Rebel governance and gender in northeast Syria: transformative ideology as a challenge to negotiating power

ABSTRACT

The Democratic Union Party (PYD), the dominant Kurdish political party in Northern Syria, has led a vanguard movement for autonomy based on Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan’s ideology of democratic confederalism. A central component of this ideology is the focus on gender equality (jineologi). Ideology has served as a potent mobilising force in particular by empowering women, a group that is often at the margins of power in traditional Kurdish society, and is a cornerstone of the Rojava revolution. However, it also presents challenges for the PYD in their relations with local tribes on whom the PYD depends for sustaining the Kurdish position in the northeast. Turkey’s interventions have given the tribes a new position in the conflict and for the PYD, this means that negotiating power with the tribes will be increasingly critical to their own position. In an effort to retain a dominant position how will the PYD, no longer a vanguard movement, relate to key elements of their gender ideology? This article examines the challenges of transformative rebel governance ideology in negotiating with traditional social structures examined through the lens of gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Syria
• PYD
• ideology
• gender
• tribes
• Kurds

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank colleagues on the Rebel Governance project for their invaluable feedback in the writing of this article, as well as the editors of the special issue, and peer reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Officially renamed the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) in 2018 acknowledging its polyethnic composition.

2. Author interview with PYD representative, Kurdish Institute, Belgium, 1 July 2019.

3. Control of Afrin passed to Turkey following its military incursion “Operation Olive Branch” in 2018 and it now administers the city providing education and security (Aydıntaşbaş 2020).

4. The interviews, attained with informed consent, are anonymised in the text and were conducted in Oslo and Brussels among PYD representatives. They were selected due to their key strategic positions in the organisation. Due to the outbreak of COVID, the number of interviews were limited as planned research trips had to be cancelled. I have also included publicly available media interviews to expand my sample.

5. Important to note in this context is that Öcalan does not come from a prominent clan in Turkey unlike other Kurdish political party leaders in Iraq, for example Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) or Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

6. An example is Syrian support for the PKK until 1998 and the Turkish support for the KDP in Iraq.

7. The revolt was an effort by Kurdish shayks to revive the caliphate and sultanate system. It differed from earlier uprisings because it was initiated and organised by a Kurdish political organisation, Azadi (Freedom), that recognised Naqshbandi Shayk Said’s ability to mobilise the Zaza speaking tribes (for whom he was one of the most respected shayks) (van Bruinessen, 1992, 265).

8. A month after the outbreak of the conflict in April 2011, the Syrian regime, in an attempt to win over the Kurds, allowed for ajanib Kurds to apply for citizenship which they had been denied earlier. Decree 49 of the 7 April 2011 was limited in its scope as it did not cover makutumiin Kurds nor did it address the issue of compensation (Allsopp 2014, 173).

9. A minimum of 40% of decision-making participants on all administrative levels have to be women (in practice). This commitment is also reflected at higher levels. For example, the PYD has a male and female co-chair in all institutions, organisations, and associations – including medical, educational, military, and police councils (Benathan, 2014).

10. Joining the SDF were also some Assyrian/Syriac militias and smaller Armenian, Turkmen, and Chechen forces.

11. Not least, the recruitment of Arabs to the SDF was encouraged by the United States to deflect claims that it chose to support the Kurds against Arabs, Turkmen, and other groups.

12. It is also noted as a terrorist organisation by the EU as well as the United States according to official EU, and US government, sources (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A62014TJ0316&qid=1634482630482, https://www.state.gov/foreign-terrorist-organisations/)

13. These debates are outlined in Jongerden (2019).

14. In a foreword to a book on Öcalan’s texts, the notes that these “writings are intensively studied and heavily discussed by the Kurdish rebels and activists, and practical concepts are derived from these discussions”. (Öcalan 26: 2017).

15. Human Rights Watch (Motaparthy 2018) noted that recruitment often occurred in displaced persons’ camps, thus targeting “vulnerable families in need of social support or humanitarian assistance”. The children between the ages of 13–17 enlisted voluntarily and in some cases were who had experienced difficult domestic situations according to HRW.

16. Interview, N.O. Özcan, 13 October 2002, Ankara.

17. Al Najjar, Allagui, and Page are all cited in Alsharakh, 2018.

18. The Social Charter can be found at http://peaceinkurdistancampaign.com/resources/rojava/charter-of-the-social-contract/

19. Tweet by Elham Ahmad. https://twitter.com/ElhamAhmadSDC/status/1265624305293017089

20. Not least, the recruitment of Arabs to the SDF was encouraged by the PYD’s external sponsor, the United States, to deflect claims that it chose to support the Kurds against Arabs, Turkmen, and other groups.

21. While numbers are not entirely reliable due to over reporting by the tribes themselves and under-reporting by rivals, the Akidat tribe is one of the largest is believed to number between 700000 to 800000 members. Its members live near the Euphrates basin in Syria, in Iraq and in the Gulf (Al-Kanj 2020).

22. Statement issued on Facebook on 11 August: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063890012919 (accessed 17 September 2021). In an interview with journalist Rena Netjes, an Ogidat sheikh from al-shuhail stated: “We want to open direct channels with the International Coalition, and with the Americans…We do not want to work with the SDF” (Twitter, 21 August 2020). https://twitter.com/RenaNetjes/status/1293616793710481408?%20s=08

23. Home page of the Syrian Democratic Council: http://m-syria-d.com/en/?p=2778

24. Although the political programmes of all Kurdish political parties including the KNC mention women’s rights, statements of support for gender equality are not always evident in practice. For example, KNC party leadership is dominated by men whereas there is a legal requirement for women’s representation at leadership levels in the PYD (and TEV-DEM) (Allsopp and Van Wilgenburg 2019, 79).

25. Bayik is one of the five founders of the PKK and part of the PKK’s three-man Executive Committee, the leading body of the organisation.

26. See contributions by Skjelderup (2022, this issue), Skretting (2022, this issue), and Lia (2022, this issue).

27. Syrian Democratic Times interview with Aldar Khalil, 1 July 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a grant from the Research Council of Norway.

Notes on contributors

Pinar Tank

Pinar Tank is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute, PRIO, and an area studies scholar working in the Middle East. Her doctorate was about civil-military relations in Turkey in the early 2000s. She works presently on projects examining the interplay between Turkey’s foreign and domestic policies from both a geopolitical and the humanitarian perspective. She has also conducted research on gender as a mobilising factor of PKK/PYD ideology. She is now engaged in a larger project on rebel governance where her focus is on Northeast Syria. Her work has been published in various academic journals such as Security Dialogue, Turkish Studies, and Conflict, Security and Development. Her most recent publications include “Turkey as an emerging donor in humanitarian assistance” in Pacynska, A. (ed.) The New Politics of Aid: Emerging Donors & Conflict-Affected States (2020: Lynne Rienner) and “Between Human and State Security: Turkey’s Syria Policy under the Justice and Development Party (AKP)”, The International Spectator (November 2021).