-- Pruittiporn Kerdchoochuen
Today at work, we sent out a bunch of letters urging various governments to protest against yet another example of Syria's systematic and continuous oppression of its Kurdish minority. 180 Kurdish students at the University of Aleppo in Syria were charged with "causing a disturbance," and were told by the University to present themselves to a so-called "disciplinary committee" which could recommend their expulsion from the institute, right before the commencement of their final examinations. We fear that these students were targeted and are being barred from taking their final examinations, and thus from graduating, on the sole account of their being members of the Kurdish ethnic minority.
The estimated 2 million Kurds living in Syria today, though making up around 12% of the entire population and the majority in three regions on the Syrian-Turkish border, are denied basic minority rights and are routinely subjected to discrimination. They are often denied the rights to practice higher paying professions, to receive higher education, and to exercise political rights. Kurdish language and culture are banned from public life and from schools. Following a program of Arabization in the early sixties, 120, 000 Kurds were stripped of their Syrian nationality. Because of the hereditary nature of this status, today the number of stateless Kurds in Syria is estimated to be around 300,000.
Deprived of citizenship, these 300,000 people cannot obtain passports and visas to travel in or out of the country, receive public aid, own homes, land or cars, and are often denied employment. Politically, they are all but powerless: they are denied the right to vote and unable to hold office.
It's hard to wrap one's head around the idea that so many people are denied the rights that are, to us, so fundamental that we never really even think about them.
