Outstanding Piece on Little-Recognized SYRIAN Kurds

NY Times: “After Decades as Nonpersons, Syrian Kurds May Soon Be Recognized,” by Katherine Zoepf, April 28, 2005.

We know a great deal about the Kurds of both Iraq and Turkey as a result of journalistic efforts over the years, ratcheting up recently, of course, due to the invasion of Iraq.

And we know a bit about the Kurds of Iran because that community has produced a number of filmmakers who have revealed some interesting glimpses into their lives – most notably, A Time for Drunken Horses by the writer / director Bahman Gobadi.

But we know relatively little about the fourth, albeit least populous, group of Kurds – those who live in the northeast of Syria.

This fascinating article by Times Damascus stringer Katherine Zoepf – my guess is she’s a German who speaks Arabic, but who knows – lays out some very interesting – and, as always when it comes to the these poor people, disturbing – aspects of Kurdish life in Syria today.

As with the previous post about the Tablighi in France, we have to leave out a lot of powerful and significant details. Therefore, I strongly suggest that you check out the complete article for yourself..

Some of the most illuminating passages (bold emphasis mine):

Saleh Osso, a Kurdish plumber, has tried to live as far outside the reach of the Syrian government apparatus as possible. Since Mr. Osso, 34, is stateless – one of perhaps 200,000 Kurds living in Syria who are denied citizenship – that has been fairly easy to accomplish.  

He has no right to own property, to travel abroad or to send his four children to high school. Officially, Mr. Osso scarcely exists. …

About 1.5 million Kurds live in Syria as the country’s largest ethnic minority, and also its most historically troublesome. Their very difference presents a living challenge to the militant Arabism of the dominant Baath party.

Kurdish parties, although illegal, are among the country’s best-organized opposition groups, a fact that became clear in March of last year, when, within hours, the parties organized a series of demonstrations across Syria to protect what they called police brutality against Kurds demonstrating in the northeastern town of Qamishli.  

In 1962 [before Hafez al-Assad took power in a coup], the government stripped thousands of Syrian-born Kurds of their citizenship. They and their descendants carry laminated orange identity cards that testify to their statelessness. International human rights groups estimated their numbers at 200,000; tens of thousands of other Syrian-born Kurds lack even the orange cards and are known as maktoomin (those who are muted). …

In the past the government has repressed expressions of Kurdish identity in a variety of ways, forbidding the publication of books or newspapers in Kurdish, for example, and jailing Kurdish leaders without trial.

And you wonder why the Kurds of Iraq are so insistent on having their own state – and why this is so scary to the elites of the four states where Kurds live: given their past brutal treatment of this repressed minority, they know full well why the Kurds are so anxious to govern themselves.

We might also wonder why the same people who – legitimately – bemoan the plight of Palestinian refugees living outside historic Palestine (Israel, West Bank, Gaza) don’t seem to be equally moved by the suffering of the Kurds at the hands of Arab regimes … hmmm …

Still, things have been easing lately for the Syrian Kurds.

On March 30, 312 Kurds who were imprisoned after the demonstrations last year in Qamishli were released under a presidential amnesty. On April 6, when the Iraqi Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was chosen as president of Iraq, Kurds living in Damascus played the Kurdish national anthem without official intereference in a street celebration, an act that Syrian Kurds say would have been unthinkable a year ago.  

But giving citizenship to stateless Kurds would be far more meaningful. Some experts on Syria believe President Assad may be contemplating doing so as a good-will gesture, a way to partly pre-empt the international pressure that is likely to follow Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon.

In which context, by the way, did you notice that Syria left Lebanon ??? No ??? Gee, a lot of other people didn’t either.

Which means that – despite all the right-wing talk about that move as part of the “wave” of democratization sweeping the Middle East as a result of the invasion of Iraq –

the Syrian of occupation of Lebanon was, in fact, NO BIG DEAL … and we’ll see how long Lebanon manages to maintain civil peace in the absence of the Syrians’ repressive – but stabilizing – presence.

Ammar Abdulhamid, the director of the Tharwa Project, an organization based in Damascus that monitors minority rights issues in the Arab world,

something I have NEVER heard of before … fascinating under any circumstances … and ESPECIALLY that it’s headquartered in Syria, of all places …

said he has conducted a survey and believed that most Syrian Kurds were willing to accept a clean-slate approach: citizenship without immediate reparations.

Gee, wouldn’t it be something if the Palestinians took this approach ??? Could really loosen things up in THAT miserable situation …

“The Kurds just want basic rights,” Mr. Abdulhamid said. “They’re not thinking about accountability for the past. Ideally, along with citizenship, the government would set up a committee that would systematically look into some of these other demands.”

Despite the possibility of technical problems, the Syrian government has compelling political reasons to offer citizenship to stateless Kurds. The government fears that a domestic Kurdish separatist movement may be growing, he suggested, and that disenfranchised Kurds could be manipulated by outsiders to destabilize Syria. …

According to Faisal Badr, a Kurdish lawyer based in Damascus whose wife is stateless, most Syrian Kurds harbor no separatist ambitions, and, citizenship decree or no, their leaders will continue to push for change within Syria.  

“The vast majority of us want our problems to be solved within the framework of the Syrian nation,” Mr. Badr said. “Giving citizenship to the Kurds would be a positive step, but it’s still very partial. We want to see democracy in Syria.”

Fascinating.

Again, the only question is why this insightful article about an important yet under-reported aspect of the Middle East situation was buried on Page 13 – even deeper than the piece on the Tablighi movement, which appeared on the same day.

If the Times is going to do this outstanding reporting, the least they could do is make it easy for people to access it.