"Christian community in Iraq has also been decimated"
Yes, mostly by our great allies---the fanatic Moslem Kurds in Eastern Turkey and Northern Iraq. The Turkish and Iraqi Kurds still occupy the Assyrian Christian lands which they stole after the massacres and ethnic cleansing of their Assyrians Christians neighbors. The Assyrian Christian community was one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.
" Holy war made in Germany: New light on the Holocaust against the Christian Assyrians during World War I
by Dr. Gabriele Yonan
The Assyrians used to hold the British responsible for the destruction of their homelands in Turkey and Persia during WW I. This responsibility was always misplaced, however.
As a consequence of post-war negotiations in the years 1919 to 1925, beginning with the Conference of Paris (1919) and the unratified treaty of Sèvres (1920) and ending with the Conference of Lausanne (1925) which confirmed the Curzon Line, except for the areas of former Assyrian settlements the Assyrians were never able to reclaim their homeland in Turkey but instead were scattered all over the world. It is useless to speculate about what would have happened to the Assyrians had they been successful in garnering enough political support for resettlement and for achieving political autonomy. The area was (and still is) populated by a majority of their old enemies, the Muslim Kurds, and it is not far fetched to compare the situation of that time with today’s ethnic conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo.
Undoubtedly the post-war negotiations finally led to new atrocities against the Assyrians, due to the fact that from the 1920s they settled in the North of Iraq (on the other side of the Curzon Line) among Arabs and Kurds, where on August 7, 1933, a year after Iraq became independent from the British mandate, they were massacred in Semile by Arab forces. The British still maintained a presence in the area but were neither able nor willing to protect their former "smallest ally" from the murderous Arab troops under the command of a Kurdish general. The disaster of Semile resulted in the deaths of about 1000 people, mainly women, and old men (according to the statistics given by the Patriarch Mar Shimon to the League of Nations).
Though for the Assyrians Semile became a national tragedy, today Assyrian organizations all over the world still observe August 7 as the Day of Assyrian Martyrs. It remains uncertain why the Assyrians did not, like the Armenians, declare a special day (April 24, 1915, the beginning of the siege against the Assyrians in Turkey) to commemorate the great massacres that took place between 1914 and 1918 in which approximately 100,000 Christian Assyrians perished by the "sword" of Islamic aggressors. Undoubtedly the Assyrians are conscious of being victims of this genocidal treatment--not for political reasons but due solely to their Christian beliefs. In many publications written by Assyrians these events are referred to as the Great Massacres, or ”The Year of the (Islamic) Sword.” But it was the massacre of Semile in the context of British post-war policy in the Middle East that became a key factor in shaping an Assyrian national movement. The Assyrian writer Yusef Malik, who was a former assistant of the British Mandatory administration service in Iraq (and who therefore had access to confidential documents), published a well documented book in 1935 under the title, "The British Betrayal of the Assyrians," which is still used as a textbook for modern Assyrian history. It might be a matter of opinion whether it was a "betrayal" or a tribute to the shift of power and changes in international policies that finally prevented the Assyrians, Armenians and Kurds from reclaiming any of their previous territory.
But is there any justification for blaming the British for the destruction of roughly two-thirds of the Christian Assyrians during WW I?
When one is interviewing Assyrians of the older generation about responsibility for the massacres, the answer usually is: it was done by the Muslims. The more accurate answer would be: it was done by the Kurds, Turks and Persians. But the British are typically exenorated entirely. American, English and French archives now report that the Turkish army attacked the Assyrian villages and, using Kurdish auxiliary troops from the Assyrian neighbourhood, who supplied the Turkish forces with arms and equipment, destroyed the Assyrians by seizing their land, livestock and possessions. In Northwest Persia the Persian and Azeri Muslim population joined the Turkish army to loot and slaughter the Assyrian Christians.
The genocide carried out by the Muslim forces against Assyrians and Armenians would never have been possible without the declaration of Holy War (jihad), by which the Muslims sought to destroy all Christian peoples in the name of the prophet Mohammed. It is well known that Islam is a religio-political concept; thus the political and religious elements were equally at work, especially in the case of the onslaught against the Armenians, who were seeking independence. By contrast, the Christian Assyrians were an ethno-religious group under the leadership of their Patriarch. They lived living as a tribal and clan society, with absolutely no secular political aims. On 12 November 1914, the sultan-caliph unveiled a decree of war, signed by the Turkish ministers, and shortly thereafter he addressed an imperial declaration to the army and navy, demanding their participation in the jihad. Nevertheless, the very idea of “Holy War,” it should be noted, at least in the WW I setting, originated not with the Turks but with the Germans, who encouraged the Turks to slaughter the Assyrians as well as many other people groups. Thus the responsibility for destruction of the Assyrians and their homeland during WW I rests not with the British, nor even primarlily with the Turks, but ultimately with the Germans. |
