality
very well, and hold discussions that make every effort to open up spaces for
our very existence.
Ghazzawi’s theoretical framework and
grounding have serious potential to provide a powerful tool for the oppressed.
But the text’s decolonial epistemic power is undermined by the flaws I have
identified. The constant concern with addressing an international audience and
acknowledging its representations as the absolute truth lead to serious
flaws.
The argument that the west’s primary
interest is fighting ISIS, and that these Realpolitik concerns might be
overshadowing the anti-Assad struggle, might be valid, but that does not reduce
the Kurds’ struggle to these Realpolitik goals. Nor does the anti-ISIS war by
the west reduce the Syrian Kurds or the PYD to operating merely in a colonial
theatre, without their own historical agency or alternative objectives.
Screenshot: It's going down. Anon.
Does that
mean that the PYD is beyond criticism? Quite the contrary. Every authoritarian
tendency should be closely monitored. However, instead of perceiving anti-oppression struggles as
monoliths, it is more productive and accurate to read the distinct struggles
against various oppressive mechanisms and dispersed powers. With a cautious
optimism, I believe that these struggles can come together, and constitute a
common ground to resist authoritarianism and colonialism together, recognizing
and respecting each other’s histories and agencies at the same time.
In conclusion, taking into account
the history of the Kurdish struggle with its own dynamics, capacity, and
motivation to oppose various oppressions, in addition to Syria’s other
grassroots activists, the discourse surrounding TQILA cannot work as a
re-colonizing tool in Syria, nor can it erase the struggle of the peoples of
Syria. Nonetheless, my assertion does not mean peoples of Syria, queer
activists, or leftists should not be critical towards TQILA or IRPGF. On the
contrary, the channel of critique should be kept open, but with a careful and
nuanced consideration of the historicity of different struggles.
Notes
[1] By Kurdish struggle (PYD/YPG-YPJ), I mean the
organized struggle initiated by Syrian Kurds, taking its roots from the Kurdish
movement in Northern Kurdistan/Turkey’s Kurdistan.
[2] Rojava means “West” in Kurdish, referring to the Western part of
Kurdistan. It is located in northern Syria. For a detailed investigation on
Rojava, see Michael Knapp, Anja Flach, and Ercan Ayboga, Revolution in
Rojava—Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan,
Pluto Press, London, 2016.
[3] For further scholarship on the
Kurds under four different states, see: David McDowall, A Modern History of
the Kurds, London: I.B. Tauris, 2004; Jordi Tejel, Syria’s Kurds—History, Politics and Society, translated by Emily
Welle and Jane Welle, Routledge, London: New York, 2009; Zeynep Gambetti
and Joost Jongerden, The Kurdish Issue in Turkey: A
Spatial Perspective, Routledge, Oxon, 2015; Abbas Vali, Kurds and the State in Iran: The
Making of Kurdish Identity, I.B. Tauris, London: New York, 2014; Choman Hardi, Gendered
Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq, Routledge,
London, 2016; Ismail
Besikci, International Colony Kurdistan, Gomidas Institute, London,
2015.
[4] It is worth noting that the PYD
was founded by Syrian Kurds in 2003, the US-led international coalition was
formed in 2014, and the Syrian Democratic Forces was announced
in 2015.
[5] Mesut Yeğen, Devlet Söyleminde Kürt Sorunu, İletişim Yayınları, İstanbul, 2015.
[6] Mehmet Bayrak, Kürtler ve Ulusal-Demokratik Mücadeleleri,
Özge Yayınları, Ankara, 1993, (quote, my translation).
[7] Tejel, 2009, pg. 60-61.
[8]
Conference paper of the Independent
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, 13 March
2017, p. 21.