Rethinking Anti-Imperialist and Anti-War Internationalism
Rethinking Anti-Imperialist and Anti-War Internationalism with respect to Turkey, US Troops in North East Syria, and Beyond
By Ozlem Goner
Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island & the Middle Eastern Studies at the City University of New York
Steering Committee Member of the Emergency Committee for Rojava
Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO, recently escalated its airstrikes on the autonomous region in North East Syria (AANES, often called Rojava). More than once, Turkey has followed such waves of airstrikes by invading and occupying large portions of the region, notably Afrin, where residents were ethnically cleansed and civilians, particularly women, are subject to constant violence. All this has been documented by the United Nations Human Rights Council[1], Human Rights Watch[2], and others. As long as Turkey, a NATO member, continues to violate international accords without repercussions, other NATO members are complicit in its war crimes.
Turkey has violated multiple international agreements including:
· the United Nations Charter, which prohibits acts of aggression;
· the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits any state from arresting and transferring the citizens of another state across its borders. Turkey has arrested and taken many Syrian Kurds over the border;
· the US-brokered 2019 ceasefire agreement. Turkey has continued to carry out attacks against North East Syria through drones and Turkish-backed militias, resulting in many civilian casualties.
No serious international action against Turkey has taken place despite these violations.
Turkey's history of colonial violence against its own minorities, including Armenians and Kurds, is well known. Today it uses F16 jets and drones bought from the US and other Western powers to assassinate dissidents and other civilians and create a continual atmosphere of fear, preventing people already traumatized by ISIS from ever living in peace. Much of this military equipment is bought with the money the US grants to Turkey in the form of military aid. By providing military aid and selling arms to Turkey, the US and other Western countries co-sponsor its violence against Kurds, other ethnic and religious minorities, women, and all living beings in the region.
At the moment, the 900 US troops on the ground in North East Syria[3] are one of the few deterrents against another Turkish invasion. Any plan to remove these forces, especially without an alternate action plan to stop an attack, will simply repeat The Trump administration's 2019 green light for a Turkish invasion.
Some anti-imperialists talk as though colonialism and imperialism in the region is simply a problem of the presence of US troops. But the Western colonial footprint in the region did not begin with the Syrian civil war. Western imperial powers, following to their own interests, engineered the very construction of the nation states in the region, denying statehood to Kurds and other ethnic and religious minorities, making these minorities vulnerable to genocidal forms of violence and assimilation at the hands of the regional powers like Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. A real anti-imperialist position would be to address the historical repercussions of colonial and imperial interventions in the region including those of the US, rather than simply focus on the presence of a limited number of US troops, which effectively create a buffer zone against the attacks by aggressive regional powers, many of which were put in power by the West in the first place. Moreover, a deep and complex understanding of contemporary imperialism requires a critique of the imperial missions of other nation-states in the region, such as Turkey’s expansionism in North East Syria, Kirkuk, and its support for Azerbaijan in Nagorno Karabakh, and Russia’s imperial policies as revealed in its support for the Assad regime and ongoing arms deals with Turkey.
Finally, it is concerning when progressives who call themselves anti-imperialist, anti-war, and/or democratic socialist are silent about war crimes conducted by oppressive regional powers like Turkey. Internationalists have historically stood with colonized peoples fighting for liberation, as in Vietnam, South Africa, and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. But the anti-colonial struggle of the people of North East Syria against both the Syrian and Turkish regimes—a struggle which led to a democratic revolution based on women’s emancipation, pluralism, and ecological sustainability—has attracted little attention among the progressives in the US.
Progressives should stop being fixated only on US withdrawal without stopping the means of Turkish aggression and be more attentive to actual colonial legacies and anti-imperial struggles against repressive regional powers in the Middle East. These regimes draw their political and military strength from political alliances like NATO, and from their mutually profitable economic relationships, like those based on arms sales, with Western powers. Real internationalism must entail ending US cooperation with such regimes and showing solidarity with the grassroots struggles of their peoples.
Progressives should call their governments to stop complicity in Turkish war crimes, and to oppose military aid and arms sales to governments that use these weapons for colonial violence against ethnic and religious minorities, such as the Kurds and Yezidis.
[1] https://undocs.org/A/HRC/45/31
[2] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/syria#
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/26/will-us-leave-syria