NEWS CENTER – Revolutionary internationalism has been present in the revolution in Kurdistan since the formation of the revolutionary party that has been carrying out this struggle for 50 years. Especially after the liberation of the territory of Rojava and the declaration of Autonomy in Northeastern Syria, the internationalist line has strengthened more and more in the freedom movement and found solidarity with different peoples and movements around the globe.
The Peoples’ Web is an articulation of communities, territories, peoples, and political organizations, rural and urban. Extractivists, river dwellers, native peoples, quilombolas, peripheral peoples, the landless, the homeless, and small farmers come together, as base nuclei and links, in this composition with the objective of formulating the paths of collective emancipation. That is, to build in solidarity a Black, Indigenous, and Popular Alliance. Under the project of Land and Territory through autonomy, they seek to build an alliance of struggle untethered to electoral politics and State institutions. Shaping peoples’ autonomy and outlining a program of food sovereignty are the steps we understand as necessary for true liberation, because it is historically evident to us that only our own hands will give us the conditions to defend our survival.
From these perspectives, our agency talked with Joelson Ferreira de Oliveira, one of the members of the Peoples’ Web, about his local struggles and International Solidarity with the Kurdish people and their struggle:
“My name is Joelson Ferreira de Oliveira, I have lived in Terra Vista Settlement for 30 years. I am one of the founders of the MST in Bahia, and for 10 years we have been building the Teia dos Povos (Peoples’ Web).
The Net of the Peoples was born from a need to build a new way of doing politics in Brazil. We understand that capitalism has changed, and with this change, we must also make an organizational change, that is, we understand that this old way of doing politics based on the French and Russian revolutions has run out of time and because of that it is necessary to rebuild. I don’t believe that we can make a Revolution from top to bottom we believe that is necessary that the Revolution is born from the bosom of the people, then nothing better than in this 21st century we can reformulate some questions that are primordial to make the Revolution of the people.
We live in a country of continental proportion, with a variation of peoples. That is, the original peoples – the primitive peoples of the region who were already here before 1500 when the Portuguese invasion took place. We also have the African diaspora, a people that was brought from Africa to be enslaved here, almost 400 years of slavery and we also have the people who came from other diasporas, various European peoples who came after the invasion. So here we have a miscellany of peoples and it is necessary to rethink the Revolution in a country as dynamic as ours.
We from Teia understand the importance of the original peoples in the struggle for the construction of the Brazilian Revolution without them, it is impossible to build a project of Revolution in Brazil. Because they were the first to be present in this territory and they know everything, they have been here for 40 thousand years. Disrespecting this construction, this knowledge, means not having the possibility to make the Revolution. When we speak of this question of ancestry, and spirituality and the relation of these people with the land, not many people from the left understand this but this understanding already existed in South and Central America, including Peru, a great thinker that already put this need to do so much recognition of the strength of the original peoples, as well as taking up their cause. Because the struggle for land and territory that the original peoples have never abandoned.
To disrespect the ancestral knowledge of these people that they have had in Brazil for over 40,000 years, means not building the Revolution. The other question is the Black people who came from Africa, without this African diaspora without the knowledge of these peoples – which is also of great ancestral and spiritual knowledge, they were a people that came here and some of them were from tribal societies and other part were from big societies already existing in the African continent and they brought great knowledge with them. If we talk about the peoples who came together with the Portuguese, like the Moors and other European peoples, we lose this important essence that came here to Brazil, so we need to add all these greatness with these peoples, that is, unity has to come from the great characteristics of these peoples.
The ones who destroyed this logic of destroying the ancestral knowledge and their historical knowledge about humanity, were the Europeans who came to colonize. Actually, they didn’t colonize at all! They came to rape, that is, to strip the resources that we have and destroy all the wisdom, the knowledge, and an entire society that already existed here. It also destroyed the science and the knowledge of the black people. So they were a society that came to destroy other societies. To complete, they came with this construction of capitalism to destroy all the processes and knowledge of nature the lives that were here even before human life.
The struggle of the Kurdish people, and all the original peoples of the world, it has its own particularities such as their local responsibilities, national responsibilities, but we have everything to do with a grand alliance – which has already been tried to be built, post soviet revolution and it did not work because sometimes there were issues of (Soviet) impositions on the other peoples and there was also a relationship of paternalism, of doing for others. We need to understand the differences of these original peoples, understand the difference of the Kurdish people and what their local, regional and national struggles are and we have to add that to other peoples’ struggles with the great things, because we are calling for a great alliance but not a dumb alliance, which is not intelligent. We seek an alliance with its differences, with different peoples and their potentialities but above all we have to build this alliance according to the potentialities of each people.
So what is the greatness of the Kurdish people that we can discuss to build this alliance?
What is the capacity of which we here can strengthen the Kurdish people over there?
And what is it that the Kurdish people can strengthen us here?
This alliance has to be a coming and going alliance, not just a coming and going alliance. It has everything to do with us beginning to seek another perspective of alliance starting from the principle of solidarity and concrete struggle. Because we believe that only with the concrete struggle is it possible to make alliances and only with the knowledge of other peoples’ struggles can we build this unity, because we need to know the other peoples, their nature and processes of their struggle in order to be included in their struggle as well. As well as the Kurds also have to understand our struggle, our particularities and responsibilities, to create unity. A solidarity of class, of peoples, so that we can advance in this process against capitalism and imperialism. Any form of imperialism we have to fight.
Any form of capitalism we have to fight, and now we are living a very opportune moment for us to build these anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist alliances, for us to strengthen ourselves in this process and create a consciousness and a call for re-enchantment especially of the Youth, of the Women, of all the people in this radical struggle against empire and capitalism.”
