JINHA

AMED -Egyptian activist Salma Said spoke about the importance of events in Rojava as an example of how people of the Middle East can form alternative models for life.

Salma has come to the first Middle East Youth Conference with the goal of learning from the Kurdish struggle how to produce alternative ways of life in the Middle East. In a time when Egypt is dealing with the repression of its revolutionary hopes, she plans to make a short film documenting the Rojava revolution to screen in Egypt.

Salma is part of the campaign against military trials for civilians in Egypt and a founding member of media collective Mosireen. Her relationship to Northern Kurdistan started in 2003, when she attended a conference of women of the Middle East. Salma, who later took part in the Gezi movement, followed the Kurdish movement closely throughout the 2011 revolutionary process in Egypt. Since the counterrevolutionary wave of 2014, she says, the movement has been in a period of recovery, focusing its energy on supporting those in jail and families of martyrs.

"This couple of years is a time for us to study different forms of struggle around the world," said Salma. "People want to know what's going on here in detail."

Because media representations of events in Rojava are sparse and dominated by Daesh propaganda, Salma plans to make a short film about the alternative system of life being built in Rojava. Salma said she has been particularly repulsed by the media's objectifying representation of Kurdish women fighters.

"They're photos of beautiful women with guns without anyreal understanding how they organize, how they participate in the fight," she explained. Salma wants to take a less objectifying approach that seriously investigates Kurdish women's organizing and the transformation of everyday life through resistance.

She says that from the beginning, Egyptians wanted to create an alternative model—beyond the Iranian and Turkish models that were presented as the only options for societies in the Middle East. Rojava has a particular appeal because self-organizing in the interstices of the state has always been part of Egyptians' daily praxis.

"The Egyptian state does not exist as a state that gives services to the people. It's just a police state that exists to oppress people.So Egyptians have been organizing in different ways because the state is absent. I'm trying to look at this closely and see how we can self-organize to create different models in our own lives."

Mosireen, the media collective Salma helped found, is one example of the effort to create alternative social forms. The collective is based on non-hierarchical, consensus and participatory decision-making. It aims to open knowledge sources to the people, distributing all products under Creative Commons licenses.

The brutal repression of the Egyptian revolution has taught Egyptians that the unity brought out in crisis can fall apart under the pressure of world events, said Salma. Armed with this perspective, she and other Egyptians will be closely following the Rojava revolution.

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