ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The United States and Turkey are hindering Kurdish rights in Syria, the leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) charged in an interview with the Germany-based Kurdish newspaper, Yeni Ozgur Politika.
“The United States and Turkey are insisting that we place ourselves under the larger umbrella of opposition groups,” the newspaper quoted Salih Muslim as saying.
“We will neither betray our martyrs nor oblige ourselves to the United States or the Turkish state. The Kurdish people are obliged to none but themselves. We are dependent only on our people,” he added.
Muslim said that certain countries were trying to manipulate the Kurds by forcing them under the wing of the larger Syrian opposition. He warned that the Kurds were being pushed into “a second Lausanne,” referring to a 1923 treaty under which world powers reversed their promises for a Kurdish homeland.
“They are trying to play the same game. America and other foreign powers want Kurds to live through a second Lausanne. To those powers which want to buy off the Kurds we say ‘we will struggle until the last person,’” he vowed.
The Lausanne Treaty replaced the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, under which the Kurds would have received their own homeland in the Kurdish-majority regions in today’s Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Last month the PYD, the dominant Kurdish group in Syria which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, declared unilateral autonomy in three Syrian provinces.
In another part of the interview, Muslim denied that the PYD had met with a Syrian presidential envoy in Erbil over the past two months.
“The regime sent us a request two months ago at a meeting in Hewler (Erbil). We did not accept because the Baath regime has not abandoned its methods of oppression and torture that it has used against us since 1963,” he commented.
Muslim also accused the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil of allying itself with Turkey. He said that Ankara and Erbil have the same policies and interests in Syria’s Kurdish regions, or Rojava.
The KRG and Turkey have both refused to recognize the interim administration declared by the PYD. Erbil says that the local administration is not inclusive of all Kurdish parties in Rojava.
Muslim accused the KRG of closing border crossings with Rojava to the PYD, which enforces its powers through its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). KRG officials have dismissed this claim.
“They (KRG) handed over all the border crossings to Rojava to Islamists,” Muslims charged. “They shut these doors to us, saying ‘you will take them over and give them to the YPG.’ For this reason there has been an embargo in place on Rojava for six months, but a new crossing has just been opened,” he added.
The Til Kocer (Yarubiyah) border crossing, which strategically straddles Syria and Iraq, was seized by the PYD in October, after weeks of fierce fighting with the radical Jabhat al-Nusrah and other al-Qaeda affiliates.
