ARAB AFFAIRS - Mar. 16 - Arrests & Violence In Syria.

With the Syrian authorities continuing to arrest Kurdish militants, more clashes between Arabs and Kurds take place in Ras Al-Ain and Amouda in north-east Syria. A tense calm prevails in cities further east after several days of Kurdish rioting. Turkey's Anatolia news agency says 7 Kurds were shot dead by security forces in Aleppo and the nearby town of Afrin during a ceremony marking poison gas attacks on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. Syrian security forces imposed a curfew in Ras Al-Ain, after 5 people were killed and 30 injured in fighting there on Mar. 15. A senior member of a local tribe was among those killed. In Amouda, Kurds attacked a police station and killed a police chief, 4 police officers and a soldier. Anwar Al Bunni from the Association for the Defence of Human Rights in Syria, in a talk with foreign news agencies, confirmed that at least 300 Kurds were arrested on Mar. 15 in the Damascus suburb of Doumar, adding: "It is true that our Syrian brothers of Kurdish origin committed (errors), which we deplore. But unfortunately the authorities have not heeded our advice and instead of favouring dialogue they have had recourse to repression". US State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli called on Damascus "to exercise tolerance for all ethnic minorities in Syria". He urged Damascus "to refrain from using increasingly repressive measures to ostracise a minority that has asked for a greater acceptance and integration into Syrian life". Syrian authorities allege that the Kurdish riots, which started on Mar. 12 at a football match in Qamishli, were due to an external effort to destabilise Syria and accused Syria's Kurds of orchestrating the unrest.

Almost simultaneously, the Baathist regime in Syria has since been publicising its release of Kurds arrested during the riots (see Recorder No. 11) and quietly arresting both Kurds suspected of planning new demonstrations and non-Kurdish advocates of freedom. The number of secret agents infiltrating various groupings throughout Syria has risen considerably. Most arrests go unannounced by the official media. According to The Boston Globe, Syria may be experiencing "the warning tremors of a political earthquake". It says: "The disparate ruling groups in Syria, Turkey and Iran all feel threatened by stirrings of Kurdish assertiveness in Iraq. The (recent) killing of more than 30 Kurds in confrontations with Syrian police...does not compare in scale with the killing of Kurds in Saddam Hussein's Iraq or in neighboring Turkey... (Violent) measures taken against Kurds in Damascus and Aleppo who dared to protest earlier killings of Kurds in towns along Syria's northern border with Turkey reflect the Assad regime's intolerance of free speech and political pluralism. But something else is also revealed in the response of the Syrian Baathists. The precedent of four million Iraqi Kurds being guaranteed a high degree of cultural and political autonomy in an interim Iraqi Constitution appears to have panicked Syria's rulers, who use an Arab nationalist ideology to justify their unbending denial of any separate Kurdish identity".