Syrian authorities have recently removed the names of more than 580 Kurdish peasants from lists of those who have permission to use the land in the Deyrik area of al-Jazeera. The Directorate of Agriculture Reform in Hassaka issued Resolution No. 2707, on 17 March 2010, which removed of the names of 381 Kurdish peasants, all from Deyrik, from the tables of users under the pretext of lack of access to legal authorization in accordance with the provisions of Law No. 41 / 2004, as amended by Decree 49 of 2008.
In effect, Decree 49 requires that a license is obtained to work the land, but Kurds are not issued with these licenses, and so now the authorities are taking away the land rights on the basis that the land is not being used. The State’s slogan is that the land is for those who use it.
There are reports from the Directorate of Agriculture Reform in Hassaka that 9000 peasants will be removed from the list, and their land will then become “State Property”. It originally belonged to the peasants, but after the Ba’ath coup on the eighth of March 1963, the State brought in the slogan that the land belongs to those who work on it, and they confiscated it from the Kurds and gave it to al-Ghramar Arabs who migrated from al-Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor and al-Tbqa. Some Kurds were given a substitute piece of land far from their place of residence that is mostly not suitable for cultivation.
The Syrian authorities forced people who do not have the title deeds to apply to Ministry of Agriculture Reform to consider their land as “the wages of such or lease”, so they had to rent their own land and pay taxes and duties to the Department of Agriculture every year when contracts were renewed.
After years of working on the land, through the generations, Kurds peasants are shocked that this decision has been made, to prevent the renewing of licenses and to confiscate the land. This territory which has become the property of the state will be re-distributed according to State policies of racism and fascism. These policies rely and play on divisions between the components of Syrian society.
The Minister of Agriculture Reform, Dr. Adel Safar, said in a visit to the province of Hassake on 5 May 2010 that they did not make this decision. The national leadership in the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party and the Office of National Security which is headed Major General Hisham Bakhtiar, made these decisions. The Office of National Security has changed its name to the National Security Council due to Legislative Decree No. 36 of 2009. The National Security Council decided which Kurdish names to remove from the list.
The region is in a state of tension and turmoil because of racism that has been fuelled by projects such as these that create crises, the effect of which cannot be anticipated and may lead to an eruption in the region. Many of the people of the region whose land has been seized will not stand idly by at this policy of slow death that is being pursued by the regime, towards the Kurdish people in Syria.
The Ba’athist regime is continuing its policy of denial of Kurds through the use of such security policies. These projects are aimed at creating a situation in which the Syrian Government can deny the existence of Kurdish identity through grabbing their land, and starving and intimidating them in their historic homelands, forcing Kurds to leave home and migrate. In doing so the Government has been changing the demographic reality of the Kurdish region, since Mohammed Hilal wrote the plan for this project in the early 1960s.
Media Institute of West Kurdistan Society – Qamishli