My way to the commune
My name is Celia and I’m part of the internationalist Young Women Commune. I got to know the Kurdish freedom movement in Autumn 2022. The assassination of Jina Amini triggered protests and popular uprisings in Iran and all over the world and reached my city in Germany as well. At one of these rallies, I encountered some internationalist young women who invited me to one of their meetings. At this time, I knew very little about the Kurdish freedom movement or about the deeper meaning of the slogan “Jin Jiyan Azadi”. Not only curiosity, but also a spontaneous feeling of trust was awakened in me.
I am the daughter of a Peruvian man and a German woman. My grandmother, the mother of my father, was still raised with the Quechua language until she moved to the capital Lima as a young woman. So my roots go back to the time before the Europeans declared the “American” continent. My ancestors inhabited this land prior to the claws of capitalist modernity tearing it up. Today my grandparents can’t speak Quechua anymore, they live in Lima, a 10-million-people metropole with a big divide between poor and rich.
I was born and raised in Germany. As a toddler I was still able to understand Spanish. Every few years we visited my grandparents, even my mother spoke Spanish fluently. However, upon entering elementary school I was fully surrounded by German and its socialization, I lost all my Spanish. Nonetheless I never lost my consciousness for my heritage, even though I couldn’t name it back then. I always had this consciousness for my identity as a diaspora-child. I loved talking about Peru, explaining to children and adults where Peru was, what they eat over there and that I descended from the Incas. In return I earned the nickname “Pocahontas”. Again and again, I experienced setbacks during my search for identity, nevertheless my roots where still very important to me, I knew they were a part of me.
My roots have always given me security, especially among the German culture, a fragile culture that had its roots trimmed. They bonded me to the place I grew up in. That’s something I only noticed through analyzing the German government and the EU, which would not have been possible without the analysis of Abdullah Öcalan. Now, I’m trying to return to my indigenous roots.
The difficulty of having been raised as a German-Peruvian lies in understanding the history, culture, and society of two people and finding my truth within. Two people showing a duality, colonize or be colonized; rise up against the capitalistic regime or become one with it; a fragile state-nationalism and a resistance-driven love for your country. My truth lies somewhere between all of this.
When I look at my family, I see many contradictions that European colonialism has created. On one hand, they feel a strong connection to the ground they’ve been raised on, on the other the capitalistic values in the form of money, property, and distribution of goods have poisoned my family. Fights over inheritance lead to a hateful atmosphere between siblings and cousins, we feel the need to compare ourselves with the neighbors and conclude that they always have it better. I see the consequences of colonialism hurting my family and the bad luck it brings them.
At the World Youth Conference in Paris (1), teenagers from Abya Yala were telling us about the militarization of the youth and I immediately thought of my dad, who had to spend his youth in a military academy. Looking at our acquaintances in Lima, mainly consisting of my dad’s classmates, I’m happy he chose to go to Germany to study instead of pursuing a career in the military or in the police. This militarization shapes whole generations and sharpens the patriarchal mentality of hierarchy which prioritizes power, possession, and comparison. With each step forward you step on the person next to you. This mentality was brought by the imperialistic state and the church and replaced respect for nature with Christian dogmatism. It’s clear that this break in society saddens people and goes against the true nature of collective life. My family too feels this contradiction, but they fail to see what they can do, the state mentality is burned in their brains and functioning routinely every day.
A cosmovision of the peoples
The fight of the Kurdish people and the fight of the people in Abya Yala not only resemble each other in the way that the dominant system used similar tactics of colonization, but also in the shared worldview of the people. The understanding between humans and nature, what it means to live in community and the recognition that everything on earth is connected characterizes this worldview. Although these two peoples are separated by space and time, their beliefs are so similar, and looking at the world history proves that they are not alone. This cannot be a coincidence, rather it must be an indication of the true nature of humans, society and the world.
When I met the internationalist women in October of 2022, I was at a very unfulfilling place in my life. Something in me wanted more than my boring school days, I needed something that gave me meaning and hope. In the years prior I had found some of that through political organization, but the Apoist movement showed me a completely new way.
At the Women Weaving The Future Conference (2) I discovered the beauty and strength of the Autonomous Organization. Abdullah Öcalan’s paradigm of Democratic Confederalism puts the struggle of the woman into the center of the freedom movement. When I heard this for the first time, it felt as if a decisive piece of a the puzzle fell into place in my life. No, actually I placed it there. With all of my decisions I had led myself there, on this path, that has been walked by thousands of women fighters in the struggle for freedom. As a young woman I need to organize autonomously (3). This has to be the conclusion of all women in the world, as only the autonomous organization of women and Jineolojî, the science of the woman, has the potential to bring together this many people and therefore lead towards a free society. It is the mothers, the sisters, the daughters, who keep our society together, who bear the grief and the luck of history. There is no other way of freeing the society, this is the strength of the woman.
Abdullah Öcalan understood the power of the woman and shows us with his writings and his life, the energy and the hope that lives within us and leads us to victory. He gave me hope for a new life, and since then, the paradigm gives me orientation. It brought me the will to struggle and when I look into the faces of the comrades around me, I see this will and hope reflected in them.
The imprisonment of Abdullah Öcalan was an attempt to also cage his ideas. The international complot and the ongoing isolation is not only an attack on his physical freedom, but on all of society, the struggle for liberation, democracy and ecology and on the woman herself. Abdullah Öcalan was not imprisoned as an individual, he represents and leads a whole movement. When he exposed and analyzed the hegemonic system of capitalist modernity he pointed his eyes towards our roots, the ground that we stand upon, and showed the world how poisoned it is, he became a threat. The representatives of the hegemonic powers made it their chore to eliminate him along with all of his ideas. As we can all testify, this did not work out. On the contrary the Apoist movement is growing and flourishing and will keep on demanding freedom for its leader. Because as long as Abdullah Öcalan, Rêber Apo, is not free, we will not be free. The forces holding him in captivity are the same ones holding us captive. It is all connected.
1. Read more about the World Youth Conference in issue number 13 of Lêgerîn.
2. Read more about the Women Weaving The Future Conference in issue number 10 of Lêgerîn “The XXI century will be the one for Women’s liberation”.
3. As a part of the ideology of liberation of women in the Kurdish Freedom Movement women organises in autonomous parallel structures at every level.
Comments