suriye kürtleri üzerine bir analiz (ft)

Syria’s Kurds prepare for life after Assad

A single patrol car sits outside the new police station in the town of Girkilige in Syria’s oilproducing heartland, the lettering on its side freshly painted in the Kurdish language.
From the dilapidated three-roomed building, once a government-owned pumping station,
Rayzan Turkmani, a clean-cut young man toting a Kalashnikov rifle, heads a ragtag force of 140
local volunteers. He explains plans to open a training academy for recruits within the month.
“It’s an emergency situation, so we have to move fast,” he says. “We are working for autonomy,
and to manage ourselves ... We must be ready when the regime falls.”
Syria’s approximately 1.7m Kurds, nearly 10 per cent of the population, are the only group with
a history of organised opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime but while many towns have seen anti-government protests
during the 18-month uprising, they have refrained from joining the armed opposition.
As the uprising has evolved, however, the Kurds – largely concentrated in the country’s north-east, which
holds a significant portion of Syria’s limited but vital oil reserves – have been quietly preparing for a postAssad future, opening police stations, courts and local councils that they hope will form the foundations of
an autonomous region.
The proliferation of newly hung Kurdish flags and signs in the mother tongue in al-Hassaka province give
the impression of liberation after years of rule under the Ba’ath party, which expropriated land in Kurdish
areas, suppressed expressions of Kurdish identity and arrested thousands of Kurdish activists, especially
after riots shook the Kurdish areas in 2004 But the effort at self-governance is taking place while the regime troops maintain a presence in many of the region’s towns and cities,
appearing to turn a blind eye to what would have previously been an unthinkable threat to its power.
Mr Turkmani points to a building a few hundred metres away, where the two-starred Syrian state flag flutters overhead.
“Bashar’s police station,” he says. “They just play cards all day. They have nothing to do.”
The state’s inaction may be a strategic move to avoid opening up another front of conflict or, as many in the Syrian opposition say, could
be designed to invigorate the Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey in order to rattle Ankara as it funnels support to the rebel Free
Syrian Army.
Turkey, once a friend of the Assad regime but now one of its chief outside opponents, has expressed concerns that new institutions in the
region are dominated by the Democratic Union party (PYD), which is known for its close links to the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK).
The PKK is listed as a terrorist organisation by the EU and US, and its militants have stepped up their campaign in eastern Turkey in
recent months.
Tensions have been rising along the Turkish-Syrian border in recent weeks. On Tuesday a government official from the Turkish
province of Mardin said that Turkish troops had shot and killed two “terrorists” and wounded a third while returning fire on militants
who were attempting to enter the country.
Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group, told the French news agency, AFP, that the three
men were PYD members.
Portraits of Abdullah Ocalan, the incarcerated PKK leader, gaze down from the walls of newly opened local council buildings in Girkilige,
where citizens queue to sign up for handouts sent from Iraq or to seek arbitration in local disputes.
“He is a hero for all Kurds,” says Daham Ali, a committee member at the freshly opened Mala Gel, or People’s House, in the town of
Derik, which lies in the foothills of the mountains on the Turkish border, reeling off the names of Syrians who have died in the insurgency
against Turkey.
Rival parties say the group lacks significant support and accuse the PYD of working in collaboration with the Assad regime – a claim the
party denies.
“We cannot kiss the hand that kills us,” PYD leader Saleh Muslim Mohammed, says, adding that hundreds of the party’s members still
languish in regime jails.
But as fledgling institutions take root, the PYD’s political dominance is causing friction on the ground.
“Ocalan’s school works only in oppression and propaganda for the youth to take guns and fight,” said Mohammed Ismail, leader of the
Kurdish Democratic party. A picture of him meeting the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, who is backing some of the
Kurdish rivals to the PYD, sits on a shelf behind him. “Barzani has never used terrorism, never bombed a restaurant,” he says.
As Mr Ismail talks he receives a phone call, after which he says a young activist from his party has been detained by the PYD at a
demonstration.
“This happens – they take people, they disappear for a few days,” he says. “Maybe they release them, maybe they don’t.”
Opposing parties now hold separate demonstrations against the regime, and some express concern that friction might spill over into
conflict.
But in the meantime the PYD is the one that appears to be consolidating control.
At a party youth rally in Derik, the speaker rouses the crowd with a message from Mr Ocalan to the Syrian Kurds, which he says was
given to a lawyer on a recent prison visit.
“You must not be with Assad, you must not be with the opposition, you must be the third power in Syria,” he quotes Mr Ocalan as
saying. “You must prepare 15,000 soldiers to protect the Kurdish areas. If you don’t take this strategy you will be crushed ... Every
young Kurd must prepare themselves to join up and protect their motherland.”