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Medico International, a Frankfurt based human rights organisation, held a conference on 10-11 September marking 10 years of autonomous self rule in the predominantly Kurdish northern Syria, and highlighting the successes and future potential of the unique democratic experiment known as Rojava.
The “10 Jahre Rojava” (10 Years Rojava) conference examined the establishment of multi-ethnic and democratic autonomous regions and their survival under adverse circumstances. Speakers included politicians, academics, activists and journalists.
“Rojava” refers to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), which came to life in 2012 as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces retreated from local protests in the northern Syrian city of Kobane and Kurdish-led forces took control.
The ensuing 10 years have seen momentous challenges to the democratic self-governing regions that sprang up in North and East Syria. A first deadly threat came from the extremist jihadist Islamic State (ISIS), which seized control of a large swathe of northern Syria after proclaiming its Caliphate in 2014.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were instrumental in driving ISIS out of most of Syria by the end of 2015. But Rojava would soon face a new threat from Ankara, as the Turkish military began a series of cross-border operations in northern Syria with 2016’s Euphrates Shield.
Despite the Turkish occupation of large parts of the AANES, continued bombing, drone attacks, and the threat of a further full-scale assault this year, “a hopeful civil society has emerged and a democratic self-government was created and a new model of society developed,” Medico International said.
The human rights organisation, which received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its successful campaign to internationally ban land mines, said it had, “accompanied Rojava from the beginning” and noted that, while Kurdish-led, the autonomous administrations had been joined by majority-Arab areas after ISIS’s defeat.
The conference included input from the AANES foreign relations co-chair Abdulkarim Omar, but also from Dr. Nazira Gorey, a spokesperson for the region’s Assyrian community alongside many others.
An important theme was the military threats to the region, with international conflicts expert Jan van Aken and activists Matthias Monroy and Chloé Troadec broaching the topic, with special attention to Turkish drone warfare, in their discussion titled, “Rojava under threat”.
The conference also raised the topical issue of water security in a discussion called “Climate change and water policy as warfare”, featuring human rights defender Egid Ibrahim, Nick Hildyard of British NGO Corner House, and German Green Party lawmaker Kathrin Henneberger.
Other challenges discussed at the conference included the “great burden” of dealing with the aftermath of the ISIS Caliphate, including the thousands of extremists remaining in prisons across the region.
The conference also tackled the subject of the region’s politics, which, as the title of sociologist Dilar Dirik and Gorey’s talk puts it, have moved “From the Kurdish Nation-State building idea to Democratic Confederalism as an alternative to the paradigm of a centralized nation state.”
“The #10YearsRojava conference at the weekend proved that an in-depth, controversial and solidarity exchange on fundamental questions in the region and on concrete and acute problems was necessary, to talk about possible perspectives for #Rojava and #Syria,” said conference organiser Anita Starosta.
“The impulses from the weekend were important, and now we need to carry them forward and continue the dialogue with the relevant decision makers – also together with the representatives of the self-government and civil actors in #NorthEastSyria,” she said.
