Pandemic Solidarity

Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis

Marina Sitrin, Colectiva Sembrar, Marina Sitrin, Colectiva Sembrar

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780745343181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In times of crisis, when institutions of power are laid bare, people turn to one another. Pandemic Solidarity collects firsthand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in the time of the global crisis of Covid-19.

The world's media was quick to weave a narrative of selfish individualism, full of empty supermarket shelves and con-men. However, if you scratch the surface, you find a different story of community and self-sacrifice. Looking at eighteen countries and regions, including India, Rojava, Taiwan, South Africa, Iraq and North America, the personal accounts in the book weave together to create a larger picture, revealing a universality of experience - a housewife in Istanbul supports her neighbour in the same way as a teacher in Argentina, a punk in Portland, and a disability activist in South Korea does.

Moving beyond the present, these stories reveal what an alternative society could look like, and reflect the skills and relationships we already have to create that society, challenging institutions of power that have already shown their fragility.

PART I

Greater Middle East
(Rojava, Turkey and Iraq)

CHAPTER ONE

Communal Lifeboat:
Direct Democracy in Rojava
(NE Syria)
Emre Sahin and Khabat Abbas

The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) made international headlines for the first time during the war of Kobane against Islamic State (ISIS, DAESH) in October 2014. This global interest has been mostly militaristic. However, the remarkable and unique bottom-up political organization has created a lifeline for the peoples of North and East Syria. The Covid-19 pandemic, which is just one of several life and death crises in the region, including war and embargo, throws the AANES’ bottom-up model of direct democracy into the spotlight. In this chapter, we illustrate how peoples’ access to decision-making processes through communes and councils has saved lives in AANES in the current epidemic and more.

In the summer of 2012, the many different ethnic and religious communities of NE Syria joined forces to establish a pluralist, decentralized, gender-egalitarian and ecologist system of self-governance. Street communes form the base unit of this model and are represented in higher-level neighborhood or village, district and national councils. The spokespeople of the lower levels make up the members of the higher levels in this four-layered network of governance. Most social, political and economic decisions are made through the formal debates that take place among these communes and councils. Gender quotas and the co-presidency principle at all levels ensure women’s equal access to decision-making processes. This governance system links communes and councils with municipalities, inspired by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan’s paradigm of Democratic Confederalism. In his book with the same title, Öcalan describes Democratic Confederalism as:

This kind of rule or administration can be called a non-state political administration or a democracy without a state … States only administrate while democracies govern. States are founded on power; democracies are based on collective consensus ... Democratic confederalism … is flexible, multi-cultural, anti-monopolistic, and consensus-oriented.¹

Surrounded by hostile neighboring states, the AANES has continuously had to be self-reliant with thousands of street communes and hundreds of neighborhood/ village and district councils working closely together to make sure basic human needs are satisfied. Shelter, food, healthcare, education and employment are not left to the mercy of the market or the state. Family-based, local and regional networks of mutual aid and solidarity ensure that nobody is homeless or starving. It is nearly impossible to find people sleeping on the street or begging for food or money in NE Syria! There are no orphanages, nursing homes or homeless shelters in the region because vulnerable members of society are not left behind. Such institutions have unfortunately become necessary across the world today due to the lack of sufficient communal care for those that need it the most urgently. Communities’ direct involvement in decision-making processes in NE Syria increases their political agency and enables them to act outside the boundaries of capitalist social relations based on self-interest and competition. The gradual de-commodification of life in the region brings people together and increases their collective capability of self-sustenance. The AANES’ dual system of local governance ensures peoples’ access to decision-making processes and serves as a lifeboat for the communities in NE Syria at times of natural and human-made disasters. As several of our interviewees describe below, the close collaboration of communes, councils and municipalities also saved lives during the Turkish state’s occupation of Serekaniye and Gire Spi in 2019.

How then has solidarity looked during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in a self-governed territory with collectivized and decentralized decision-making? Nation-states are often hostile to solidarity and mutual aid efforts because their existence alone exposes state failures in social welfare. What happens when, as the Zapatista saying goes, “people rule and the state obeys?”

During the early days of the pandemic, the AANES established a Central Crisis Committee bringing together representatives from the areas of education, security, health and local governance. The organization of this emergency committee reflects general political mobilization in North and East Syria, where communes and councils at all levels have representatives from the same areas responsible for policy formation and implementation. The Central Crisis Committee works in conjunction with regional committees from the seven administrative parts of Jazeera, Euphrates, Afrin, Raqqa, Tabqa, Manbij and Deir ez Zor. As co-authors of this chapter, we made five phone-interviews in April 2020 with people actively involved in solidarity, mutual aid and relief efforts in Qamishlo, NE Syria. We made an explicit effort to include voices from different levels of local governance, genders, ethnicities and ages. Like the AANES, our interviewees organize their response to the Covid-19 pandemic along the themes of local governance, health, education and security. We decided to organize the rest of this chapter similarly in order to amplify the voices of our interviewees, to whom we are thankful for inspiring us after the initial shock of the pandemic and collective inaction.

LOCAL GOVERNANCE: COMMUNES AND COUNCILS

Members of street communes and higher-level councils have stopped their regular meetings as a preventive measure to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, they have been the driving force of aid distribution efforts in NE Syria. They register the names of their neighbors that require urgent assistance, distribute food and fuel oil, and sterilize public spaces and utilities.

Heval Hikmet is a neighborhood organizer, cooperative member and computer programmer based in Qamishlo with a hopeful yet cautious account of ongoing Covid-19 efforts underlining society’s high level of organization as its main strength.

Hikmet: Due to the ongoing war, embargo, and lack of health infrastructure, the current strategy here is to prevent the spread of infection and prioritize public health over the economy. We know our strengths and weaknesses, and plan accordingly. There aren’t enough testing kits and ICU units, so initiatives are launched to address these issues. The health ministry is working with a Swedish institute on the development of a new test kit to produce accurate results in less than a minute. A new hospital was built in Heseke recently for corona patients only.

Our main strength is that the society is organized and public health is not less important than the economy! You are currently in the US, no? How much would they charge you if you received intensive care for corona there? Not a single dime here! With an organized society, it is easier to implement lockdown measures and make sure nobody gets left behind. There are food and oil distribution campaigns organized by the municipality to help the people in urgent need. Communes and councils have stopped their regular meetings in order to prevent spread of infection but are working remotely in coordination with municipal and other officials.

I recently finished programming a database interface to be used in hospitals across the region. With this program, all health professionals in Rojava (West Kurdistan) will have access to patient records and histories in a secure way. I started working on the database interface before the outbreak but I believe it will be useful in containment efforts. Honestly, more people are concerned about the threat of Turkish invasion than the corona pandemic itself! People are used to quarantine-type conditions because they have been living under conditions of war and embargo for almost a decade now. However, the Turkish state began its invasion with Afrin, continued with Serekaniye and Gire Spi, and poses an imminent threat to the rest of the region. We suspect a large scale Turkish state attack on Bashur (South Kurdistan) this summer.

LOCAL GOVERNANCE: MUNICIPALITIES

Municipalities are the other pillar of the AANES’ dual system of local governance and have been the organizational force behind all aid distribution efforts in NE Syria. They work in close collaboration with communes and councils to deliver assistance to vulnerable groups. For example, Qamishlo Municipality is currently collaborating with a local women’s clothing cooperative that has agreed to produce only face masks until the end of the pandemic. The municipality then takes these masks and delivers them to neighborhood and district council members, who have so far distributed than 40,000 masks in the city of Qamishlo.

Sharmin Shako works at Qamishlo Municipality and is playing a key role in the coordination of municipal and communal relief efforts in Qamishlo, the most densely populated part of North and East Syria.

Shako: I am a member of Qamishlo’s municipal committee, which brings together 37 local municipalities in and around the city. When the corona pandemic started, we as the municipality did not stop our work and continued to address the needs of our people. We established a sterilization committee in coordination with health workers and launched a disinfection campaign to clean and sterilize all public spaces. We then converted a women’s cooperative to a face-mask production workshop and have been distributing the masks made here to frontline workers to support them. We played an active role in raising awareness about the pandemic and distributed information, particularly through social media and pamphlets.

Communes are the base unit of the political system that we have been building here, and as municipalities we coordinate the efforts to respond to the peoples’ needs by collaborating with communes and councils closely and in a circular way. Communes are made up of local residents who mobilize their neighbors and collect information on their specific needs and demands. Commune members then communicate these issues to neighborhood and district councils as well as our municipal committee. Policy decisions are made through the feedback that circulates among all these different groups. For example, there are municipal subcommittees responsible for food and fuel oil assistance during the pandemic. These two subcommittees work closely with local councils, whose members identify the families in their neighborhoods that are in urgent need of assistance. Our food and fuel subcommittees use this information to deliver aid to peoples’ doorsteps, and the absence of distribution centers with large crowds helps us fight the spread of the virus.

Our municipality has received several volunteer initiatives from individuals and civil society organizations over the past few weeks. Each initiative is discussed at the level of its scope and impact. Regional campaigns are coordinated at the municipal level whereas initiatives at the village and neighborhood levels are organized in local councils. For example, an NGO recently launched a regional campaign in collaboration with us to provide all municipal workers with protective equipments. At the local level, communes and bakeries distributed informative pamphlets and led our campaign to raise awareness about the epidemic.

HEALTH

Since the Covid-19 pandemic is a medical issue, all segments of society in NE Syria have been mobilized to contain the infection and improve the healthcare system. The Health Ministry recently discovered a new test kit, in partnership with Pias Institute from Sweden, that detects Covid-19 infection within 30 secon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Preface
• Foreword by Rebecca Solnit
• Introduction by Marina Sitrin
• About Colectiva Sembrar
• Part I Greater Middle East (Rojava, Turkey and Iraq)
• Part II South and East Asia (Taiwan, South Korea and India)
• Part III Southern Africa (Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe)
• Part IV Europe (Portugal, Greece, Italy and the UK)
• Part V Turtle Island (North America)
• Part VI South America (Argentina and Brazil)
• Concluding to Begin: Colectiva Sembrar
• Notes on Contributors
• Index