Reflections on Brazil and Kurdistan from dialogues with Hesen Koçer by Beatriz de Tullio P. Ramos and Vitor Maia Veríssimo of NUPIEC
In June 2024, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Kurdish Studies (NUPIEC) had the honor of virtually welcoming Hesen Koçer, co-president of the Executive Council of the Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria (AANES). NUPIEC is a research group made up of researchers from different parts and universities of Brazil, specializing in fields such as Law, History, Sociology, Anthropology, International Relations and Political Science, all dedicated to the study of the Kurdish Question. Founded in May 2021 and based at the Postgraduate Law Program of the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC-MG) in Belo Horizonte, the Centre's main objective is to bring together researchers interested in the subject, promoting a network for the exchange of information, references and collaborations. It also acts as a scientific disseminator of the Kurdish Question in Brazil.
The Centre is also dedicated to establishing links with the Kurdish Movement in its different sectors, acting as epistemological support by inserting the Kurdish Question into debates on democracy, autonomy and ecology in Brazil, as well as aiming to get closer to the movements active in Rojava. In this sense, NUPIEC has established a partnership with the Internationalist Commune of Rojava to exchange information and mutual support. One of the initiatives of this partnership was a series of classes on key themes in the Rojava Revolution, such as Education, Jineolojî, History, the Social Contract and Democratic Confederalism.
It was in the context of this initiative that Hesen Koçer met - via the Zoom platform - with NUPIEC. Two meetings were held in which he discussed the Social Contract and Democratic Confederalism, respectively, based on his experience. This included debates about the history of resistance of the Kurdish people, which culminated in the formation and organization of the territory of Rojava in northern Syria in 2012.
In these meetings, Koçer, based on the texts of Abdullah Öcalan, presented a critical analysis of history, based on a broader understanding of socio-cultural phenomena. To explain the Kurdish Question, he shed light on the debates surrounding the origin of national states and bourgeois democracy. According to Öcalan and reinforced by Koçer, there is a direct relationship between the two, in that democracy ends when the nation state begins. This provocative statement lays bare a series of tensions of our time, relating to colonialism, imperialism and the capitalist system.
In his speech, Koçer explains that during the 1990s, with the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), various movements, parties and revolutions that were inspired and supported by the USSR found themselves helpless. While some of them, as in the case of Vietnam, Cuba and Mozambique, with their own particularities, followed the basis of the Soviet socialist promise, i.e. did not give up the creation of a national state, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) set out to reinvent itself.
In short, the PKK's decade-long process of ideological and structural reformulation resulted in the development of Kurdish Democratic Confederalism, a political system systematized by Abdullah Öcalan on the basis of his contact with Murray Bookchin's thinking and with the already consolidated autonomous women's organizations.
Considering the historical process of Kurdish resistance against the successive attempts at erasure perpetrated by the Turkish and Syrian states, the peoples united there are building another way of living in society on a daily basis. This way has been enshrined in the Social Contract, which has been in its third official version since 2012. This Contract is an important milestone that outlines the social, political and ethical values of AANES' Democratic Confederalism, but which are based above all on the autonomy and freedom of the various peoples who coexist in that territory.
At the meetings, Hesen Koçer also highlighted some of the main precepts of the confederalist system: (1) women's freedom; (2) ecology; (3) a stateless society; and (4) communes, councils, cooperatives and academies. These notions form a different way of thinking about the organization of society, aimed at overcoming the state model. Thus, the PKK's so-called "ideological turn" - the moment when Democratic Confederalism was developed - is structured around a broad critique of the nation-state. As Koçer argues, the state comes to be understood in its anti-revolutionary and anti-democratic character: "Democracy, in its essence," he argues, "is against the state".
This new formulation of the state defends its own notion of democracy, as opposed to bourgeois and liberal democracy, which leads to disputes over the term. One example of the reverberations of this new formulation concerns the ways of achieving women's liberation. It is not enough, for example, to advocate that women take up political positions in the same system that oppresses them: "If women want to occupy the position of president in this [capitalist] system, they need to adhere to the male mentality" - in other words, submit to hegemony.
In this sense, we can think that the range of disputes is broadened, offering new perspectives not only on "democracy" and the "state", but also on "freedom" and the various forms of social emancipation. Freedom is no longer something that can be given by the state, but something that must be won by the people and understood in an interconnected way with society: "The greater the freedom, the less the state mentality," says Hesen Koçer. We can therefore infer that if "the state is oppression through laws", then Confederalism emerges as freedom through the people.
It's clear that the conditions for building an anti-state democracy are unstable. Since 2012, when the Rojava revolution began, Kurdish movements in the region have been trying to organize a society based on Democratic Confederalism. As Hesen Koçer reminds us, this has been a process in which "a war is fought on one side and a system is built on the other". This is the practical ambivalence imposed on the political imagination of the movements in Syrian Kurdistan. Everything that is built lives under the imminent threat of destruction. The contrast is clear: the state spreads war, and Confederalism the dream of a society capable of "seeking its own solutions and finding its own way".
At times during the meetings with the Co-President, parallels were also drawn with the Brazilian reality. Given our colonial history and our third-world position, it is common to be asked "how to think about Confederalism in Brazil". Native peoples were mentioned as examples of a non-state way of life. But rather than a system ready to be replicated around the world, the revolution in Rojava provides us with the possibility of broadening our political lexicon so that it is possible to recognize other forms of liberation and anti-systemic struggles.
In fact, the Kurdish experience has several characteristics that can serve as alternatives for thinking about - as Hesen said - "the place we call Brazil", not from the point of view of the state, but "from the point of view of the people who are there". From this angle, we can draw a parallel between the Kurdish people and the peoples of Brazil: if on the one hand the Kurds were dispossessed, had their land divided into four states and their identity erased by the processes of national unification in Turkey and Syria, in Brazil, the violent and ideological creation of the state and the "Brazilian identity" involved the genocide and erasure of native peoples, and the enslavement of African peoples.
Part of the Kurdish Revolution was based on the realization that oppression in Turkey is deeply linked to ethnic issues, and on claiming Kurdishness as a legitimate identity. Given the historical affinity that we have just presented, even if only preliminarily, similar questions were also part of the Brazilian intellectual and militant trajectory. The contributions of Lélia Gonzalez, for example, justify this approach. The author questioned the idea of a "Brazilian identity" as something natural and democratic. Her argument is supported by the experience of black women who, as an indispensable factor in the process that established a state and consolidated national identity, were deprived of the right to their own collective histories and cultural roots. In other words, in Brazil too, it is possible to observe that in the attempt to unify the nation, the state legitimizes racial, class and gender oppressions. In this sense, Hesen himself noted: the state needs nationalism, gender and class oppression in order to exist.
Therefore, if the Kurdish proposal aims to solve problems similar to ours, it is feasible to consider the potential of Rojava's political orientation for the Brazilian case. It's not a question, of course, of following the same Kurdish program, but of understanding what our processes are, as Hesen pointed out during the meetings.
Finally, understanding Democratic Confederalism in its ideological dimension is fundamental to realizing the relevance of this political orientation to the Brazilian reality. As we have argued, an alternative perspective to the national state - which, as Öcalan pointed out in the Kurdish case, is not the solution, but part of the problem - is fundamental to a social horizon that aims for the cultural, linguistic and religious coexistence of all peoples. Thus, one of the greatest contributions of the Kurdish revolution for us to reflect on possible solutions for the Brazilian case is less about replicating Democratic Confederalism as a political model and more about broadening our interpretations of the worlds and peoples in struggle.
Too often, both the Kurdish people and the indigenous peoples of Brazil have their revolutionary potential hijacked by socialist perspectives frozen in the Soviet model. The experience of Rojava and Hesen Koçer's public lectures show that the Kurdish revolution has a transformative force that is consistent with the issues of our time. The turn of the century demanded that the conceptions of freedom that corroborate the creation of a national state be overcome, and the Kurdish people of Rojava - like other examples around the world - showed themselves ready to take on this historic task. We just have to be ready to recognize it.
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