Kurdish communities around the country have responded to the genocidal war against the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria/Rojava with multiple protests in Gadigal Country/Sydney, Naarm/Melbourne, Kuerta Yerta/Adelaide, Boorloo/Perth and Canberra over the last two weeks of January.
This war, led by the armed forces of the United States, European Union and Israel-backed Syrian regime of President Ahmed al-Sharaa and allied Turkish-backed militia groups, has been raging since January 6 and threatens the very existence of the democratic, socialist and feminist Rojava revolution.
Many Kurds in Australia have family members who have been disappeared or displaced in the fighting. The protests have united Kurds from all the parts of Kurdistan, which was divided by Western colonial powers between Turkey, Iran, Iran and Syria after World War I.
“We call on the government and all Australians to show solidarity with Rojava and condemn these attacks”, Baran Sogut, a spokesperson for the Federation of Democratic Kurdish Society (Australia) said at a protest held outside the Parliament House in Canberra on January 17.
This call has been strongly supported by the Greens, Socialist Alliance and Amnesty International, whose representatives have spoken at protests.
NSW Greens Senator David Shoebridge addressed the rallies in Gadigal Country and Canberra, along with Greens and Labor Kurdish city councillors Ismet Tashtan and Mira Ibrahim, respectively. A January 25 rally at Sydney Town Hall on January 25 was also addressed by Labor MP for Liverpool Charishma Kaliyanda.
The Druze community, which has also recently suffered genocidal massacres carried out by the al-Sharaa regime, supported the protests.
"The military campaign launched on January 6 was a deliberate and coordinated operation aimed at dismantling Kurdish self-rule in Syria,” Sogut told Green Left.
"The Kurdish people — who sacrificed tens of thousands of lives in the global fight against ISIS on behalf of international security — now face abandonment in the name of geopolitical expediency.
"This war not only targets Kurdish political existence but also risks reviving the ISIS terror threat it once helped defeat."
The Kurdish freedom movement is now putting forward these demands:
• Immediately establish an internationally monitored protection line. Deploy a well-mandated international armed observer mission empowered to oversee ceasefire arrangements and document violations and abuses in real time.
• Open permanent, internationally guaranteed humanitarian corridors to besieged areas, including Kobanê. Humanitarian access must never be conditional, temporary, or subject to military coercion.
• Secure the constitutional recognition of Kurdish identity, language, self-defense, and democratic self-governance. Without binding political guarantees, any settlement will merely institutionalize dispossession, repression, and structural violence.
More demonstrations are being planned, including in Gadigal Country on February 1 and in Canberra on February 4.
[To find out more about upcoming protests contact Rojava Solidarity.]