Gains by Kin in Iraq Inflame Kurds' Anger at Syria
March 24, 2004
The New York Times
Neil MacFarquhar
AMISHLIYE, Syria -- The larger-than-life statue of the late president, Hafez al-Assad, that towers over a traffic circle here stands hidden beneath a blue and red striped tarpaulin, which residents say hides the fact that antigovernment protesters knocked off its head.
In Malikiya, a nearby town, two gilded plaster busts of the elder Mr. Assad and his son, President Bashar al-Assad, the main décor inside a culture center, were also decapitated and the building was set on fire. Someone scrawled "Kurdistan" in bright red spray paint across an interior wall of the gutted Water Authority building there, too.
Antigovernment protests are extremely uncommon in Syria, where grim memories are vivid of thousands of Islamic militants mowed down by government troops in the early 1980's. But grievances simmering within the Kurdish minority for decades — over their difficulties in obtaining citizenship, the ban on their language, their poverty amid rich farmland — finally boiled over in the last few weeks.
Kurdish Syrians, 2 million of Syria's 17 million people, say that watching rights for Kurds being enshrined in a new if temporary constitution next door in Iraq finally pushed them to take to the streets to demand greater recognition. In their wake is a toll of blackened government buildings, schools, grain silos and vehicles across a remote swath of the north.
"What happened did not come out of a void," says Bishar Ahmed, a 30-year-old Kurd whose cramped stationery shop sits right next to a cluster of blackened buildings in Malikiya. "The pressure has been building for nearly 50 years. They consider us foreigners; we have no rights as citizens."
Clashes on March 11 between fans from rival soccer teams set off the sudden squall, which officially left 25 people dead and dozens wounded. But the raw emotions shocked Syrians and left officials painting a sinister picture of foreign plots to partition the country.
To a man, local officials all suggest that the Kurds were motivated by infiltrators from Iraq. "They came from outside the country, from the east, and they have been paid in U.S. dollars supplied by Bremer and his gang," said Ahmed al-Salah, an employee of a burned-down government feed warehouse in Qamishliye, some 400 miles northeast of Damascus. He was referring to L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator of Iraq.
For their part, Kurdish residents claim the government responded to what they call peaceful protests with violence as an excuse to say Syria remains too unstable to introduce the kind of democratic reforms that are helping their brethren in Iraq.
"We want democracy like the others," said Hoshiar Abdelrahman, another young shopkeeper in Malikiya, 60 miles east of Qamishliye.
The question of minorities remains a highly sensitive, largely unspoken topic in Syria, particularly because one small group, the Alawites, dominates the government. "Unity" has been their rallying cry. Already edgy about the possibility Iraq will split on sectarian lines, Syrian officials see the Kurdish riots as another step in an attempt to partition all Arab states.
After the first few demonstrators were killed, Kurdish areas throughout Syria bubbled over with years of repressed grievances, local residents say. In Malikiya, a town of one and two-story buildings, the tide of angry voices at the Saturday market eventually led to a march on city hall. As the crowd approached, troops opened fire, killing a 17-year-old and a 20-year-old, residents said.
The government version is that the Kurds starting setting fire to buildings first and the government fired on them to protect its property. "If we were attacked by an Israel missile, we would respond with all means possible," said Salim Kabul, governor of Hassakeh Province, where Kurds are concentrated. "So what do you expect when we are attacked from inside?"
He put the toll in his province at 20 dead, including 14 Kurds and 6 Arabs, among them two policemen. Kurds suspect the toll is far higher.
The area produces significant amounts of oil, wheat and cotton, and yet, residents say, they get little development money. Instead, they complain, for the past four decades the government has been slowly moving more Arabs into the area, trying to form a belt 10 miles wide and 165 miles long to sever the Kurds from ethnic kin in Iraq and Turkey.
Village and even mountain names have been Arabized and the Kurdish language banned, although most families teach it at home. Worse, tens of thousands of Kurds are denied citizenship. (Kurdish groups say more than 200,000; the government says 100,000.) The government says Kurds denied citizenship are the offspring of illegal immigrants who came over the border from Turkey to find jobs and stayed.
"My grandfather was born here, yet my father is considered a foreigner, I am a foreigner and my 3-year-old son has no nationality," said Mr. Abdelrahman, the shopkeeper. Both he and his wife's identification cards read "single"; their marriage is not recognized.
He pulls out a tattered orange identification card that reads, "Foreign Records Department, Hassakeh Governorate," and notes that the bearer cannot travel outside Syria.
Suddenly every young man in a crowd that has gathered starts waving similar cards and shouting against the government. It was a brazen, unusual display of discontent, considering that the Ministry of Information had organized the recent tour for a few journalists, who were escorted by security officers.
Syrian officials deny that the Kurds face any discrimination or have any real basis for their complaints. They note that the young President Assad visited the area in 2002 and pledged greater development, which will come.
After the riots, the Kurdish Democratic Party in Iraq issued a statement suggesting that Damascus do something to end the problems in "Syrian Kurdistan" peacefully. Shock waves rippled through the government here.
Hoshar Zubairy, Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister, made his first official visit to Syria, partly to try to smooth ruffled feathers. At a news conference on Monday, where Mr. Zubairy was peppered with questions that fell just short of calling him an American stooge, he said Iraq had enough trouble with instability to want to create any here.
Of course, not even a riot in the Middle East seems complete without invoking some historical precedent, in this case, Saladin. This Kurdish warrior, who is buried in Damascus, evicted the Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187.
Syrian officials asked aloud this week how a country that enshrined Saladin could mistreat his descendants. "We want a political dialogue because our nation is for all," Ahmed Haj Ali, a consultant to the minister of information, said on Al Arabiya satellite television.
But Abdul Baqi Youssef, a Kurdish opposition figure in Qamishliye, said that by drawing all the warriors and intellectuals out of the Kurdish area to battle the Crusaders, Saladin left it buffeted by overlords to this day. "The Arabs should consider him a saint, but he brought devastation to the Kurds," Mr. Youssef said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/international/middleeast/24SYRI.htmlCaught on tape: Syrian State`s crimes against humanity - updated
20/03/2004 KurdishMedia.com
London (KurdishMedia.com) 20 March 2004: Amatuer cameramen caught on tape the Syrian state security forces firing indiscriminately on unarmed Kurdish civilians at a March 13th funeral.
Similar pictures were broadcast by the UK TV station Channel 4, which reported that the officials in the Syrian embassy in London declined to be interviewed.
In a newly released unedited videotape, the mourners are taking for burial the bodies of the Kurds who had been killed by the same state security forces during a football match the day before, on March 12th, in the Kurdistani city of Qamishlo.
The unedited videotape, along with two other edited tapes, clearly demonstrates that Syrian state security forces responded to the unarmed crowd of men, women and children by shooting to kill.
The images show that the Kurdish protestors at first think that the soldiers and militias on moving vehicles were firing into the air. Some in the crowd are trying to calm the panicking crowd. People are falling down by what seems to be the gunshot wounds they receive.
Some in the crowd are trying to help the wounded while some demonstrators put up resistance, by shouting slogans and throwing stones, many civilians are running for their lives; women and children are screaming.
The videotapes were released by a newly established Web site, serhildanaqamishlo.com. It is a news and information site, established by a number of other information providers to offer information specifically on the current situation of West [Syrian] Kurdistan.
1) Unedited video:
http://www.serhildanaqamislo.com/qamislo_13_03_04.wmv 2) Edited video 1
http://www.serhildanaqamislo.com/Video/qamishlo.ram 3) Edited video 2
http://www.serhildanaqamislo.com/Video/qamishlo130304.ram Warning: The videos include extremely violent images, not suitable for children or other vulnerable people.
source:
http://www.kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=4805