Strains in Syria
3/22/2004
RECENT DEADLY clashes in Syria between Kurds and the Ba'athist regime's security forces are not merely a curious exception to the rule of totalitarian tranquillity that normally prevails in that country. Insofar as these eruptions of disorder come in response to the prospect of Kurdish autonomy in a pluralist Iraq, demonstrating the unchanging penchant of the region's autocracies to deny minorities' rights, Syria may be experiencing the warning tremors of a political earthquake.
The disparate ruling groups in Syria, Turkey, and Iran all feel threatened by stirrings of Kurdish assertiveness in Iraq. The killing of more than 30 Kurds in confrontations with Syrian police over the past week -- the outcome of swiftly repressed Kurdish protests in Syrian towns and cities -- does not compare in scale with the killing and ethnic cleansing of Kurds in Saddam Hussein's Iraq or in neighboring Turkey. Nevertheless, the underlying pathology behind those crimes against humanity was also on display in the behavior of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.
The violent measures taken against Kurds in Damascus and Aleppo who dared to protest earlier killings of Kurds in predominantly Kurdish towns along Syria's northern border with Turkey reflect the Assad regime's intolerance of free speech and political pluralism. But something else is also revealed in the response of the Syrian Ba'athists.
Like their counterparts in Turkey and Iran, Syria's rulers appear panicked by the precedent of 4 million Iraqi Kurds being guaranteed a high degree of cultural and political autonomy in an interim Iraqi constitution. The very idea that this constitution would enshrine the Kurdish language along with Arabic as one of two official tongues for the new Iraq represents an intolerable threat to the Ba'athists of Syria. They use an Arab nationalist ideology to justify their unbending denial of any separate Kurdish identity.
Indeed, the current killing spree began at a soccer match March 12 in the northern town of Qameshli between a Syrian Arab team, al-Fatwa, and a predominantly Kurdish team, al-Jihad.
Arab fans of al-Fatwa taunted Kurds by holding up portraits of Saddam Hussein, who murdered more than a hundred thousand Kurds. Scuffles broke out. Police shot and killed six people. The police shot several mourning Kurds the next day at funerals that turned into riots. Then on Tuesday, when Kurds in the cities of Aleppo and Afreen sought to commemorate the 5,000 Kurds in the village of Halabja whom Saddam killed with poison gas in 1988, Syrian security forces opened fire again.
At issue is not only the status of Kurds in one country or another but a historic challenge to Arab, Turkish, and Iranian societies. They must learn to let minorities live among majorities without effacing their otherness.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
