RiseUp4Rojava Finland held a speech at PKK’s 45th anniversary celebration in Helsinki on the 27th of November. The speech in it’s entirety can be read below.
We send our warmest congratulations to the PKK, and thank NCDK, the Kurdish Democratic Society Center in Helsinki, for organizing the event.
I speak as a member of R4R Finland, a local group part of an Internationalist network of activists working to support and show solidarity to the vanguards of the Revolution in Rojava.
I am here to convey congratulations to the PKK and congratulations to all of you here, who are friends and supporters of the party. Without you the party would not be as strong as it is, so part of the praise belongs to you.
I speak as someone who has never needed the PKK to be a defender of his own families, his own language, his own culture and his own life. So I speak only of what I respectfully can.
Since it’s founding 45 long years ago, the PKK has been one of the most important material forces fighting for decolonization in the Southwest Asia, especially in the specific fight against the imperialist and fascist state administration of Turkey that has now for a century tried to assimilate the Kurds into itself, and suppress the righteous resistance against this assimilation.
During the 45 years of the PKK one of its most notable efforts has been to show how a leftist political movement could organize itself to not only theoretically, but also concretely put a real emphasis to the liberation of women. I quote Dilar Dirik as she states that “in a patriarchal world women’s autonomous organization in all spheres of life, from knowledge production to armed self-defence, is a paradigmatic stance and a precondition for true democracy.”
After the ideological, strategic and organizational reconstruction that the PKK went through in the early 2000’s, the Kurdish freedom movement has established itself as a global vanguard in another sense as well, in how to structure a democratic struggle in a way that doesn’t maintain the nation-state as a goal or presumption for the political project.
In the modern colonial times the Europeans have for centuries presented themselves as the professors and the rest of the world as the listeners and learners. But today the Europe is in a sorry state. All that was learned, or at least claimed to have been learned about morality and humanity in the aftermath of the Second World War has been forgotten. In how they deal with the Kurds, as a war ally when the Kurds are needed to fight the Daesh, as an silent observer when Turkey continues its illegal targeting of Rojavan civilians, the Western nation states are exposing their real interests. As expressed by reber Apo, these are the interests of Capitalist Modernity, and they are always pursued by strategies of colonial, imperial, patriarchal and ecocidal violence.
So in these times we, as the people living in Europe who seek for a world based on morality and not capitalist accumulation, we have to refuse the “we” in Europe and our respective nation states, and develop alliances with the communities and movements all around the world that believe in the same democratic liberation as us. And out of those, the people of the PKK and the party itself, with all its parallel organizations, is one of our most important allies.
As I am a Finnish citizen born in Finland it is my recently renewed shame that the state administration which is supposed to represent me is working in a military cooperation with fascist Turkish state that tries to eradicate the Kurdish people. The same can be said about the ongoing arms trade and diplomatic support that Finland maintains for the genocidal Israeli occupation.
So if I want to follow what is moral and humane about me, I must resist the state’s right to represent me, resist being an obedient subject of a state that enforces violence I do not accept.
To act upon this is not an easy task in a society in which the nation state works as a framework for so much of my public and private life. But as I try to learn from the vanguards of our global resistance, I can turn to reber Apo, the leader of the movement which we celebrate tonight. In his works, Öcalan has presented an observation of the moral and political society, which is the only essential form that a human society takes. Against the notions formed in the European colonial mentality that people, by nature are violent and suspicious, and thus need the state to centralize power away from them, the moral and political society assumes only what is inarguably true about humans: that they are moral in the sense that they can evaluate different kinds of actions on the basis of what is right and wrong, and political in the sense that, unlike any other animal, they can choose to organize themselves in any way they see fit.
But in capitalist modernity, this is all suppressed, and the state has established itself as the sole moral evaluator, and as the sole model for political organization. But the moral and political society was not destroyed, as it could not have been. It is imagined and presented in all the resistances against the capitalist state system, against patriarchy, colonialism and imperialism, showing us that another kind of world is possible, and there are countless people fighting for it. The PKK is one of brightest examples of this in the last century and now.
But what is important from the perspective of our lives here in Finland and elsewhere in the Western nation states, is that the moral and political society lives in every one of us, as a possibility to evaluate our own actions on the basis of what is right, and follow those judgements, refusing to comply to the evaluations and interests of the nation state. It lives as a possibility to organize ourselves into communities independent of the nation state, consisting of people practicing their ability to see what is right and what is wrong, together learning, imagining and trying out what it means to live as a moral and political society.
I wanted to communicate the hope and the spirit that the PKK has awakened in me, and to praise the resistance that it leads not only in Kurdistan, but everywhere, against the Capitalist Modernity.
So again, congratulations to the PKK and all of you, for 45 years of fighting for all that is good in humanity. I hope this night, for you, and for all of the Kurdish freedom movement, is a night for celebration, comradeship, and strengthening of hope.
Long live the resistance of the PKK