A statement on the forty-sixth anniversary of the implementation of the racist Arab Belt Project in the Kurdish areas

ARK News.. The General Secretariat of the Kurdish National Council in Syria issued a statement on the forty-sixth anniversary of the implementation of the Arab Belt Project in Syrian Kurdistan Syria. ARK has received a copy of the statement it says

On the twenty-fourth of June this year, the forty-sixth anniversary of passing of the implementation of the Arab Racist Belt Project in the Kurdish areas, and with this anniversary the sons of the Kurdish people renew their condemnation to it and their continuous demand to cancel it and remove its effects.

With the Ba’ath Party’s seizure of power in Syria in 1963 of the last century, the Kurdish people were subjected to chauvinist policies and systematic racist projects, and targeted its presence on their lands to complement the unjust census of 1962 whereby tens of thousands of Kurdish citizens were stripped of their Syrian nationality, passing by changing the national and demographic features of the Kurdish regions and pursuing and preventing political, cultural and societal activity for everything related to the Kurds in relation to the Arab Belt Project, which is one of the most dangerous of these racist projects presented by a chauvinistic Muhammad Talal Hilal, head of the Political Security Division at the Jazira at that time and a member of the Baath Party leadership later this conference was approved by the Baath country conference in September 1966, which instructed that extraordinary measures be taken to prepare for the implementation of this notorious project.

On June 24, 1974, the Baath Party regional leadership issued an order to implement the project on the ground, and it built 40 settlements in the strip adjacent to the border with Turkey from Ain Dewar in the far east to the western city of Sari Kaniye from Hasaka governorate and acquired the land through restraining procedures that belong to the Kurds within this strip it is approximately 275 km long and 10-15 km wide. Thousands of Arab families from the tribes of Raqqa and the countryside of Aleppo have brought in and settled in these settlements, thus depriving tens of thousands of the Kurdish people in this area from using the land of their fathers and grandfathers, and worked in various ways later on cordoning off the Kurds and their impoverishment and forcing them to displace and emigrate from their areas, and the poverty belts in the outskirts of the capital Damascus and other major cities with a Kurdish majority were only evidence of the results of the racist policies practiced against the Kurds, including the fateful Racist Belt.

What the sons of the Kurdish people were exposed from the persecution, exclusion, and targeting of their existence and freedom for decades at the hands of successive governments and regimes, which places the Syrian opposition in all its spectra and all patriots who are jealous of the country's future in front of national entitlements by working to redress the Kurdish people, who have actively contributed alongside the rest of the components in achieving independence and building Syria, in recognizing its national rights constitutionally and abrogating all those unjust decrees and laws issued by the authoritarian regime against the Syrians in general and the Kurdish people in particular, and in the forefront of them the fateful Arab Belt, and adopting this in its documents and all documents that relate to the future of the country, and this will be a realistic approach to building the future Syria that all Syrians seek, and who have made great sacrifices to end tyranny and achieve freedom and dignity for all its citizens.

6/23/2020
The General Secretariat of the Kurdish National Council in Syria

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