The importance of the democratic confederalism model has been better understood with the Kurdish-led autonomous administration in North and East Syria, said Democratic Union Party (PYD) leadership council member Syrian Kurdish politician Foza Yûsif, speaking at the final session of the “We Want Our World Back!” conference on Sunday.
“In the last 12 years, 12,000 of our comrades have been martyred. States have divided us into four parts. They have created hatred between the people and we have been suffering from this for a century. Today there is no state in Rojava, but the consequences of the nation-state continue to live in our minds and bodies. We are under the pressure of nation-states,” Yûsif said in the fourth three-day conference of the “Challenging Capitalist Modernity” series of conferences in Germany’s Hamburg.
Stating that Abdullah Öcalan put forward the model of democratic confederalism for all the peoples of the world, Yûsif said that after the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) was established, children went to school without fear and did not have to deny their language for the first time in Syria, and added: “Democratic confederalism liberated our enslaved minds. We are after how to build a new life. We have done in Rojava in 12 years what we could not do in the last 100 years. In these 12 years.”
“We Want Our World Back! – Resist, Reclaim and Rebuild”, organised by the Network for an Alternative Quest (Network AQ), was scheduled to take place at the University of Hamburg on April 7-9, however, it actually took place at Wilhelmsburg Bürgerhaus (town hall) in the city after the university administration cancelled the conference.
The cancellation sparked a strong reaction from academics and initiatives across the world, with over a hundred professors and academics signing a declaration supporting the conference and condemning the decision to cancel the rooms.
