Jenny Keesden
speaker
114 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jenny Keesden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
For one thing, it was such an example of how the social movement here works and what society is like and all the complexities. Because, yeah, a lot of people here are very wedded to the liberatory, progressive, grassroots, democratic, women's freedom, ecological movement that I'm sure you've spoken about in your programs on Rojava.
And thousands and thousands of people completely take ownership of that and see themselves in that and are the driving force of that. Obviously, that doesn't mean every single person here is 100% sold on government at all.
Some of them are just trying to get on with life. Some of them are, you know, I mean, if you talk about women's freedom, there's always going to be a few men who are a bit like, what does this mean for me? What do I have to give up? So it would be silly. I've encountered that. It would be silly and new topic to say that everyone's totally sold.
However, nobody wants to get invaded by one of the largest armies in NATO.
So you have this sort of actually even broader than usual kind of coming together, like groups from the sort of like tribal clan structures here that are still like a really political force and that don't, you know, have a kind of...
uneasy truth and sort of slowly learning each other relationship with yeah with the movement you can say but they really came out in in force as well um as well as like the Kurdish movement as well as like lots of different ethnic groups and we marched and to be honest I didn't know we were going to an American base a lot of people didn't it was quite a confusing day because I think you didn't want to announce things too widely until they got there yeah um and we went and did this kind of yeah they like
read out a letter symbolically i think in some of the arabic community leaders went up to the base and we the majority of people there's hundreds of hundreds of people in this crowd and they stayed back at a distance and i found out later that that is because the american soldiers said if two bigger group of people come close we will like we will open fire like that that information was given yeah um i don't know what they were scared of you know it's like like any mart here the people in the front row are always granites yeah yeah it's old ladies yeah it's
No different on that day. I mean, they're a bit scary to be said. I don't, I think that it's a bit embarrassing, isn't it? And I reckon soldiers would be scared of them. But anyway, that stuff makes sense. But while we were there by like pure chance, a fleet of not tanks, but big armoured cars rolled in. And there was just this moment that I really clearly remember. It just kind of paused.
And they rolled through the crowd and the crowd parted. and turned and looked and nobody teared or clapped, obviously. There was no sense of, oh, it's the Americans, right? But nobody sort of threw, you know, threw anything or threw insults or chanted anything negative either.
There was just this stillness and this really palpable energy of this kind of sense of people looking at, you know, obviously they're just these soldiers that happen to be driving these trucks, but they really symbolized something more than that. And people were kind of looking
sort of insisting that you look them in the eye saying like hey if anyone owes anyone you owe us after everything we fought for and everything we've done yeah 13 000 martyrs if they would call them exactly exactly yeah so many people lost in the fight against isis and so much like blood and sweat and tears given and there was just yeah this palpable sense of like at least have the decency to kind of look at us and admit what you're doing because you know what you're doing yeah
And it really, yeah, it really felt, it was very kind of moving at the time. And I feel like it's very symbolic into politics here of how, you know, someone asked me the other day, what was it like for people to rely on America, knowing that they'd betrayed them? And I said, well, they didn't. They never relied on them.
But, you know, there's that kind of, the expectation of at least some sense of dignity. That is a very important concept for people here, dignity and, yeah. So yeah, I always remember that. Say again, I know it's confusing. That was five and a half years ago now. And now you've got this sort of, is history repeating itself?
They're talking about, well, the troops, I think it's important to understand what that means. What that means is they're talking about potentially giving a green flag for more military aggression. And I think they kind of haven't decided yet if they're really going to do it. And there's a lot of things in, in the balance. And in terms of, I'll just say one more, one more thing.
And it's out, I think it's a bit long. In terms of like the plan for Syria and America's role, like this is my opinion. I can't say for sure that this is the, the definite reality, but my understanding of the situation is, is that once again, people here in this movement are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.
And the rock and the hard place now looks like you've got the new government that set itself up in Damascus, HBS, and their goal, if they can windle it and get the outside and international support, is to build your sort of socially, at least if not politically, the model's going to look a bit like Afghanistan and the Taliban, right?
like from the signs of changes they've made to the constitution, incidents of like violent sectarianism and feminicide have been rising, attacks they've already made on women's rights, like very rapidly, and things that have been put in, like the president now legally has to be a Muslim, all of this stuff. That's sort of their plan.
But on the other hand, I think if you kind of let the American government lose on Syria to build up its plan, At the moment, I think they are seeing an opportunity to use this kind of formula from Iraq in 2020.
And I think they want to create this sort of very open to capital markets, which creates kind of space in which the north and east area with majority, though not entirely Kurdish, can sort of play this role that the Kurdistan region of Iraq has played.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, great. I'm glad you asked about that because in some senses, you know, there is some horrible stuff in there, but this is the beautiful bit. This is the great bit, the bit that we should be talking about at the moment. So, yeah, the Tishin Dam is a big hydroelectric facility that is on the Euphrates River.
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