Tag: Syria

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Rojava

Rojava

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

I first noticed Rojava (northeast Syria) a decade ago – while running my millisphere model through a philosophy of the science of geography paper. At the time Syria was in the grip of the 2006-2010 drought (probably caused by climate change). Large areas of Syria’s crop lands were turning into desert and by 2009 their cattle herds had been reduced in number by 80%. Desperate farmers were migrating to the cities.

The Arab spring of 2011 was the spark that started Syria’s civil war but there were pre existing factors. Drought, ethnic factions, economic divides, religious differences and rapid population growth all contributed. Before 2011 Syria’s population had been doubling every twenty years – since 2011 the population has dropped from 21 million to 17 million today.

Roughly 40 million Kurds live in the mountainous region where the states of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran meet. In 2005 Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), proposed a “border-free confederation” of North Kurdistan (S.E. Turkey), West Kurdistan (N.E. Syria aka Rojava), South Kurdistan (N. Iraq) and East Kurdistan (N.W. Iran) – neatly equating to four millispheres.

Originally from Turkey, Abdullah Ocalan lived in Syria from 1979-98 before he was captured by the Turks – with the help of the CIA. Ocalan has been banned from holding public office for life and has been held on the Turkish prison island of Imrali since 1999.

While in prison Ocalan discovered the writings of the American anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin (The Ecology of Freedom, 1982). Abandoning his Marxist/Leninist beliefs, Ocalan embraced Boochin’s Libertarian Socialism which amongst other things doesn’t believe in capitalism, the nation state or the United Nations.

The Syrian branch of the PKK embraced Ocalan’s ideas and in 2011 the Kurds formed the YPG (People’s Defence Units) and the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) and entered the Syrian civil war. In 2012 Bashar Assad’s forces withdrew from Rojava leaving the Kurds in control of half of Syria’s oil fields – and the United States put the PKK on its list of foreign terrorist organisations.

The Kurds have administered N.E. Syria since 2014 “working voluntarily at all levels to make Ocalan’s experiment successful.” Based on a bottom-up direct democracy with no hierarchy or party line they set up self-governing sub-regions. Ocalan was critical of nationalism and the Kurds instead proposed a democratic confederation within Syria obeying all Syrian civil laws. So as not to inflame Assad’s government they called their autonomous region NES (North East Syria) instead of Rojava.

In jail Ocalan wrote a book on feminism – his sister had been in a forced marriage – and he was for gender equality. The Kurds in Rojava have banned child marriages and polygamy and a 40% gender quota is required on all councils for a vote to take place. All men entering the Kurdish army take a compulsory class on feminism – highly unusual in the Middle East.

Rojava’s PEP (People’s Economic Plan) proposes “moving beyond capitalism”. Private property and entrepreneurship are protected “by the ownership of use” – but there was to be no absentee ownership. In Rojave there are no direct or indirect taxes and government services are funded through the sale of oil.

From 2014 to 2017 ISIL (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) controlled large areas of Iraq and Syria. The Kurds (both in Syria and Iraq) played a major role in the defeat of ISIL. Women YPJ snipers with antique Kalashnikovs were deployed to the front line where they proved to be very accurate. In October 2019 the Kurds led the American Special Forces to a tunnel NW of Idlib where Abu Bakr al-Baghadadi detonated his own suicide vest and that was the end of the first caliph of ISIL.

Turkey meanwhile vehemently opposes Kurdish autonomy in Syria and has moved its forces across the border into Rojava. Trump’s sudden pullout of US forces shortly before the Turkish invasion was seen as a “serious betrayal” of the Kurds who have “no friends but the mountains.”

Nanaia Mahuta should ask president Erdogan of Turkey to free Abdullah Ocalan. Twenty years is a long time for starting a political party.

 

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Iraqi Kurdistan

Kurdistan

Aspirant millispheres (discrete regions of approximately one thousandth of the total world population) have been coming thick and fast lately. Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous Kurdish region (8.4 million) in  northern Iraq and Catalonia (7.5 million) in Spain have both had referenda in the last month about forming independent states.

On the 25th of September 2017 Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government asked voters: “Do you want the Kurdistan region to become an independent state?” – 93% percent of those who voted said: “Yes.”

At the end of the World War I, the Ottoman Empire was divided up by the victors at the Treaty of Lausanne, roughly into the countries we see today in the Middle East. The Kurds were initially promised their own country but today’s 40 million Kurds are distributed along the mountainous borders between Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

“We have no friends but the mountains,” say the Kurds and (with the exception of Israel) this remains mostly true today. Iraq’s reaction to the referendum was to impose a land and air blockade and to threaten military action. In the 1980s 180,000 Kurdish “infidels” were killed by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Arab government – this included the infamous 1988 Halabja poison gas attack on civilians.

Turkey warned of military measures, cancelled flights and called the referendum “treachery.”

One in five Turkish citizens are Kurdish. Ankara refers to their country’s Kurds as “Mountain Turks” and has actively suppressed the Kurdish language and culture. 40,000 Kurds have been killed by the Turkish forces maintaining control in southeast Turkey.

Ten percent of Syrians are Kurdish and Syria also has a semi-autonomous Kurdish region (Rojava in northeast Syria). Syria rejects the “unilateral” call for independence by Iraq’s Kurds and says it cannot accept the division of Iraq – fearing a similar division in Syria.

The Kurds are largely Sunni Muslim but there are also Yazidi, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish Kurds and schools in Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region are “religiously neutral.”

It was the Kurdish Peshmerga who helped the Iraqi Army defeat ISIS in Mosul recently.

The fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam has failed to attract adherents among Sunni Kurds like it did with their Sunni Arab neighbours to the south. Kurds have also been active in defeating ISIS in Kobane in Syria.

Iraqi Kurds have only been able to secure a passport since 2005. Admittedly it is an Iraqi passport and about as difficult to travel with as a Somali or Afghan passport – but it is easier than traveling with no passport at all.

When the Iraqi army fled in the face of ISIS advances the Kurdish Peshmerga occupied the Kirkuk oil fields in 2014, resisting an ISIS takeover. Oil now flows by pipeline from Kurdistan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan in the Mediterranean.

Trade between Erbil and Ankara is estimated to be $US7.5 billion per year, with a similar volume of trade between Erbil and Tehran. The Kurds have set up free trade zones on both their Turkish and Iranian  borders. The per capita income in the Kurdish regional government area is 25% higher than in the rest of Iraq.

Kurdistan has four billion barrels of proven oil reserves and an estimated forty-five billion barrels of unproven reserves. Exxon has recently defied Baghdad and signed exploration agreements with Kurdistan, walking away from its southern Iraq oil fields.

Based on the region’s history one would need a heart of stone to oppose Kurdistan independence but at present Russia, China, the European Union, the United States and the

United Nations are all against it. The United States government says that independence for Kurdistan risks destabilising Iraq.

Iran has called Kurdistan’s president Massoud Barzani a “middleman for the Zionists.” Chuck Schumer the Jewish Democrat senator for New York said: “neighbouring states, led by despots, who oppose the Kurdish state out of self-interest need to have respect for the Kurds to determine their own future,” echoing the position taken by Israel; the one country to support independence for Kurdistan. There are 200,000 Jewish Kurds now living in Israel.

While Spain called the referendum illegal Artus Mas, the former president of Catalonia, said he supported Kurdistan’s bid for independence and applauded Kurdistan’s leadership for “defending democracy.”

 

 

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Syria (part two)

Asi, Halab, Furat, Rojava – and the three-step peace plan for Syria.

Imaginary speech to the United Nations Security Council.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nation Security Council, in our speech last week we said that the conflict in Syria was a proxy war between Russia and America. In this our second speech, we declare once again that empires cause war and we put forward a peace plan based on this supposition.

The first step of our peace plan we call “Russki and Yankee go home.” Russia must give up its Mediterranean naval and air bases in Latakia and withdraw from Syria. The United States has military personnel stationed in 133 countries around the world and it is high time for them to all go home, starting with those in the Middle East. All other member states of the United Nations must then halt arms sales to the various parties to the Syrian conflict.

The second step we call the “Millistate solution,” based on a proposal by the Marquis of Bath: that to avoid warring empires the world should consist of one thousand roughly equal population states. This means the creation of states with an average population of around seven million people.

The third step we call the “Bio-region solution.” When drawing the boundaries of these new “millistates” we should attempt to follow geophysical boundaries not geopolitical ones – ideally water catchments and river systems. We propose redrawing the map of Syria into the separate regions where the various factions have dug in and ground to a halt. Some of these millistates will straddle the borders of neighbouring countries.

The Asi River catchment and Damascus together form the millistate of Asi. It includes the Russian base at Latakia and a small piece of Turkey that the Asi flows through on its last few kilometres to the Mediterranean. Safely wrapped around their ally “sister Lebanon” Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite, Shia aligned clan can remain in charge and the military bases in Latakia can be converted into holiday parks for sun starved Russian tourists.

Halab (Aleppo) was the Mediterranean terminus of the Silk route from China. When the Ottoman Empire was split up, after the First World War, the region around Aleppo was divided between Turkey and Syria. Restored Halab would have a connection to the sea at Iskenderun (in Turkey) and Aleppo would again be a terminus for highways leading north, south, east and west. The bombing of Aleppo must cease immediately and interim power should devolve to the people who have been driving the ambulances, staffing the hospitals, reconnecting the power, water and sewage and keeping the roads open (whether they be Sunni, Shia, Christian, Jew or Kurd).

Terrorism is a consequence of the Syrian war; it did not cause it. Maps of ISIS held territory show lines through the Syrian Desert that are either roads or the Euphrates River (al Furat). Sunni tribes all the way from Jarabulus on the Turkish border to Ramadi and Fallujah near Baghdad largely control the millistate of Furat. The withdrawal of Assad’s forces from their last base in Dayr az Zawr would give the Sunni tribes control of this stretch of the Euphrates straddling the Sykes-Picot on the Iraq/Syria border.

North of Furat, on the border with Turkey, is the semi-autonomous region the Kurds call Rojava. There are about 40 million Kurds in the Middle East, enough for six or seven millistates on their own. History has drawn the red lines of national borders through the middle of their homelands, which straddle the borders of Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The Syrian army has all but withdrawn from Rojava and the Kurds there should be left to manage their own affairs – as they do in the Kurdish autonomous region of Northern Iraq.

Mr Chairman, members of the Security Council, our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. How right she is.

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Syria (part one)

Fred’s speech to the United Nations about the war in Syria

Mr Chairman

This speech marks the end of the two-year period in which New Zealand has been one of the ten elected members of the United Nations Security Council.

Last year New Zealand pointed out that the Security Council is an institution with failings. This year we go further and call the United Nations Security Council a failed institution. The problem is a structural one. The power of veto given to the five permanent members of the Security Council (USA, Russia, China, UK and France), merely because they were victors of the Second World War, means that the P5 negotiate positions before engaging us, the ten elected members, and that no action is taken if any one of the permanent five does not agree. This extraordinary imbalance of power is what is preventing action on Syria.

New Zealand challenges the authority of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council for reasons other than structural ones. The Russian Federation was not one of the winners of the Second World War, it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) who helped defeat Hitler’s Third Reich, therefore we challenge the right of Russia to be a permanent member of the security council.

Equally we question the right of the United States of America to still be a permanent member. The Security Council was originally set up to resolve conflicts and prevent wars such as we are seeing today in the Syria. Since the Second World War the USA has developed a massive global arms industry that has an economic interest in fuelling conflict, therefore we believe that America has lost any moral right to a permeant seat.

In summary New Zealand believes that the superpowers are part of the problem; that what we are seeing in Syria today is actually a proxy-war between Russia and America – the shared rationale being, to quote Henry Kissenger, “he who controls oil controls the world.”

Our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel.

Some of the causes for the war in Syria go can be traced back to the First World War and the division of the Ottoman Empire, but there are others. Resource depletion from overpopulation is one – although the Syrian birth rate has fallen from seven children per woman in the1960s to three at the present day. From 2006 to 2009 Syria experienced its worst drought in living memory resulting in a million pastoralists moving to the towns and cities, joining the 1.5 million refugees from the war in Iraq that Syria was already hosting. This contributed to overcrowding, worsening unemployment and rising tensions.

The first thing that is required on the ground is a nationwide ceasefire. The main suppliers of arms to the conflict are in order of magnitude, starting with the largest: America, Russia, China and then Israel (recently moving from position six to position four). If the flow of arms from the superpowers, either directly or indirectly, to the various factions in Syria were to stop then the conflict would simply run out of bullets and the process of reconstruction could begin – it is estimated that there are over a thousand different armed militias with constantly shifting alliances operating in Syria today.

The sheer complexity of the situation on the ground is compounded by various religious disputes. As the numerous sects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam embrace fundamentalism and then turn inhumanly on one another it is useful to remember that Moses, Jesus and Mohamed were all Middle Eastern Semites.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nations Security Council, thank you for giving us the time to present what we think are the causes of the awful conflict in Syria. Next week we will outline our plan to bring peace.