LONDON – Kurdish demonstrators rallied outside the British prime minister’s office on Monday to demand that Syria’s Kurds be given their own seat at the so-called Geneva-2 peace talks, due to begin in Switzerland this week.
It was among a series of protests in Europe spearheaded by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose military wing controls much of Syrian Kurdistan and has successfully fought off incursions by jihadist groups.
The demand for independent Kurdish representation at the international conference may turn out to be irrelevant for the time being: A surprise invitation from the United Nations on Sunday night for Iran to attend the opening session at Montreux on Wednesday threw the talks into doubt.
The Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, the mainstream political opposition to President Bashar Assad’s regime, threatened to pull out of the conference over the invitation to Iran, Damascus’s key regional ally.
If the talks do go ahead, the PYD, linked to Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), wants Kurds to have their own delegation under the umbrella of the Supreme Kurdish Council.
On the eve of the conference – assuming it will now go ahead – the plan is for Kurds from the foreign relations committee of the Kurdish National Council to be part of the wider Syrian opposition delegation.
In a statement issued at Monday’s demonstration, across from Prime Minister David Cameron’s Downing Street office, the PYD’s U.K. office said: “As we are approaching the Geneva-2 conference, the Syrian regime and several international and regional powers are seeking to exclude the Kurds from representation along with other minority communities.”
A PYD spokesman, Juan Efrin, told Rudaw that all the opposition factions fighting on the ground in Syria should be represented. “Unfortunately, major players on the Kurdish side will be missing,” he said, “including those who have been heavily involved in the conflict against jihadi groups and al-Qaeda.”
He questioned to what extent Kurdish delegates, acting as part of the overall Syrian opposition delegation, would be in a position to represent legitimate Kurdish rights.
A Kurdish student from Erbil, who identified himself as Nush, questioned whether the Syrian National Council truly represented the opposition on the ground. “They’re all businessmen. They sit in hotels in Istanbul and Antalya, and they only represent themselves,” he charged.
“They want to give Kurds one or two seats on their delegation. That’s not democracy.” he said.
He said Kurds were determined to prevent a re-run of the 1923 Lausanne Conference in which Kurds were excluded from international talks that produced a post-World War I settlement in the Middle East but denied the Kurds an independent state.
