The Kurdish Freedom Movement began to discuss the communal approach, and to bring forward its first concrete examples, particularly in the 1990s. One cannot say that there was no communal mindset before the 1990s; however, a practical form of communalisation, a period when the movement became more rooted in society and accelerated its connection with the people, unfolded during those years.
In the first phase, the movement followed a Party/Front strategy, and a front organisation structure had been established accordingly. Yet the practical experience revealed that this front structure could actually achieve far more than originally expected.
From the early 1990s onward, debates began to focus on communal and assembly-style forms of organisation, and how such structures could contribute to the struggle. In some materials published by the Kurdish Freedom Movement during the 1990s, the structures of communes and assemblies, how they should be formed, and why such organisational methods were needed in Kurdistan were explained in detail.
Although the movement itself had a communal character, the first concrete efforts to implement the communal perspective in practice, in other words, communalisation in the fields of struggle, started inside prisons. With thousands of political prisoners, the movement initiated a communal organisational form in all prisons as a step towards collective organisation.
This was also because, in prisons, not only the cadres or fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were present. There were also militiamen and patriotic Kurds. For this reason, the movement created commune structures not only according to its internal rules but also in accordance with the specific conditions of prisons, thereby laying the foundation of a tradition of place-based problem solving.
Communes in the Kurdish Freedom Movement reject general definitions
In the Kurdish Freedom Movement, the concept of commune functions differently than other definitions. Here, communes were not structures that simply executed the rules of a general administration. They could make decisions in accordance with their own specific circumstances and in harmony with the strategic approach of the movement.
Abdullah Öcalan’s following statement summarises the importance the movement attributed to the commune understanding:
“How democratic federalism and democratic autonomy constitute the organisation and institutionalisation of the political life of the democratic nation; the federation of communal economic units is also the organisation and institutionalisation of economic life. The Federation of Communal Economic Units expresses the economic foundation of the Democratic Union of Middle Eastern Nations at local, national and regional scales.”
Communal experiments within the Kurdish Freedom Movement spread from prisons to every area where the people existed. By the end of the 1990s, People’s Assemblies and Communes, despite shortcomings and mistakes, had been put into operation in almost every region of Kurdistan. Experiences of the People’s Assemblies formed especially under the harshest conditions of war in Northern Kurdistan (Bakur) ensured the full participation of the people in the struggle and expanded the struggle further.
One of the most significant steps taken during this period, which began in the mid-1990s, was the effort to explain the true purpose of the struggle by taking into account the beliefs, culture and traditions of the people, and by using a language that the people would understand.
At that time, this approach was heavily criticised by the Turkish and Kurdistani leftist movements and was labelled as “tailing the people.” Yet in reality, it was the most crucial step in the process through which the Kurdish Freedom Movement became a people’s movement. The Kurdish people rejected all attempts that were distant, patronising, instructive, or colonial in character, and instead embraced the approach of the Kurdish Freedom Movement, recognising that the movement came from within themselves.
One of the steps in the 1990s towards communalisation and establishing unbreakable ties with the people emerged in the funerals and mourning processes held for guerrillas who fell in the war. Local organisational structures of the PKK, by organising funeral and mourning periods with respect for religious beliefs, which socialist and revolutionary structures had previously ignored or denied, demonstrated an approach that took into account the demands of the people. They ensured that burials were carried out with mass participation and demonstrated an attitude of not disrespecting the beliefs of the people.
What we wish to explain through this example is how the Kurdistan People’s Liberation Front (ERNK) process, which we will also regard as a commune practice of the Kurdish Freedom Movement that had just begun to organise itself and meet the people, became a mass movement and was embraced by society.
Communal experiments in prisons
The first commune experiments of the Kurdish Freedom Movement began to emerge in prisons towards the end of the 1980s. Although a culture of collectivisation had evolved earlier, a full commune structure had not yet been implemented. However, by the late 1980s, the Freedom Movement began to move towards commune organisation inside prisons.
Especially after the intense attacks of the state, not only the cadres of the PKK but also its sympathisers and patriotic Kurds were arrested. Communes were adopted as a method to address the problems that arose in this context, and after a while, this became proof that the Freedom Movement had taken the right step. Through the commune structure created in prisons, where cadres and patriotic people lived together, the effects of state attacks against prisons, attempts to recruit informants, and the influence of those who abandoned the struggle were reduced. In this way, the idea of resistance has survived to this day.
One of the reasons behind the communal experience in prisons was to explain to those imprisoned solely for being Kurdish or for sympathising with the Kurdish Freedom Movement, the aims of the struggle, its reasons, the meaning behind these sacrifices, and how a new life should be. These communes played a significant role in the expansion of the struggle.
In addition to this, communication and dialogue with those whose children and spouses were arrested, and the approach of not leaving the families of detainees alone, played a major role in the important place that the Kurdish struggle holds today.
Thanks to the prison communes conducted in accordance with the rules of the Freedom Movement, the stance and will of the Kurdish Freedom Movement continue to maintain their own system even today.
The first major commune experience in Kurdistan: ERNK
ERNK was an organisation that announced its foundation on the Newroz of 1985, established in line with the party-front strategy which was the initial strategic approach of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. From the day it was founded until it dissolved itself in 2000, ERNK responded to many problems, including the everyday problems of the people; it reorganised the economic, social and cultural life of society in accordance with the ideological approach of the movement, and wrote its name in golden letters in the history of the Kurdish Freedom Struggle.
What distinguished ERNK from other Kurdistani organisations was the effort to solve people’s problems together with the people themselves and to build a new life with the people. In this sense, ERNK was the first major commune experiment implemented by the Kurdish Freedom Movement throughout the entire country. The Kurdish people, who had been denied throughout history, who had never been given the right to truly govern themselves, and who were forced to live within the limits determined by those in power, experienced a history filled with massacres and genocide. In the 1970s they embarked on the great struggle of reclaiming their own rights.
This process was initially belittled by both the state and certain oppositional circles who believed it would once again be erased. Yet the present reality shows that rather than being eliminated, it transformed into a major change and a return to a people’s reality through an organisation that restored hope in socialism throughout the world. The people of Kurdistan, under the leadership of the PKK, continue their march by paying great prices, but also by contributing major innovations to the revolutionary struggle and history of resistance of the peoples of the world. One of these innovations was redefining the communal approach and concept, restoring it to its essence, and turning it into a hope for the peoples of the world.
From this perspective, despite all shortcomings and mistakes, ERNK existed for fifteen years as the communal organisation of fragmented people in a manner unlike any example anywhere in the world. In 2000, due to the ideological transformation within the Kurdish Freedom Movement, it dissolved itself and passed into a new phase of organisation. The ERNK period was also the first period in which a new phase and a new form of organisation was tested within the Kurdish freedom struggle. During this period, the Kurdish Freedom Movement, which had already started an armed struggle and proven itself through resistance, saw that neither a solely armed nor a solely ideological organisation would be sufficient for success. It was a period in which the movement identified the need for integration with the people and the necessity of the people’s ownership as a fundamental pillar.
In this context, the Freedom Movement would convey its attempts to explain its discourse to the people and to show them that there was hope for liberation through the ERNK and this is exactly what happened. ERNK showed that freedom in Kurdistan was possible through People’s Assemblies and communes. The phrase by Abdullah Öcalan in the mid-1990s, “The resurrection is complete the time for liberation has come,” essentially summarised this reality. A people who had been buried under tremendous pressure and suffocated beneath the earth had to rise again, stand back on their feet again and this would only be possible through correct and grounded organisation; this was accomplished during the ERNK period.
ERNK marked a step toward a people’s movement
Coming to the ERNK practice itself: ERNK was not simply a militia structure or an organisation that merely sent fighters to the armed wing; it was an organisational form that produced solutions for the people’s problems and addressed their everyday issues. In Kurdistan, in Turkey, and in every part of the world where Kurds lived, whenever the Kurdish people faced an issue they could not resolve, they turned to ERNK, meaning they turned to the Kurdish Freedom Movement and asked for support. With this practice of solving problems and its subsequent effort to reorganise and rearrange daily life among the people, ERNK became the first major commune experience of Kurdistan and of the Kurdish people.
Until the day it dissolved itself due to the strategic transformation of the movement, ERNK resolved thousands of cases; it produced solutions for conflicts that could even arise between two neighbours in everyday life, it explained to the people how life should be, it informed the people at every stage and included them in decision-making processes. Through these practices, ERNK succeeded in gaining great respect among the Kurdish people.
In resolving emerging problems, the practice created by ERNK listening to the influential people in each area, involving them in the process, and, in major issues, forming people’s courts where the population was included in the mechanisms of authority and decision-making, became so deeply rooted in Kurdish daily life that even today thousands of Kurds continue to organise their lives based on what they learned from that period.
ERNK also organised in spaces such as weddings and funerals, where the people preserved their own traditions, and it regarded every sphere as an arena of struggle for weaving a new life. With its constant efforts to inform the people and teach them this new life, ERNK played a major role in the creation of today’s Kurdish Freedom Movement.
Turning the funerals of martyrs into spaces of organisation
To explain this through the example of martyr funerals: when guerrilla funerals began to arrive in the 1990s, the Kurdish Freedom Movement developed an approach that had not been practiced before by Turkish or Kurdistani organisations, and ensured that martyr funerals were embraced by the people. At the same time, it neutralised a major special warfare tactic directed against the Kurdish people.
In a period when the state tried to prevent the meeting between the people and the guerrilla by saying “They are Armenians, they are Alevi, they are uncircumcised,” ensuring that funerals were conducted according to the religious perspectives of the people and acting in accordance with this influenced the people’s attitude towards the struggle as well.
In the 1990s, many guerrilla funerals, even when the identity of the fallen was not known, were buried collectively by fulfilling religious requirements, and their graves were built. A proper approach to mourning and grief processes paved the way for people to embrace the struggle and to approach it correctly. The impact of this approach can still be seen today: in some guerrilla funerals, the burial is carried out not by state-appointed imams but by individuals chosen from among the community who are regarded as “religiously committed.”
ERNK, with both its shortcomings and its mistakes, entered history as the first major commune experiment of Kurdistan. In this period, the Kurdish people met with their own values; in a manner that can also be interpreted as a form of civil disobedience against the annihilation policies imposed by the system, they held tightly to their own culture. The people accepted the new life perspective of the Freedom Movement and turned it into daily practice.
The Kurdish people reached a level of social consciousness where they solved their issues through the assemblies they formed, resolved even debt disputes by using the assemblies they themselves had created, taught their children how they should live, and contributed greatly to the development of the Kurdish language and Kurdish art.
In the 1990s, when ERNK was at its strongest, the Kurdish people discovered their own existence in every respect and took ownership of their own identity.
In those same years, the Kurdish Institute was established as another commune organisation, the Mesopotamia Cultural Centre was opened, and MED TV began broadcasting from abroad. The MED TV process by itself resembled a process of resisting by communalising against an attack. The state persistently tried to prevent the channel from being watched; the Kurdish Freedom Movement, however, ensured through local organisational structures that the channel was watched throughout Kurdistan, and even supported the purchase of satellite dishes to watch the channel, going to people’s homes to set it up. There were even those who were arrested and imprisoned for years because of this.
Today, if Kurdish can be spoken anywhere in the world, if Kurdish art can be practiced anywhere in the world, and if Kurdish national dress and traditions are recognised, this is thanks to ERNK, the first major commune movement of Kurdistan, which declared its foundation in 1985 and for fifteen years taught the Kurdish people a new way of life.
This practice shows that the commune structure and the idea of commune within the Kurdish Freedom Movement did not appear suddenly. At the same time, contrary to those who claimed that such a thing would not succeed in Kurdistan, it stands as concrete proof that great success can be achieved through correct approaches.
To be continued…