|
Kurds, Marginalized, Could Be Key to Syrian Revolt’s Success |
|
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the
content of news information on this page |
|
Kurds, Marginalized, Could Be Key to
Syrian Revolt’s Success
28.3.2012
By Harvey Morris
—
NY Times' Blog |
|
|
|
A demonstrator holds aloft a
Kurdish flag (right) at an anti-regime protest near
Damascus on February 1, 2012. Photo: Reuters
Read more by the Author
March
28, 2012
The Kurds of Syria could provide the tipping point
in a year-long revolt against the dictatorship of
Bashar al-Assad. But on Tuesday night their
delegates walked out of opposition unity talks in
Istanbul over the failure of their Arab partners to
acknowledge their national rights.
There are about 2.5 million Kurds in Syria or around
10 percent of the population — the Damascus regime
never formally counts them for fear of acknowledging
the size of their community. By some estimates,
Kurds may be Syria’s largest minority, larger even
than the ruling Alawite sect.
A new report by the Henry Jackson Society, a
London-based foreign policy think tank, describes
them as “the decisive minority” in the Syrian
revolution. Their participation in a unified
opposition that would be “in the interests of the
U.S. for a stable and inclusive Syria and would
boost the rapid overthrow of the Assad regime,” the
report says.
The importance of the Kurdish position has been
marginalized in the mainstream opposition narrative
of the Syrian revolt, despite the fact that some of
the earliest demonstrations took place in the
northeast where Kurds inhabit a strategic area
bordering Turkey and Iraq.
The Kurds are a combative people. In the face of
more powerful enemies, they have had to be. As a
nation of more than 20 million with their own
language and culture, they have defended their
presence for millennia in what is today the troubled
borderland of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.
“Fighting is better than idleness,” as the Kurdish
proverb goes.
Yet overall their participation in the revolution
has been muted — and so, notably, has been the
response of the regime. It has spared this
traditionally oppressed minority the worst excesses
of its crackdown, as it attempts to play a “Kurdish
card” in a strategy of divide and rule.
The Kurds have reasons enough to bide their time.
When they rose against the Assad regime in
widespread rioting in 2004, their short-lived revolt
was met with disdain and even hostility from
potential allies in the Arab opposition.
They now find themselves on the margins of an
opposition movement dominated by the Muslim
Brotherhood and Arab nationalists, two tendencies
implacably opposed to recognizing Kurdish minority
rights.
Worse still, from the Kurdish perspective, the
Syrian opposition is being shepherded towards unity
by Turkey, a country with a long history of
repressing its own 14 million-strong Kurdish
minority.
“The U.S. outsourced the task to Turkey,” Michael
Weiss, a Syria expert and communications director at
the Henry Jackson Society told Rendezvous. “If the
unity conference were hosted by the U.S., the Kurds
would have been much happier.”
The main Kurdish opposition alliance — the Syrian
Kurdish National Council or KNC — has been pressing
for the past year for its Arab allies to recognize
the Kurdish people and their national identity in a
post-Assad constitution. If the Assad government
fell,www.ekurd.net
the Kurds would likely press for reparations for
past forced “Arabization” of Kurdish land.
But the current talks on unity have hardly been
felicitous. As recently as Monday night, Kurdish
delegates in Istanbul obtained a copy of a “national
pact,” penned by the Arab-dominated Syrian National
Council (SNC), which contained “no single word” on
the Kurds in Syria, according to a Kurdish activist
familiar with the document.
Recent efforts by the U.S. and others to cajole the
SNC into embracing the Kurds may have come too late,
as President Assad seeks to re-impose his control.
The Kurds have at least one loyal ally — the
leadership of Iraqi Kurdistan, the most peaceful and
prosperous region of post-Saddam Iraq. Masoud
Barzani, president of the region, has acted as the
godfather of the KNC in Syria.
It is a partnership with a downside: the prospect of
an alliance between an influential Iraqi Kurdistan
and a possible autonomous Kurdish zone in Syria only
serves to heighten Turkish fear about the unsettling
effect it might have on its own Kurdish population.
As Syria’s Kurds debate their next move, they face
divisions within their own ranks — the curse of
Kurdish politics throughout the ages.
The Assad regime appears to have renewed its links
with the cultish Kurdish Workers’ Party, the PKK,
and is accused of employing a local offshoot of the
PKK to crack down on other Kurds.
Although it proclaims itself to be a pan-Kurdish
movement, the PKK is essentially a Turkish-oriented
movement that Damascus has in the past used as a
cat’s paw in its relations with Ankara.
A number of moderate Kurdish leaders have been
assassinated since the PKK affiliate attacked Kurds
demonstrating against the Damascus regime.
There is no mystery in why the regime seeks to
divide the Kurds, according to Heyam Aqil, London
representative of the Kurdish Democratic Party in
Syria that is prominent in the KNC. “Assad knows the
Kurds are well-organized,” she told Rendezvous. “If
the SNC allied with the Kurds, other minorities
would join.”
The Kurds and their supporters claim it would be a
tragedy if they were cut out of the Syrian equation.
They say the Syrian Kurds are predominantly secular,
western-oriented and embrace a pluralistic vision
for a “new” Syria, in contrast to some other
opponents of the Assad regime.
Just the kind of people who deserve support, you
might think.
Editor’s Note: Harvey Morris is (in addition to be
terribly British about some things) the co-author of
“No Friends but the Mountains: The Tragic History of
the Kurds.”
Copyright ©, respective
author or news agency,
rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the
content of news information on this page
|
|
|
®
