Direct Democracy Within Rojava

A commune meeting in Amude in Rojava's Cizîrê canton, November 2015 (Corporate Watch)

A commune meeting in Amude in Rojava’s Cizîrê canton, November 2015 (Corporate Watch)

By Dr Jan Best de Vries:

Brexit has shown the failure of representative democracy at the highest level of a political structure like the EU. In Rojava, after the revolution of 2011, at the moment there is direct democracy and gender equality. The arabization of the polyethnic population of Rojava under the Assads does not mean that Arab families living there before should not have the same, equal rights and obligations as the other ethnic groups mentioned in the poem below (let there be no misunderstanding.

The united districts of Afrin, Kobane and Jazira would form together a solid buffer for a federal Syria against the territorial claims of Turkey on this region. It can not be stressed enough that otherwise the 65% Kurds of the ethnically mixed population in Rojava would be extinguished in the same manner as the Kurds in Turkey since 1923. It is in the interest of the state of Syria that Rojava as a buffer against Turkey’s political and military ambitions in West Asia should remain as strong as possible after the defeat of IS and Al-Nusra. Whether Damascus remains or Aleppo would become the capital of a democratic Syria doesn’t matter. Rojava as an autonomous province would always let its members in parliament follow the constitutional rules of a democratic state Syria as a whole!

Literature: Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, Green Books 2012;
E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful – A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, Vintage Books, 2011

Women’s Fabric Inanna

For Bahar,
my former student of archaeology

We on the fertile soil of Rojava do still adore you Sumerian Inanna,
goddess of love, fertility and war, brave lioness in battle
we women care for the fields with your plants around our fabric
from which we produce the healthy foodstuffs for our people

Kurds, Assyrians, Jews, Armenians, Tschetchens, Turkmens, Aramaeans,
whose languages are not Arabic and who are free now to speak their own,
who are free now to respect each others’ religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam
because they all believe in their new society on a common humanitarian basis

Deep are the cultural roots of the land which they inherited from you Inanna
we women between the rivers did not forget that it was you men once adored
now your lionesses are Swedish and Polish girls in the YPJ going to die
in the protection of our fabric, they are so happy Inanna!

Rimelan, October 27, 2015

Dr. Jan Best de Vries is an archaeologist and historian, decipherer of the so-called Byblos Script from Aleppo and Alalakh (‘How to Decipher the Byblos Script’, Aspekt Publishers 2014, ISBN978-946-153-420-0)

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