I
exist, said the Kurdish dragon
By Naila Bozo
There
was a dead town in Syria. The tombstone read ”Qamişlo”
and on the grave lay red, yellow and green plastic roses. My knees are still
hurting because I often kneeled down by the grave and begged the town to come
back to life. Sometimes I threw myself on it to prevent the dazed youth from
joining their parents in the soil. They merely looked at me pitiyingly and
pushed me away. They had good reason to do so because what human is alive if he
does not exist?
A
Fatal Census
Kime ez?
asked Cegerxwîn (1903 - 1984), a celebrated Kurdish poet. Who am I? Nobody, the
Syrian government answered, you do not exist.
In
August 1962 the Syrian government ordered a census in the province of Hasakeh
which was carried out in October 1962. The province is situated in the northern
parts of Syria and mostly inhabited by Kurds seeing as this area is the western
part of Kurdistan that was divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria as a
consequence of the Lausanne Treaty in 1923.
The
census was fatal for the Kurds as it resulted in 120.000 Kurds loosing their
Syrian citizenship and thus their rights. The number of stateless Kurds has
according to Human Rights Watch since then only continued to grow to a number
of 300.000 because children of the stateless, born and raised in Syria, have
not been given citizenship either.
In April
2011 the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad said he would grant the Kurds
citizenship. This did not cause much joy for two reasons. First, only
registered Kurds would be given official identity papers while non-registered
would remain stateless. Second, it was a poor way to keep the Kurds, who
consitute 10 - 15 % of the Syrian population, from joining the anti-regime
protests that had begun only weeks earlier.
You Deserved To Be Gassed!
They say
the uprising started in Damascus, March 2011. No, it started in Qamişlo,
March 2004. A report from KurdWatch that gathers information about violation of
human rights against Kurds within the Syrian borders closely describes what
happened on March 12, 2004.
A football match was to be played at
the stadium in Qamişlo. The team al-Futuwah was an Arabic team from Deir ez Zor
and the other team, al-Jihad, was from Qamişlo. According to the Danish Refugee
Council quoted in the report, an eyewitness said that the supporters of
al-Futuwah had not been checked by security before entering the stadium and
that they brought weapon in the form of knives, sticks and stones with them.
A journalist sitting in the press box
observed that the supporters of al-Futuwah prior to the game had kept shouting:
"Fallujah, Fallujah!" after which they started attacking the other
team's supporters with the sticks and stones they had brought with them.
According to the report, "Fallujah" was a way for the supporters of
al-Futuwah to show their support to Saddam Hussein, one of the worst oppressors
in the history of Kurds, who in 1988 ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town
Halabja which killed more than 5.000 people and injured more than 10.000.
While the attack took place, three
young men came to the press box and asked another journalist, who was to
comment on the match on radio, if he would announce that three children had
been killed during the attack. The news spread and people from the nearest
towns came to the stadium in such large numbers that the journalist described
the stadium as being besieged. But the death of the three children soon proved
wrong and people both inside and outside the stadium grew calm.
The peace did not last long as people
soon began to throw with rocks and the police, military and intelligence
service arrived to the stadium.
The report remarks that the security
made a mistake by shooting into the air and thus frightening people; they
should have instead tried dissolving the growing angry crowd with other measures.
The first mentioned journalist said according to the report that supporters of
al-Futuwah called out to the Kurds: "Saddam Hussein treated you they way
you deserve to be treated!"
At this point the security people stepped
in and split up the two groups. The Kurds were told to leave while al-Futuwah
supporters remained inside the stadium.
According to eyewitnesses the security
consisting of the police, military and intelligence shot and even killed Kurds
who protested al- Futuwahs discriminating heckling by saying "Long live
Kurdistan." A witness said that security was being untruthful when it
later claimed that the Kurds were shooting back: "Even the government have
not stated this."
9 people died on the 12th of March 2004.
The Kurdish parties made an agreement with the government; if they were allowed
to bury their murdered Kurds without the involvement of the police, they would
make sure to keep the funeral procession under control. A journalist described
the procession joined by tens of thousands of people as being quiet. Kurds
waved the Kurdish flag, a few cried out in anger at Bashar al-Assad and others
threw rocks at a statue of Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, a man so feared and
infamous that before one did not even dare point their fingers at pictures of
him. But other Kurds stopped them from throwing stones and the mourners
continued walking towards the city hall.
At some point during the march one
could hear shots from a military base nearby. Nothing happened and the
procession continued. The journalist who had walked with the mourners left them
to visit a lawyer whose office had a view over the square where the march had
passed through. He was standing near the window when a car drove by. The car
was open in the back and 7-8 men were sitting facing the square with their
machine guns. They drove up to the few mourners at the back of the funeral
procession and shot them. That day 23 people died.
The word
about the killings spread and soon hell broke loose. People in the Kurdish
towns set public buildings on fire while large demonstrations were held abroad
in solidarity with the Kurds and support of the much anticipated uprising
against al-Assad.
According
to the report sources say that the Kurdish TV-channel ROJ TV, broadcasting from
Denmark, was an important factor in mobilising the Kurds and gathering them at
demonstrations in dimensions never seen before in West Kurdistan. The
government's crack down on the protests was brutal, and the Kurdish voice was
once again brought to silence.
A Kurdish Dragon
Ketin xewê, ketin xewê, ketin xewa zilm
û zorê, ketin xewa bindestiyê. They have been lulled into a deep sleep by the
oppressor, Cegerxwîn said about the Kurds.
In the time after the uprising no one dared say a word about al-Assad.
Many families had either lost a son to death or to the security service who usually
came early in the morning and took the young Kurdish men away. My friend, who
had only been out to buy bread on March 12, was brought home to his mom alive
after one month in a jail in Damascus, tortured and with his teeth missing.
The
grief of Kurds was deeper than the wells in their garden, it was a grief that
paralysed the town and rest of West Kurdistan. Qamişlo
was dead because its sons were dead. The Kurdish mothers tore their hair and
ripped their clothes apart, the Kurdish fathers rocked back and forth with
tears dripping down on the palms of their hands and the Kurdish sisters and
brothers sat side by side, numb and with their heads falling first against
their chest, then the wall.
The windows of Qamişlo are barred. The
bars are shaped as flowers, fountains and sunrises but it does not change the
fact that the town is a prison. The question is how can dead people tear off
the window bars and demand freedom?
I was sitting in a livingroom in Qamişlo
in January 2011, only weeks before the uprising in Syria began, and watching
the people in Tunis overthrow Ben Ali. I once again asked the elder Kurds what
this meant to them and what they would do. Nothing, they answered, never will
we rise against al-Assad. I asked the young Kurds what they would do. They did
not answer but I could see a fire in them I had never seen before.
Belê em in ejdehayê, ji xewa dili,
siyar bûn niha, Cegerxwîn
writes. The sleep of the Kurds will not last forever; the Kurdish people is a
dragon that will awaken, ready to fight all injustice done to it.
The dragon
is my generation, the dragon are the young men and women. Their sleep is not as
deep as the sleep of their parents.
They are
alive. They are Kurdistan.
