Promising Developments - Kurds to get Citizenship

A number of new and promising developments have taken place in the last several days.

Syria has promised to withdraw all its forces from Lebanon by 30 April and will let a United Nations team verify the pullout.

UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara had told him "all Syrian troops, military assets and the intelligence apparatus will have been withdrawn fully and completely ... by 30 April 2005".

Speaking to Aljazeera by phone from Beirut, Lebanese opposition member of parliament Faris Buwayz said: "This step was expected and it has been heartily received in Lebanon.

"It will speed up the withdrawal and the measures required to transform Lebanon into an independent, sovereign and democratic state."

The president announced that the Regional Baath Party Congress would be held at the end of May or in early June. Many of the reformers here have gotten their hopes up again and believe that he will be introducing some important changes to the Baath constitution. Of course, we don’t yet know what they will be. Everyone is talking about it though. Here is what one of my Syrian readers wrote from Canada about what he is hearing:

In the last 4-5 days, we have gotten literally a flood of articles, quoting very high level sources about the VERY BIG changes that are coming in the next baath party conference. It has been practically confirmed that they are going to:

Empty all the prisons,

Allow private and free political daily newspapers and private tv stations,

Form the new political parties law,

They have also confirmed return of all syrian exiles (numbered in tens of thousands),

The return of passports to the kurds in the next few days....

Now you can say it's all talk, but it can't be because I have read confirmations of these things by literally about 30 different articles in the arab press from very high level sources quoted...one top official said it was gonna be the biggest change syria has seen in last 50 years, and another said Bashar is going to lead a "jasmine revolution" (you know that's what damascus is known for).

It's almost impossible to contain the excitement I feel, especially as i'm about to graduate next year from university (i'm in canada) and i'm dreaming of coming back to syria to work one day.....and thus can't wait to see you post all the discussions you had with your contacts on the syrian coast as that would tell if i am getting 2 happy for nothing, or if there is substance behind what I am reading.

Although, I have heard some of these suggestions and there does seem to be a recent wave of excitement due to the announcement that the Party Congress is going to be held soon, there is still much skepticism among some reformers who are close to the situation. They say there are no signs that it will amount to much. Tonight all4syria will publish an editorial throwing cold water on the notion that much can be accomplished at the Congress because only 10% of the candidates can be new according to the voting regulations and everything is being rushed along. Others suggest that the President has some fairly aggressive reports already sitting on his desk and can push them though if he decides to. Perhaps the biggest news that seems verifiable is that:

300,000 Kurds are to get Syrian Citizenship
Ibrahim Hamidi wrote in al-Hayat (3 April 2005, p. 7) that Damascus is putting the “last touches on a law that will give citizenship to roughly 300,000 Kurds. Two days prior President Bashar announced a general pardon for the 312 Kurds who were taken into custody as a result of the “Qamishli events” of last April. Abdul Hamid Darwish, the head of the unlicensed Progressive Democratic Party, told al-Hayat that he was informed by an “important security official” that a decree announcing the restoration of citizenship to 300,000 Kurds was in its final stages. Although there are no exact statistics for the number of Kurds living in Syria without citizenship, it is believed that there are now 225,000 who had their citizenship revoked due to a 1962 law passed by President Nazim al-Qudsi the year before the Baath took power. Another 75,000 Kurds are believed to be resident in Syria with no official status at all. Most of these 300,000 are believed to be decedents of Turkish Kurds who fled into Syria following the brutal suppression of the Shaykh Said Naqashbandi revolt of 1925, the Shaykh Rida movement of 1933 and that of General Ihsan Basha in 1936.

The plan to finally give citizenship to all the Kurds follows announcements by President Bashar al-Asad to the effect that the “Kurdish nation is an elemental part of the Syrian fabric and history.” Bashar was also the first Syrian president to visit the Kurdish areas of Syria in the Jazira in many decades. I believe that President Husni Zaim, a Kurd, may have been the last Syrian president to visit in 1949, though I am not sure of this.

This move is part of a broader Syrian development plan for the Jazira, which is home to many of Syria’s poorest citizens. Al-Hayat states that two million Syrians or %12 of the country of 17 million are believed to live below the poverty line according to a new study, the highest concentration of whom are in the East. A recent report by the Ministry of Statistics put the level of poverty in Syria at less than 9%, but a courageous reporter writing in al-Tishriin created a national scandal out of these statistics, when she did the math and wrote that there was no way that such figures could be accurate. She asked the director of the office of statistics if she could see the data on which the 9% figure was based, and he told her that it was “none of her business.” She created a big fuss about this and about the office’s estimation that the average Syrian income is $220 a month, which everyone here knows is far above the reality. The average government employee doesn’t earn more than $170 a month.

The development plan for the Jazira will be announced officially during the Turkish President’s visit to Syria on the 13th and 14th of April this month. The Turks have agreed to release an additional 90 square meters of water a second from the Tigris River for Syrian and Iraqi use in irrigation. Turkey, Syria and Iraq are planning to pump some 60 million dollars a year into the Kurdish region where their three countries meet, according to Hamidi’s article. This new plan is an attempt to stabilize the region, raise the average income level, and comes in response to the anxieties Syria and Turkey share about eventual Kurdish independence in Iraq.

Many Syrians, particularly ethnic minorities are hoping that this new development signals that the Baath party Congress will move toward weakening the Pan-Arab identity of Syria, which is the official stand of both the Party and national constitutions. The hope is that a new Syrian identity will be allowed to emerge that better reflects the interests of the country and the sentiments of many of its citizens. It may also help Syria adopt a "Syrian for Syrians," or Syrian first strategy of focusing on internal development.

Asad also stated in his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Kharazi that they both supported Lebanon having its elections help on time in May, according to Ibrahim Hamidi in al-Hayat (3 April 2005, p.2.)

The Syrian ambassador in Washington, Imad Moustapha, recently said all Lebanese political prisoners in Syrian jails will be released. It was a surprising announcement: since December of 2000 both Syria and the Syrian-backed Lebanese government have denied there are any Lebanese prisoners in Syrian jails. The ambassador's announcement gave renewed hope to hundreds of Lebanese families who have tried for as long as 15 years to secure the release of their loved ones.

Meanwhile, in Washington government officials and neocons are speaking tougher than ever about change in Syria.

Liz Cheney, the US Vice President's daughter(thanks to Rami Khoury for correcting an earlier mistake in claiming she is the VP's wife.), said that Washington was looking for ways to broadly encourage freedom and democracy in Syria. She met with Farid al-Ghadry of the Syrian Reform Party last week.

Charles Krauthammer's recent opinion piece in the Washington Post takes the cake though:

Syria and the New Axis of Evil

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 1, 2005; Page A27

Say what you will about Bashar Assad, dictator of Syria and perhaps the dimmest eye doctor ever produced by British medical schools, but subtle he is not....

Syria made its intentions unmistakable when Assad sent his prime minister to Tehran to declare an alliance with Iran when world pressure began to build on Damascus after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

All this regional mischief-making is critical because we are at the dawn of an Arab Spring -- the first bloom of democracy in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine and throughout the greater Middle East -- and its emerging mortal enemy is a new axis of evil whose fulcrum is Syria. The axis stretches from Iran, the other remaining terror state in the region, to Syria to the local terror groups -- Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- that are bent on destabilizing Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and destroying both Lebanese independence and the current Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement.

Iran is the senior partner of this axis of evil. Syria is the crucial middle party allowing a non-Arab state to reach into the heart of the Middle East. For example, Hezbollah receives its weapons from Iran, shipped through Syria. And Iranian Revolutionary Guards are stationed today in the Bekaa Valley, under Syrian protection....

Today the immediate objective of this Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas-Islamic Jihad axis is to destabilize Syria's neighbors (Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Authority) and sabotage any Arab-Israeli peace. Its strategic aim is to quash the Arab Spring, which, if not stopped, will isolate, surround and seriously imperil these remaining centers of terrorism and radicalism.

How, then, to defeat it? Iran is too large, oil-rich and entrenched to be confronted directly. The terror groups are too shadowy. But Syria is different. Being a state, it has an address. The identity and location of its leadership, military installations and other fixed assets are known. Unlike Iran, however, it has no oil of any significance. It is poor. And the regime is weak, despised not only for its corruption and incompetence but also because of its extremely narrow ethnic base. Assad and his gang are almost exclusively from the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot considered heretical by many Muslims and representing about 10 percent of the Syrian population.

Syria is the prize. It is vulnerable and critical, the geographic center of the axis, the transshipment point for weapons, and the territorial haven for Iranian and regional terrorists.

If Syria can be flipped, the axis is broken. Iran will not be able to communicate directly with the local terrorists. They will be further weakened by the loss of their Syrian sponsor and protector. Prospects for true Lebanese independence and Arab-Israeli peace will improve dramatically.

As Iraq, in fits and starts, begins finding its way to self-rule, the center of gravity of the Bush Doctrine and the American democratization project shifts to Lebanon/Syria. The rapid evacuation and collapse of the Syrian position in Lebanon is crucial not just because of what it will do for Lebanon but because of the weakening effect it will have on the Assad dictatorship.

We need, therefore, to be relentless in insisting on a full (and as humiliating as possible) evacuation of Syria from Lebanon, followed by a campaign of economic, political and military pressure on the Assad regime. We must push now and push hard.