Debating Kurdish unity in honesty: Diplomatic pathways in Rojava

Dastan Jasim

With Bashar al Assad toppled and most of the country under the effective control of Ahmad al Shar’a, the decisive hour of Rojava’s survival and acknowledgment has come. Creating a new political system gives chances and risks like the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) which has been existing de facto since 2012, has a real opportunity for acknowledgment.

Clearly, domestic Syrian debates are essential in this regard, and mixed signals can be heard from the current transitional government, comprised of mostly people who have been serving under the Islamist “Salvation Government” that ruled the Idlib region in the last years. However, the future of AANES and its possible status is closely linked to diplomatic dealings with the West and their Kurdish neighbors.

On the one side we see that already present and supportive US elements but also French and even German diplomatic missions have intensely exchanged with the AANES to discuss the next steps of unification with the Syrian central state as well as possible options for the future of the AANES security forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the ranks of a unified Syrian army. At the same time, it is evident that the biggest threat to any resolve or unification is the decisive veto of Turkey against anything that concerns Kurdish self-rule.

In this context, one could assume the Western call for Kurdish unity to be a productive one: only a strong and unified Kurdish front can be supported effectively against Turkish expansionism and attacks. Repeatedly, western policymakers call upon the Kurdish National Council (KNC), which is rather pro-Barzani, and the political structures of AANES, particularly the dominant parts of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), to unite and share power. Slicing Rojava into two political centers seems to be the magical solution for many of these diplomats. The truth looks more complicated, though.

Precedents in the Kurdistan Region Iraq

When in 1991, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq became de facto independent, hopes were high as well. Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), as well as a handful of splinter parties, came together in elections in 1992, and a new parliamentary Kurdish autonomy was to be built. Hopes were high, not only for the Kurds in Iraq but in all parts of Kurdistan and even MPs like Ahmet Turk of the late Halkın Emek Partisi (HEP) came to Iraqi Kurdistan to support the democratic process.

The elections ended with an almost equal split between KDP and PUK, which was unsurprising. Both parties had a long history of armed resistance against Iraq, their own paradiplomatic networks, their sources of revenue, and relatively straightforward geographically defined zones of influence. However, none of them accepted that the other took the responsibility of governing the autonomy, and so for many years, the bloody war between both parties, also known as Birakujî [fratricide], pushed the young autonomy into years of horror with many terrible internal killings not having been examined to this day.

The late US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, is considered the architect of the much needed intra-Kurdish pacification, and in this tradition, the US and other Western partners conclude that a similar 50/50 solution could be ideal as a first step before the acknowledgment of the AANES as some sort of autonomous entity in Syria.

Building a system vs. marrying parties

What I would, however, strongly question is whether the two cases can be compared and whether this predicament of unity even makes sense.

The rationale for unifying the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) in a 50/50 way was based on the need to institutionalize a de facto reality. As the PUK was a split-off of the KDP and existed for a long time before the establishment of the KRI, the competing parties had an almost similar strength. The West, particularly the US, that was preparing for war against Saddam needed a system that simply works. As a real Kurdish union would also be dangerous to Turkey, and a system where Turkey has one party, namely the KDP, a loyalist entity, would be stable enough to work but not too stable to put the NATO ally Turkey off.

More than 30 years later, the success of this model of division of power and the normative repercussions of the suffocating clientelist system of the KRI that has brought much suffering for the own population can be questioned. Therefore, it is surprising that a similar approach would be suggested for AANES. On another level, however, the circumstances of 1991 KRI are not even given to the AANES. Firstly, the KNC does not have the same support base in numbers as the pro-PYD movements. This is undoubtedly given to the limited extent to which they were allowed to operate in the region but also given to the fact that they refused to integrate into the AANES system, where the representative body of the Syrian Democratic Council gave the possibility for them to compete with other parties. Secondly, the KNC never accepted this possibility but automatically claimed to have a 50/50 share in power before anything. This is furthermore questionable, as the majority of losses in the war against ISIS and Turkey, which were the defining battles of the nascent autonomy, were taken by the SDF and not the KNC and Barzani affiliated troops like the Roj Peshmerga, which are based in Iraqi territory.

Given that the 50/50 reality on the ground does not apply, I would also qualitatively oppose the notion that a political entity, whether it is a state, an autonomy, or any other self-governed body, needs to have political “unification” before getting to have a status. At no point was Germany, for example, after WW2 or the reunification asked to prove a partisan unity before becoming a unified institutional entity – and demanding that would not make sense either. When building a system, especially a democratic one, unity has to be in the monopoly of power and respect to a common legal base. Not only does the AANES already have a sophisticated constitution – the Social Contract – but it does have established institutions and derived from the Social Contract a very progressive system of checks and balances as well as a well-defined relationship between the essential democratic and representative elements of the autonomy.

Asking the AANES to go for a 50/50 model with the KNC, therefore, not only repeats proven mistakes of the West in the past in the KRI and tries to make facts that are not given on the ground but also destroy a well-developed institutional framework that has already been established. The KNC, just like all other groups, should instead support these institutions and partake in the democratic process instead of bulldozing everything that was built in the last 13 years of the AANES.

Ways forward

Seeing increased Western diplomatic presence in the AANES is vital for the progress of the battle for a status for the AANES. However, the West must learn from its own mistakes and avoid setting wrong standards that they do not seem to set for other elements of the region. No one would ask Palestinians for total political unity before claiming that they should have a right to democratic self-determination. No one would ask Druze leaders to join the HTS to get the right to a unified Syria. So, why is the fundamental acknowledgement of the Kurds as a nation, which is the base of the debates around any need for a separate status, conditioned around them promoting partisan unity? Parties should compete in a democratic competition – just like in every other democracy.

The Kurdish cause, its actors constellation, its demands and its strategies have changed considerably, and immense learning effects can be observed. As much as the AANES has its problems and challenges, it does not deny having these challenges and does not hide them behind a facade of a national struggle. The Kurdish national struggle is the base of the battle that enabled the AANES but also that enabled the war against ISIS and the successful inclusion of other ethnic and religious groups. Western actors need to understand that they are not dealing with tribal groups turned parties – which were the sometimes justified but also sometimes racist assumptions of past Western dealings with the Kurds – but instead they deal with a political entity that has not only learned from multiple sources of oppression but also from the trial and error of the overall Kurdish struggle.

An undeniable aspect of the debate for unity is indeed how a self-reliant AANES will look like with regards to the two greater inner-Kurdish hegemonies: those of PKK-affiliated groups in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan and those allied to Barzani in the KRI. I strongly urge the AANES to take their philosophy of the “third path” seriously also in internal Kurdish regards. Dogmatic elements inside the AANES that do not respect the institutional workings of the AANES but rather seek to influence political processes in a 90s Ocalanist way are simply not fit to reflect what the current society of Rojava needs. A guerilla struggle in illegality is fundamentally different from the building of governance in an acknowledged setting that goes beyond the struggle for survival but that asks the question of how to live together. Turkish occupied Kurdistan is facing its own challenges, internally and externally, and with talks with Abdullah Ocalan going on, it is good for those talks to focus on what is needed there. Not because Kurdistan is not one – but because one leader, one part of a movement and one strategy cannot fit all parts. Rojava is the child of a greater Kurdish and democratic movement, and it has reached adolescence. It is time to award Rojava that status and to allow it to act in inner-Kurdish sovereignty.

Similarly, the Barzani side needs to stop claiming an inherent entitlement to anything regarding Kurdish affairs. The KRI is in years of political crisis and the political landscape of the 50/50 system has deeply hurt all efforts of Kurds in the region to fight against corruption and for more involvement and democratic development. The talks between Mazlum Kobani and Masoud Barzani are a vital first step showing that this level of sovereignty is in some way given to the AANES. Similarly, the KNC should be pushed to act as a party inside of the AANES and not as a heir to the horrors of bipartisan quota mismanagement in the KRI. As we know, none of these processes happen outside of the realms of Track 2 western diplomacy and in a great irony international and internal acknowledgement of the AANES happen in a factually but also epistemologically linked manner.

Dastan Jasim is a political scientist and associate fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies. She researches among other topics matters of Democratization, Kurdish civic culture and struggles against Islamism in the Middle East.