In the after-Ba’ath: Syria’s rising Kurds

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fre perspective on the events shaping your world. Walter Luebke was the leader of a regional council in central Germany and a proponent of the country's immigration policies. Last month he was brutally murdered by a man with neo Nazi ties. We take a look at why the killing has shocked Germans so much and what it says about the rise of the far right and China's education model seeks the one true answer American high schoolers put hard questions to a debate, arguing either side or both. We visit a debating tournament where it's clear that many Chinese youngsters are becoming experts in arguing the American way. But first, For all the cruelty of the war in Syria, the country still does see moments of joy. For decades under the rule of President Bashar al Assad and his father, ethnic Kurds in the largely Arab country had all kinds of restrictions. Speaking the Kurdish language was discouraged, property rights were limited, and celebrations of their annual Nowruz festival were muted.

It was so hard to celebrate Nowruz before 2011.

Nuvin Ibrahim is a Syrian Kurdish journalist.

The Syrian regime was not allowing us as Kurds to celebrate it and suppressing us with so many ways by spreading out all the police members in the places that we were heading to celebrate Nowroz in, they were taking all of what we have that had a Kurdish symbol.

Now the festival is celebrated freely.

We can celebrate it happily with no fear at all. Honestly, it's a great feeling, and I'm so happy with that.

That transformation happened over several years. As Mr. Assad's control over the country slipped away. Kurdish political and armed groups mobilized. Now they've gone from being an ethnic underclass to controlling much of the north and east of the country and may have greater ambition still.

From the moment you cross the Tigris river to get into northeastern Syria, you see Kurdish flags flying at the terminal and then along the roads.

Nick Pelham is the Economist's Middle east correspondent.

You see photographs of the many Kurds who've been killed fighting for control of this northeastern swathe of Syria. And you hear a lot more Kurdish than you would have heard in the past when this area was under control of the Assad government.

And why were you heading there?

I really wanted to see what they had made of this third of Syria that they control, what sort of administration they've put in place. You have a fairly small Kurdish population, perhaps anything between half a million to a million at the most, who have been ruling over perhaps three times the number of Arabs. And was curious to see how it was that this kind of role reversal of ever since independence, Arabs have really been ruling over Kurds, and this pecking order has been reversed. And I wanted to see how it materialized in practice.

Well, tell me how that came to be. What's the history of Kurds in Syria?

The concentration of Kurds in the region is really in Turkey, but when the borders were drawn up, some Kurds were left on the Syrian side. And there may have been some movement of Kurds down into Syria at later stages. But the party, the movement that was ruling Syria was an Arab nationalist party. It was a. And they were determined to ensure that it was only Arabic that was spoken in government institutions, including in schools across the country. And so they took a dim view of any expression of Kurdish identity. And suddenly this whole process of Arabs ruling Kurds has been turned on its head. And you now have a Kurdish military which is having to grapple with ruling an Arab majority.

So how did that come to pass? How did that reversal happen?

After 2011 and the revolt against the Syrian government, the Assad regime was very much on the back foot in cities across Syria. It was fighting for control of Damascus and Aleppo and its other strongholds. And it really felt too stretched to control much of what was more thinly populated areas in northeastern Syria. And so they pulled back to defend Damascus, essentially leaving local forces in control. Those local forces in the north, in the Kurdish cities, were local Kurdish forces. And then Islamic State. The jihadists of Islamic State filled the vacuum along much of the Euphrates as well, and took control of Raqqa, which they turned into the capital of their caliphate. And then the Americans moved in at the head of a coalition to push back Islamic State.

Last night, on my orders, America's armed forces began strikes against ISIL targets in Syria.

It was Kurdish forces in the north who they instrumentalized as their force on the ground.

Syrian Democratic Forces continue to hold despite repeated enemy attacks. Coalition has supported them with air power, conducting 10 strikes just as recently as Saturday to help propel to work with.

Coalition bombardment to oust Islamic State along Euphrates River. And that left the Kurds in control of this area, which they never really expect they would ever control. They've extended far beyond the Kurdish cities in the north, and they're now dominating what is a predominantly Arab area along the Euphrates River.

And so how is that reversal going? How is that sort of self administration experiment playing out?

It's really had a dramatic impact on the sort of aspirations that Kurds now have in Syria. As I said, when you cross into areas of Kurdish control, you see a Kurdish flag, you hear talk of a rojava, the land where the sun sets, a Kurdish homeland. But that kind of thins out the deeper into the territory you go, and the more you head south, the less focus there is on an establishment of a Kurdish homeland. And the more talk you hear of an attempt to establish an autonomous administration in northeastern Syria. It's an attempt to be more inclusive. And don't forget that many of the Arabs themselves are coming out of the horror of Islamic State rule. And the administration that they're living under is very much a Kurdish creation. But conditions are substantially better than they were under Islamic State. And perhaps for many, they're better than they might have been under the Assad regime as well.

I mean, I would imagine, especially after this sort of turning of the tables, that there would be cultural conflicts of sorts between the former rulers and the current ruled.

The entire population is Muslim. It's Sunni Muslim. That said, the Kurds who initially set up the self administration came from a deeply secular Marxist background. Ramadan, for them, is largely a non event where women manning the at checkpoints. One of the co chairs in the Raqqa is a woman. Indeed, at every level of government there's an insistence on gender equality by the Kurdish led administration. And it's perhaps that more than the religious differences, it's the kind of attitudes towards women which perhaps are most striking for what is a largely sort of tribal Arab population.

So how serious, how concerning is that level of dissent? I mean, is it a destabilizing amount of.

At the moment it's still fairly low level and containable. I think everything depends on the extent to which this administration is going to retain American backing. The Kurds were deeply alarmed when just before Christmas, Donald Trump tweeted that American troops should leave. Job was done. As soon as you lift that American umbrella, the rest is likely to fold. Northeastern Syria surrounded by encircled by far more powerful forces. On the ground to the south you have the Syrian army and the Assad regime which have vowed to retake every inch of Syrian territory. To the north you have Turkish tanks who view Kurdish control as an extension of the pkk, a prescribed terrorist organization that's carried out attacks inside Turkey. Both have ambitions in this area and would want to eliminate the Kurdish led administration given the opportunity. And the only reason that they're being held back is because of the American umbrella.

Nick, thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you. Thank you. Jason.

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In Germany, a politician is dead, a neo Nazi in custody and a nation shaken. The killing of Walter Luebke is the country's first suspected far right political assassination in more than half a century. It sounded alarm bells. Fears abound of a resurgent German far right and what appears to be an assault on democracy. The murder took place in a tiny village in central Germany.

Walter Lupke was the head of a regional council in central Germany.

Wendelin von Bredo is our European business and finance correspondent based in Berlin.

He was basically a senior civil servant, it's called District President of Kassel. He didn't live in Kassel, which is sort of a bigger city, but in a little village called YSTER of just 900 people about, about half an hour away from Kassel. He was close to retirement at age 65 and lived with his family very calmly in a pretty white house with a balcony next to a kindergarten and a field with grazing horses. And on June 22, a Saturday evening, a village fair in Easter was in full swing and Mr. Lupke's son wanted to attend. So he was watching his grandchild at home, and the grandchild was in bed. He was still on the terrace with a friend. They had a nice chat. They could be heard laughing. At some point his friend left and he must have been assassinated. Afterwards. Nobody really heard the gunshot. But when his son returned home from the village fair, he found his father bleeding on the floor with a gun wound in his head. He died a few hours later. It was cold blooded murder at close range, shot in the head, which must.

Have been a shocking thing in a small town like that. Was the murderer found?

It was a huge shock for several reasons. The police arrested a man called Stefan Ernst. He had in 1992, almost killed an immigrant at a train station. He had been active in neo Nazi circles. I mean, this was somebody who was known to the authorities. And at the end of June, he confessed in detail to having killed Walter Lupge. He even told them where he had hidden his weapons. As it happens, he now, on July 2, recanted his confession. But it's generally assumed that he recant his confession for tactical reasons.

But why would he target Mr. Lupke?

It seems that the main reason was that Lupke was supportive of Angela Merkel's refugee policies. And there is a video of him defending them forcefully at a town hall meeting in 2015. Basically there were right wing agitators disrupting the meeting. And he at some point basically lost his temper a little bit and said, you know, this is a Christian country and if you, you don't agree with human rights and with Christian values, you might as well leave the country. And because he said that this video clip was circulated by these Nazi groupings on the Internet and he became a hate figure for them.

And so what has the response been to this murder?

Very anxious. Soul searching. All German senior political leaders have come out to express their. And Indeed, on Thursday, June 27, more than 10,000 people took to the streets of Kassel to march against right wing violence. It's a shock, and a bigger shock than any of the 195 murders by right wing extremists since reunification, because it targeted a representative of the state, whereas the other victims tended to be homeless people, foreigners, gays, members of very marginal groups. But this, this seems a direct attack on Germany's constitutional democracy. It was also the first murder of its kind since the days of the Weimar Republic. There was a famous assassination in June 1922 when a group of anti Semitic right wingers appalled the German establishment by murdering, in the streets of Berlin, Walter Rattenau, the then foreign minister, who happen to be Jewish.

So should this be viewed as an isolated case, or do you think it's indicative of a greater rise of far right extremism in Germany?

There has been a rise of far right extremism ever since the refugee crisis in 2015, when more than a million migrants flooded into Germany. And although the flood of asylum seekers have come down, far right extremism has not. And it's been been at a higher level ever since. One reason for this is the popularity of the AfD, the alternative for Germany party, which started as a one issue party, it was all about Euroscepticism, but it has now transformed into a far right, anti immigration, xenophobic party. The AfD is not responsible obviously for the murder of Mr. Lupke, but it created an environment or a mood in Germany that I think paved the way for such a murder. And you could see it also in the reaction of AfD members. There was one in the Bavarian State Parliament who refused to stand up during a minute of silence for Mr. Lupke. There was another also local parliamentarian in Baden Wurttemberg who said, oh well, you know, far right extremism is bird shit compared to the threat from radical Islam or from left wing extremism. And if there's one good thing to come out of this tragedy of Mr. Lupke's death is that it has forced the CDU to draw a line and to say, you know what? We will not form a coalition anywhere in any state with the AfD. These people are too extreme. They have sympathies for neo Nazis and we cannot work with them.

What's being done though, or indeed what could be done to put a cap on this rise of far right extremism? Quite apart from the AfD and its.

Antics, quite a lot can be done. And there's a sense that Germany has maybe played down the problem or German authorities have played down the problem and not done enough. The central and most daunting challenge is how to monitor and police what's going on online. And that's difficult. That's not uniquely a German problem. You have that all over the world. And certainly efforts will be made to monitor and not to ignore these extremist groups. They are small and they are marginal, but they can do a lot of harm, as we have seen. So I think it is a wake up call for Germans in general, but for the authorities in particular.

Gwendolyn, thank you very much for your time.

Pleasure, Jason.

Climate change is fast becoming the defining challenge of the century and it's even begun to preoccupy central banks. Mark Carney, the governor of the bank of England, spoke to my colleague Anne McElrovoy on the Economist asks our interview.

Show the bigger risks are about the transition of the economy of where we are to where we need to get to in terms of a lower, ultimately net zero economy.

What kind of climate shock would you say could do damage to the economy such that we might have to change a lot of our thinking, a lot of our modeling in order to avoid that?

Well, the way we have framed this is that climate is a tragedy of the horizon because by the time that these major physical risks manifest from an everyday perspective, it's too late for more.

Search for the Economist asks in your podcast app. For teenagers in China, studying abroad is often scorned as an easy out for well off kids who fear the gaokao, the country's brutal university entrance exams. But there's a more idealistic side to Chinese students wanting to study in the West.

It's very interesting when you talk to these bright youngsters who give up their weekends and their holiday time to debate in English.

My partner mentions that like a drought.

Using the rules of a US High school education, this is about a remarkably kind of pure ideal of what an American education is for.

David Renney is the Economist's Beijing bureau chief.

So the English language debate tournament that I visited was in the central city of Wuhan. I went on a smoggy Saturday morning earlier this year. The school was pretty interesting. It was a bilingual private school, a boarding school which has its own golf course, and an ice hockey team which boasts it has Russian coaches imported from Russia. The tournament had borrowed classrooms there, but the kids were very much less kind of grand and wealthy than that school setting.

And what is it that attracts these teenagers to English language debates?

It's a really interesting question because the whole idea of studying in an American university is quite a worldly kind of thing. People will talk rather cynically about how it's good for your career, how even some rich kids will go to America rather than to China, because that's a soft option. They don't have to take the incredibly ferocious college entrance exam here, the gaoka. But when you talk to these kids who are giving up their weekends to debate in English, not all of whom have the money or the chance to study abroad, it's actually something rather pure about critical thinking and just a different way of debating and learning. One of the really striking things about Chinese debate is how different it is from, say, the United States, where lots of debate clubs at schools and colleges are dominated by quite sort of shouty, self confident boys, overwhelmingly kind of male thing in North America, in China, most contestants are girls. And actually of the champion debaters, it's absolutely dominated by girls. And one of the kids I met, she uses the English name Angela.

Debate is a great way to have a deeper understanding and to have a more comprehensive understanding.

She's 18, she's from Beijing, and she's actually just been accepted into an Ivy League college.

It doesn't necessarily mean that being in a Western style debate would give you like a Western mindset. Debate kids are generally almost always very open minded because in debate you have to debate for what you believe in. And the harder part is that you have to debate for what you don't believe in.

They debate kind of geopolitical technical questions. So I watched a tournament about should governments be trying to combat climate change or mitigate, take measures to just live with it. And they do three weeks of research. They tend not to do kind of super political debate topics about Chinese politics because this is, after all, China.

And so implicit within that then is this idea of sort of studying, examining both sides of an argument.

That idea of having to kind of put yourself in the shoes of someone who disagrees with you or think about how some debates have two sides, that there isn't a correct answer handed down from on high. They say again and again. It's a completely different experience. And it's one of the things they most enjoy. Meeting these debate kids is another reason to be really worried about suspicion of China getting out of hand. And anything that looks like a kind of blanket suspicion of Chinese students on American campuses, which we're seeing starting, these are such idealistic young people who really see something valuable about the freedom and the intellectual excitement of Western education. And they're also aware that visas are getting harder to get and that when you're on a campus in America, you may be under suspicion of being a spy sent by China. So there's a real cost to tensions rising at the human level.

Thank you very much for joining us, David.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.