A Basque journalist's diary from Kurdistan - FINAL PART
A Basque journalist's diary from Kurdistan - FINAL PART
Trying to erase them off the maps (7th August)
A railway at the edge of the desert. The wishes of the colonialism decided that one part of the Baghdad train would be on Turkish land. The other belonged to the French Protectorate, which later would become the Syrian Arab Republic. The railway linking Europe and Asia divides, at the same time, the land of the Kurds, condemning families to be next to each other but fully separated. The Kurds under Damascus rule are the most forgotten of all.
Hundreds of Kurds in the streets in the Asharfiya quarter in Aleppo. They have a new martyr. Many clashes broke down the previous night in North Kurdistan and one of the seven guerrillas dead comes from the neighborhood. There are about half million Kurds in the city, and they form the majority in neighborhoods like this. Local people demonstrated with pictures of the martyr and the leader Abdullah Ocalan and flags of the PKK. There have been no incidents.
In March, on the other hand, while thousands of people celebrated Newroz –the spring celebration of the Kurds and many other nations in Central Asia - , three were shot dead by the Police in the city of Raqqa. “There was just music and dance, but Damascus is much harder against local Kurds”, especially since the 2004 revolt. More than 30 Kurds were killed in the city of Qamishlo. “Syria always managed to have a double face: it is officially a socialist country but so corrupted that all high officials have so many business with western companies; at the same time that they supported pan-Arabism they never touch a single business in Syria” says a writer that we will call Reza in the city of Qamishlo. “They do the same with the Kurdish issue. While they once supported PKK, they were silencing local Kurds, now they are loyal allies of Turkey, to struggle Kurds alongside Iran”.
Unlike in Iraq, Iran and Turkey, the Syrian Kurdistan does not form a single compact region, but three areas separated by Arab lands: there are about one thousand villages in the East, in the Yazira region, bordering Iraq and Turkey; around three hundred in the mountain area of Kurd Dagh, to the northwest of Aleppo. Kobani is in the middle, but we will try in vain to find it on the maps: it was renamed as Ain al Arab, as they did with hundreds of Kurdish villages: “My village is Metina, derivates from the Metin tribe, but the government changed it to Doha; what was the danger of the name of the village?” says Abu Aziz, a historic leftist leader in his home near Efrin. Circassian, Armenian or Assyrian minorities have been able to live in Syria without too many problems, Christianity is practiced peacefully, Armenians have schools. But Kurds, even without official statistics, form a too dangerous number for a state that calls itself “Arab”: there might be between two and three million Kurds, from 12 to 20 % of the population, depending on the sources. “Imagine the 60’s: Turkey has taken Iskenderum, they have lost Golan Heights, the union of Egypt and Syria has failed and they were afraid that one day Kurds could get more strength and join Turkey”, says Abu Aziz. It was the cold war era; out of fear of Kurds’ demography, “an Arab belt was built. Kurds were expelled and Arabs brought in their place, in order to create buffer zones that would impede Kurds’ unity”.
Neither land nor name
As if taking lands wasn’t enough, thousands of Kurds were also stripped off their identity. Jamil is a student at Aleppo University, but he doesn’t “exist” officially. He finished his career with his fellow students, and he has not got any document. He is one of the 300,000 ajanib (foreigner) or maktoumeen (mute). Their drama started in the 1962 census: thousands of Kurds were deleted from the list, for being of foreign origin, in order to deepen the Arabisation. “Just a few were descendants of exiled from Turkey, but most of us have always been living here. But neither we nor our parents or our descendants have no right”. No vote, no travel, nor official work. They study, but can’t get any document. His fellow student Ismail has papers, “Jamil’s situation is worst of all, but most Syrians think that we Kurds are not from here. At the university, even students of the opposition tell us that we are originally from Turkey. And you have to tell them yes, because you know that otherwise they will go to the secret services”.
The Syrian regime managed to spread the fear to the neighbor. “I have two or three trustworthy friends, when we meet, we speak freely against the government, but if one or two more join us, we always keep silent, even if we know them from long ago”. This system of denouncing neighbors has infiltrated in Kurdish communities, too. “I know that the secret services will interrogate me for hosting you. I hope it will not go further, or we will have to buy the officials”. Corruption is also another of the marks of Syria. The secret service agent forced our taxi driver to pay him in front of us. Just one hundred pounds, one and a half euro, and we carried on our way.
Consequences of 2004
Corruption is not unlimited however; tens of Kurds have been arrested in recent weeks, accused of being members of some Kurdish party acting in Syria. The situation has worsened these last years: until 1999, even if many Kurds were not accepted, the PKK had its headquarters in Syria. Turkey succeeded in forcing Syria to expel Abdullah Ocalan and recently, Damascus has become a loyal alley of Ankara. After the death of Hafez el Assad, his son Bashar became president and the regime was softened. But it didn’t last long. After the 9-11 attacks in New York, the country was accused of being in the Axis of Evil. The invasion of Iraq made Damascus even more nervous. The situation exploded in March 2004, after Newroz. Football fans of the Arabic city of Deir ez Zur went to Qamishlo singing songs for Saddam Hussein and against Kurds. Seven Kurds were killed that day. During the protests that followed in the coming days, policemen shot against demonstrators and tens more lost their lives. Since then, the situation of the Kurds is Syria has become much worse. The last measure was the 49th decree. It was signed in September 2008 by the president Bashar al Assad. Arguing state security, the decree has imposed new and very strict rules to own lands in border areas. And Kurds live in border areas. “Their will is to take lands from Kurdish farmers, expel us from our territory and give it to the Arabs. I cannot sell or give my land to my brother, I must sell it to the Arab”, says Omer near Efrin. “They have succeeded in making Arabs believe that we came from outside, but go wherever you want in Kurd Dagh, you will find traces of Christians’ churches, there is a Kurdish Alevi village, there are Yezidi Kurds, there are Sunni Muslim Kurds, but no Arabs. How can they say that we are not from here?”
Stories of exclusion (8th August)
The road goes parallel to the railway in North Kurdistan. For years Kurds from both sides spoke shouting to each other. Nusaybin belongs to Turkey, Qamishlo to Syria. They are face to face; both have a forbidden language, both have opposed assimilation. After a few meters, Ataturk's pictures are replaced by those of Bashar al-Assad, instead of Latin alphabet the writing is Arabic, and no Turkish in heard in the streets. Arabs’ assimilation policies were less successful than Turks’ and here, in the multiethnic Qamishlo, practically everyone, Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds of course, speak Kurdish. “If things have changed since 2004? Look, what happened a few days ago: five friends went to a dam four hours from here. We five like fishing, we took all our tools. When we arrived, the Police stopped us, they saw we were from Qamishlo and sent us back, arguing we were five and therefore it was a political meeting”. The anecdote of Reza and his fisher friends is just a small example of the exclusion of Kurds. “We denied, we said we were going to fish and we hadn’t committed any crime. But they told us they would arrest us. At the end I showed my journalist card, I told them I worked for a regime shitty newspaper and they allow us to leave back home. But no fishing”. “It all comes from that tragedy of 2004”. Iraq is not far and an autonomous Kurdistan has become a dream, a mirror of millions of Kurds. Arabs, on the other hand, were angry because in that bloodshed of Iraq Kurds were for the first time sovereign. Reza remembers well the Intifada of the Kurds of Syria, which left more than 30 dead in March 2004. “After the first killings in the football stadium, I joined the next demonstration and I saw how the police opened the door of the car and started the burst of gunfire”. Since then there have been frequent riots, and the state has tightened its policy against Kurds. “Their aim is to spread the fear, they hate us, and they hate Iraq. They want to let clear what we will have if we keep on looking at the autonomous Kurdistan”. Reza is writer, and considers that the regime achieved its goal: “USA has made many mistakes, but the regime has been able to survive. And now they tell us clear: look at the bloodshed of Iraq, this is democracy, is it what you want?” The rule of Bashar Al-Assad would, this way, manage to spread a culture of fear: “around forty families live in this street, I am sure that fifteen or so pass informs to the government. For money, out of fear, willingly, whatever, but they collaborate, and they help spread the paranoia and the suspicion of the neighbor.
Arrests
In the other part of the country inhabited by Kurds, around Aleppo, our driver has a similar story: “we are about seven hundred drivers, among them around fifty collaborators of the government. If two Kurdish drivers meet to help each other, they will come threatening shouting that we are making a meeting”.
As we approach to Efrin, the biggest Kurdish town in the area, the driver points a detail: “Do you see those houses painted in white? The government told Arabs to paint houses in this colour, so that they could see who lives where”. Three members of the Yekiti party will be on trial in October. A week later two more men from Efrin were arrested: Ahmed Mohamed Ali Qalij and Mustafa Mohammed Shekho, members of the Democratic Convergence of Kurdistan. Nevertheless, Kurds still form the majority in and around Efrin. A law of 2008 bans the ownership of lands in border areas, since a great part of the borderland is Kurdish. In Yazira, too –capital, Qamishlo- there is a Kurdish majority. Apart of this law, these last days farmer in Deyrik denounced the threats they suffered from secret service officials to force them sell lands: “they told us they would accuse us of being PYD (Party of the Democratic Union, related to PKK) members. Reza admits that, in comparison with the Kurds from Iraq, Turkey and Iran, Kurds from Syria are badly organized. “There are 13 political parties, but, speaking clearly, about half of them are with PKK and the rest with the other parties, which we call feudalist”. The writer joined the PKK, and still supports it. “Thanks to the PKK, the mentality has changed. Before, only rich people were interested in politics, it wasn’t a matter of the poor, only the heads of the tribes took part in politics, like in Iraq”. Reza also point the big change that it has meant for women: “this second change has been probably the most important. It gave them a pride, even if they were illiterate, women took their word, and many went to the mountain. When I was active guerrilla, we were around 10 men, and a woman was commanding us”.
The writer whose real name we cannot give shows us a picture with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in Berlin. Like his poem to the soldiers that shoots to the children, Reza wrote to the Turkish soldier that took a picture holding two head of dead guerrillas. “I read that poem in Amed, it was full of symbolism and power, and I told to the soldier that he had two hands and two eyes, to see his beloved, to touch her, the same hands that held those heads. Some would prefer that I wrote something harder, it I directly called him bastard. But I find more important to call to the humanity point of the enemy”.
Arab belt
Riza admits the desperation of many Kurds, the lack of organization and fight of other Kurds as a result of the fear for the secret services. «Here there are no mountains, there is no guerrilla, but the proper use of the word also damages them. But even for this, people are frightened, look how many people were imprisoned, and it seems that nobody cares».
The worst situation, however, comes from the Arab belt. It was created in 1962, taking lands from Kurds to give to Arabs, 300,000 citizens have no rights, they are foreigners at home, without any right to work or travel.
At the bus and taxi station of Aleppo an Arab-German couple has come. She is married to a Bedouin; they live right on the border. She doesn’t know about the Arab belt, she only knows that her husband family “came in search of better lands”, no one told her that these lands had an owner. But she soon realized of the big difference from a Kurdish town to an Arab one: “you wouldn’t believe how they live, without electricity, sometimes even without water”. My friend and colleague Karlos Zurutuza wrote two years ago: “if there are no electric poles, it means a Kurdish village”. But Zurutuza’s brilliant word didn’t have too much echo, not even in the traditional leftist websites in Spanish: it is OK to write about Kurds from Turkey, Iran or Iraq, but not Syria. Pan-Arabist lobbies still have long arms in the seas of internationalism.
I travel with the German girl to the border: “even in those conditions, they keep their language and their way of live, they don’t resign. There are even villages where no Arabic is spoken, or very badly. The state imposes them a teacher but they don’t pay attention. These Kurds are hard people, hard people”.
A railway at the edge of the desert. The wishes of the colonialism decided that one part of the Baghdad train would be on Turkish land. The other belonged to the French Protectorate, which later would become the Syrian Arab Republic. The railway linking Europe and Asia divides, at the same time, the land of the Kurds, condemning families to be next to each other but fully separated. The Kurds under Damascus rule are the most forgotten of all.
Hundreds of Kurds in the streets in the Asharfiya quarter in Aleppo. They have a new martyr. Many clashes broke down the previous night in North Kurdistan and one of the seven guerrillas dead comes from the neighborhood. There are about half million Kurds in the city, and they form the majority in neighborhoods like this. Local people demonstrated with pictures of the martyr and the leader Abdullah Ocalan and flags of the PKK. There have been no incidents.
In March, on the other hand, while thousands of people celebrated Newroz –the spring celebration of the Kurds and many other nations in Central Asia - , three were shot dead by the Police in the city of Raqqa. “There was just music and dance, but Damascus is much harder against local Kurds”, especially since the 2004 revolt. More than 30 Kurds were killed in the city of Qamishlo. “Syria always managed to have a double face: it is officially a socialist country but so corrupted that all high officials have so many business with western companies; at the same time that they supported pan-Arabism they never touch a single business in Syria” says a writer that we will call Reza in the city of Qamishlo. “They do the same with the Kurdish issue. While they once supported PKK, they were silencing local Kurds, now they are loyal allies of Turkey, to struggle Kurds alongside Iran”.
Unlike in Iraq, Iran and Turkey, the Syrian Kurdistan does not form a single compact region, but three areas separated by Arab lands: there are about one thousand villages in the East, in the Yazira region, bordering Iraq and Turkey; around three hundred in the mountain area of Kurd Dagh, to the northwest of Aleppo. Kobani is in the middle, but we will try in vain to find it on the maps: it was renamed as Ain al Arab, as they did with hundreds of Kurdish villages: “My village is Metina, derivates from the Metin tribe, but the government changed it to Doha; what was the danger of the name of the village?” says Abu Aziz, a historic leftist leader in his home near Efrin. Circassian, Armenian or Assyrian minorities have been able to live in Syria without too many problems, Christianity is practiced peacefully, Armenians have schools. But Kurds, even without official statistics, form a too dangerous number for a state that calls itself “Arab”: there might be between two and three million Kurds, from 12 to 20 % of the population, depending on the sources. “Imagine the 60’s: Turkey has taken Iskenderum, they have lost Golan Heights, the union of Egypt and Syria has failed and they were afraid that one day Kurds could get more strength and join Turkey”, says Abu Aziz. It was the cold war era; out of fear of Kurds’ demography, “an Arab belt was built. Kurds were expelled and Arabs brought in their place, in order to create buffer zones that would impede Kurds’ unity”.
Neither land nor name
As if taking lands wasn’t enough, thousands of Kurds were also stripped off their identity. Jamil is a student at Aleppo University, but he doesn’t “exist” officially. He finished his career with his fellow students, and he has not got any document. He is one of the 300,000 ajanib (foreigner) or maktoumeen (mute). Their drama started in the 1962 census: thousands of Kurds were deleted from the list, for being of foreign origin, in order to deepen the Arabisation. “Just a few were descendants of exiled from Turkey, but most of us have always been living here. But neither we nor our parents or our descendants have no right”. No vote, no travel, nor official work. They study, but can’t get any document. His fellow student Ismail has papers, “Jamil’s situation is worst of all, but most Syrians think that we Kurds are not from here. At the university, even students of the opposition tell us that we are originally from Turkey. And you have to tell them yes, because you know that otherwise they will go to the secret services”.
The Syrian regime managed to spread the fear to the neighbor. “I have two or three trustworthy friends, when we meet, we speak freely against the government, but if one or two more join us, we always keep silent, even if we know them from long ago”. This system of denouncing neighbors has infiltrated in Kurdish communities, too. “I know that the secret services will interrogate me for hosting you. I hope it will not go further, or we will have to buy the officials”. Corruption is also another of the marks of Syria. The secret service agent forced our taxi driver to pay him in front of us. Just one hundred pounds, one and a half euro, and we carried on our way.
Consequences of 2004
Corruption is not unlimited however; tens of Kurds have been arrested in recent weeks, accused of being members of some Kurdish party acting in Syria. The situation has worsened these last years: until 1999, even if many Kurds were not accepted, the PKK had its headquarters in Syria. Turkey succeeded in forcing Syria to expel Abdullah Ocalan and recently, Damascus has become a loyal alley of Ankara. After the death of Hafez el Assad, his son Bashar became president and the regime was softened. But it didn’t last long. After the 9-11 attacks in New York, the country was accused of being in the Axis of Evil. The invasion of Iraq made Damascus even more nervous. The situation exploded in March 2004, after Newroz. Football fans of the Arabic city of Deir ez Zur went to Qamishlo singing songs for Saddam Hussein and against Kurds. Seven Kurds were killed that day. During the protests that followed in the coming days, policemen shot against demonstrators and tens more lost their lives. Since then, the situation of the Kurds is Syria has become much worse. The last measure was the 49th decree. It was signed in September 2008 by the president Bashar al Assad. Arguing state security, the decree has imposed new and very strict rules to own lands in border areas. And Kurds live in border areas. “Their will is to take lands from Kurdish farmers, expel us from our territory and give it to the Arabs. I cannot sell or give my land to my brother, I must sell it to the Arab”, says Omer near Efrin. “They have succeeded in making Arabs believe that we came from outside, but go wherever you want in Kurd Dagh, you will find traces of Christians’ churches, there is a Kurdish Alevi village, there are Yezidi Kurds, there are Sunni Muslim Kurds, but no Arabs. How can they say that we are not from here?”
Stories of exclusion (8th August)
The road goes parallel to the railway in North Kurdistan. For years Kurds from both sides spoke shouting to each other. Nusaybin belongs to Turkey, Qamishlo to Syria. They are face to face; both have a forbidden language, both have opposed assimilation. After a few meters, Ataturk's pictures are replaced by those of Bashar al-Assad, instead of Latin alphabet the writing is Arabic, and no Turkish in heard in the streets. Arabs’ assimilation policies were less successful than Turks’ and here, in the multiethnic Qamishlo, practically everyone, Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds of course, speak Kurdish. “If things have changed since 2004? Look, what happened a few days ago: five friends went to a dam four hours from here. We five like fishing, we took all our tools. When we arrived, the Police stopped us, they saw we were from Qamishlo and sent us back, arguing we were five and therefore it was a political meeting”. The anecdote of Reza and his fisher friends is just a small example of the exclusion of Kurds. “We denied, we said we were going to fish and we hadn’t committed any crime. But they told us they would arrest us. At the end I showed my journalist card, I told them I worked for a regime shitty newspaper and they allow us to leave back home. But no fishing”. “It all comes from that tragedy of 2004”. Iraq is not far and an autonomous Kurdistan has become a dream, a mirror of millions of Kurds. Arabs, on the other hand, were angry because in that bloodshed of Iraq Kurds were for the first time sovereign. Reza remembers well the Intifada of the Kurds of Syria, which left more than 30 dead in March 2004. “After the first killings in the football stadium, I joined the next demonstration and I saw how the police opened the door of the car and started the burst of gunfire”. Since then there have been frequent riots, and the state has tightened its policy against Kurds. “Their aim is to spread the fear, they hate us, and they hate Iraq. They want to let clear what we will have if we keep on looking at the autonomous Kurdistan”. Reza is writer, and considers that the regime achieved its goal: “USA has made many mistakes, but the regime has been able to survive. And now they tell us clear: look at the bloodshed of Iraq, this is democracy, is it what you want?” The rule of Bashar Al-Assad would, this way, manage to spread a culture of fear: “around forty families live in this street, I am sure that fifteen or so pass informs to the government. For money, out of fear, willingly, whatever, but they collaborate, and they help spread the paranoia and the suspicion of the neighbor.
Arrests
In the other part of the country inhabited by Kurds, around Aleppo, our driver has a similar story: “we are about seven hundred drivers, among them around fifty collaborators of the government. If two Kurdish drivers meet to help each other, they will come threatening shouting that we are making a meeting”.
As we approach to Efrin, the biggest Kurdish town in the area, the driver points a detail: “Do you see those houses painted in white? The government told Arabs to paint houses in this colour, so that they could see who lives where”. Three members of the Yekiti party will be on trial in October. A week later two more men from Efrin were arrested: Ahmed Mohamed Ali Qalij and Mustafa Mohammed Shekho, members of the Democratic Convergence of Kurdistan. Nevertheless, Kurds still form the majority in and around Efrin. A law of 2008 bans the ownership of lands in border areas, since a great part of the borderland is Kurdish. In Yazira, too –capital, Qamishlo- there is a Kurdish majority. Apart of this law, these last days farmer in Deyrik denounced the threats they suffered from secret service officials to force them sell lands: “they told us they would accuse us of being PYD (Party of the Democratic Union, related to PKK) members. Reza admits that, in comparison with the Kurds from Iraq, Turkey and Iran, Kurds from Syria are badly organized. “There are 13 political parties, but, speaking clearly, about half of them are with PKK and the rest with the other parties, which we call feudalist”. The writer joined the PKK, and still supports it. “Thanks to the PKK, the mentality has changed. Before, only rich people were interested in politics, it wasn’t a matter of the poor, only the heads of the tribes took part in politics, like in Iraq”. Reza also point the big change that it has meant for women: “this second change has been probably the most important. It gave them a pride, even if they were illiterate, women took their word, and many went to the mountain. When I was active guerrilla, we were around 10 men, and a woman was commanding us”.
The writer whose real name we cannot give shows us a picture with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in Berlin. Like his poem to the soldiers that shoots to the children, Reza wrote to the Turkish soldier that took a picture holding two head of dead guerrillas. “I read that poem in Amed, it was full of symbolism and power, and I told to the soldier that he had two hands and two eyes, to see his beloved, to touch her, the same hands that held those heads. Some would prefer that I wrote something harder, it I directly called him bastard. But I find more important to call to the humanity point of the enemy”.
Arab belt
Riza admits the desperation of many Kurds, the lack of organization and fight of other Kurds as a result of the fear for the secret services. «Here there are no mountains, there is no guerrilla, but the proper use of the word also damages them. But even for this, people are frightened, look how many people were imprisoned, and it seems that nobody cares».
The worst situation, however, comes from the Arab belt. It was created in 1962, taking lands from Kurds to give to Arabs, 300,000 citizens have no rights, they are foreigners at home, without any right to work or travel.
At the bus and taxi station of Aleppo an Arab-German couple has come. She is married to a Bedouin; they live right on the border. She doesn’t know about the Arab belt, she only knows that her husband family “came in search of better lands”, no one told her that these lands had an owner. But she soon realized of the big difference from a Kurdish town to an Arab one: “you wouldn’t believe how they live, without electricity, sometimes even without water”. My friend and colleague Karlos Zurutuza wrote two years ago: “if there are no electric poles, it means a Kurdish village”. But Zurutuza’s brilliant word didn’t have too much echo, not even in the traditional leftist websites in Spanish: it is OK to write about Kurds from Turkey, Iran or Iraq, but not Syria. Pan-Arabist lobbies still have long arms in the seas of internationalism.
I travel with the German girl to the border: “even in those conditions, they keep their language and their way of live, they don’t resign. There are even villages where no Arabic is spoken, or very badly. The state imposes them a teacher but they don’t pay attention. These Kurds are hard people, hard people”.
