How “anti-terror” laws used to silence meaningful dissent and solidarity with oppressed peoples.

~ Arîn Qereçox

In January 2019, I travelled to Syria to learn about the revolution unfolding in the country’s north since 2012. At the time, we called it the Rojava Revolution, as the land being held by revolutionary forces was roughly the area that would have comprised western Kurdistan, or Rojava – a strip of land approximately 30 kilometres deep along the northernmost part of the Syrian nation state. Today, we call it the revolution of North and Eastern Syria because it encompasses land outside the Kurdish majority regions in the north and many more ethnicities than Kurds. The revolution is built on three main pillars, which are worked towards in all areas where the Kurdistan Freedom Movement is present (including outside of Kurdistan in diaspora and international organising): grassroots democracy, women’s liberation, and ecology.

I could talk much more about the ideology of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and how it was to live in a real life revolution carried out and administered by the people, but this is sadly not the purpose of this article*. This article is about the dark and insidious things that have been happening since I returned from Rojava, illustrating the so-called UK’s escalating slide into fascism.

Before I start, a few notes: first, I want to recognise that this story is not the worst thing that could have happened to me on returning to England. Other folks have had their houses raided, been imprisoned, and seen what I would categorise as the sharp end of “justice” in this country. Second, as a white person and a citizen of the so-called UK, I have spent a lifetime prior to this being incredibly passport-privileged and floating across some of the world’s most dangerous and deadly borders. Even so, I wanted to write this article to tell a story about a specific type of repression that seems to be becoming more prevalent in the current political climate and is likely to affect many readers of this publication if we continue along the current political trajectory….

https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/01/21/kurdish-solidarity-crackdown/