Sara Dorşîn (Sarah Almuth Handelmann) was a German revolutionary that joined the ranks of the PKK guerilla in 2017 and fell martyr in the mountains of Kurdistan from the bombings of the Turkish army on the 7th of April 2019. About her, the Internationalist Commune of Rojava wrote:
Şehid Sara's story began in 1985 in Germany where she felt capitalism's hostility towards youth. This sparked her quest for something more, something different. Embracing socialist ideals, Heval Sara found herself in the Kurdish Freedom Struggle. The struggle of the Kurds resonated deeply with her, as she saw it as the struggle for humanity. In 2017, driven by her convictions, Heval Sara made the courageous decision to journey to the Kurdistan mountains to join the Freedom Movement, guided by the vision of Abdullah Öcalan of a free life. In the life of a free guerrilla in the vast Kurdish mountains, Comrade Sara adapted swiftly. She delved deeper into Öcalan's ideology, particularly his vision of women's liberation in the ranks of YJA Star (Free Women's Units). Comrade Sara's journey embodies strength, solidarity, and the relentless pursuit of a socialist world. From Germany to the Kurdish mountains, her story inspires us to challenge oppression and strive for a Revolutionary Life.
The following is a letter she wrote in the mountains of Kurdistan addressing her friends back in Europe. We publish it here as an example of the kind of stance and aptitude that we as young revolutionaries and internationalists aspire to reach as well as of the will and hope we must cultivate inside ourselves to accomplish it.
We are at war, it’s something obvious, as serious as it is ordinary. This has been our life since we started to search something we couldn’t find in our immediate surroundings; or at least we thought we couldn’t. And this is what this war has become: it’s not easy to believe in something nowadays. I suppose that has become an excuse: believing. We have to be able to make what we are doing become something we can believe in. In other words, that the action itself is what produces value and belief, and later, at the same time, by believing in it, it gives it the power that it needs to be something believable and resilient. That is, acting, beginning, doing something, being in movement, instead of waiting for something to arrive that satisfies our idealist demands in every sense, or losing hope become it’s not like this or it cannot be like this. Already here there is a mistake. Because the point is that our project must be impossible. If it doesn’t go beyond the limits of the doable, it cannot make justice to a radical aspiration at all. The worst thing is that we have unlearned to follow the path we believe to be truly correct. We let our impulses die because we are too busy calculating the result of a hypothetical struggle. We even force ourselves to believe that by doing this we are giving value to our actions.
But by doing this, we lose the honest experience of a resistance that creates strength through itself. The value always arises from the struggle. The same happens with freedom. So I can say “this is freedom”, and at the same time I can never affirm that I am free. A freed society doesn’t imply that the fight is over. A free society is a society that fights for freedom, a liberating society. And that is a path, a movement in the awareness that history is something we influence. We have to work on our aptitude. We have no right to fail. As militants, as revolutionaries, we don’t have that right. Again, a problem of liberalism. We allow ourselves too much the right to fail; due to the circumstances, due to ourselves. We even revel in our own inabilities. We learned it like this to be able to love ourselves. Towards others we explain it as comprehension or compassion. In actuality, we deprive ourselves, with the lack of radicalism and excuses, of being able to fight any battle successfully. We rob ourselves of our radicality, we limit ourselves. In fact, if something doesn’t succeed, if we fail, it’s entirely due to our own mistakes. The fault is not of something or someone. It’s a question of aspiration and will; because the fight has no limits. This aptitude is not only our mission, but it’s also our advantage. Because at the same time, it also means that we will succeed when we don’t make these mistakes. It means not hiding these mistakes and working in ourselves, to change. The person itself is the victory, and therefore also the guarantee. In this sense, in fact, there is nothing we cannot do, nor a battle we cannot fight. We are talking here about radicalism.
The war is being fought against us, and is an every-day fact, but that only imperfectly has settled itself in our consciousness. Of course, it presents itself in different forms. It has always done so. As we know, violence is a common tool that also adopts different forms. The Public Power includes this definition of violence in its definition of power and it also likes to resort to psychological measures. With this violence they can maybe break the will, but with a system like the one that is lead by the so-called democratic states of Occident, they guarantee the will can never arise in the first place. In reality, this is working very well. How many of us can say we are risking something, that we are willing to sacrifice ourselves? But at the same time, we find ourselves in a search for meaning. There is in people a deep longing of promising themselves something bigger.
We are at war... it’s the time of internationalism. When today I go to the mountains of Kurdistan, learn to handle a Kalashnikov, read the books of Abdullah Öcalan and discuss about feminism with young female guerrillas, I don’t do it because I have fallen to an orientalist idea and believe I am helping an oppressed people to liberate itself. In the end I do it because I know that I cannot pretend to spread any value if I don’t fight. And because the weapons that are given to the Middle East are of German fabrication.
A value is always created in the fight. A theory is always incomplete without the practice. We lack a seriousness that doesn’t despair but that believes in itself. We are part of a world-wide fight, against the same enemy. This war that we call Third World War is before anything else an ideological one. If we win, it will be a victory over a great depression. But if we fail, an even greater hopelessness will fall over the same people who know can look with interest, but who don’t fight actively on the militant side. But fighting doesn’t mean that we can’t lose at all, because we have already won when we start to fight for real.
This war is our war, our responsibility, our decision and our determination.
Then, why do we forget so easily we are at war?
- Sara Dorşin, Mountains of the south of Kurdistan 2018-2019
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