“Everything was green before,” sighs a young peasant from Sawidiyah, a small Syrian village at the banks of the Euphrates near Tabqa’s massive dam. “Now it should be the season, but the crops are lost, because Turkey cuts the water, preventing the production of electricity. For us here everything is linked to the agricultural sector. If there is no agriculture, there is no more work.”
The Women’s Agricultural Co-operative was established in 2015 by Kongreya Star and the Committee of Women’s Economy. It includes 135 members from Derik and the villages of Braaf and Kojerat, who each participated with 65,000 SYP, and planted on 380 dunams of land.
The efforts to build up communes everywhere never ceased after the start of the military cooperation with the US; rather the number of communes doubled. Also the creation of co-operatives continued; today there are a few hundred co-operatives. The democratic-communal economy continues to be developed. The anti-capitalist mentality was stronger in 2017 than in 2014 when I traveled for the first time to Rojava.
During my time in Rojava I want to realise a few ecological projects like a small sized bio-gas station as a source for cooking at the Internationalist Commune, and a water filter to recycle water to grow plants and vegetables all around the camp.
Many of the defining features of the political philosophy that Öcalan began to espouse in the 2000s are firmly rooted on my father’s idea of social ecology and its political practice: “libertarian municipalism” or “Communalism.”
Eleven people participated in the co-operative. The price for a share is 60,000 SYP.
An electric generator co-operative is a co-operative society that generates electricity for its beneficiaries, who become members by buying shares.
Considering the shortage of bread around the villages of Sheddadi, the Committee of Co-operative Societies in Hasakah has opened Erisa Bakery Co-operative in the village of Attala, 10 kilometres north of Sheddadi.
A new women’s radio station, Star FM, began its broadcast in Tirbespiye [Tirbespî / Al-Qahtaniyah] in Northern Syria. The radio was launched by Union of Free Women Northern Syria-Rojava and will broadcast mainly about women related issues. The slogan of the radio is “Star: The voice of the woman and life”. In addition to the residents of
Farmers in Al-Jarniyah have had to stop harvesting summer crops as a result of Turkey cutting the flow of the Euphrates river. The farmers rely on the flow of the Euphrates to irrigate their crops. About 70% of the people in Al-Jarniyah and its countryside use farming as a primary source of income, but a disastrous
Here you can read the translation to English of the social contract published in the Vladimir Van Wildenburg blog. You can download the French translation, the German translation, the Spanish translation. Preamble We, peoples of Rojava-northern Syria, including Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs, Assyrians, Turkmen, Armenians, Chechens, Circassians, Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, and the different doctrines and sects, recognize that the nation-state has made Kurdistan,
In a small street in Kobane, the walls surrounding the Kongra Star building – the women’s movement within the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria – house a vast and peaceful garden, green and flowery on this sunny day of late April. The calm is disturbed only by the roar of the generators. In the shade
