Interview by 'Anarchist Today' from Belarus to the Editorial Board of the newspaper 'The Truth of the Oppressed'
1/ What organization (group) do you represent? What role did it play in the Syrian revolution?
1) To introduce ourselves, we would first like to salute you in a fraternal way. We know of the tough struggle you are waging against dictatorial counterrevolutionary governments and regimes such as those in Russia, Belarus and in Ukraine facing the invasion of the murderer Putin. In this struggle, we feel that we are united in the cause of the international proletariat. Here, we try to tell you which organization we represent.
Going deeper into your question, we are a revolutionary internationalist current that comes from different splits with totally right-wing and reformist wings of currents that claim to belong to the Fourth International.
We are organized in an editorial board of an international paper, which is the International Workers' Organizer, and as such we fight tooth and nail to unite the struggle of the international working class, which all the currents that have sold out, capitulated to capital and its system and states are preventing. They know, as well as big capital, that international unity is what makes the struggle of the working class invincible.
We are part of the heroic Syrian revolution, in which we have the honor to fight and die. The name of our Leon Sedov Brigade is because we praise the trajectory of the revolutionary movement of the Fourth International in the 1930s, which, like the anarchist currents, put all our forces into the victory of the Spanish civil war. That militant internationalism is what has been lost and is what encouraged us and allowed us to reach the civil war and intervene in it. The name of our paper The Truth of the Oppressed is because we want to reflect the truth of the working class and all the exploited in the face of so many lies and slanders that have been told about the Syrian masses, as we will tell later.
We consider ourselves a revolutionary, internationalist and working class fraction of the masses who rose up in 2011 against the murderous regime of al-Assad, a lackey of imperialism. On an international scale, we had waged a huge international struggle for the victory of the Palestinian revolution since the year 2000, when the masses overcame their pro-bourgeois PLO leadership to enter into a direct clash with the Zionist state. We fought for the freedom of their prisoners. That is why, when the Middle East revolutions of 2011 began in Tunisia, we quickly understood that this would sooner rather than later reach the heart of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.
Therefore, imperialism concentrated all its forces into Syria to stop this chain of revolutions there. It used the dog Bashar and his partner Putin to drown a heroic revolution in blood.
The revolutionary process of 2011 found new comrades fighting in Libya against the partner of Italy's ENI and FIAT, Qadafy. We rose up with the youth of Benghazi, who came to Tripoli, and when the uprising began in Syria, by the thousands we came with them to the uprising.
Our brigade, during the civil war phase, fought to defend the independence of the workers' organizations, the poor peasants, the students, who were grouped in the coordination committees, so that they could organize themselves and the masses, by attacking the property of the capitalists and by breaking the army of the bourgeoisie, could reach Damascus.
In Syria we met with very valuable fighters of the revolution. They and we were young. In the war, the youth is on the front line and there we met one of our main organizers, comrade Abu Al Baraa, who fell fighting on the southern front of Aleppo in 2016. Therefore, our brigade is a merger of workers and vanguard youth with partisans of the revolution.
We were part of the front of the revolution, which faced the deadly trap of the state that sent Assadist generals under the democratic cloak of the Free Syrian Army to destroy from within and disarm the coordination committees. Our battle was in the front and also in the rear, to prevent these generals, who haven’t been in any battle, from expropriating the combat and the bloodshed by the Syrian masses, as it ended up happening.
On the battle front, as in the civil war, we fought in unity of action, but with organizational and political independence.
Our brigade worked and continues to work by electing its leaders directly, with direct democracy and self-organization of the comrades who are at the forefront of their struggle. Direct democracy prevails. Our demands are no other than bread, freedom, that the regime falls and that the invading troops that plunder and partition Syria leave. We denounce the partition plan and the continuity and recognition of al-Assad, supported by all the Arab bourgeoisies, the Kurdish bourgeoisie, and HTS in Idlib, which is back-shooting the fighting masses. Millions of refugees must return to their lands, regain their jobs, their homes. And this can only be achieved with a new revolutionary offensive that this time will make the big capitalists and plunderers of the nation pay for the crisis.
During the revolutionary offensive we were part of the Coordination Committees, which were made up of workers, poor peasants and rank and file soldiers who refused to shoot their people. We fought for the workers to lead the whole of the oppressed classes and take the lead in the war. The bourgeoisie, the banks, the oil had to be expropriated in order to put all the resources available to win the war. In the hands of the bourgeoisie, the revolution was only surrendered.
The head of the snake was and is in Damascus. We reached there, fighting 30 blocks away from the government house.
At that moment, the dog Bashar was saved by the Iranian theocracy, the counter-revolutionary forces of Putin and Hezbollah, who started their counter-offensive by massacring tens and tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Yarmouk camp.
It was a counter-offensive that began on an international level with all the traitorous left, the Stalinists and the miserable social-imperialists who made the masses of the world believe that the partisans of the revolution were "terrorists" when in reality, and life has already proved it, they were the vanguard of millions of workers and oppressed people in revolt.
Many of our own shed blood defending the revolution. In our book, Syria Under Fire, written from the trenches of revolutionary combat, about the lessons of the Syrian revolution, we account for this process, which today is already clear before the eyes of the whole world. All the Arab bourgeoisies and the imperialist powers recognize the government of al-Assad as the legitimate government of a Syria divided under the bayonet of Putin, Turkey, and the US, to plunder it a thousand times more than before the beginning of the revolution.
2/ What was the role of anarchist/anti-authoritarian forces in the events?
2) To answer this question, we would like to make a reflection with you. We always saw the Syrian revolution as a link in a single revolution in the Maghreb and the Middle East. And we always knew that, as in the war in Vietnam or Iraq, in order to achieve victory and expel the invading troops of imperialism, the support of the workers and youth of the imperialist countries was essential. They are the ones in charge of stopping the military machine of the executioners of the oppressed.
From the Leon Sedov Brigade, with some of our members, we not only fought on the fronts but also followed the route of the refugees and with them we arrived in Greece. Other comrades from Latin America and Europe travelled to Athens to set up a committee of solidarity with the refugees. We stayed and camped with more than 14000 refugees in Idomeni and with them we tried to break through the barbed wire fences to enter Europe and reach Germany.
We waged that fight together with many anarchists like you, who proved to be the most courageous and brave current for the refugees who came from different nations from war and hunger to save their families by arriving in Europe.
This is how we got in contact and started a big campaign for the freedom of the anarchist political prisoners, such as Nikos Romanos, Giannis Michailidis, Dimitris Politis, among others who were in prison for fighting against the Greek state and the fascist gangs of Golden Dawn. It was not by chance that we met. The role of the anarchists in Greece was really courageous and self-sacrificing. But a debate was opened there, like the one that went all over Syria, the Middle East, and internationally, and that is what we want to carry with you.
Many anarchists, if not most of your movement, were very moved by the resurgence of the Kurdish movement, which announced that it had set up "self-determined libertarian communes".
Because if the attempt to pass off the revolutionary masses in Syria as terrorists was a big deception, creating illusions in brave revolutionaries that "self-determined communes" had arisen in the north of Syria, in Rojava, created a huge confusion and was a deception organized by the Kurdish Communist Party (PKK) to justify its separation from the front of the revolution to defeat al-Assad, and then to work for him.
The Syrian revolution suffered a first blow in addition to the attack on the Palestinian camp in Yarmouk. Al-Assad and the Kurdish bourgeoisie signed a non-aggression and collaboration pact in 2012, a year after the revolution started when we were fighting on common barricades with the Kurdish people not only in Rojava but all over Syria. This was done by the PKK, the Kurdish Stalinist party, which leads the Kurdish masses in Rojava.
In Turkey, Ocalan signed a non-aggression and reconciliation pact with Erdogan while he was in prison, while the government was attacking the Kurdish people, who are the heart of the working class and the most exploited of the working class in Turkey. That experience in Turkey ended up as a unilateral disarmament pact of the PKK inside Turkey.
The pact with al-Assad in Syria included that the military barracks in Rojava should be under the flags of al-Assad and later the pact was also with the US as it authorized the establishment of US bases in northern Syria. This was a key issue because that is where the oil pipelines and oil wells are located, which were quickly appropriated by the imperialist oil companies such as Exxon, Shell, Total, etc.
What is substantial is that the pact of Stalinism and Turkey ended up strengthening the butcher Erdogan and broke the front of Kurds and Arabs in the Syrian revolution, which was the only way for the Kurdish people to self-determination and to conquer their nation in a liberated Syria.
Comrades, you should know that the PKK is like Ziuganov's party in reality, but in the middle of the revolution, in order to control the Kurdish people, it had to guise as "democratic", "self-management", "libertarian" etc. You can corroborate this by checking the statements of the pacts that the PKK signed in Syria and Turkey and corroborating the 10 American military bases in Rojava at the moment.
This debate and reflection that we are doing with you, we also did in Greece and we agreed with the comrades of the Anarchist Initiative of the D-Wing of the Koridallos Prison, who as an anarchist front, established relations with our brigade and even gave us a help in internationalist class solidarity and many of the bullets of our rifles came out of this solidarity of the Greek anarchist youth. They published a book called Syrian Revolution with their position on this revolution, which we have also reproduced together with a selection of letters from the exchange we had.
A lot of water has already flowed under the bridge. The libertarian communes are clearly led by the Kurdish bourgeoisie and there cannot be self-managed villages under the command of the US bases.
In order to further deepen what happened in Syria, we say -and so we spread among thousands of fighters- that in order to defeat our revolution, al-Assad came and committed a genocide, together with Putin and other henchmen of imperialism. But as that was not enough, they sent the generals of the Free Syrian Army who surrendered all the rebel cities from within. As the Syrian partisans denounced, when Aleppo fell to al-Assad, there were weapons, ammunition and food there to resist for a year. As this also was not enough, as it is still not enough, from the Sunnite triangle of Iraq, imperialism sent ISIS to finish pushing the Kurdish people into an increasingly ouvert pact with the US troops, who claimed to "defend them" and therefore installed military bases in Rojava. Thus, with the ISIS shootings on the one hand and the military bases on the other hand, the US took all the oil in the north and east of Syria.
As this was not enough, the traitorous parties of the world working class accused us of being "terrorists" and turned off the light so that al-Assad could massacre unmolested the best children of the Syrian people.
We want you to know that the Leon Sedov Brigade voted and refused to clash with any Kurdish military advance, except in extreme defense of our lives. The fact is that the YPG with al-Assad surrounded and entered Aleppo when it fell to the regime. The YPG then took over parts of this city, and because they were the US outpost in other raids, they also took over other areas like Menbej. In Afrin, a Kurdish city, the US made the Kurdish nation hand it over to Turkey. In other cities, the same thing was done but handed over to al-Assad instead. And they were far away from becoming libertarian communes... This is how the bourgeoisie and imperialism paid the martyred Kurdish people for having submitted to their executioners due to the betrayal of the PKK.
We want you to know our opinion and view. We believe that today everything is clear. There is no country or commune in the world that does not recognize the dog Bashar as the legitimate president of Syria, starting from Rojava and all Arab bourgeoisies.
On this point there was a lot of confusion. And that is also what the civil war is about, to create confusion in the ranks of the revolutionary movement.
We tell you our truth, the truth that we lived from inside the civil war itself. And we do it because we have fought before, during and now in the Syrian resistance, for the only true self-determination of the Kurdish people that will come by them taking back their occupied nation as workers' and peasants' communes, where the private property of the capitalists is not allowed (as the constitution of Rojava allows it) and where the oil and riches of Northern Syria will be at the disposal and in the hands of the Kurdish workers, the Syrians and all the peoples of the Middle East.
Finally, we have correspondence from our comrades and Abu Al Baraa, the coordinator of the Leon Sedov Brigade, with the anarchist comrades in Greece. We want you to know it, we have translated it into English and hope you can read it carefully.
3/ How do you evaluate the results of the revolution now, ten years later? What do you see as the main achievements?
3) The answer to this question is linked to the next one, which we will answer later. Please notice that there was no movement of labor organizations in the world, except those influenced by our current and other currents in solidarity with the Syrian revolution, which supported the struggle of the armed people that rose up against a regime of oppression and massacre.
Our current, the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, traveled the world seeking support and solidarity with the Syrian revolution. We called on the unions and worker and student organizations to take solidarity with a massacred people in their hands, as it happened in the Spanish civil war. A day-wage per worker is what we asked for, for example, in the trade union federations in Brazil, Argentina, the Spanish State, Greece, so that money arrived directly with weapons, medicines, solidarity with the labor organizations of the world to enter into direct combat against the fascist regimethat was drowning the Syrian people in blood.
If there’s something we should have done more, it is that we would have had to give ten thousand times more our lives to defeat all the currents that are lackeys of the bourgeoisie and the capitalists of the world and their governments, which made the Syrians revolutionaries appear as enemies of the exploited of the world, and their worst enemies: the fascist beasts al-Assad, Putin, Erdogan appear as their allies.
The Syrian revolution has been defeated. The nation was divided and occupied; the rebel cities were handed over or whereas still liberated, the generals of the Free Syrian Army and Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) control them manu militari, each time more and more like al-Assad himself and share business between each other.
However an enormous achievement remained: that they could not finish crushing or controlling. Millions of people exploited in the refugee camps, as it happened with the Palestinian people during the years along which their nation was occupied, from Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, or on the Syrian borders, hate the scoundrel al-Assad and those who support him. They have condemned them and their children to a miserable life in tents in the desert. Thousands of them were only children when the revolution began and today it is the new generation that enters the fight and organizes the resistance, as we see in uprisings in different cities against the reconciliation pact between Turkey and the Sunni bourgeoisie of the FSA and HTS with al-Assad to recognize and support him in the government.
The achievement is that the masses have not given up, they were betrayed. That is why the resistance continues and the partisan movement has not given up and the self-organized masses win the streets, breaking with all the traitors and collaborators with the al-Assad regime.
The revolutions of 2011-2012 have not ended -which is an international achievement of the masses of the Middle East. The revolutionary fire in Syria did not go off and today the fronts opened in Iraq where the Prime Minister fled and the masses entered the Green Zone and the government house. Honor to the revolutionary masses of Iraq because the Syrian revolution lives there!
The most powerful working class in the Middle East, the one that works in oil, gas and petrochemicals in Iran, is in a proletarian boom, rioting and leading the demands of workers, women, etc. against that opprobious regime of the Iranian theocracy.
But the definitive achievement will come, after 12 years of revolution and counterrevolution, when the international working class manages to recognize its allies, which is not Bashar the dog, nor those who handed over the Kurdish people in Turkey and Syria to their executioners, or the class collaboration governments like the one in Sudan or Egypt that distracted the masses and opened the doors to brutal counterrevolutionary coups.
For us, comrades, the achievements and defeats of a revolution in a country are just one battle of the international class struggle.
Our resistance is the same as yours fighting against the murderous government of Lukashenko. We feel identified with the Ukrainian working class that is confronting the murderer Putin, but it does so under the worst conditions, under the command of a shameless IMF and NATO agent such as Zelensky, who in the middle of the war against the invasion has attacked the rights of workers. That is what our fight in Syria is about and the one we believe must be waged today in Ukraine to crush the butcher Putin, namely for the working class to take the military leadership of the war in its hands, to set up committees of soldiers that choose their commanders in battle, to expropriate the owners of the land, to raise the point of opening the Donbass mines, uniting the Ukrainian working class from east and west with the same demands for wages and decent work, health, education, expelling imperialism and Putin, making the Russian workers upsurge to stop the war machine of Moscow.
It is high time that the workers of the world see our revolution as a link in the world revolution and fight against those who only strive to leave revolutions isolated, as if they were national, so that their executioners massacre them.
We send our tribute to the Chicago martyrs, martyrs of the entire world labor movement. It is high time for fighting internationalism to return to the ranks of the world labor movement.
4/ What mistakes should revolutionaries avoid during the uprising? If you return 10 years back, what would you have done differently?
4) We have traveled the world seeking support and concrete solidarity from all the mass organizations with the Syrian revolution. We implacably denounce the treasonous groups and organizations, which supported the dog Bashar or the traitors of the FSA from the bureaucracies of the world's trade unions. We did everything within our reach. But we needed more. You can never do enough for a revolution to succeed. You always get that bitter feeling, after having put your life at stake, thinking what else could have been done to prevent a defeat.
We are going to correct this “error” of not being able to do more due to our weak forces, fighting so that never again will a revolution and a struggle be isolated on the planet. We have now Iraq, Iran, the Ukrainian resistance, the uprisings in Kazakhstan, the current "French May"...
We gave everything from our part. We even went to Japan, invited to the anti-war conferences by the Zengakuren students and the JRCL-RMF, where we held a rally and collected funds to send to the fighters of the Leon Sedov Brigade. As we already told you, we fought alongside anarchists like you in Greece for the revolution.
It is our understanding that the victory of the revolution is in the uprising of the working class at the international level, particularly in the imperialist metropolises. This is how, for example, the Vietnam War was won and the US troops had to leave Iraq due to a heroic resistance of the masses of the subjugated peoples and the US workers refusing to go to fight for their executioners’ businesses. We believe that what we needed was an international coordination committee to fight to make the workers upsurge and untie their hands, which are tied by their treacherous leaderships. We waged this fight to build up this coordinating committee, for example with our comrade Abu Al Baraa trying to leave Syria, an issue that ended with the governments of the respective countries where he attempted to go closing their borders. We believe that this international committee is an unfinished task.
We know that we will deepen our debate, reflections and relationships, and that perhaps sooner than later we will recognize each other as revolutionary combatants of the international working class for its liberation and self-determination.
But now, a particular mistake and a lesson for our ranks is that we did not know how to distinguish, at the time the revolution was advancing, the opportunists who rode on it to gain a position before the mass movement in its "leading layers" for later, when the revolution retreats, to demoralize, go home and tear their clothes off saying that the "revolution cannot win." Revolutionaries must be prepared for victories and defeats, of those who are always there and never lacking. We would correct that and we are doing it.
5/ On April 19, Comrade Dmitry Petrov (also known as Illa Leshiy, Lev, etc.) died at the Ukrainian front. Before that he was in Syria, defending Kurdistan people. Do you know him, can you share any memories of him?
5) You inform us that on April 19 your comrade Dimitri Petrov fell fighting in Ukraine, while before he was in Syria defending the Kurdish people. We couldn't meet him personally. But with numerous revolutionary fighters of the Kurdish people, both in Turkey and in Syria, we were able to fraternally discuss what we are discussing with you today about the path to liberate the Kurdish people and liberate true revolutionary workers' and peasants' communes, which are the vanguard of the combat for defeating the butcher Putin.
With the revolutionaries, wrong or not, we only have respect and solidarity for them. We insist, perhaps if we had met, we would have sat down to exchange the same positions we have here.
And that is what we must do. Between the revolutionaries of the Leon Sedov Brigade and the brave anarchists who are on the front lines, we think we must fight the enemies of the working class as one fist and debate our differences openly and in the face of the masses.
This is what this interview that you make with us is about and through it we send a warm fraternal and revolutionary salute to your comrades and an honor to your fallen in the field of class war.
Of course, we would like to know more about Dimitri Petrov's experience and yours. We want you to know that our paper The Truth of the Oppressed is at your disposal for your struggle and for the messages that you want to send to the workers of the Middle East and wherever our forces arrive.
We will publish in our press this interview that you make with us and we are preparing some questions for you covering your fight in Putin's Russia, your program and fight against the oppressed nations and their fascist authoritarian regimes.
Soon the International Worker Organizer will present its work Ukraine at War and our fight for a self-determined and Independent Soviet Ukraine. We will intervene in that presentation and of course let you and your comrades from Ukraine know that the microphone and the possibility of speaking before the audience that is there is at your disposal.
We have been invited to intervene by the book authors and we want you to know that your voice will be heard, either directly or in writing. Your message must reach revolutionaries in dozens of countries.
Your voice from Eastern Europe must be heard, from the very war in Ukraine where you left your martyrs, and it will be heard. Count on us.
Your comrades who are fighting in Ukraine have at their disposal our Middle East paper and the International Workers' Organizer, which reaches dozens of countries, to issue up-to-date war reports and news, if they consider it favorable and opportune to convey your message of struggle. Know that you have a page at your disposal.
Long live the militant internationalism of the exploited of the world! For a worker and peasant Syria! For a federation of self-organized worker and peasant republics of the Maghreb and the Middle East! Long live the uprising of the Syrian masses of Idlib and countryside against the reconciliation pact and against the local HTS bourgeoisie who wants to impose it! Lastly, we would like to propose to you to make a common campaign for the political prisoners who are in the prisons of al-Assad and the Palestinian prisoners, people who are suffering after the defeat of Syria one of the worst attacks of Zionism that occupies the Palestinian territory. Without any doubt, in this campaign we should include the freedom of the prisoners of Greece, Belarus and the Russian youth that rose up so they don’t go to Ukraine to die for the business of the butcher Putin.
Abu al Bara, writer of the book "Diary of a Syrian Writer"