Death threats intended to stop anti-Assad demonstrations in Kurdish region

Death threats are being made in an attempt to prevent the Kurdish population in northeastern Syria from rising up against dictator Bashar al-Assad. The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) in Göttingen learned on Monday from reliable Kurdish sources that in the Syrian city of Qamishl, where a majority of residents are Kurds, someone has been distributing flyers for days now containing threats against Kurdish dissidents. The flyers say that anyone who takes part in demonstrations against Assad will be killed. Apparently threats were also made in talks last Saturday between representatives of Kurdish organizations and some representatives of the Arab tribes who have lived in the area since 1975, who threatened that anyone calling for the overthrow of Assad would be shot. Rather than giving in to these intimidations, the Kurdish organizations plan to continue exercising their right to free speech.

Kurdish politicians assume that the threats originate from the Assad regime. In an attempt to divert attention from the nationwide protests against the government, Syrian rulers are trying to fuel ethnic hatred between Kurds and Arabs in the Al-Hasakeh province, where the population is made up of Kurds, Arabs and Christian Assyrian-Aramaeans and Armenians.

The "Arab belt" in this province, established in the early 1970s, extends 350 kilometers along the Turkish and Iraqi borders, and is ten to fifteen kilometers wide. All of the Kurds who had lived in this area were expropriated and driven out. Then the new settlement units were built, and families of Arab tribes from the middle valley of the Euphrates moved in. They were provided with a modern infrastructure, including a drinking water supply, schools and agriculture. This settlers were armed by the government and are still today supported by a security service. Each family was given 20 hectares of land (almost 50 acres). By 1975, a total of 177,915 acres of the most fertile agricultural areas had been taken from Kurds and given to the Arab families that had been resettled there.

The Kurdish population in Syria numbers at least two million people. In three regions on the Turkish border, Kurds are in the majority, and have been politically and culturally repressed for decades.