KurdistanObserver.com

Syria Arrests 100 Kurds After New Year Clashes

DAMASCUS, March 27, 2006 (AFP)-More than 100 people were arrested last week in northern Syria when a demonstration by thousands of Kurds celebrating their New Year turned violent, a human rights activist said Monday.

"Cases are being brought against 36 of the people arrested including some minors," said lawyer Mustapha Suleiman, who witnessed last week's ill-fated protest in Aleppo.

"They are accused of attacking the public interest, inciting confessionalism and violently resisting (Syrian security forces)," he said in a statement.

Last Monday, about 3,000 Kurds had gathered in Aleppo to celebrate Newroz, carrying candles and Kurdish flags, when police fired tear-gas and demonstrators hurled stones.

In March 2004, bloody clashes initially sparked by a riot between rival football fans pitted mainly Kurdish protestors against security forces and Arab tribesmen in Aleppo and Qameshli, another northern town.

Forty people were killed in several days of violence, according to Kurdish sources, although Syrian authorities said 25 people died.

According to New York-based Human Rights Watch, Syria's Kurdish minority, which makes up an estimated 10 percent of a population of 18.1 million people, is regularly discriminated against.

Around 120,000 Syrian Kurds were stripped of their citizenship after the country's 1962 census and have never regained it.