BEIRUT, 11 April 2004 — Syrian Kurds accused authorities yesterday of arbitrarily arresting hundreds from their community and torturing some of them to death since a bout of unrest died down last month.
“The campaign of arrests and raids is continuing in all the Kurdish areas as well as in Aleppo and Damascus,” Syrian Kurdish parties said in a joint statement. “This campaign has in the past two days resulted in the arrest of hundreds of Kurdish citizens, including women and schoolchildren no more than 15 years old, all of whom were and remain subjected to savage torture.”
Syrian officials were not immediately available for comment. About 30 people were killed in unprecedented clashes between Syrian Kurds and police in March after a soccer match brawl in the northern town of Kameshli escalated.
Kurdish activists said on March 19 that authorities had freed 500 to 600 Kurds detained in the wave of unrest, but said there could be up to 2,000 more still in detention. The state, which has accused unspecified foreigners of stirring violence to shake Syria’s security, has not released its own figures.
The Syrian Kurdish parties said two Kurdish men, identified as Hussein Naaso and Ferhad Ali, had died this week as a result of torture in detention, while another man was in a coma. “We condemn this racist policy against our people and urge authorities to cease the campaign of arbitrary arrests and free all of the detainees,” the statement said.
Rights group Amnesty International this week urged Syria to make known the whereabouts of Kurds detained in the clashes. Kurds make up about two million of Syria’s mainly Arab 17 million population. They have often demanded rights to teach their language and citizenship for some 200,000 stateless Kurds.
Meanwhile, as much of Iraq marked the anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s fall with fighting and bloodshed, Kurds in the relatively stable northern Iraq celebrated with parties and the melting of an ice statue of the ousted dictator.
In the mountains north of Arbil, hundreds of people held a carnival to cheer the fall of a regime that oppressed Iraq’s Kurdish minority, in stark contrast to large parts of the country further south where insurgents battled foreign troops. “Those people who are fighting now don’t like freedom for Iraq. We are celebrating this day,” said the mayor of Choman, Abdullah Wahid.
“The coalition is now wondering again who is with them and who is against. This carnival is our opinion.” The people of the Choman town sculpted a huge statue of Saddam out of ice taken from the nearby mountains where peshmerga militias once fought Saddam’s armies, then melted it.
They danced and picnicked, happy with the relative safety that Iraq’s northern Kurdistan enjoys. “We like the coalition here because they supported us in crushing Saddam,” said Borjan Muhammad, 17, a college student.
