The second of a two part interview with Debbie Bookchin & Emre Sahin on their experience in Rojava
I knew that Rojava was very much a women’s revolution and that one of its main organizational aspects is that it is anti-patriarchal and anti-hierarchical. I was also aware that at the heart of the revolution is the idea that you have to change social relations completely in order to create a just society. This idea comes from Abdullah Öcalan and is also present in the work of my father [Murray Bookchin], from whose work Öcalan drew inspiration.
What surprised me, however, and what I had not realized until I got there and saw it with my own eyes, was how profoundly important the women’s movement is in making this transformation happen. Under the auspices of the umbrella women’s organization Kongreya Star (Star Congress), the women’s movement reaches into every aspect of life.
To give you an example, there are the Mala Jinê, the Women’s Houses, which are present in every community that I saw in Rojava. These are places w here women of all ages, though largely led by elder women, sort out problems in the community. The Mala Jinê are used very frequently by a large swath of the community; instead of the police or the court system, they’re sort of the first stop for people who have disputes.
Many of these disputes are domestic, since there is a lot of education still to be done within the communities, and so you will often see women come who are having problems with their husbands or their fathers, but they are also used for other types of conflict, such as disputes between neighbors or economic disputes. Importantly, there are not only Kurdish members of the community who visit the Mala Jinê; for example, I witnessed an Arab woman coming in one time who was having difficulties with her father.
The focus is very much on education. For example, when a father thinks it is okay to force his adult daughter to stay at home, the women of the Mala Jinê first of all offer protection to the aggrieved party — they have a system in place where if a person needs to be removed from a dangerous situation, she can be, and together with her children, if necessary. Then they reach out to the aggressor party and they work things out by bringing them in, talking to them, creating a plan for how they can be educated to a more liberatory point of view and then having them sign a contract, which they then follow up on, seeing if they are actually making changes.