Kurdish national unity now stands before us as a clearer, more explicit, and more urgent agenda. At a time when the demand for national unity is being felt with growing intensity among the Kurdish people living across the four parts of Kurdistan and throughout the world, the Kurdistan freedom struggle is approaching the threshold of achieving yet another of its founding aims. Today, the Kurdish reality is being recognized in a way that can no longer be denied, and revolutionary leaders shaped by the Apoist tradition have reached a level at which they represent the Kurdish people on the global political stage.
The genocidal attacks that began in Aleppo on 6 January, and the wave of major resistance that followed wherever the Kurdish people live, have once again brought the debate on national unity and its importance to the fore among the Kurdish people and Kurdish organizations. Not only in the four parts of Kurdistan but also among Kurds living across the world, the process embraced with a strong declaration of will has transformed into a spirit of national unity, contrary to the genocidal ambitions of international powers. In the aftermath, however, a major wave of attacks was launched against this very spirit.
Years ago, Abdullah Öcalan said: “In order to prove the existence of the Kurds, perhaps no social existence in the past two centuries, within the context of capitalist modernity, has experienced repression, denial, and annihilation of such intensity in both content and form. Cultural and physical genocides were carried out. In their primary homeland (Kurdistan), every kind of coercive and ideological instrument was put into operation for both physical fragmentation and cultural (mental) fragmentation and erasure. It can be said that there is no mechanism of repression and plunder inherent in capitalist modernity that has not been applied, up to and including genocide.”
National unity is a necessity
Today, Kurdish parties and organizations have come to see more clearly that the formation of national unity has become a necessity. The demand for national unity, for which the Kurdistan Freedom Movement has worked and taken initiatives for years, now stands before us as a demand of the entire Kurdish people. The system built in Rojava, which represents the practical reflection of Öcalan’s ideology, has become a model embraced, internalized, and defended by the Kurdish people.
At the height of the war in the 1990s, Öcalan defined national unity as follows: “The concept of national unity is sometimes misunderstood when it is mentioned, as if it only refers to the coming together of organizations, large and small, in the form of a single front. That is one aspect of it, but before that comes the unity of the Kurdish people as a people. In other words, becoming aware of being a nation and entering the arena of struggle as required by being a nation. This is what should primarily be understood by national unity. Otherwise, it is not merely a matter of several organizations coming together. It is about the people having attained the consciousness of being a nation and grasping that they have placed themselves at the service of a comprehensive struggle for their existing homeland.”
In essence, these words underscored that what is at stake is not merely the convergence of organizations with differing views, but the necessity for people to act as people and to think within the framework of a national consciousness. For the Kurds, who have been divided into four parts by international powers and denied any form of status, recognizing themselves as a nation means taking their place on the world stage. In one of his recent statements, when Öcalan said, “They want to leave the Kurds wounded and make them dependent on themselves,” he once again pointed to the importance of nation-building and the formation of national consciousness.
The struggle for nationhood, beginning with the first manifesto
In one of his analyses, Abdullah Öcalan explained how he began to reflect on the national question and national unity: “When I began to take an interest in socialism in the 1970s, I also became interested in the national question and national unity.” The emergence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its subsequent development into a form of organization that went far beyond the model of a classical socialist organization demonstrate that Öcalan had been thinking from the very beginning about how national unity could be shaped.
The statements of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement on national unity date back to the movement’s founding years. In the declarations and analyses published at the time, the Freedom Movement consistently underlined the importance of national unity for the struggle of the Kurdish people. Its concrete steps in this direction began in 1992 with the Kurdistan National Congress. In the work known as the first manifesto, The Path of the Kurdistan Revolution, the first step toward national unity and independence is defined as follows: “For colonized peoples, a national independence movement cannot develop without the emergence of a patriotic youth and intellectual movement under the leadership of a conscious and organized ‘minority.’”
In the same work, Öcalan also explained what kind of national consciousness was envisioned: “The nation-building effect of capitalism is often discussed. That is true. But it is also true that under the dominance of capitalism many peoples have either disappeared or lost their national character by dissolving into the dominant nation. Many saw no alternative to waging an uncompromising struggle against capitalist imperialism to become a nation.”
The national consciousness that Öcalan sought to cultivate among the Kurdish people stood in contrast to the impositions and definitions of capitalist modernity; it was a vision of nationhood that preserved its own distinctiveness and attained status. One of the Freedom Movement’s core objectives was to foster and build this emancipatory form of national consciousness.
Revolution is the product of each country’s internal conditions
In the early years of the Freedom Movement, Abdullah Öcalan offered the following definition of nation-building during internal meetings: “The stage of national liberation is the stage of becoming a nation through a revolutionary method; after the war is won, it is the stage of becoming an independent and democratic nation.”
The debates and strains witnessed today stem from this very framework. The national liberation struggle that began fifty-two years ago has reached the stage of becoming a nation and has now entered the phase of building a democratic society. The definition articulated by Öcalan and the Kurdistan Freedom Movement in the 1970s demonstrates that the movement has continued along the same ideological path from its earliest days to the present, undergoing serious development and reshaping itself in line with the requirements of the era.
In one of his earliest speeches, Abdullah Öcalan said, “Revolution is not something that can be exported. Because revolution is the product of each country’s internal conditions,” underscoring that any revolution to take place in Kurdistan would be shaped by its own internal dynamics and the conditions of the period.
The following definition adopted at the founding congress of the PKK also reveals that, from the very beginning, there was an aim to cultivate a correct national consciousness: “Until just yesterday, political life in Kurdistan and the political status granted to Kurdistan by international status were virtually nonexistent. It was unthinkable for the people of our country to engage in politics for themselves and in their own interests, to make their weight felt in politics, and to carry that weight onto the international arena. We know that some movements and individuals preached in the name of Kurdistan and Kurdishness from various sides. But the politics they practiced was a familiar, collaborationist politics. It reflected a Kurdistan that had been subjected to oppression and submission. It was not a politics of resistance, but a politics of submission and collaboration. And of course, such politics could not be expected to bring anything to the country’s people or to their political life beyond a series of negative consequences.”
Öcalan’s insistence on the question of national consciousness, though heavily criticized at first glance, in fact constitutes one of the foundational pillars of the understanding of democratic socialism that today defines the character of the Freedom Movement. This insistence has often been used as a pretext to attack Abdullah Öcalan, with claims put forward that he could not be a national leader. Yet, in his book Insistence on Socialism Is Insistence on Being Human, Abdullah Öcalan stated: “At this point, I say that without national and class aims that are matters of life and death, I cannot exist. If you want to understand me, first and foremost, I am an ideologue; I safeguard the fundamental national aims and bind everyone to the national aim. I say this; I uphold this. This is what a national leader means, and this is where I draw my strength from.”
In Abdullah Öcalan’s thinking, national unity is life itself. Contrary to the claims of the state and those hostile to the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, national unity holds central importance for Abdullah Öcalan and is seen as one of the foundations of this struggle.
In one of his analyses, Abdullah Öcalan said: “To cultivate love in Kurdistan and crown emotions means to grasp the national dimension. Let us not dismiss Mem and Zin as mere legends. In fact, it too is a question of national unity. If there had been national unity and even a degree of democracy, and if that feudal father had not existed, Mem and Zin could have lived together freely, and the known tragedy would not have taken place. We can examine their lives from many angles. Ehmedê Xanê calls for national unity. The author says, ‘If there had been Kurdish sovereignty, these things would not have happened to us.’ He has a deep passion for unity and reflects it in this epic. It can be said that he made great efforts for national unity and embarked on the path of love. If you advance the national democratic revolution even slightly, you also open the path of love a little.”
Öcalan’s understanding of national unity as resistance to capitalist modernity
Abdullah Öcalan’s understanding of national unity does not rest on a classical model of nation-building or on unity grounded in feudal ties. Although some circles associate the concept of national unity with the goal of establishing a state’s apparatus, Öcalan has never articulated such a position. In one of his analyses, when he said that “the PKK is not a classical leftist organization,” he underlined that the steps taken and the gains achieved through this struggle cannot be confined to, or understood through, classical definitions.
Neither the Kurdistan Freedom Movement nor its struggle has followed the path of a classical leftist organizational model or a conventional axis of resistance. For this reason, Rojava, which represents the practical reflection of Öcalan’s ideological world, today stands as a space embraced and claimed by the entire Kurdish people, and the peoples draw inspiration from the new life being shaped in Rojava.
In another assessment in 1993, Öcalan used the following expressions: “The proposals we have put forward regarding the coming together of the southern forces and all the forces of Kurdistan under a general umbrella have matured. What needs to be done for national unity, for democracy, and for the unity of all democratic forces can only be advanced and carried out with this degree of clarity. Our party, which adopts a stance that is fully justified and confident, once again emphasizes these truths in this way; it not only demonstrates that it is on the right path and acting correctly but also displays a responsible and mature attitude in addressing grave problems. We hope that all friendly forces will properly assess this and will not further deepen dead-end paths. They should take the path of reason, the path of peace, and the path of the nobility of politics as their basis. This would create conditions for the equality and freedom of peoples with less pain and bloodshed. We are not dreamers, but we also wish to be optimistic. We are very realistic.”
Öcalan articulated a distinct definition of becoming a nation, and this definition became the foundational motto of his understanding of national unity. The concept of national unity as defined by the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and Öcalan fundamentally rejects classical nationalism and the nation-state paradigm, while offering a different perspective on the principle of “the right of nations to self-determination,” one of the core tenets of socialism.
In the Manifesto of Democratic Civilization, Abdullah Öcalan defines the nation as follows: “It is possible to call the identity that emerges when communal identity lives on in a stable and continuous form of governance a nation or national identity. The dominant feature of a nation is its ability to govern itself through its own will. Governance may develop in democratic or statist forms. Peoples, or confederations of tribes, who live under the rule of other nations, more precisely, under nationalities with statist forms of governance, are not called nations, but slaves.”
Democratic modernity is flexible in its understanding of the nation
In Abdullah Öcalan’s framework that defines national identity in this way, the path toward national unity is shaped by a democratic conception of society. The primary aim here is to resist capitalist modernity’s use of the concepts of nation and nationalism to safeguard the nation-state apparatus and to organize nations through nationalist delusions, thereby producing individualistic societies.
Accordingly, the concepts of nation and national unity in Abdullah Öcalan’s philosophy carry a meaning that goes far beyond what has been taught to date. “Democratic modernity is flexible in its understanding of the nation,” Öcalan said, continuing as follows: “A perspective of national construction that is not based on language, ethnicity, religion, or the state plays an immense transformative role by integrating multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-denominational, and politically diverse elements within its structure. Against conceptions of the nation grounded in the state, language, religion, sect, and ethnicity, this multi-dimensional and holistic understanding of the nation offered by democratic modernity provides a strong foundation for the peace and fraternity needed in the geocultural landscape of the Middle East. It can be said that a great regional people, composed of the three major monotheistic religions and of all kinds of different languages, ethnicities, and political formations, in other words, even a Middle Eastern nation, can be formed.”
At this juncture, the significance of Abdullah Öcalan’s thinking has once again become clear. In particular, following the attacks of 6 January, it is now more evident what the persistent assaults by certain nationalist circles and opponents of the Kurdish struggle against Öcalan, the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, and the new understanding of socialism it has fostered truly signify: a refusal to allow the spirit of national unity that has emerged among the Kurdish people to be placed on a principled and emancipatory footing.
It is clear that these attacks are not merely a matter of rejecting a particular line of thought, but are the product of individuals and circles who do not wish to see the Kurdish people achieve freedom or present a new perspective on socialism and life to the Middle East and even to the world, and who remain unable to transcend the legacy of servitude embedded within their own outlook.
For this reason, it is important that the framework developed by Öcalan be followed with interest and embraced not only by the Kurdish people but by peoples across the world. A national unity to be forged by the Kurdish people based on the thought of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and Öcalan will demonstrate to all that, despite all the assaults of capitalist modernity, a new socialism and a new way of life are possible. National unity is no longer merely a need; it is a necessity.
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