CENTRAL NEWS – My Name is Şiyar Gabar. I was born on October 10 in 1994 in Hamburg, Germany. My family are democrats and Germans. Before I was in the german left. I was always on the search, I was searching for socialist movements and where revolution would happen: in this way, through the internet, I heard about the revolution of Rojava. Through this I was influenced a lot and at the same time I got to know the PKK. In the beginning, since I was 13/14 years old, I always had this contradiction in my head. I asked myself: How am I going to live? I looked around myself and I saw the people were living an empty life, without meaning. They are living like robots. Only putting some content to it and selling it. I always said to myself: I cannot accept a life like this.
I said I cannot accept injustice in this world and I have to struggle in some way. Thus I joined the German leftists, but after some time I understood that the German leftists are opportunists. In theory they are socialists, and we can say some of them are doing some good things, but not in the way that they could make revolution actually happen or give an answer to capitalism, to injustice, to oppression. It’s not on this level. I was always in this search how I could bring theory and my life together. If I say that I want to fight for socialism, a different world, for freedom… I was always in the search of how I could actually achieve this. In this search I got to know the PKK. What influenced me from the movement is the unity of theory and practice. If you want to build up a free life, a life of equality, if you want to build up an alternative system, first of all you have to practice these things in your own life. You have to build up freedom and equality in your own personality. This is what always influenced me; the sacrifice in this. Every militant of the PKK, every guerilla, is sacrificing their life, giving everything they have for freedom. They sacrifice their lives for the people.
Like I said, this always had a big impact on me. How can these people be so courageous? That was attracted my attention the most. I also started to read Serok’s (Abdullah Öcalan’s) books, which opened up a lot of contradictions, a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer myself. But now I found the answer. The answer was given to me. In this way it influenced me a lot. The more I got to know the ideology, the more I could analyze my life from before, my family, and the society that I grew up in. The more I was reading, the more I understood. It’s a bit like one is being born anew or like one’s eyes open anew. Because inside the system I couldn’t understand a lot of things. For example, how the state’s system is working; in the relationship between women and men, on which basis the system is enslaving us; on which basis it is enslaving women, enslaving men, enslaving the consciousness of humans. So before I was very much in search for these things, but until I joined I couldn’t give an answer. With the difficulties of the life in the mountains, I feel like I got the closest to the meaning of freedom. Before, in the system, I had an opinion of freedom just like liberalism is portraying it to humanity. It is an individual approach to freedom. It tells you that you can just live pleasure, live a physically easy life, accumulate material value. In this way it explains freedom. But when I came to the mountains I saw that all these things are without value, they are all empty.
Though life on these mountains, we can say a life without opportunities in these difficulties, one can feel freedom. It’s true that the PKK fights for the freedom of the Kurdish people. But the freedom of the Kurdish people is the freedom of all the people in the world. One has to say it like this. All cadres of the PKK know this and act and fight according to it. When we are fighting for the Kurdish people today, when we are fighting for their freedom today, it opens the door of freedom to the world. The comrades are first and foremost comrades. Whatever nationality we belong to or where we come from is not so important. One can say, there’s a lot of different people among us. From every class background, every country, every profession, with every education level, a lot of different people. But at the same time we are all one, our comradeship connects us. We are revolutionaries, we are friends. There is no big differences between us. We are friends, we are comrades. What caught my interest the most was the life inside the PKK. In the system really everybody is lying. Everyone is lying and working for their own interests.
When I joined [the party] I still had doubts. I thought, okay, it may be that the PKK is fighting for freedom in theory, but I thought it may not be true in practice. I thought, “Everyone works for their own interests, why not them?” But after joining and seeing life in the PKK, after living on the free mountains, working, fighting, only then did I feel the truth, understand the truth that the foundations of the PKK is freedom, that life in the PKK is freedom.
After I joined, there were big changes. I know that I was very weak in society. Morally I was weak, I was an insensitive person. I knew my conscience was asking me every day, every day I was thinking: how am I living? I thought to myself, there is a crisis in the world. Billions of people have no food, no water. They are dying of hunger. Millions of people are being murdered. Peoples are oppressed. Our environment is being destroyed for the interests of a few. Everyday I saw this, and I thought: how can you go on living like this, how can you accept it? I knew I could not accept it, but I did not see my strength. I thought that I was weak, that I couldn’t fight against the state, that I couldn’t fight. I thought that I could not. But after joining the PKK and living in the free mountains of Kurdistan, I found the strength within myself. I know that before I was afraid of death. I thought, what if I die? But with the strength I found in the PKK, I now know that I will fight with all my might until I die or fall as a martyr. I will fight with all my strength for the revolution. So, I have seen this strength in myself.
Now I know that on a hill, against thousands of soldiers with tanks, guns and fighter planes, I will resist. To the last drop of blood I will resist. This is the strength that the PKK has built up in me, the strength that the leader APO’s ideology has given me. This is not strange at all. I have found my own nature again. So I have become a human being who develops his own power, has a will, has conscience. I have rediscovered human nature, you could say. In Germany I didn’t know Kurdish. I learned it when I came to the mountains, when I got my basic education; and Kurdish is really a beautiful language. I had a pocket dictionary. When the friends were saying
something, I would write it down and later I would look it up. So I learned it on my own. If you really want something, you can learn anything. There is no borders.
My call for all the youth in the world is for them to finally take sides, to join the revolution. A lot of people, young people, in Europe know by now that they cannot live in the system, but they are not seeing an alternative. The system is lying. It says that the time of revolution is over, that socialism failed, that it was proven. That is all a lie, it’s not true. And the proof is the revolution of Rojava, the PKK movement and the ideology of Serokatî (Abdullah Öcalan). I call up on all the youth to join the ranks of the guerilla, to take up arms, to fight for freedom, equality and socialism!
