Kurds in Syrian Constitutional Committee: A strong blow to Erdogan regime

Ali Rajab

For months, the Kurds’ site of having a representative on the UN-supervised Syrian constitution committee has been debated, but the UN envoy to Syria, Geir Pederson, recently announced their participation in the committee.

The presence of Kurds in the Syrian Constitution Committee represents a strong blow to the regime of Turkish President Erdogan if he pressured for preventing their presence at the constitutional committee which consists of 15 members chosen by the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

“We have worked to represent a broad cross section of civil society on the committee – different ethnic groups and religions,” Pederson told a news conference on Tuesday. “Of course, different political affiliations, I think this is unique in his representation of the Syrian body, which will meet in Geneva on October 30.”

Letter to the Kurdish representative

For his part, Kurdish activist Newroz Peugeot directed a letter to the representative of the Kurds in the Syrian Constitutional Committee Dr. Abdul Hakim Bashar, calling on him to shoulder the historical responsibility, which he assumed, and stressed in press statements, the importance of the principle of Syria federal parliamentary pluralism.

The Kurdish activist stressed that the Syrian constitution is expected to recognize the Kurdish people, a people living on its historic land, which suffered from injustice and deprivation of the most basic rights.

For his part, the former secretary and member of the political office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party Dr. Abdul Hakim Bashar said on his personal website, “We will be in a political battle in the first place and through the legalization of consensus or achievements or political gains that we achieve through specialists in the Constitution and the law, so we have a plan once the work of the Constitutional Committee is in place.”

The Salvation Committee

The member of the Board of Trustees of the Kurdish Organization for Human Rights in Syria, the human rights Bradost Kamali said that the UN envoy’s announcement of the presence of Kurds in the Constitutional Committee of this size is not commensurate with the size of their population, but there is a presence of Kurds in the Committee on the list of opposition that are members of the Syrian Kurdish National Council as well as in the list of civil society.

Kamali added in a statement to the Reference, “We, as a Kurdish human rights organization in Syria, see that the list of civil society is very weak and the Kurdish presence in it is weak and it would have been better to have civilian figures representing the Kurdish community in Syria.”