The Secretary General of the Permanent People's Tribunal (TPP), Gianni Tognoni, spoke to ANF about the next session of the tribunal that will take place in Brussels on 5 and 6 February. The session is titled "Rojava vs. Turkey."

The Tribunal will focus on the Turkish state’s attacks on Rojava between 2018 and 2024, and will present them for scrutiny in a broad and documented format. Already, the reports / documents / data made by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, prestigious human rights institutions, and many civil society organizations have shed some light on the picture.

In the 2018 session, the aim was to highlight that Turkey, which was the center of the problem we were addressing as the Permanent People’s Tribunal (Tribunale Permanente dei Popoli - TPP), was clearly the place, the main actor of a chronic situation. Now that situation has become even more complicated due to all the things that have happened in the past 6 years, and that has to do with the condition of management and control of the powers in that territory. And this is something chronic and common to all those regions because they were created as part of a very old colonial design in which Turkey – especially under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan - wanted to be the dominant actor.

Turkey’s aim is precisely that of erasing other actors that may be present in the region, because it is Turkey that has to define the fate of those other countries.

So the crime back in 2018 was a very specific and documented crime related to the territory of Turkey where Erdoğan made it very clear that the Kurds could not even have the right to internal. But the internal Kurds were somehow a reminder that the Kurdish question was a bigger problem because there was Kurdish resistance in the other territories in which Kurds live. So the issue for Turkey was how to prevent any hope for Kurdish minorities in the region. That is, any hope of being able to have a future. Something, these aspirations, that had evidently to do with Abdullah Öcalan and with his proposals, which clearly had to be silenced as far as Turkey was concerned.

Since 2018, as you were mentioning, a lot of things have happened and not only in Turkey.

Absolutely. The fight against Islamic State to begin with has shown that the Kurds, and in particular the Kurdish women, can not be silenced. And not only that. The Kurds, while fighting against the Islamic State, also managed to declare the autonomy of the areas of ​​Syria under their control. They establish the Autonomous Administration in areas which had already experienced a big crisis for many other reasons. A crisis accelerated in the past few months because all the powers came into play in Syria, from Russia, to the United States, and Europe (progressively erased from the panorama of the region because Europe ended up deciding that Erdoğan was functional to its plans).

This session of the Permanent People’s Tribunal will happen at a crucial point. What are the differences from the previous session on Turkey?

As far as the Permanent People’s Tribunal is concerned, in 2018 the problem was to document something that was not visible, or rather it was pretended to be not visible, that is, the fact that President Erdoğan was actively involved in a total repression of a minority against all the rules not only of Europe but of international law. Now, in this session on Rojava, the thing has become much more important from the point of view of the meaning of the rights of peoples because in the meantime, it has been seen, even with the latest developments that Erdoğan tries to show on the one hand his willingness to give space to a person like Abdullah Ocalan, while on the other, maintaining a total repression of all those – Rojava - who actually represent very concrete, with the Autonomous Administration they have established.

There is no doubt that there is an attack on Rojava that has been going on for years, it is not something that has happened now. There has been a refusal to recognize the radical novelty of the situation in Northern and Eastern Syria, because Rojava has in fact highlighted an element that is an open question for international law, and which is, in my opinion, the main issue these days. That is, Rojava is the strongest element of contradiction that can not be fully regulated and brought under control.

The importance of the Permanent People’s Tribunal is certainly that of giving visibility to Rojava as an experiment of a possible conscience of the international community. Because the model implemented in Rojava shows that solutions are possible and that the real crime is the denial of solutions. The real crime is saying that there are no spaces, because the spaces that exist should only be managed by agreements between oppressors, without taking into consideration the peoples, who, despite everything, continue to propose a possible way.

Because the greatest crime is precisely that – and it is ultimately the real crime that lies beneath the genocide – of the denial of a possibility of a future.

We have to say that the law, instead of being what it should be, i.e. an instrument of liberation, is simply - looking to the past and the balance of power - the controller of the perfect state of repression.

It's a bit like saying that the problem is just to set up another diplomatic table, making sure that the peoples must not be seated at that table.

I think that this session of the Tribunal is somehow complementary to that of 2018. In other words, Turkey managed to even kill the future in Paris by murdering three women who were important symbols for the Kurds and the representation of freedom. Those three women became a people, they became a culture and a real model somehow, and now it is this reality that Turkey, and not only, want to erase.

How much this will be translated into a sentence is a challenge because, in the meantime, things have certainly become very complicated.

What is certain is that the tribunal has a title that is Rojava vs. Turkey because what seems important to me will be how to make visible this apparent opposition of two actors, what these two actors represent: the extreme negativity (Turkey) and the extreme potential (Rojava) and to see what scenarios can be discussed.

Background

The Permanent People's Tribunal on the "Alleged violations of international law and international humanitarian law by the Turkish Republic and its officials in their relations with the Kurdish people and their organizations" was taking place in Paris on 15 and16 March 2018, at the same time in which Afrin was being occupied by the Turkish state and its proxies. 

The Tribunal in 2018 delivered its verdict finding Turkey "responsible for the denial of the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination, the imposition of Turkish identity, the exclusion of the Kurdish people’s identity and presence, and the repression of its participation in the political, economic and cultural life of the country, interpreted as a threat to the Turkish State’s authority."