13 May 2005 01:04:27 GMT Source: Reuters By Lin Noueihed
DAMASCUS, May 13 (Reuters) - Ismael Hami is a foreigner in the country of his birth. He cannot vote, run for office or register property in his name. A pink card stamped "not for travel" is one of a few documents proving he even exists. But all that could soon change for Hami, who says he is one of an estimated 200,000 stateless Kurds living in Syria.
Rights activists and Western diplomats say Syria is mulling a solution to the status of Kurds in the mainly Arab state. Word is spreading and cautious hopes are rising among the stateless that they could finally get citizenship.
"There are rumours that changes are coming," said Hami, an official in the small but active Syrian Kurdish Yikiti party.
"They have promised a solution to the stateless Kurds issue. We have despaired of Syrian policy but hope they reform even if it is a response to international pressure, not people's wishes."
Decades of Kurdish discontent in Syria's northeastern governorate of Hasake, where Kurds say a 1962 census omitted 120,000 of their number, fuelled riots that swept several towns in March 2004, after a brawl between Arab and Kurdish supporters of rival soccer teams in the town of Kameshli escalated.
The clashes, in which some 30 people were killed, reflected unprecedented tension between Kurds and the state in Syria, which, like neighbouring Turkey and Iran worries Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq could inspire separatism in its soil.
Syria's estimated two million Kurds, many with family ties in Turkey and Iraq, say they seek rights within the country where they make up around 10 percent of the population, not a separate state.
They want citizenship -- denied to those classified as stateless but required for higher state education and employment -- and the right to teach and publish in their own language.
UNDER PRESSURE
President Bashar al-Assad, whose country is under U.S. pressure to reform, had pledged to look into statelessness, raising hopes of an end to the problem.
In a move Syrian Kurdish activists hope heralds wider reform, Assad pardoned 312 Syrian Kurds accused of taking part in last year's riots, to enhance "national unity".
"They released some of the detainees. This was a positive move that all the Syrian movements welcomed," said Lukman Oso, an activist in the Kurdish Leftist Party in Syria.
"We are hearing through leaks to the press that they may give stateless Kurds identity. We would welcome any such move as positive but we have seen nothing on the ground so far."
Kurdish activists say they wish to see the stateless Kurds issue addressed, not least because some have no rights at all.
The offspring of stateless Kurds who married Syrians over generations when those unions were not officially recognised, are now caught in legal limbo.
Kurds estimate there are some 75,000 of these so-called undeclared living in Syria today.
Hami was recently allowed to register his marriage to a Syrian citizen, finally giving their three children official recognition, if only as foreign residents living in Syria.
The Kurdish issue is sensitive in Syria, eliciting little official comment or sympathy among the general public.
But Western diplomats and Syrian activists say they expect the government to naturalise tens of thousands of Kurds.
"It will happen slowly, slowly. They will probably announce 30,000 then after a few months another 10,000 and so on, but of course they will not give citizenship to all," said Ayman Abdel Nour, an engineer and reform activist.
"They will only give citizenship to those who deserve it, only after they study their files because many of these people actually come from Turkey or Iraq, not Syria."
LONG HISTORY
Kurds have lived in the mountains that straddle Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran, an area some Kurdish nationalists refer to as Kurdistan, for centuries. Some Syrian Kurds have held senior official posts.
Some Kurds in Syria trace their roots back to one of the greatest military leaders in the region's history, Saladin.
A Kurd from modern-day Iraq, Saladin led a Muslim army that vanquished the Crusaders and reconquered Jerusalem in the 12th century. Saladin died in Damascus where he is buried.
While Iraqi Kurds were repressed by Saddam Hussein, who gassed the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, and Turkey battled Kurdish separatists in its southeast during the 1980s and 1990s, Syria has rarely clashed with its own minority.
Ruled by the secular Baath party, it has traditionally stressed national unity, avoiding references to its many minorities, including Assyrians, Armenians and other Christians, Druze, Kurds, Shi'ites and Assad's own small Alawite sect.
But some Kurdish political activists accuse the state of trying to stamp out their distinct cultural identity and dilute the Kurdish character of the northeastern Jazeera -- a fertile plain rich in oil and gas that Syria's command economy needs.
They say Kurdish towns and villages in the north have been given Arabic names too.
They accuse the state of transferring Arab families from the eastern Euphrates river area into specially-built towns in the northeast, long home to large Kurdish and Assyrian populations.
Western diplomats say Syria could consider the demands of Kurds as part of a wider effort to deflect international pressure by proving it is serious about domestic reform.
"The release of the Kurds was a gesture and there might be more measures," one diplomat said. "As the regime feels under pressure it is opening up to the Kurds to build national unity."
