Source: Asharq Al-Awsat Newspaper

By: Michel Kilo

Published: 9^th September 2012

In the past, minorities in Syria were not oppressed. If we studied the Kurdish example, we would find the Kurds to be founders of the national Syrian state, amongst them those who held the highest governmental positions; from the first Prime Ministry to the first Presidency to the first Army Generals. The Kurds did not endure persecution, indeed many of them were Arabized and in return many Arabs were taken in by Kurdish tribes known as Mawali. They did suffer greatly, however, in the years following 1963, as the regime set in motion a highly vindictive criminal plan known as the “Arabic Belt”, that sought to separate and surround areas which they had long occupied, changing the names of their towns and villages and installing Arabic tribes in their place, turning them into a foreign, hostile body in a land where they had long played a formative role, serving it with loyalty and devotion just like any of its other loyal children. On the other hand, the regime worked to incite the rest of Syria’s factions against them, under the pretext that they were conniving strangers waiting for the opportunity to pounce on the homeland, insisting that they must be harshly repressed as a preventative measure to limit their harm and eliminate their evil.

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