DAMASCUS, 4 May 2004 — A Syrian Kurdish leader said yesterday he was hopeful that President Bashar Assad would release the hundreds of Kurds jailed after deadly unrest in March.
Kurdish Progressive Democratic Party head Aziz Daoud, in a statement, also welcomed Bashar’s comments in an interview with Al-Jazeera television that the issue of Syrian nationality for the country’s Kurds was being resolved. The Kurdish community has long demanded the return of the identity cards which were confiscated from almost 200,000 Kurds in 1962.
Daoud said he hoped the president would now “intervene to secure the release of the hundreds of Kurds who were arrested during the painful events” that took place last March in northern Syria.
“The Kurds are Syrian citizens who live among us, and Kurdish nationalism forms part of the history of Syria,” Bashar said in an interview broadcast Saturday by Qatar’s satellite television Al-Jazeera. “The issue of nationality that has lasted 42 years will be resolved,” the president said.
Since the riots, Syrian Kurdish groups have complained authorities have continued with a crackdown, making hundreds of unfair arrests. Syria’s Kurds, estimated to total 1.5 million, represent around nine percent of the country’s population and live mainly in the north. Kurdish parties yesterday issued a statement condemning the “terrorist” attack which took place in Damascus on April 27 and called for the authorities to identify the perpetrators.
They also called for the perpetrators to be identified “so as to lift any ambiguity” over who carried out the attack in which four people — two gunmen, a police officer and woman passerby — were killed.
Bashar said in the interview that Damascus had been working on a solution to the issue of stateless Kurds when the riots and clashes took place. He said he was fulfilling a promise he made during a visit in 2002 to the northeastern province of Hassaka, home to most of Syria’s Kurds, to solve the problem created when a 1962 census failed to register the Kurds.
The Kurds consider they were stripped of citizenship while Damascus has viewed them as stateless. “We hope ... that the citizenship would be returned to Kurd citizens who have been deprived of their citizenship,” the Kurdish statement said.
As many as 27 Syrian Kurdish minors are being tried on multiple charges in connection with recent ethnic riots in the northeast, Kurdish parties said Sunday. “The juvenile court judge in Damascus has filed charges, including some criminal charges, against 27 Kurdish minors arrested on March 14,” the parties said.
It said the Kurds, whose ages were not given, are accused “of provoking trouble and attacking the image of the state, insulting the head of state, harming national sentiment, damaging state property and breaking car windows.”
