178 McGee same time it was an injustice against my culture.’ Another added that ‘stripping us of nationality was no accident, it was part of a comprehensive strategy to disadvantage Kurds, and must be understood in this context.’26 This, as well as the false hope generated by the regime’s previously broken promises to resolve the problem,27 led to widespread suspicion of the motivations behind the April 2011 decree.28 ‘They would not give us citizenship,’ commented one ajnabiyya woman in late 2011, ‘unless they knew we wouldn’t be able to benefit from it.’ Similarly, the Kurdish street generally considered that the measure was not well-intentioned, but simply an attempt to distance Kurds from the developing protest movement of the Syrian Revolution. An evaluation of the naturalization decree as an attempt to discourage, and detract from, Kurdish participation in the Revolution has been covered in this author’s previous work.29 The fact that the decree was clearly a calculated reaction to the popular protests taking place in Syria at the time,30 and not a response to the years of Kurdish mobilization on the subject was also a source of disappointment among a number of interviewees. The measure cannot be considered as a success for the Kurdish movements and their activists. Here it is necessary to recognise that statelessness, in the sense of being bê nifûs (without I.D.), had been a significant campaigning issue of Kurdish society in general, and the parties and other groups often mobilised in the name of those who were stateless. In many cases, statelessness became an emotive short-hand for the situation of all Kurds in Syria: oppressed, alienated and right-less. Statelessness was not an issue for the ajanib and maktumin alone, but for Kurdish society in general. When a sample of 20 stateless (or recently naturalised) Kurds were asked about an image in which a man holds up a protest sign that reads ‘we do not want 26 27 28 29 30 The systematic and far-reaching nature of discrimination against Kurds in Syria since the 1960s is covered at length in Harriet Montgomery, The Kurds of Syria: An Existence Denied (Europäisches Zentrum für Kurdische Studien, 2005). e.g. Katherine Zoepf, ‘After Decades as Nonpersons, Syrian Kurds May Soon Be Recognized’ New York Times (New York, 28 April 2005) <www.nytimes.com/2005/04/28/international/ middleeast/28syria.html> accessed 18 June 2013. For a detailed study of the context surrounding the implementation of the 1962 census, and assessment of the Syrian government’s rhetoric on the subject prior to the 2011 decree, see Kurdwatch, ‘Stateless Kurds in Syria: Illegal Invaders or Victims of a Nationalistic Policy?’ (2010) Report 5 <www.kurdwatch.org/pdf/kurdwatch_staatenlose _en.pdf> accessed 13 August 2013. McGee (n 12) 9–17. Al-Arabiya, ‘Syrian Kurds naturalized as reform law drawn up’ (7 April 2011) <www .alarabiya.net/articles/2011/04/07/144582.html> accessed 6 June 2013. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 171-181