World’s Democracies Must Support Kurds in Rojava Now!

Rebwar Reshid

By Rebwar Rashed:

How often do not the Turkish president Erdogan and his prime minister Ben Ali Yldirim lift their forefingers to threaten Kurds and repeat: We are not allowing a Kurdish entity on our border?

As a matter of fact, Erdogan, especially after the collapse of his neo-Ottoman dreams of occupying Kurdish lands and “liberating” Jerusalem, has sworn to sabotage any success the Kurds achieve. The state of Turkey is explicitly against any kind of Kurdish achievement, no matter where in the Middle East. Any Kurdish gain is seen by Turkey as encroaching on “Turkey’s national sensitivity”.

This racist ideology grew not under AKP governance, but rather it incubated during the Cold War when Turkey became a member of NATO and started to belong to Western Europe. In return for that Turkey got a green light and license to exterminate Kurds as long as it did so in a “proper” way.

Killing thousands of Kurds, imprisonment of tens of thousands, deportations, displacements, burning at least 4,500 Kurdish villages, confiscating the lands of Kurds, bombing and burning Kurdistan to ruins, daily and systematic harassment, every kind of discrimination and abducting Mr. Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan liberation movement, has been done either with the direct help of the USA, NATO and EU or with their unconditional political and military support to Turkey or at least by contributing to the matter with silence and thus acceptance.

Promoting, encouraging and supporting Turkey in this barbaric and seldom seen sort of racism is probably the biggest case of moral failure for the Western Democracies’ and the UN’s advocacy for the rights of people to national and democratic rights.

rojava-map

The Kurds are indigenous people of the area. Their only crime is not allowing Turks to steal their land and annihilate them.

Kurdish people, along with Christians, Armenians, Assyrians and Arab people in northern Syria, have formed the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and have succeeded in pushing ISIS more and more to the middle part of Syria and have declared a federal system for themselves. Turkey, which has been supporting and still supports ISIS in order to stop Kurdish achievement, and this outside of its own borders, cannot accept ISIS’s failure to win. Therefore it has started a war on Kurdish people inside Syria, again using Western Europe’s sophisticated military armware. Turkey officially says that it has the “support” of US air cover and that the US had knowledge of the military planning.

The West, once again — despite the Kurdish ability to build a civil society, a democratic functioning system, a unity of people and a pluralist feminist and secular entity — is betraying the Kurds and supporting Turkey by not doing anything to stop the aggression. The West knows well that Erdogan develops a Turkish expansionistic agenda on the expense of the Kurds and other non-Turkic people in the area.

The West and the rest of the democratic world knows that Turkey has lately staged a military campaign in northern Syria that is is not aimed at deterring ISIS. The real target is to crush the YPG (Kurdish defense units) and (SDF) Syrian Democratic Forces.

So far, unfortunately, Turkey has received international legitimacy for this aggression and intervention which has already cost the Kurdish people thousands of lives.

According to official statistics there are three times more “Turks” than Kurds in Turkey and the remaining Turkish territory is at least twice as big as the Kurdish part in Turkey. Still, almost every single bomb which explodes, all the assassinations and “ISIS” atrocities happen in Kurdistan and against Kurdish people. Even where they happen in Ankara or Istanbul they happen to kill Kurdish demonstrators or their democratic friends. Is this just a series of coincidences?

The recent bomb at a Kurdish wedding on 22 August, while the Kurds were dancing and singing, happened just a day after the Turkish military took a severe blow by the Kurdish guerrillas.

The US, EU and everybody else knows that Turkey´s incursion inside Syria by going into Kurdish areas such as Jarablus, has at least three major aims: as mentioned before, to stop the Kurds’ achievements, to stop a democratic, pluralist and secularist entity because its against Erdogan’s Salafist and Jihadist Islam ideology, and to push deeper inside Syria in order to have more say when it comes to the negotiating table on the issue of the future of Syria.

The world’s democracies have a moral obligation to support Kurdish and other people in Rojava so they can build their own future and to have a free, stable and prosperous entity. This is the first time in history that the peoples of Rojava are living together peacefully and in harmony.

Turkey must be advised and encouraged to solve its own Kurdish issue. That is by freeing Mr. Ocalan, going back to the negotiating table and solving the Kurdish question by peaceful and democratic means. Turkey must be guided to friendship and sisterhood.

Rebwar Rashed is Co-Chairman of the Kurdistan National Congress – KNK

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