The Kurdish and Palestinian people must become the subjects of their own political fate if they’re to overcome statist violence and exploitation by external powers, Professor Hamit Bozarslan has said in the latest Freedom Lecture at Rojava University. The lecture, which touched on several recent issues including Israel’s war on Gaza, Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, the Syrian conflict, Turkey’s occupation of Kurdistan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, can be viewed in full here:
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An expert in the Middle East, Turkey and the Kurdish question, Dr. Bozarslan has been director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris since 2006. He regularly contributes to Le Monde and other French Media, and has published multiple works addressing revolutionary violence and anti-democratic tendencies in Turkey and the Arab world.
Addressing the annual lecture, which was opened by Dr. Sardar Saadi, Director of the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Rojava, and moderated by Rosa Burç, a PhD candidate at the Center on Social Movement Studies in Florence, Italy, the professor represented all these conflicts as wars of ‘decivilization’, saying: “civilization is neither Eastern nor Western. Civilization is neither Christian nor Islamic, or Chinese or Indian. Civilization is trust in time and space.”
Commenting on how war attacks civilization, he continued: “Our wars now are focused on destroying trust, urbanity, and civilization. You cannot give meaning to your past. You cannot project yourself into the future. The destruction becomes the only moment when your history starts. The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were similar situations aimed at destroying time and space.”
Discussing the Syrian Civil War, and the destruction of Syrian civil society, he argued: “We call it the ‘Syrian Civil War’, but it is much worse. It is a war of destruction, an annihilation of a society, as many parts of Syria have been destroyed. Syria in 2011, had 23 million people. Today, we have 500,000 killed and 13 million exiles or internally displaced people. The Syrian society has basically been destroyed. It was a war of decivilization.”
On Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, Bozarslan said: “[in] Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh), where the population was almost 100% Armenian, and their civilization has been destroyed by the Azeri military. In this war, Russia, Turkey, and Israel have supported Azerbaijan against the Armenians. Russia did this because Armenia had their own democratic revolution. While Israel has supported Azerbaijan for cynical reasons to counter Iran.”
And on Ukraine, Bozarslan pointed out the global nature of the conflict. He continued: “It is a global war—a war on urbanity. Each attack is a war on urban space that can continue for weeks and months and create so-called ‘liberated spaces’ when the population is destroyed. This form of war is against life and civilization.”
A summary of the lecture, published by the Kurdish Centre for Studies (KCS), outlined the themes of Bozarslan’s hour long address. KCS wrote: “Philosophical themes Professor Bozarslan focused on include wars of decivilization which are carried out with the intent of destroying urbanity, why genocides attempt to annihilate a people’s living memory, and how anti-democratic regimes mentally merge the state and the nation so that autocrats such as Erdoğan and Putin become the living embodiments of the people they claim to represent. These were coupled with historical reflections on how passive democracies overlooked Turkey’s role in the Armenian Genocide and fascism’s assault during the Spanish Civil War.”
KCS continued, discussing Bozarslan’s analysis of the Kurdish issue specifically: “on the Kurdish front specifically, Professor Bozarslan opined on all four regions of Greater Kurdistan, discussing internal regional disunity between Rojava (Western Kurdistan) and Bashur (Southern Kurdistan), the effective mobilization of municipal civil society in Bakur (Northern Kurdistan), and the cultural impact of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom) movement in Rojhilat (Eastern Kurdistan). Moreover, he tied the mass violence against Kurds throughout the 20th century to the current day colonialist policies of Turkey and Iran, where both states wish to keep the Kurds divided and Kurdistan as a buffer zone between their spheres of control.”
On Palestine, Bozarslan pointed out that during Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaigns in 1948 and 1967, the Palestinian people were militarily supported by Arab states. But now “almost all Arab capitals are silent”.
Bozarslan said that the “Palestinian society is still a dynamic one, in which there are intellectuals, including many women, engaged in the fight for national and gender emancipation. I hope that this society will be able to develop a new political alternative that is not Islamist, jihadist, or based on violence,” adding that “We must support Palestinian society”.
The historian argued that “Israel has become a state of domination comprised of religious sects, kleptocrats, and military forces,” urging the people to “fight for democracy within Israel, which is connected to a democratic Middle East.”
Bozarslan was critical of Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attacks in Israel, which resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths. He argued that “the October 7 Hamas attackers thought they could reduce the history of Palestine and Israel into a span of 27 hours. But they forgot to anticipate the extremely heavy cost of that decision. Their actions represent the destruction of rationality.” Bozarslan argued, moreover, that Hamas contributed to these problems by engaging in state politics and seeking to draw Saudi Arabia closer to Iran (a strategy that didn’t work), rather than acting in the best interests of the Palestinian people.
He highlighted the hypocrisy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who, he said, has made harsh declarations, but there have been no diplomatic changes with Israel,” on the contrary, Bozarslan pointed out that Turkish trade with Israel continues.
In his concluding remarks on Palestine, Bozarslan emphasised that the “brutal war going on in Palestine” requires us to express our solidarity with the civilian population of Gaza.
The lecture highlighted that the Kurdish people face similar challenges to the Palestinian people. Describing the existential threat similarly faced by the Kurdish people, Dr. Bozarslan said: “Afrin had a population of 90% Kurds and today it is less than 10%. When I hear in Turkey some [pro-government] partisans criticizing Israel, what I want to say to them [is], ‘If Netanyahu is Gaza’s hangman, in Rojava the Netanyahu is named Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’.”
He described Turkish-occupied regions of Rojava where the Kurdish population has been eradicated, saying: “In this war, we have on one part, the cynicism of Russia and Putin who wanted to improve their relations with Turkey, and on the other side we had the cynicism of Donald Trump.”
As such, both peoples need to become independent of statist exploitation and pursue their own interests in the common interest of humanity, Bozarslan concluded by saying.
His comments came at the fourth annual Freedom Lecture at the leading educational establishment in the Kurdish-led autonomous regions of North and East Syria, which offers education, teaching, novel research and publications on the basis of the Kurdish political movement’s critical perspective on pedagogy.
*The quotes in this article have been transcribed by the Kurdish Centre for Studies, and have been slightly reworded for clarity in some places.
