Lessons from a historic act of disarmament in Kurdistan

This article Lessons from a historic act of disarmament in Kurdistan was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On July 11, in the hills of Northern Iraq, a scene unfolded that would shake even the most experienced disarmament activist. Walking down a steep clearing to a makeshift staging area surrounded by several hundred community members and supporters, 30 heavily armed guerrilla fighters — at least half of them women — made their way towards a large grey barrel to surrender their weapons.

They were part of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a paramilitary and political group formed in 1978 to unite the Kurdish populations living in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey to fight for independence. The PKK decided to lay down their arms in a ceremonial burning of a stockpile of weapons carried by each of the guerrilla combatants. They hope that this unilateral act of ceasefire will begin a new political process with the unresponsive Turkish government.

The day and the decision that preceded it were not without their deep roots in the struggle for Kurdistan’s freedom. In 1923, when the region was ruled by Sheikh Mahmoud, the king of Kurdistan, the British army tried to protect their recent mandate over the Mesopotamian region and all the rich oil reserves that entailed. Mahmoud took refuge in the Jasana Cave, where the ceremony on July 11 took place. He asked his followers to move to the region for safety and helped publish the first modern Kurdish anti-colonial resistance newspaper from the cave. Over the last century, the cave was used as an important refuge for armed and nonviolent resisters facing anti-Kurdish forces, including the genocidal Anfal campaign of Saddam Hussein.

Beloved Kurdish leader, theoretician and long-standing political prisoner Abdullah Öcalan, who founded the PKK, called for its dissolution on Feb. 25, over 26 years since his capture and ongoing imprisonment. The careful follow-up to that call by groups within the PKK — and a subsequent call by Öcalan for PKK fighters to lay down their weapons — led to the July 11 disarmament events.

There was also a broad statement by a “Group for Peace and Democratic Society” that has emerged over the past months. Formed out of recent meetings with the jailed Öcalan, the group is working to bring together Kurdish peoples from all major regions and countries, as well as from diverse political and strategic viewpoints. Its members issued a broad and bold statement at the Jasana Cave ceremony, the sole communication allowed that day.

The group noted that the act of “voluntarily destroy[ing] our weapons, before your presence” was taken as “a step of goodwill and determination.” They asserted that they did so in accordance with Öcalan’s pronouncement in the belief “not in arms” but in the power of the people. They said that their disarmament act was taken “with great pride and honor in doing what is necessary for this historic principle.”

The statement was dramatically read aloud in Kurdish by Besê Hozat, the co-chair of the Kurdistan Communities Union Executive Council and active proponent of feminism and women’s leadership. It was also read in Turkish and distributed in English and other languages to all those assembled. “Given the rising fascist pressure and exploitation around the globe and current bloodbath in the Middle East,” the statement reads, “our people are more than ever in need of a peaceful, free, equal and democratic life.”

Though there are still some open questions about how they will help fulfill these needs locally, it is likely that the shifts will take place through projects and campaigns on education, health care, literacy, women’s empowerment and learning about democratic practices. Programs of this type have already been very successful in the Kurdish communities of Syria, in the area that has come to be known as Rojava.

Beyond the significance of these words and actions for the people of Kurdistan, Turkey, Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish freedom struggle and its current initiatives signal vital challenges for global resistance movements everywhere. Here are three elements of the Kurdish movement that have been central to their popularity and success and could benefit progressive forces around the world.

1. The centrality of women in all areas of struggle

Far more than simply an isolated local phenomenon, the Rojava resistance movement has long been an example of women’s rights exercised even in the midst of active war and deep patriarchal practices. For some analysts and activists who have been part of or studied Rojava, the Kurdish region in contemporary Syria — controlled by the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or DAANES — has the most gender equity of any government in the world.

In a recent article by British feminist and environmentalist Natasha Walter, the life-affirming slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” is held up not just as a rhetorical rallying cry but as a celebration of changes taking place even beyond the Kurdish communities that developed the phrase. While researching a book on feminist resistance movements, Walter came to one clear conclusion about the women of DAANES and throughout the different Kurdish communities: “These women are probably the most determined feminists that I have ever met.”

It’s not hard to figure out where some of these ideas took shape. Here again, Öcalan’s role is important. His assertion that “a country can’t be free unless the women are free” has guided practice throughout much of Kurdistan for more than a decade. In a 2013 pamphlet, “Liberating Life, Women’s Revolution,” he wrote: “The extent to which society can be thoroughly transformed is determined by the extent of the transformation attained by women. Similarly, the level of a woman’s freedom and equality determines the freedom and equality of all sections of society.”

The transformation of relationships in the Rojava region has been noted by many leading internationalist feminists, including the academic and activist Meredith Tax. She wrote clearly that Rojava and its related Kurdish movements were “the best place in the Middle East to be a woman” and an active experiment worthy of global study and support. 

2. The changing nature of the nation-state

The idea that “states” need not be the main way people relate to one another is not unique to anarchist thinkers or to the Kurdish movement. Examples of prior challenges to nationalist models include the Black Panthers and Mexico’s Zapatista movement. Many decades have passed since the time when radicals could assume that all major struggles were based on national liberation. None of this is to suggest that the vital centrality of land is diminished, or that a person’s “national” identity is unimportant.

However, the era of successful national liberation struggles based on the winning of new or newly liberated states is long gone. Even those progressive new nation-states that have emerged, say South Sudan for example, were borne more of mediation and compromise than of effective liberation struggles. The Kurdish introduction of “Democratic Confederalism” must be seen in this larger context. The ideals embedded within democratic confederalism include direct democracy, autonomy, political ecology, feminism, multiculturalism, self-defense, self-governance and cooperative economies.

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Here, the work and words of Besê Hozat are again instructive. In commenting on the July 11 action, she noted that the Kurdish guerrillas who gave up their arms didn’t want to just come down from the mountains and lay down their weapons. “We want to become pioneers of democratic politics,” she noted, “in Amed, Ankara and Istanbul.” Political power, autonomy and democracy, in Hozat’s analysis and that of many in the Kurdish movement, do not mean they want to build a new nation-state.

“A state system will not be to the benefit of the Kurdish people but a thorn in the side,” she told New Internationalist in 2017. “It would deepen the fight with our neighbors and bring decades of war against the Arabs as well as chaos and suffering.”

With Kurdish people spread out through at least four existing nations (some in great conflict with one another), the idea of crossing the existing borders to re-unite artificially separated communities seems especially appealing — and not just in the Kurdish context. Moving beyond our current borders and boundaries has been discussed in Pan-Africanist, Pacific Island and other diverse decolonizing circles. This includes the Occupied People’s Forum, which brings together still-colonized resistance leaders from Kurdistan/Rojava, Kashmir, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Western Sahara, West Papua, Tibet and Ambazonia.

The strategic and tactical initiatives of the Kurdish movements that transcend any given region or single Kurdish organizational structure are instructive for all these active struggles. In Hozat’s succinct framework for the future: “The era of the nation-state is over.”

 3. The dialectics of nonviolence, revolution and armed struggle

There is little historical evidence to suggest that pacifist principles or a scientific review of the research on civil resistance led to the Kurdish decision. Rather, the Kurdish movement is exploring options based on experiences and conditions today, looking ahead at what tactics will best suit the movement and its peoples. As Hozat put it: “For a movement that calls for democratic politics, weapons are now an obstacle. We want to remove these obstacles with seriousness and responsibility.”

The Group for Peace and Democracy and the leadership of the Kurdish movement are hardly the first to conclude that new methodologies are needed for the new conditions they are confronting.

In 2018, Western Sahara’s Polisario Front helped coordinate the Sahara Rise conference, which brought together diverse sectors of Sahrawian society to examine and shift their policies towards nonviolent civil resistance.

After decades of a multifaceted resistance that leaned heavily towards urban guerrilla warfare, Puerto Rican militants associated with armed movements became more open to the strategic power of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. In the words of Puerto Rican former political prisoner Alejandrina Torres, “Every historical period goes through phases, and we have to grow and develop in response to the times.” 

The contemporary Kurdish group’s initiative is different only in intensity and pragmatic precision. They have begun this new phase with a widespread series of conversations and actions that look carefully at the future. In an assessment by Dutch author and solidarity activist Fréderike Geerdink, the 2025 unilateral act of ceasefire is far from a sign of surrender, defeat or weakness, but merely an acknowledgment that fighting for freedom using military weapons is “no longer ‘logical’” in the current period.

For this experiment with nonviolent means to work best, the Kurdish movement is hoping that their actions for “an honorable peace” are not a one-sided affair. Whatever the response from their opposing forces, though, the July actions were taken in response to an evaluation of the needs of the people. As Kurdish activist Nilüfer Koç and spokesperson for the Commission on Foreign Relations of the Kurdish National Congress put it: “We’ve got to move forward with hope.”

The acts of direct disarmament of July 11 in the mountainous region of Iraqi Kurdistan give concrete reasons for new hope for people of Kurdish identity — and for us all.

This article Lessons from a historic act of disarmament in Kurdistan was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/07/lessons-from-a-historic-act-of-disarmament-in-kurdistan/