Syria: Maschal Tamo is alive!

Maschal Tamo, the Syrian Kurdish human rights activist and correspondent of the Society for Threatened Peoples GfbV), who disappeared ten days ago, has been seen in a court building in Damascus. A Syrian human rights organisation confirmed to the GfbV on Wednesday that the father of six children had been brought before an examining magistrate. There is at present no information as to what it is that the Syrian authorities are accusing him of. The GfbV called on the Syrian government urgently once again to release immediately the human rights activist and all Kurdish political prisoners.

Tamo was arrested in the early hours of 15th August 2008 in the town of Ain al-Arab in the north of Syria. His relatives were refused any information as to his whereabouts. Mishandling and torture in police custody are the order of the day in Syria.

Since the Syrian authorities had denied his arrest the GfbV was extremely worried about their correspondent, who is also spokesperson of the Kurdish Movement for the Future. He could have suffered the same fate as the Syrian Kurdish minister of religion Maschuk Al Khnzawi, who was found dead in May 2005 following his abduction some weeks before.

The GfbV had alarmed all EU or Western European embassies in Damascus and requested them to speak up for Tamo, and sent a written appeal to the Syrian President Al-Assad and his ministers of defence, justice and foreign affairs, that he should be set free. The GfbV had also sent a request for help to the German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and his French colleague, Bernard Kouchner. The speaker of the GfbV at the United Nations approached the representative of the Syrian Arab Republic in New York concerning Tamo’s release. This international publicity has presumably helped to produce a first sign of life of the Kurdish human rights activist from Syria.