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Syrian religious leaders call for unity after riots
Jordan Times, Tuesday, March 16, 2004
HASSAKE, Syria (AFP) — Anti-riot police guarded public buildings in Hassake on Monday as shops reopened and calm returned to the northeast Syrian town shaken by Kurdish riots over the weekend during which a former MP said 19 people were killed and 150 injured. In public parks and the town's central square, Muslim and Christian leaders called for “national unity” and on the people to “bury sedition fomented abroad.”
An AFP correspondent in Hassake, 680 kilometres northeast of Damascus, said schools had reopened although attendance was reduced. No military checkpoints could be seen at the town entrances and identity checks were no longer being carried out. Rioting broke out on Friday during a football match at Qameshli, close to the border with Turkey to the north and Iraq to the east. Locals from Arab tribes in the region shouted slogans against Iraqi Kurdish leaders and brandished pictures of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Fighting spread to Hassake and the mainly-Kurdish frontier villages.
Rioting Kurds set fire to public buildings, which were empty on Friday, the normal day off in Syria. The three-storey customs headquarters in Qameshli was burnt out, along with warehouses and other public buildings.
Witnesses said the Syrian flag was pulled down from some buildings and Kurdish colours hoisted.
“Nineteen people have been killed and around 150, including members of the security forces, were injured during the troubles which took place Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the towns of Qameshli and Hassake, and the villages of Al Amodi and Al Darbassiya,” former MP Abdel Hamid Darwish told AFP.
A local authority member, who asked not to be named, said the unrest originally started in Qameshli and spread to Hassake.
“The troubles continued Sunday in Hassake where armed Kurds attacked Arabs in Al Salihe district, killing two of them. Around a dozen armed Kurds have been arrested by the security forces,” he said.
“But since Sunday afternoon calm has returned and the security forces are deployed in the two towns and nearby villages and have detained the authors of the troubles,” he added.
The official ruling Baath Party journal said on Monday that a commission of inquiry set up to investigate the causes of the riots had already started work.
It will “be charged with applying the law and punishing everyone who used arms against citizens and the country,” the paper said.
An estimated nine per cent of Syria's population of 18 million are of Kurdish origin, concentrated in the northern region abutting Turkey and Iraq.
Around 250,000 Kurds living in Syria do not have Syrian nationality after being excluded during the last census, in 1962. They are obligated to do military service but have no civil or civic rights. But Kurds are largely integrated into Syrian society.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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