Date: 18 March 2004 Source: KDP info

By Heval Hylan

Together with the rest of the Syrian population, Syria’s 1.5 million Kurds have been ruled under emergency law for the last 30 years. Political opposition is not tolerated and the media is strictly controlled. There are a considerable number of Kurds in Syria’s jails, some of whom include women who were jailed for speaking their minds.

The Syrian government classifies the Kurds either as "foreigners" or as maktoumeen, meaning "unregistered." The former are issued red identity documents, which prevent them from owning land, practicing certain professions, receiving food subsidies, being admitted to public hospitals, or having legally recognized marriages to Syrian citizens. The latter are issued no documents at all.

Maktoumeen are the children (grandchildren, etc.) of "foreigners," including foreigners who marry women who are Syrian citizens." "In March 1999, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (“UNCERD”) singled out statelessness of Kurds in Syria as an issue of particular concern, recommending that the Syrian government do more to "protect the rights of all persons belonging to ethnic and national groups ”notably the right to nationality and cultural self expression." It further called on the Syrian government to find an expeditious solution to the predicament of stateless Kurds in the country.

Every dictatorship has an Achilles heel; in Syria, it is the public itself. The fact that 5 percent of the Syrian Alawit population controls the rest of the country is both a mathematical anomaly and a political tragedy.

During the course of Hafez Assad's thirty-year rule, Syria's Alawit minority and a privileged strata of political, military and commercial elites developed a vested interested in the perpetuation of his regime.

The palpable fear that this regime inspired among most Syrians was so closely linked to Assad's cult of personality that there is a fairly strong consensus among these elites that the presidency should be passed on to another member of the Assad family in order to preserve an aura of continuity. However, this elite predisposition does not innately favoured Bashar over other political aspirants within the Assad family.

Today, Syria provides a prime example of a despotic regime. This is a police state where the dictator, Bashar Assad, rules with an iron fist through the other half of Saddam’s Baath party and a widespread network of secret services.

Bashar, an Awaly Muslim, oppresses the Kurdish elements of the Syrian people and has himself recently ordered the imprisonment and execution of hundreds.

Of course not a word of this is to be found in the Syrian press where a personality cult in the Stalinist/Saddamist tradition has been developed. But Kurds in Iraq and other parts of Kurdistan have made the truth known to the world.

Assad is naturally the target of a human-rights campaign to have him indicted for his crimes against the Kurds in Syria, and there should be no doubt that eventually he will be held accountable for the misery and degradation he has inflicted upon Kurdish people.

Assad’s new "Arabization" has much in common with what Saddam did in Kirkuk and colonize the Kurdish homeland. This ethnic cleansing has gone almost unreported by the Arab media, and it deserves to be exposed and publicly condemned.

Arbitrary arrest, torture, and worse, face the Kurds in Syria today, while being terrorised into parroting slogans that glorify the vicious tyrant. Due processes of law, habeas corpus and so on are non-existent in Syria. Extensive information should be provided on the Internet about Syria’s human right violations against the Kurdish people.

It is well known that the modern concepts of "human rights" and "civil liberties" are not native to the Middle East. Their introduction into the Arab world has been patchy at best, as local traditions of governance saw themselves threatened by such basic human rights.

Absolutism can not easily be overthrown in countries such as Syria. Nonetheless, as the record will show that Syria and other Arab states have a long way to go to catch up with the modern world in this respect. Arab regimes share one main aim - is to survive. What happens to the rights of the minorities under such regimes is of little importance.

A one-party dictatorship such as in Syria is characterized by severe limitations on personal freedoms, a strict control of the media, and strong repression of all dissidence. What the Kurds can expect from such a regime. Thunder storms to pass over Syria as it happened in Iraq.

The Kurdish people are aware of a second Saddam (Assad), but we have to wait for the International Community to take a similar action as it happened in Iraq last year. A hundred miles must begin with a single step.

Note that the International Community is taking major steps to promote democracy in the Middle East, as the Iraq example shows. If the democratization is to be taken more seriously, however, it will need to come from every level of the government, including politicians, career diplomats, and intelligence officers.

The International Community should also rescind the immunity it grants to authoritarian regimes and offer its support to grassroots democratic opposition movements like that in Syria. Working for a change in and a democratic Syria is the only way to achieve peace, security, and stability in the Middle East.

It is the Time for the Kurds everywhere to raise-up and support their brothers and sisters in Syria. It is time to show the regimes such as in Syria that the modern human rights will override the state sovereignty.

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