The PYD: "Yes to democratic change, no to foreign interference!"





Will the syrian uprising ignite the Kurdish powderkeg? Syria counts a sizeable Kurdish population, marginalised by the successive military regime having ruled syria since the independence, including the present days al Ba'ath regime. It is so surprising to see that, while the rest of Syria is torn by violence, the Kurdish populated provinces are remaining conspicuously quiet.



"It's a tactical choice", are saying representatives for the PYD, a syrian kurd opposition party whose radical agenda and close links to the revolutionary PKK made it a prominent enemy of the regime. "There is a de facto truce between the kurds and the government. The security forces are overstretched over Syria's arab provinces to face demonstrators, and can not afford the oppening of a second front in Syrian Kurdistan. On our side, we need the army to stay away. Our party is busy establishing organisations, committees, able to take over from the al-Ba'ath administration at the moment the regime will collapse."


Reports say that to enforce this truce, their cells in Afrin and Kobane stopped some Kurdish activists to organise demonstrations. They claim that all their efforts are about maintaining calm to avoid a bloodbath. (about those allegations, and the PYD’s chairman Saleh Muslim answer, see the KurdWatch interview edited by www.ekurd.net “Turkey’s henchmen in Syrian Kurdistan are responsible for the unrest here” http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2011/11/syriakurd383.htm ) They have been, they say "advising youth to remain peaceful". "An open confrontation with the dictatorship would be disastrous. Our people would become military target, not only for the army but also for some militias made of arab settlers present in our provinces. The demonstrations would be turned in an ethnic conflict the government would use at his advantage. As well, amongst the arab opposition, some groups do not accept us Kurds as equal citizens. They want to keep Syria an Arab homeland, where minorities are kept in a state of submission. We need to build our strength to be able to deal with them on an equal basis at the fall of the regime."



Hence the truce then. But the assassination, the 07/10/2011, of Mishal Tamo, leader of the Kurdish Future Movement party, could compromise everyone's calculations. At his funerals in his hometown of Qamishli (where took place a massacre of demonstrators the 12/03/2004), 50000 mourners went to the streets, accusing the state secret police to have killed the opponent. They were fired at by police - estimates are that between 2 and 5 were killed, countless others wounded. Reports from inside the town say police deployed around hospitals to prevent people to give blood for the victims.



The murder, and its potentially disastrous consequences, have infuriated the Turks. Their decades-long war against the PKK resumed with a new intensity at the end of the winter. They have been, during the past couple of years, aiming at encircling the insurgents in the mountains in Qandil, in Northern Iraq, acting alongside Iran, itself engaged in an offensive against the PKK-aligned PJAK. They gained the support of the Western democracies, which consider the PKK as a terrorist organisation, and launched in march 2010 a series of coordinated police raids in Belgium, Italy and France to break the PKK support net in europe. They enlisted Syria in this all-out offensive, organising common "military exercises" in april 2010 (http://www.globaliamagazine.com/?id=1165), and enticing the Syrian government to step up its repression against the PKK sympathisers present on its territory. But the relations between the two governments soured since the start of the Syrian uprising in march 2011. With Mishal Tamo's assassination, the Turks fear to see turmoil reaching Syrian Kurdistan, and the PKK seize the opportunity to implant itself there with the help of the PYD. Until 1999, the Syrian government allowed the PKK to run training camps on its territory. It was an opportunity to wage a proxy war against Turkey, with which it had tense relations then, while sending the more combative amongst the Kurds to get themselves killed on a foreign battlefield. It was something normal for a young Kurd to join the organisation, very popular at the time. It is estimated there are today around 1500 Syrians in the PKK's army, and it is not unusual, when entering a Kurdish household in Qamishli, to find a portrait of a family membre who left to fight as a gerrila. One so understands Turkey's nervousness, thinking about the 800 km of border it shares with its southern neighbour, doted with Kurdish villages it sees as as many potential PKK outposts.



But for the PYD, changing Syrian Kurdistan in a second Qandil is not an option. "It is not in our agenda, and it would be very difficult from a practical point of view", says Zuhat Kobani, a PYD representative. "But more, a PKK presence in Syria would mean a Turkish military strike, which nobody wants. We do not avoid a confrontation with the Syrian army to get one with the Turks." These denegations do not prevent Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to wave threats at Ankara: "We have religious and ethnic difference, so has Turkey. If we have domestic disturbances, then so will Turkey", did he say ominously (quoted by S. Dermitas, co-chairman of the BDP, a party regularly accused of links with the PKK, in an interview with the Hurriyet newspaper the 13/10/2011), clearly hinting that his regime could back the insurgency inside Turkey, would Ankara continue to meddle with Syria's internal politics. The PYD says the Kurds must not become anyone's pawn in the struggle for regional supremacy. "We will not help the dictatorship in any way", continues Zuhat Kobani. "We want its fall. We do not have anything to expect from Bashar al-Assad and his generals. We Kurds come under criticism because we don't join the mass demonstrations. I already explained it was a tactical choice. But look from where are coming those critics: from groups, or coalitions, which are backed by the Turks, and which are very carefull in avoiding to address any Kurdish demand." The PYD accuses the Damascus conference, held in Turkey, to actually serve Ankara's agenda. "We want change. But it must come from the syrians, and be for the syrians. It must not come from any external power willing to reduce Syria in a satellite state. The PYD so opposes any foreign intervention in Syria."



For what will come if the present regime falls? It is a concern for all the Syrian factions, from the al-Ba'ath to the most determined reformists, passing through all the religious, ethnic and political spectrum. Syrians are aware that another dictatorship could emerge from the agonising one. Zuhat Kobani and the other PYD delegates do not want to stop their action at the collapse of the junta. "The demise of the police state is just halfway of the process. Other Kurdish parties want the establishment of a federal state. It is not enough. The PYD wants a system of self-governance, in which our communities are able to rule themselves, emancipated from a central government which, all along our history, always oppressed Kurds. It means a radical reform of the Kurdish society. For this we need to educate our population, and that's what the committes we're creating are busy at now. Our cadres schools, until then located in a neighbouring country, are now in Syria. We have opened schools in Kurdish language, something unbelievable just eight months ago." He concludes: "For the PYD, it is the moment to put our theories in application."



But, maybe more than the opening of the "second front" the Syria government fears, there is a danger to see the Kurdish provinces bordering Turkey becoming the extension of another war.