A-Infos (en) The Kurdistan Shoras - Resistance AF (Ireland)

[Al S <klasbatalemo@yahoo.ie>]

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(continuing our series on the history of workers?
councils. A longer version apears at our website)

Outbreaks of resistance spread rapidly across the
north of the Iraq towards the end of the Gulf war.
They were completely spontaneous, popular
insurrections free from, and in spite of, the
influence of Kurdish nationalism and leftist
splinter-politics. What they would have achieved if
they had been joined by returning Iraqi soldiers
massacred along the now infamous road to Basra in the
south of the country, and if the too short-lived
revolt there had lasted long enough to link up the
struggle, is another question.

The Northern Uprising

The main centres of the northern revolt were in the
regions of Sulaimania, Kirkuk and Hawlia. As Iraqi
soldiers deserted the front in their thousands (30,000
in Sulaimania!), thousands more took to the streets,
organising themselves into committees (shoras) across
the region. Demonstrations took place everywhere. Over
50 shoras sprung up in Sulaimania and Ba?athist
centres (Ba?ath being the ruling party in Iraq), army
bases and security headquarters were attacked. Listed
below are examples of some of the activites in which
the shoras participated.

1) Every Shora had its own radio station. 
2) Every shora set up medical posts. 
3) Each shora had a number of committees dealing with
the media, the militia, medical matters,
administration, finance and general assistance and the
law, as well as a committee for relations between the
shoras and a foreign relations committee.
4) The building up of a militia for resistance
purposes. 
5) On the 16th of March, 1991, the anniversary of the
massacre of Halabja, the shoras incited the entire
city even threatening the Kurdistan Front (KF). 
6) On the 17th, a general meeting of all the shoras
took place at the Majid Bug shora to elect a supreme
shora covering the city. 
(Abridged from The Kurdish Uprising?)
 
It was at this point, on March 17th, that the shoras
came under attack, not from the Baathist regime, but
from the Kurdistan Front (KF). 

Defeat

So frightened were the nationalists by the Shoras that
by March 18th they were openly calling for them to be
disbanded. Through a concerted campaign of
misinformation regarding a government backlash and
other lies, but mainly because of their large stocks
of food supplies, the nationalist parties were able to
undermine the Shoras. After years of hunger and
conflict, people were, naturally enough, desperate
enough for security.

Given time the shoras could have created the building
blocks for a society organised along libertarian
lines. The ?organised left? and the nationalist
parties preferred, however, to pursue their own narrow
agendas and set out to destroy them with the twin
tactics of propaganda and food. Sufficient confidence
had yet to be built up in the shoras for the people
not to be hoodwinked by the duplicity of these
methods. 

If the shoras had spread, this confidence, the
confidence which, after all, had destroyed in the
space of a few days the institutions of Ba?athist
terror that had stood for decades, could have
manifested itself into a completely new system of
social organisation.


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>From the pages of Resistance#19, regular monthly
bulletin of the Anarchist Federation (Ireland), now
available in text and PDF format at:

http://www.afireland.cjb.net

Help distribute Resistance, contact us at:

contact@afireland.cjb.net

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