FEATURE-Syria’s stateless Kurds hope for new rights
By Lin Noueihed
05/16/05 08:00 ET
DAMASCUS (Reuters) – Ismael Hami is a foreigner in the country of
his birth. He cannot vote, run for office or register property in his
name. A pink card stamped “not for travel” is one of a few documents
proving he even exists.
But all that could soon change for Hami, who says he is one of an
estimated 200,000 stateless Kurds living in Syria.
Rights activists and Western diplomats say Syria is mulling a solution
to the status of Kurds in the mainly Arab state. Word is spreading
and cautious hopes are rising among the stateless that they could
finally get citizenship.
“There are rumors that changes are coming,” said Hami, an official
in the small but active Syrian Kurdish Yikiti party.
“They have promised a solution to the stateless Kurds issue. We
have despaired of Syrian policy but hope they reform even if it is
a response to international pressure, not people’s wishes.”
Decades of Kurdish discontent in Syria’s northeastern governorate
of Hasake, where Kurds say a 1962 census omitted 120,000 of their
number, fueled riots that swept several towns in March 2004, after
a brawl between Arab and Kurdish supporters of rival soccer teams in
the town of Kameshli escalated.
The clashes, in which some 30 people were killed, reflected
unprecedented tension between Kurds and the state in Syria, which,
like neighboring Turkey and Iran worries Kurdish autonomy in northern
Iraq could inspire separatism on its soil.
Syria’s estimated 2 million Kurds, many with family ties in Turkey
and Iraq, say they seek rights within the country where they make up
around 10 percent of the population, not a separate state.
They want citizenship — denied to those classified as stateless but
required for higher state education and employment — and the right
to teach and publish in their own language.
UNDER PRESSURE
President Bashar al-Assad, whose country is under U.S. pressure to
reform, had pledged to look into statelessness, raising hopes of an
end to the problem.
In a move Syrian Kurdish activists hope heralds wider reform, Assad
pardoned 312 Syrian Kurds accused of taking part in last year’s riots,
to enhance “national unity.”
“They released some of the detainees. This was a positive move that
all the Syrian movements welcomed,” said Lukman Oso, an activist in
the Kurdish Leftist Party in Syria.
“We are hearing through leaks to the press that they may give stateless
Kurds identity. We would welcome any such move as positive but we
have seen nothing on the ground so far.”
Kurdish activists say they wish to see the stateless Kurds issue
addressed, not least because some have no rights at all.
The offspring of stateless Kurds who married Syrians over generations
when those unions were not officially recognized, are now caught in
legal limbo.
Kurds estimate there are some 75,000 of these so-called undeclared
living in Syria today.
Hami was recently allowed to register his marriage to a Syrian citizen,
finally giving their three children official recognition, if only as
foreign residents living in Syria.
The Kurdish issue is sensitive in Syria, eliciting little official
comment or sympathy among the general public.
But Western diplomats and Syrian activists say they expect the
government to naturalize tens of thousands of Kurds.
“It will happen slowly, slowly. They will probably announce 30,000
then after a few months another 10,000 and so on, but of course they
will not give citizenship to all,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, an engineer
and reform activist.
“They will only give citizenship to those who deserve it, only after
they study their files because many of these people actually come
from Turkey or Iraq, not Syria.”
LONG HISTORY
Kurds have lived in the mountains that straddle Iraq, Turkey, Syria
and Iran, an area some Kurdish nationalists refer to as Kurdistan,
for centuries. Some Syrian Kurds have held senior official posts.
Some Kurds in Syria trace their roots back to one of the greatest
military leaders in the region’s history, Saladin.
A Kurd from modern-day Iraq, Saladin led a Muslim army that vanquished
the Crusaders and reconquered Jerusalem in the 12th century. Saladin
died in Damascus where he is buried.
While Iraqi Kurds were repressed by Saddam Hussein, who gassed the
Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, and Turkey battled Kurdish separatists
in its southeast during the 1980s and 1990s, Syria has rarely clashed
with its own minority.
Ruled by the secular Baath party, it has traditionally stressed
national unity, avoiding references to its many minorities, including
Assyrians, Armenians and other Christians, Druze, Kurds, Shi’ites
and Assad’s own small Alawite sect.
But some Kurdish political activists accuse the state of trying to
stamp out their distinct cultural identity and dilute the Kurdish
character of the northeastern Jazeera — a fertile plain rich in oil
and gas that Syria’s command economy needs.