START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT US

Daughters of the revolution: High in Iraq's Qandil mountains, 5,000 armed women stand ready to go into battle for liberation and sexual equality. To some, they are glorious freedom fighters, but to the west they are dangerous terrorists... Jason Burke meets the soldiers of the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress (Jason Burke, May 11, 2003, The Observer)

Comrade Gulbar is a military commander, in charge of a unit of 30 young men and women of the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (the Kurdish Workers Party or PKK). Her struggle, she tells me, is twofold. She is fighting for the Kurdish people and for the liberation of women. She says that the two issues are inextricably connected.

To those who have suffered most from their activities, the PKK is a brutal, criminal terrorist organisation given to indiscriminate attacks on civilians and motivated by a fanaticism paralleled only by Osama bin Laden's Islamic militants. To many Kurds, either in the diaspora or in the heartland Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, northern Iraq and eastern Syria, the PKK are freedom fighters, battling for a homeland, or at least better rights, for a people without a nation. Up to half the PKK are women and, throughout the group's 30-year history, the 'struggle for women's freedom' as Comrade Gulbar terms it, has been an integral part of its campaign.

The PKK's ideology is, to coin a phrase, very last century. Were it not for its propensity for extreme violence, self-immolation, bombing towns and kidnapping journalists and tourists, there would be something quaint about its talk of dialectic materialism, the struggle against imperialism, false consciousness, the alienated capitalist self and so on. When you talk about 'gender issues' with PKK members (they don't have cadres, I am told, but volunteers), you are suddenly returned to agitprop feminist debate, circa 1980.

Take the issue of marriage. PKK volunteers are not allowed to marry because truly free gender relations are impossible given the oppression inherent in the capitalist world system that is currently dominant. In that system, individuals and their emotions are reduced to commodities and so marriage, a bourgeois concept based on ownership, can only aid the continued dominance of patriarchal (and imperialist) power. As no truly power-free gender relations are possible (and here the revolutionary Marxism shades into French existentialism) until capitalism is replaced by a system which allows truly free relations between individuals, no marriage between PKK volunteers is permissible. Instead, all must strive for the revolution. As an added incentive, sex is banned, too, also until the revolution. It is 'not included in the programme plans of the party'.

Such sophomoric Leftism is understandable given the origins of the movement.

Mr. Burke's strong language, though welcome, is surprising when you consider how many Western intellectuals believed in that "sophmoric Leftism" just a very few years ago. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 11, 2003 12:55 PM