I. Background

The Kurds in Syria

Kurds are the largest non-Arab ethnic minority in Syria, with their numbers estimated at approximately 1.7 million—roughly 10 percent of Syria’s population.[4] The vast majority is Sunni and speaks its own distinct language, Kirmanji.[5] Kurds live in large numbers along the borders with Iraq and Turkey in three areas of concentration: the Jazira in the northeast, the `Ain `Arab region in the north, and the highlands in the northwest around `Afrin (also known as Kurd Dagh (Mountain of the Kurds)). There are also sizeable Kurdish populations in Aleppo and Damascus.

 

The Kurdish Area of Syria. © 2009 John Emerson

Historic marginalization

Since the 1950s, successive governments in Syria have embraced Arab nationalism and accordingly pursued a policy of repressing Kurdish identity because they perceived it as a threat to the unity of an Arab Syria.[6]In 1962 the government carried out a special census in al-Hasakeh province in northeast Syria on the pretext that many non-Syrian Kurds had crossed illegally from Turkey. Kurds had to prove that they had lived in Syria since at least 1945 or lose their citizenship. The government conducted the census in one day, and failed to give the population sufficient notice or information about the process. As a result, the authorities revoked the citizenship of some 120,000 Kurds, leaving them stateless and facing difficulties of all sorts, from getting jobs to obtaining state services.[7] The number of stateless Kurds in Syria has grown since then to reach an estimated 300,000 today, because the children of stateless men are themselves considered stateless.[8]

The Ba`ath party came to power in 1963 and continued the policy of denying Kurdish identity under the guise of promoting Arab nationalism. A key component of this policy was to encourage Arabs to resettle in areas where Kurds traditionally lived and to create an “Arab belt” that would separate Syria’s Kurds from the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, who had started experiencing a national reawakening.[9] The government developed the plan for the “Arab belt” in 1965 and envisaged the creation of a band 15 kilometers deep (about 9 miles) over a distance of 280 kilometers (174 miles) along the Turkish border. The plan anticipated the deportation of Kurds who were living in villages falling inside this band to areas in Syria’s interior.

The government started executing the resettlement plan in the early 1970s, but under a new terminological cover: for the “Arab belt” the government substituted “Plan to establish model state farms in the Jazira province.” Under the new justification for the plan, the government would build “model farming villages” in the Kurdish region and populate them with Arabs. The government expropriated the lands on which it built these “model farms” from Kurdish owners, either under the guise of land reform or because the owners were Kurds whose citizenship had been withdrawn in 1962 because they failed to prove their residency under that year’s census. In 1975 the government resettled an estimated 4,000 Arab families, whose own lands had been submerged by the construction of the Tabqa dam on the Euphrates, in 41 “model farms” in the very heart of the Kurdish region. The government suspended the “Arab belt” project in 1976, but never dismantled the model villages, nor returned the Kurds displaced from their land.[10]

In parallel, successive governments focused on repressing Kurdish identity, through restricting the use of the Kurdish language in public, in schools, and in the workplace, banning Kurdish-language publications, and prohibiting celebrations of Kurdish festivities, such as Nowruz, the traditional Kurdish New Year.[11] Restrictions on the Kurdish language—which continue to this day—stand in contrast to Syria’s treatment of its other non-Arab minorities, such as the Armenians and Assyrians, who are allowed to have private schools, clubs, and cultural associations, where their respective languages are taught. In 1967 school geography texts dropped all mention of a Kurdish minority in Syria, and government registry officials began pressuring Kurds not to give their children Kurdish first names.[12] The government also renamed Kurdish regions and villages to give them an “Arab identity,” many through an administrative ordinance in 1977.[13] Even Syria’s constitution, adopted on March 13, 1973, focuses on Arab nationalism and excludes other ethnic identities by stating, “The people in the Syrian Arab region are a part of the Arab nation.”[14]

Starting in 1976, as an opposition movement to the Ba`athist regime grew among Syrian Arabs and the regime entered into an armed confrontation with the Muslim Brotherhood, then president Hafez al-Asad sought to placate the Kurds and build functional alliances with them. The Syrian government enlisted many Kurds in the security services and the army, released some long-term Kurdish political detainees, and showed some tolerance toward public manifestations of Kurdish culture.[15]

In contrast to its repression of its own Kurds, the Asad regime in Syria became a champion of Kurdish rights in Iraq and Turkey in the 1970s and 1980s. The likely objective was to weaken its neighbors by stoking Kurdish sentiments in those countries, while also encouraging Turkish and Iraqi Kurds to talk to Syria’s Kurds and dissuade them from making any national claims in Syria. In the 1970s Syria provided a haven for Iraqi Kurds, particularly the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by Jalal Talabani. During the 1980s and early 1990s the Syrian government backed the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) against Turkey by providing its fighters based in Syrian-controlled Lebanon with arms and training.[16] This strategy had some success in putting pressure on Syria’s Kurds to keep quiet about their demands on Damascus in the 1980s and 1990s in order to ensure that Syria’s support for Kurdish groups in Iraq and Turkey continued.[17]

While the Ba`ath regime repressed the Kurds as a group, it allowed certain individual Kurds to reach positions of state authority. For example, in 1964 the authorities named Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaru, a Kurd, as grand mufti of Syria. Other Kurds have been able to reach high-ranking positions in the government, like Mahmud Ayubi, prime minister in 1972-76.[18] A few Kurds sit in the People’s Assembly, or hold positions of local authority. Syrian officials often cite these Kurds as evidence of Kurdish equality and immersion in the state.[19] However, according to many Kurdish activists interviewed by Human Rights Watch, these men would not have achieved these positions if they had manifested any support for Kurdish rights in Syria.

 

Kurdish political organization

In 1957 a broad coalition of prominent Syrian Kurdish intellectuals calling for recognition of Kurdish rights, land reform, and democracy—but not Kurdish independence—founded the Kurdish Democratic Party of Syria (KDP-S). In addition to the KDP-S, the Syrian Communist Party, whose founder and many of its members were Kurds, often defended Kurdish ethnic rights. In 1960, however, the government launched a crackdown on Kurdish activists, arresting a number of KDP-S leaders and hundreds of supporters. Under the weight of severe government repression, the party quickly fragmented into competing factions and lost much of its support base.

Since then, Kurdish groups in Syria have been plagued by divisions. The reasons for their weakness are a combination of the government’s repression of any form of political mobilization, the security services’ success in infiltrating various parties, political disunity within the Kurdish community, the Asad regime’s recruitment of certain Kurdish elites, and Syria’s support for Kurdish separatist groups in Iraq and Turkey in the 1970s and 1980s, which deflected attention from the internal situation.[20] In addition, Syria does not have a legal framework, such as a political parties law, that could provide a sustainable basis for the operation of political parties. The Syrian constitution simply notes, in article 8, that the “Ba`ath Party is the leading party in the society and the State.”

Rumors started circulating in September 2004 that the Ba`ath Party would consider introducing a law to organize political parties and would amend article 8 of the constitution. However, no actual steps were taken when the Ba`ath Party Congress finally took place in June 2005. More than four years later, these reforms have still not taken place.[21]

Today, at least 14 unlicensed Kurdish parties operate in Syria. Many of these parties are divided, and alliances between them are often short-lived and depend on personalities. The parties are fairly consistent in their calls for democracy in Syria and for recognizing Kurds as an ethnic group. Unlike the response of Kurds in Turkey or Iran to government repression, the Syrian Kurdish parties never took up arms against the government. While the parties are all technically illegal, the Syrian government tolerated their existence in the 1980s and 1990s on the condition that they remained fairly quiet, did not call for any form of self government, and offered no unified threat.

The March 2004 events

The quiescence of the Kurdish community in Syria began changing in the late 1990s due to a combination of external and internal factors. In 1998 Syria, under heavy Turkish pressure, ended its support for the PKK, expelling PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan from his home in Damascus and closing PKK camps in Syrian-controlled Lebanon. Meanwhile, al-Asad’s reconciliation with Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s strained his relations with Iraqi Kurdish leaders. These developments meant that there was less pressure on Syrian Kurds to suppress their criticism of the Syrian regime.[22]

Hafez al-Asad’s death in June 2000 and the relaxed atmosphere of the “Damascus Spring” that followed, when informal groups began meeting in private homes to discuss reform efforts, further emboldened Kurdish activists. A new generation of Kurdish political groups began to proliferate. While Bashar al-Asad, Hafez’s son and successor, initially showed limited tolerance for these groups, this quickly changed; security services soon began harassing and arresting Kurdish leaders.

In December 2002 a new Syrian Kurdish party, Yekiti, staged a sit-in outside parliament calling on it to “remove the barriers imposed on the Kurdish language and culture and recognize the existence of the Kurdish nationality within the unity of the country.”[23] The authorities arrested two members of the party’s political bureau, Marwan Othman and Hasan Saleh, on charges of “inciting religious and ethnic discord.” The Supreme State Security Court (SSSC), a special court set up under the Emergency Law, tried them and jailed them for 14 months. A few months later, on June 25, 2003, the security services detained participants in a gathering outside the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) building in Damascus demanding that Syrian authorities grant stateless Kurds citizenship and allow Kurdish children to study in their own language.[24]

It was, however, developments in Iraq that had the greatest significance. The Syrian Kurds grew in self-confidence as they followed closely the US invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and the subsequent increase in autonomy gained by Iraqi Kurds. The US invasion heightened tension between Kurds and Arabs in Syria, as many Arabs accused Iraqi Kurds, and by association Syrian Kurds, of supporting the US-led war in Iraq.

Trouble finally broke out on March 12, 2004. At a football match in Qamishli, a town in the Jazira region, tensions rose between Kurdish fans of the local team and Arab supporters of a visiting team from the city of Deir al-Zor, and fights eventually erupted between members of the opposing supporter groups. Security forces responded by firing live bullets into the crowd, reportedly only into the Kurdish section, killing at least seven Kurds. The next day, members of the security forces fired at a Kurdish funeral procession and demonstration, causing a number of additional Kurdish fatalities and injuries.

Two days of violent protests and riots in Qamishli and other Kurdish towns in the north and northeast, including al-Qahtaniya, al-Malkiya, and `Amuda, followed. Kurdish demonstrators vandalized or set on fire a number of state-owned and privately-owned buildings. The demonstrators also attacked a police station in `Amuda, and a police officer received fatal injuries from stones.[25] The authorities reacted with force, beating, arresting, and imprisoning large numbers of Kurds. The army surrounded and moved into Qamishli and other major Kurdish towns in northern Syria, and a week later calm was restored. At least 36 people were killed, most of whom were Kurds, and over 160 people were injured. The security services detained more than 2,000 people and there were widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees, including children, women, and the elderly.[26] Most of the detainees were released, including 312 detainees who were released under an amnesty announced by President Bashar al-Asad on March 30, 2005.[27]

Syria’s Multiple Security Services

There are four main security agencies in Syria: Military Intelligence (Shu'bat al-Mukhabarat al-'Askariyya), the Political Security Directorate (Idarat al-Amn al-Siyasi), the General Intelligence Directorate (Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-'Amma, generally referred to as State Security (Amn al-Dawla), its previous name), and Air Force Intelligence (Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawiyya).[28] It is these agencies, not the regular police, which usually deal with individuals involved in what the authorities consider political activities, including those advocating for Kurdish political and cultural rights.[29]

Security agencies overlap extensively, and there are no clear rules for which agency will take the lead in a particular arrest. These agencies have virtually unlimited authority to carry out arrests, searches, interrogation, and detention. They are more than a simple arm of the government; they are in practice autonomous entities answerable only to the president.[30]

Penal Code Provisions Commonly Deployed against Kurdish Activists

Syria’s prosecuting authorities have at their disposal criminal provisions that are so broadly articulated that the courts are able to punish a range of peaceful activities and free expression. Some provisions explicitly ban political expression, such as those banning membership in political parties without permission. The seven most commonly used penal provisions against Kurdish activists are:

• Article 267 (undertaking “acts, speech, writings, or other means to cut off part of Syrian land to join it to another country”);
• Article 285 (“issuing calls that weaken national sentiment or awaken racial or sectarian tensions while Syria is at war or is expecting a war”);
• Article 288 (joining a “political or social organization or an international group without the permission of the government”);
• Article 307 (undertaking “acts, writings, or speech that incite sectarian, racial or religious strife”);
• Article 308 (membership in an organization that was created to “incite sectarian, racial or religious strife”);
• Article 335 (attending “a meeting that is not of a private nature ... where an individual issues calls for rioting or displays signs that perturb the general safety, or undertakes any form of rioting”); and
• Article 336 (“any gathering or convoy in a public space is considered rioting if ... (b) there are at least seven people gathered to protest a decision or measure taken by the public authorities or (c) if they are more than 20 people and they appear in a way that can threaten general quiet.”

Article 288 is particularly problematic because it can be used against any Kurdish party member, since none of the Syrian Kurdish parties are actually licensed and, as noted above, there is no political parties law.

Fuad `Aliko, general secretary of the Yekiti party, commented on the charge against him of belonging to an unlicensed organization: “They accuse me of belonging to a secret organization, but I have been active in politics in a public way since I was elected member of parliament in 1990. So how can I be tried on an accusation that has no real basis to it?”[31]

(The cases of Musa and `Aliko are covered in chapter III.)