Kobane for us

This is the time to ask ourselves how to be like Kobane, to bring the experience of Rojaya everywhere, breaking the media and military siege, taking place against this political project.

15 / 10 / 2014

The militias defending the people of YPG and YJA Start have been resisting for 29 days to the siege of Kobane, one of the three canton of Rojava, at the hand of IS Jihadists. They are doing this in desperation, without any escape route, any rear guard: the extremists have moved their attack on three fronts, while the frontier separating the canton of Syrian Kurdistan from Turkey is hermetically closed by Turkish army. Also to the refugees, escaping war.

The Jihadists keep on flocking to the area, conscious of the strategic importance of conquering Kobane. Both materially and symbolically, the militias defending the people of YPG and YJA Star, close to PKK, have been the only ones able to defeat the black militias of the caliphate, laying bare their vulnerability and dislocating the strategy of terror of Al Bagdadi militias, brought about with kidnappings, rapes, beheadings – all skilfully shared through television and the Internet.

Rojaya political project is completely opposed to that professed by the extremists: indeed, it is founded on building spaces of autonomy and self-government, based on an open citizenship, going beyond the boundaries of race, religion and sex.

IS fascists know that both regional powers and international community are ready to sacrifice Rojaya. The events of last days clearly illustrate this will: while the UN, through its delegate Staffan de Mistura, launched the warning for a genocide, if IS conquers Kobane and Turkey does not open a humanitarian corridor, US are laconically speaking of Kobane as an area not strategically important for them. That is to say: go on with the massacre.

Erdogan’s Turkey is doing even worse, comparing PKK to IS, closing its frontiers to refugees, sustaining and supporting the dirty work of the caliphate in a project that is alike Erdogan’s: put an end to Rojaya experiment.

The guerrilla fighters of YPG and YJA, besieged with very scarce armoury to support their desperate defence, keep open a space for living and a political project. It is a temporal space and its duration is unknown. IS fascists have already entered Kobane, they have conquered an area of the city and other extremist militias are concentrating towards the Kurd city.

Political activists from Turkish Kurdistan, from Turkey and from all over the world, are starting to use this space left open by the Kurd comrades.

The best way to give solidarity to Kobane, has become Kobane.

This is what it’s happening in demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul, in Dijarbakir (where police and Turkish army attacked, used gas, shot and killed tens of pro Kurdistan demonstrators), in London, in Dusseldorf, in Milan and in Venice, where demonstrators are asking for a humanitarian corridor to be open, in order to allow Kurds to exit their isolation.

We do not know for how long this corridor should remain open, but we do know that we cannot limit ourselves to root for them.

We have to ask ourselves how to be Kobane.

We have to contribute, through the very reality of our political practices, to cause distress to the siege that Kobane is subjected to, not only on IS behalf, but also on international community behalf, that consider it expendable.

The international mobilizations of last days gave a contribution to the rupture of the monolith on which the power relations addressing the Middle east conflict lay. Probably a small crack, itself open for a limited period of time.

It is our responsibility to understand how to keep it open, to make it become a chasm, by insisting on all ambiguities, connivances, complicities that brought the international community, the upper world people, to think that Kobane is isolated and expendable.

The protests against Turkish government in Milan and Venice (where Turkish consulates have been punished) are synchronically aligned to demonstrations in Turkey and Europe against the plans of Erdogan government to stop, once and for all, Kurdish heresy and to impose its hegemony upon the region.

Kobane siege must be broken by bringing it everywhere, by besieging Turkish government and its global economic interests, by imposing upon the international community the political pressure on Turkey behalf – and consequently, on behalf of anyone supporting, directly or indirectly, IS fascists.

Kobane siege must be broken by underlining that not only is Kobane not expendable, but also its rear guards are everywhere there are comrades fighting against fascism, practicing autonomy, living in freedom.

We have to explain to all that not only is Kobane neither isolated nor marginal, but also it is located among the most profound and intense levels of a political research, acted in the flesh of fighting, that is questioning itself, as for Zapatism, on the relationships between territory, self-government, forms of living and of citizenship.

Kobane is a common good, and it must be defended as such.

Her yer Kobane, her yer direnis!