NATO’s second largest army Turkey is currently leading attacks on northern Syria that have caused a severe humanitarian crisis. And its primary target is what former British diplomat Carne Ross calls “an egalitarian feminist, ecologically-conscious society” which has been at the forefront of the fight against Daesh (Isis/Isil) for over a decade.

The Canary spoke to Ross to see why he believes this war should be a much bigger news story, what it says about Western racism and “post-imperial arrogance”, and what the world needs to do to stop it.

Turkey in Syria

After the invasion of Iraq, Ross gave “secret evidence to the Butler Inquiry” and resigned his post as a British diplomat. He knew the government had lied, failed to pursue alternatives to military action, and broken UN resolutions. And this experience profoundly changed his political views. In 2015, he visited the multi-ethnic but largely Kurdish area of northern Syria (aka Rojava), eager to find out about the “bottom-up self-government” developing there in the middle of the country’s brutal war. Vice News previously called the process in Rojava “the most feminist revolution the world has ever witnessed”.

Ross described his experience of the revolution to the Canary, saying:

there is such a system of bottom up self-government starting at the communal or the village level, where people take decisions for themselves in a very egalitarian atmosphere which is women-led. Women are co-chairs of all forums, including the system of justice…

He added that:

systems of self-government are often described as implausible in the West. But there in Rojava, it’s actually happening.

And he emphasised:

I think it’s an extraordinary political experiment that’s underway there that deserves to be known about and preserved and protected against aggression.

Turkey’s war against Rojava in Syria

NATO member Turkey, however, “has long seen the Kurds as an internal enemy” and sees Rojava “as a threat”. The state long oppressed its Kurdish population, and this sparked resistance from the PKK. It has also pushed its allies to designate the PKK as terrorists. But as Ross stressed:

I don’t believe really in designating groups as terrorists, and therefore kind of putting them beyond the pale where you won’t talk to them or deal with them. The PKK represents something real which is the need for self-defense of the Kurdish people in Turkey.

The Rojava Revolution shares ideological roots with the PKK, but as Ross stated:

The Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF], which is the force that defends Rojava, has stated that it is separate from the PKK.

In reality, Ross insisted, “Rojava is run by Syrians for Syrians”:

they’re not a kind of Kurdish separatist movement. They are, as I’ve described, a democratic and inclusive dispensation which is defending itself, has defended itself, particularly against Isis, for the last decade or so.

But if people in Rojava have been a key part of the on-the-ground resistance to Daesh, why have Western nations participating in the fight against Daesh allowed Turkey to attack them?

Western complicity with Turkish war crimes

Regarding the West’s shameful failure to challenge Turkey in any meaningful way, Ross said:

it is extraordinary that the West is willing to tolerate extensive human rights, abusive abuses, political repression, and violent, including violent repression by Turkey, and now attacks on northeast Syria where the the local militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, have been an ally to the West in fighting Isis.

He called it:

a strange kind of alliance when your allies let you be attacked by another country without response… so ‘ally’ would certainly be an inappropriate term in that regard.

And he explained that:

there’s a traditional reason for that, which is Turkey is seen as a kind of bulwark at the eastern end of NATO, a pivot between East and West, and therefore a vital ally to have in the Western alliance. There is a more insidious, pernicious reason now, which is Turkey has agreed to stop the flows of refugees across the Mediterranean and Aegean into the EU, and the West more generally, in return for Western acquiescence in, you know, authoritarianism in Erdogan’s Turkey.

Considering if there’s any red line Turkey could cross, he added:

I don’t know what the limits of Western hypocrisy are… I find the West’s position on Turkey, and what the Turks have done to the Kurds both in Turkey and in Syria, extraordinary and reprehensible. And yet they continue to do it. It’s one of those… platitudinous eternals of Western foreign policy, a bit like ignoring the rights of Palestinians and allowing them to be killed in large numbers. There’s a degree of racism in it. There’s a degree of post-imperial arrogance in it. The idea that you’re kind of moving chess pieces around the world to ensure stability for your allies, and thus for yourself.

Ross is fully aware of the impact Israel’s impunity in Gaza has had, too. As he stressed:

Turkey will have noticed the impunity with which Israel has carried out war crimes in Gaza. The US has… basically allowed this to happen – indeed, has fueled it by providing huge amounts of weaponry to Israel – and what Turkey will have learned is that you can get away with it. You can get away with abuses and war crimes of the kind that Israel has practised, and that Turkey is now practicing by aggressively attacking northeast Syria and Kurdish regions. And particularly in the dark latter days of the Biden administration, where there’s literally weeks left of that administration, it’s a very good moment to take advantage of the turmoil in Syria to pursue your own national ends, which is clearly what Turkey is doing.

Why the media should be focusing more on Turkey’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Rojava, Syria

Simply on a humanitarian level, Ross asserted:

The SDF currently controls about 40% of eastern Syria. That’s a very big chunk of the country, and if there is turmoil and war there that will affect a great many people. There’ll be a humanitarian disaster. There already is a humanitarian disaster in terms of the people who have been expelled from the Aleppo region by Turkish-backed militias – the Syrian National Army [SNA], as they’re called… Tens of thousands of people have been ethnically cleansed effectively from the Aleppo area.

Adding to his comment about racism and “post-imperial arrogance”, meanwhile, he addressed journalistic bias in the mainstream media, insisting that:

it is absolutely the responsibility of journalists to reflect the facts accurately, not to ignore human suffering, not to ignore certain areas, not to give different moral weights to different peoples… Evidently, they have done in the Israel-Palestine case, where you know individual Israelis are named and given personal histories, their families are interviewed… but Palestinians are just reduced to numbers talked about in the tens of thousands of deaths. There is a clear inequality between the way different groups of people are talked about, and I think a minimum requirement of journalism is to treat people equally.

He believes that most people absolutely would respond with empathy if that had the full story, and said:

we respond to the suffering of others when that is presented to us. Of course we won’t, respond if it is not presented to us, if it is ignored as is the case currently in northeast Syria, where what is going on in northeast Syria is being ignored in the discourse of what has happened to Syria.

Rojava is an alternative to the divisive and destructive status quo

On the left in particular, Ross argued that Rojava is a real sign of hope. Apart from being “one of the only examples in the world today of what a truly self-governing… society looks like”, he said:

I believe it’s a plausible alternative to the way we organize things in the West. In the West, we have top-down government, which is in basically the enforcement mechanism for capitalism, which is basically an exploitative economic system where one human exploits another and where we exploit nature. I believe in a more collaborative, shared economy of benefit to all where we practise mutual aid to support one another, and the concomitant of that is, it’s shared. Government where everybody has an equal say, rather than a hierarchy which is intrinsically corruptible, because when the few take decisions for the many, access to the few is always limited, so that access will always be won by the most powerful, the richest. And that’s what we see in our society today, where the interests of the most powerful and the most wealthy warp the whole system in their direction, and government has diverged from what popular wishes truly would be if they were expressed in a more egalitarian setting.

He added:

And that’s the lesson of Rojava, that they are doing that in Rojava and creating an egalitarian, feminist, ecologically conscious society in wartime. It’s not an easy thing.

So what can we do to help?

Ross doubts that the West is willing to take meaningful action to stop Turkey’s attacks. But he knows that polite requests don’t work. Speaking about autocratic Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he said:

He’s a bit like [war criminal Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. Diplomatic rhetoric is water off a duck’s back to him, just as it is to the Israelis. You can say you want ceasefires and restraint all you want. What matters is force and coercion. And I’m not saying use military force on Turkey, but tell them in no uncertain terms that relationships will be damaged if they continue in this vein.

Only legislation, sanctions, or other concrete, tangible changes would have an impact. But that’s unlikely to come unless there is massive pressure from voters in the West. This could be demonstrations, writing to MPs, or writing to the media. As he said:

Write to your MP. It’s not nothing to write to your MP. MPs take notice of that. They have to forward the letters to ministers for reply… As much as possible, talk about it. Demand that the press cover it much more. I’ve been writing to the Middle East editors of various newspapers and broadcast media saying, ‘Why aren’t you covering this? This really matters.’

Watch our full interview below:

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.