Are Kurds a pariah minority?

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Michael Rubin

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It is tempting to label the Kurds as Iran's pariah minority, but they are only one of many groups treated as pariahs within Iran. For example, Human Rights Watch has documented that members of the Revolutionary Guards raped Kurdish women, but press reports indicate that Kurds are not alone in being victims of sexual molestation at the hands of officials of the Islamic Republic (Human Rights Watch, 1997: 26; Moghadam, 1989; IRNA, 2001). Many Western officials, journalists, and academicians may see President Muhammad Khatami as evidence of a reformist trend in Iran, yet he still represents a system that systematically discriminates against anyone who is not an adherent of Shiite Islam--that is, anyone who is a Kurd, Jew, Baha'i, or Baluchi. As other Iranian minorities are well integrated into society, it appears that the root cause of the Kurds' pariah status under the current regime is their religious belief. Unfortunately, this indicates that Iranian Kurds can expect no improvement in their status as political and cultural outcasts until the Islamic Republic is replaced by a system more tolerant of religious diversity.

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Syria's Kurds

As in Iran, the Kurds in Syria continue to suffer as a pariah minority with little hope for immediate improvement. Friction between Syria's minority Kurdish and majority Arab communities grew in the early twentieth alongside the rise in pan-Arabism. The French disproportionately used Syrian Kurds and Druze troops to subdue Arab revolts during the years of the French mandate, leading to lasting distrust and antagonism between Arabs and Kurds (McDowall, 2000: 467-468). The situation of the Kurds deteriorated markedly after Syrian independence. In 1957, suspected Arab nationalists set fire to a cinema, killing 250 Kurdish children in what would remain the deadliest attack in Syria until 1982, when Syrian President Hafez al-Asad slaughtered 20,000 people in Hama, a hotbed of political opposition. In 1958, the Syrian government banned all Kurdish-language publications. The Kurds' pariah status was sealed in 1963, when a coup d'etat in 1963 brought the Ba'th party to power.

As in Iraq, the Ba'th in Syria promoted an ethnic chauvinist platform that in effect relegated the Kurds and any other non-Arabs to second-class status (Nazdar, 1993: 199). Almost 40 years of Ba'thist rule has only intensified the pariah status of Syria's Kurdish minority. Nearly a quarter-million Syrian Kurds remain without citizenship; they were stripped of their nationality after the 1962 census. Many Kurds believe they lost their Syrian citizenship because of the Syrian government's desire to "Arabize" the potentially oil-rich region bordering the Iraqi and Turkish frontiers (Human Rights Watch, 1996b). Accordingly, for four decades the now-stateless Kurds and all their children have been prohibited from owning land, legally marrying, and receiving an education. Syrian Kurds cannot even enter a public hospital (and instead must rely on unsubsidized private care), yet the government continues to forcibly conscript its non-citizen Kurds into the military. Even during the worst of times in Iraq and during the height of insurrection in Turkey and Iran, these governments did not strip their minorities of citizenship.

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Are Kurds a pariah minority?

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Michael Rubin

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