Sayfo 1915: An Anthology of Essays on the Genocide of Assyrians/Arameans during the First World War 9781463239961

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Sayfo 1915

Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies

50 Series Editors George Anton Kiraz István Perczel Lorenzo Perrone Samuel Rubenson

Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies brings to the scholarly world the underrepresented field of Eastern Christianity. This series consists of monographs, edited collections, texts and translations of the documents of Eastern Christianity, as well as studies of topics relevant to the world of historic Orthodoxy and early Christianity.

Sayfo 1915

An Anthology of Essays on the Genocide ofAssyrians/Arameans during the First WorldWar

Edited by

Shabo Talay Soner g. Barthoma

gp 2018

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2018 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܕ‬

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2018

ISBN 978-1-4632-0730-4

ISSN 1539-1507

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ..................................................................................... v Preface ...................................................................................................... vii Contributors ............................................................................................. ix Sayfo 1915: The beginning of the end of Syriac Christianity in the Middle East ........................................................................... 1 SHABO TALAY I – The Sayfo and Archives .................................................... 19 1. The Ottoman Genocide of 1914–1918 against AramaicSpeaking Christians in Comparative Perspective ..................... 21 TESSA HOFMANN 2. The Targeting of Assyrians during the Christian Holocaust in Ottoman Turkey ............................................................................ 41 THEA HALO 3. The Significance of the Assyrian Genocide after a Century ....... 61 ANAHIT KHOSROEVA 4. German Perceptions of the Sayfo: How Much Did Germany Know? ............................................................................................. 71 ABDULMESIH BARABRAHAM 5. Letters on the Sayfo from Assyrian Eyewitnesses ........................ 89 MARTIN TAMCKE II – Local Studies.................................................................. 105 6. The Increasing Violence and the Resistance of Assyrians in Urmia and Hakkari (1900–1915)...............................................107 FLORENCE HELLOT-BELLIER 7. ʲ,ZDUGR$6WUXJJOHIRU([LVWHQFH ................................................135 ABLAHAD LAHDO 8. “I will stay with Jesus and will never betray Him!”: Sayfo in Mansuriye ......................................................................................147 EPHREM ISHAC v

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9. A Victim of the Sayfo: Addaï Scher and His Contribution to Scholarship ...................................................................................163 ERICA C. D. HUNTER 10. The Methods of Killing Used in the Assyrian Genocide ........177 B. BETH YUHANON 11. Assyrian Genocide from a Gender Perspective ........................215 SABRI ATMAN III – Post-Sayfo Period ........................................................ 233 12. Writing Assyrian History: the Military, the Patriarch and the British in Yaqu bar Malek Ismael’s Assyrians in Two World Wars (Tehran 1964) .....................................................................235 HELEEN MURRE-VAN DEN BERG 13. Assyrian Christians in Iraq, the League of Nations and Transnational Christian advocacy (1920s–1940s) ..................253 HANNELORE MÜLLER 14. The Memory of Sayfo and Its Relation to the Identity of Contemporary Assyrian/Aramean Christians in Syria ..........305 NORIKO SATO 15. Forgotten Witnesses: Remembering and Interpreting the ‘Sayfo’ in the Manuscripts of Tur ‘Abdin ................................327 SIMON BIROL 16. The Poems of Ghattas Maqdisi Elyas and the Remembrance of Turabdin...................................................................................347 TIJMEN C. BAARDA 17. Before and After Linguicide: a Linguistic Aspect of the Sayfo ..............................................................................................365 SEBASTIAN BEDNAROWICZ Appendix: Synopsis Report of the Conference ..............................385

PREFACE This anthology offers a collection of essays written from a multidisciplinary perspective about the genocide of Assyrians/Arameans during the First World War. The essays are selection from papers presented at the ‘SAYFO 1915: An International Conference on the Genocide of Assyrians/Arameans during the First World War’ (Freie Universität Berlin, 24–28 June 2015) which was organized by the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies at the Free University of Berlin in cooperation with the Inanna Foundation in the Netherlands. In Appendix I, the reader can find a detailed synopsis report about this conference and all presentations. The essays are categorized in three sections, followed by an introductory article written by the editor. In section I, the essays deal with general aspects of the Sayfo, using a diversity of archival sources. Section II includes essays focused on local studies, and violence methods specific to the Sayfo. The essays in Section III study the post-Sayfo period with a specific focus on construction of memories in the aftermath of this genocide, and look at the impacts of the Sayfo for language and identity formation processes. This anthology aims to promote the emerging scholarship on the Sayfo, which is still very weak and underdeveloped. The contributors of this anthology consist of a mix of junior and senior scholars whose main expertise is not in genocide studies but whose field has somehow been affected by the Sayfo in one way or another. This explains also the mix of disciplinary perspectives included in this anthology. We believe that this multi-disciplinary richness will provide the reader with a historical understanding of this genocide, its local implementation and impacts in the aftermath. I would like to thank all the contributors for their collaboration. Many thanks to Soner Ö. Barthoma for helping me in the editing of this work; Dr. Robert Phenix for the English vii

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editing, and Lea Rasche for the English translation. I am grateful to Dr. Naures Atto, director of the Inanna Foundation, for her cooperation in the organization of the conference, as well as the team of Seminar for Semitic Studies at the FU Berlin. Finally, I would like to thank Gorgias Press for making the publication of this anthology possible, which, I think, will contribute significantly to the study of the Sayfo. Shabo Talay Berlin, 26 July 2017

CONTRIBUTORS Editors SHABO TALAY, Professor of Semitic studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, received his PhD in Semitic philology (“A Grammar of the Arabic dialect of the Khawetna tribe in Syria/Iraq/Turkey”) in 1997 at the University of Heidelberg. He did his postdoctoral qualification at the University of ErlangenNuremberg, where he obtained the “Habilitation” (Dr. habil.) with an award-winning thesis about the Neo-Aramaic dialects of the Khabur-Assyrians in 2006. Currently, he serves as the executive director of the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies. Earlier, he worked as full professor in Arabic language and culture at the University of Bergen in Norway (2011–2014). He has published extensively on linguistic and cultural aspects of endangered Aramaic languages and Arabic dialects. Besides the linguistic research activities in Neo-Aramaic languages and Arabic dialectology, he is interested in the history and current situation of Syriac Christian communities in the Middle East. SONER Ö. BARTHOMA, is a Research Fellow with a background in political science. He is the project co-coordinator of the Erasmus+ Surayt-Aramaic Online Project (2017–2020) at the Freie Universität Berlin and co-coordinator of EU-Horizon 2020 “RESPOND” project (2017–2020) at Uppsala University. Soner has broad research interests in various inter-disciplinary topics, amongst forced migration, governance and discourse theories, European politics, Turkish foreign policy, late Ottoman period and genocide studies, history of the modern Middle East and its political regimes, identity politics, cultural heritage and the revitalization of endangered languages. He is a board member of the Stichting Inanna Foundation in the Netherlands and Mor Ephrem Stiftung in Germany; he has initiated and coordinated ix

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various international projects such as the Erasmus+ AramaicOnline Project (2014-2017). Previously he co-edited Let Them Not Return: Sayfo – The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire (Berghahn, 2017). Contributors SABRI ATMAN is the founder and the director of the Assyrian Genocide Research, SEYFO Center. He studied economics at the University of Gothenburg and has a master’s degree in human rights and genocide studies from Kingston University in London, Siena University in Italy, and Warsaw University in Poland. Atman continues to contribute immensely to worldwide awareness of the Assyrian Genocide. TIJMEN C. BAARDA received his bachelor’s degree in theology and his master’s degree in religious studies from Leiden University, focusing on Christianity in the Middle East. His PhD dissertation is about the use of Arabic and Syriac by Syriac Christian authors in the early-twentieth century in Northern Iraq. From October 2017 he will work as a subject librarian for the field of Middle Eastern studies at the University Library in Leiden. ABDULMESIH BARABRAHAM has an MA in Engineering from the University of Erlangen/Nuernberg and is an independent researcher on Assyrian related topics, including genocide; he has published various articles. He is the author of “Turkey’s Key Arguments in Denying the Assyrian Genocide,” in D. Gaunt, N. Atto, and S. Barthoma (eds.), Let Them Not Return (Berghahn, 2017); and (co-authored with J. Bet-Sawoce), “Repression, Discrimination, Assimilation, and Displacement of East and West Assyrians in the Turkish Republic,” LQ)%DÿND\DDQG6¤HWLQRJOX (eds.), Minorities in Turkey (2009). He is also the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of both the Yoken-bar-Yoken Foundation and Mor Afrem Foundation, Germany. SEBASTIAN BEDNAROWICZ holds a Ph.D. in Syriac linguistics. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Culture in the Institute of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics at Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland. His academic interests include diachronic and comparative Semitic

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linguistics, language policy (language standardization, corpus planning, graphization, religious terminology planning), languages of minorities inhabiting the Middle East and North Africa as well as Muslim-Christian cultural interactions. He is an active interpreter. B. BETH YUHANON is a PhD student at the Department of Cultural and Geo-Sciences, University of Osnabrück. Her research interests are Diaspora and Refugee Studies, Assyrian history, Eastern Christianity and minorities in the Middle East. SIMON BIROL is a PhD candidate at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He is the author of several articles about Syriac Church History, Christian-Islamic Coexistence and Migration/Diaspora: ‘Die Ambivalenz des 21. Jahrhundert: Syrisch-Orthodoxe Christen in der Türkei zwischen bekannten Repressionen und neuen Hoffnungen?’ in M. Tamcke, S. Grebenstein (eds), Geschichte, Theologie und Kultur des syrischen Christentums, (Harrasowitz 2015), ‘Einige BemerkuQJHQ ]X GHU 6FKULIW q/DZLMr GHV %DVLOLXV kHPoŠQ II.’ (Parole de l’Orient 2015), and ‘Syrisch-orthodoxe Christen in Deutschland’ in T. Bremer, A. E. Kattan, R. Thöle (eds), Orthodoxie in Deutschland (Aschendorff 2016). Since 2016, he has been involved in the ERC Project ‘Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic’. THEA HALO is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Not Even My Name, which was instrumental in garnering the first statelevel resolutions in the U.S. that recognized the genocide of the Pontian and other Asia Minor Greeks and Assyrians. She was a cosponsor and driving force behind the resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) which passed in 2007, calling for joint recognition of the Ottoman Genocides of Pontian and other Asia Minor Greeks and Assyrians as comparable to the genocide of the Armenians. Ms Halo was a former news correspondent and producer for public radio, and has also published a collection of poetry. She is currently working on a history book on the Ottoman Empire and the Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian Genocides. In 2009, Thea, along with her mother, Sano Halo, who passed away in 1914 at the age of 105, were awarded honorary Greek citizenship by the Greek government. Among

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other awards and honours, in 2002, Thea was awarded the AHEPA Homer Award and, in 2012, the Association of Greek American Professional Women honoured Thea and Sano for their “Profound contribution to Literature and to Hellenic Cultural Heritage and History.” FLORENCE HELLOT-BELLIER is a historian and associated member of the Joint Team of Researches/Unité Mixte de Recherches ‘Mondes iranien et indien’ (Paris, CNRS). She has conducted research about the modern history of Iran, especially about the Christian minorities and their relations with the Iranians and with Western powers in Iran during the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. She has published several books: France-Iran, quatre cents ans de dialogue, 1604–2004 (Peeters, 2007), Les Assyriens du Hakkari au Khabour. Mémoire et Histoire” (co-authored with G. Bohas, Geuthner, 2008) and La Géorgie entre Perse et Europe (co-authored with I. Natchkebia, L’Harmattan, 2009); and won the ‘academic prize 2015’ of the Œuvre d’Orient society for her book Chronique de massacres annoncés : Les Assyro-Chaldéens d’Iran et du Hakkari face aux ambitions des empires (1896–1920) (Geuthner, 2014). TESSA HOFMANN, Berlin, philologist (Slavonic and Armenian studies) and sociologist (with focus on comparative genocide studies); 1983–2015 employed as research associate at the Institute for Eastern European Studies of Freie Universität Berlin; at present independent scholar; since 1979 author and editor of numerous publications on the Ottoman genocide against Christians, including two collective monographs in German (with Turkish translation) and English (https://independent.academia.edu/TessaHofmann). ERICA C.D. HUNTER is a Senior Lecturer in Eastern Christianity at the Department of History, Religions and Philosophies, SOAS. She is Co-chair, Centre of World Christianity, SOAS, University of London which focuses on the Christian communities of the Middle East, with a particular interest in the heritage of Christianity in Iraq and Syria. She is the principal editor of The Christian Heritage of Iraq: collected papers from the Christianity in Iraq I–V Seminar Days (Gorgias Press, 2009). Published articles include “Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Catholics” and “The Holy Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East” in L. Leustean (ed.) Eastern Christianity and Politics in the

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Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014); “Coping in Kurdistan: the Christian Diaspora” in K. Omarkhali (ed.) Religious Minorities in Kurdistan: Beyond the Mainstream (Harrasowitz, 2014). EPHREM ABOUD ISHAC, BA in English literature, MA from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary – New York. Secretary for Mor Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim and the Syriac Orthodox Archdiocese of Aleppo until 2010. He defended his PhD dissertation in 2013 at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik – Lebanon. Since October 2013 he has been conducting Postdoctural research in Austria on “Syriac Anaphoras: Editions According to Manuscripts” at Graz University and teaching for the MA Programme in Syriac Theology at Salzburg University. ANAHIT KHOSROEVA, Ph.D, Leading Researcher in the Department of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Institute of History, National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Armenia. For several years she has also been a scholar in residence at North Park University in Chicago, where she taught courses on Genocide Studies. Dr. Khosroeva is the author of half a dozen research books and monographs, as well as the numerous articles on the history of the genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks during the Ottoman period. Her research interests include comparative genocide studies and human rights. She has presented at various worldwide academic conferences bringing awareness to the plight of the indigenous Assyrian people in the Middle East. Among her many honors the most precious is for her “Dedication to advancing the Assyrian national cause in promoting international recognition of the Assyrian Genocide”, awarded by the Assyrian Universal Alliance Australia & New Zealand, Sydney, Australia, in 2011. ABLAHAD LAHDO, Associate Professor in Semitic Languages at Uppsala University. Lahdo’s field of research is spoken Semitic Languages such as Turoyo and Arabic. Since January 2006, Lahdo has been head of the Arabic department at the Swedish Armed Forces’ Language School. One of Lahdo’s major interests is fieldwork; during the last 17 years, he has conducted a large number of fieldwork trips to the Middle East, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Jordan, etc., which have expanded his knowledge of the

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different dialect regions, and culture. Lahdo’s latest publications are a textbook in Tillo Arabic, 2016 and a textbook in Turoyo, 2017. HANNAH MÜLLER-SOMMERFELD is a scholar of religious studies at the Religionswissenschaftliche Institut of the University of Leipzig. She is a specialist in the history and dynamics of religious minorities in the Middle East and Europe. Beside her dissertation on the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade (2004) she has published (as Hannelore Müller) further monographs on the modern history of Karaites (2010) and two volumes on religions in the Middle East (2009, 2014). Her postdoctoral research is dedicated to Assyrians, Jews and Bahà’í and international politics during the monarchy in Iraq, which she currently is preparing for publication. HELEEN MURRE-VAN DEN BERG, Professor of Eastern Christian Studies at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands), received her Ph.D. from Leiden University in 1995 and currently serves as the director of the Institute of Eastern Christian at Radboud University. Earlier, she taught at Leiden University in the field of World and Middle Eastern Christianity. She has published extensively on Christianity in the Middle East, especially on the Syriac/Assyrian traditions and the interactions between Western and Middle Eastern Christians in the period from 1500 onwards. Recent publications include an edited volume with S.R. GoldsteinSabbah (eds), Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East (Leiden Studies in Islam and Society 4: Brill, 2016) and the monograph Scribes and Scriptures: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500–1850) (ECS 21; Peeters, 2015). NORIKO SATO completed her M.Phil at SOAS and her Ph.D. at Durham University in the UK. She took a position of RAI Fellow in Urgent Anthropology and taught at Durham University. She is Associate professor at Pukyong National University, South Korea. She has been conducting anthropological research on Syriac Christian communities in Syria and undertakes research on their diasporic communities, as well as on Korean-Japanese relations.

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MARTIN TAMCKE is Professor at Georg-August-University in Göttingen/Germany since 1999, Director of Studies in the international Erasmus-Mundus-Masterprogram Euroculture and in the international Masterprogram Intercultural Theology. He studied Orientalistics, Philosophy and Theology and wrote his dissertation on a Syriac Catholicos in Iran in the sixth century (1985) and his habilitation on an eyewitness to the Armenian Genocide (1993). He has written more then 50 books and 500 articles, is president of several scientific associations and has received several awards.

SAYFO 1915: THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF SYRIAC CHRISTIANITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST SHABO TALAY More than one hundred years have passed since the genocide of the First World War, perpetrated by the Young Turk government, its regular troops together with paramilitary forces against all Christian denominations and ethnic groups living in the Anatolian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Still, the descendants of the survivors have to justify themselves and are subject to hostility when they openly speak about it and want to commemorate their victims. Denialism is a part of genocides. Perpetrators in all genocides aim to establish a hegemonic regime with a distorted image of history. In Turkey, and even among many Turks settled in western countries, it is still taboo to talk openly about this genocide and address the annihilation of the Christian communities of the country during the First World War. The official Turkish position is that the Christians have been victims of a war catastrophe, which led to the death of Muslim Ottoman soldiers as well, and that there were never organised massacres against the Christians. This denialist approach is constantly articulated in the Turkish public sphere by a wide range of political parties. So, when it comes to the issue of ‘genocide’, Turkish political parties, and in fact the whole political establishment, has one official standpoint which can be

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summarized in the statement of Hasan Celal Güzel, 1 given to the daily newspaper Sabah on 25 June 2014: …the Turkish nation will never accept the false accusations and defamations of the (Armenian) diaspora and Armenia. We would like to underline (the message) saying, that there is no Armenian genocide, but there are massacres committed against the Turkish nation. 2

This approach is even defended with Islamic rhetoric. For example, regarding the genocide in Darfur/Sudan which had more than 300,000 victims (in the years 2003–2008), the current Turkish SUHVLGHQW (UGRüDQ stated (November 2009): ‘A Muslim cannot perpetrate a genocide’ and ‘Islamic countries are not able to commit such crimes’. 3 After a century of pure denialism, in 2014 on the day of commemoration of the genocide of the First World War, the then 3ULPH0LQLVWHU57(UGRüDQRIIHUHGLQDVWDWHPHQWFRQGROHQFHV to the grandchildren of Armenians killed in the First World War by Hasan Celal Güzel is a former minister, journalist, editor of major historic publications, and director of the Yeni Türkiye Center for Strategic Studies. 2 The original text in Turkish: ‘Türk Milleti, GL\DVSRUDQïQ ve Ermenistan’ïQ gerçeklere tamamen D\NïUï LGGLDODUïQï ve LIWLUDODUïQï aslâ kabul etmeyecektir. $OWïQï çizerek belirtelim ki, Ermeni VR\NïUïPï yoktur, Türk Milleti’ne \DSïODQ katliam YDUGïUp. (https://www.sabah.com.tr/ yazarlar/guzel/2014/04/25/ermeni-soykirimi-yoktur-turk-milletineyapilan-katliam-vardir) accessed on: 3.12.2017. The same H.C. Güzel said, as a reaction to the protest note against the Turkish policy towards the Kurds in the Eastern provinces, signed by more than 1100 academics: ‘Those who claim that Turkey committed “massacres” (Turk.: katliam) in Southeast (of the country) stand on the side of terrorists …. and betray Turkey and the Turkish nation. Their purpose is to stain Turkey’s reputation in the world’ in SonDakika.com 14/1/2016 (https://www.sondakika.com/haber/haber-akademisyenlerin-bildirisinetepkiler-8062387) accessed on: 10/12/2017) 3 www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article5144277 of 9.11.2009, accessed 7.11.2015 1

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Ottoman soldiers. Nothing was mentioned about other Christian populations of the Empire who were the victims of the same genocide. Although it did not use the term ‘genocide’, this statement described the events of 1915 as ‘inhumane’, using more conciliatory language than has often been the case for Turkish OHDGHUV +RZHYHU (UGRüDQ LQ PDQ\ DVSHFWV UHSHDWHG D ORQJ-held Turkish position that the deaths of millions of people during the First World War should be remembered ‘without discriminating as to religion or ethnicity’. 4 The main aim of this cunning statement has been revealed with the attempt of the Turkish government to organize an international event for the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli on April 24, even though the battle began on March 18, 1915 and lasted until late January 1916, in order to distract the world’s attention from the hundredth anniversary of the genocide of the First World War. Since the conventional Turkish standpoint has been outdated in many aspects and is increasingly isolated internationally, the ruling AKP government developed more conciliatory rhetoric. However, this political turn was not a part of long-term political change. Due to developments in the region in relation to the Syrian Civil War, the Turkish political approach reverted to ‘factory settings’ and Turkey in recent years has adopted an even more rigid and aggressive denialist political approach both inside and outside Turkey. Denialism has different faces. After a discussion following a OHFWXUH RI WKH 7XUNLVK KLVWRULDQ .HPDO ¤LÄHN, in Nuremberg, Germany a Turkish acquaintance said to me ‘let us forget the past and not burden our children and their future with it’. But, how can the survivors forget what happened when this genocide is still not acknowledged, when the victims and their descendants are not granted the right to exist in their homeland, when they are still being discriminated, especially by the state itself? Turkey as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire has not acknowledged the survivors of the genocide as equal citizens since its foundation. Subject to discrimination, harassment and even persecution, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/23/uk-turkey-armeniaerdogan-idUKBREA3M0XP20140423 4

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Christian minorities have almost entirely been dispersed from the country. 5 Of 80 million inhabitants in the whole of Turkey only 80,000 are Christians adhering to traditional churches and predominantly live in Istanbul. This number illustrates well how Christian minorities have disappeared from the country. No more than 3,000 Christians live in the eastern part of Turkey, the former strongholds of the Armenian and Syriac Christians, although the population of the region was at least 35% Christian before the genocide. It is important to historically contextualize the genocide of the First World War by looking at the historical developments and the series of massacres that took place over the course of the nineteenth century. The First World War can be considered as an important break in Muslim-Christian relations in the Ottoman Empire. Until the 19th century, the Ottomans reigned over a multi-ethnic and multireligious empire. The millet concept, integrated into the Empire’s political system, allowed the Christian communities to coexist with the Muslim population who underpinned the state. During the socalled long nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, pressured by and following the example set by the European national states, intended reforms. In addition to the reform of the armed forces, the reinforcement of the rights of non-Muslim citizens played a major role. Briefly and simply said, they were supposed to be ensured equal rights to the Muslim citizens as ‘Ottoman citizens’. The period of reforms, called Tanzimat Era, ‘reorganization’, took almost 40 years from 1839 to 1876. However, the Tanzimat Edict failed. Not only in the East of the Empire did the Muslimconservatives oppose to the Tanzimat Edict. Specifically, they did not agree to the equalization of non-Muslims, and the abolition of additional taxes, the Gizya, as a consequence thereof, with which the Kurdish Emirs in the East filled their war chest.

R. T. Erdogan, then prime minister of Turkey explained the expulsion of the minorities from the country in 2006 with the behaviour of the state as ‘the result of a fascist way of thinking’ Mehmet Y. Yilmaz: ‘BDÿEDNDQpï oWXWDUOï ROPD\Dp ÄDüïUï\RUXP’ in Hürriyet of May 26, 2009, P. 7/17. 5

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As even regions in the midst of Anatolia withdrew themselves from the control of the central government, the great massacres of the Kurdish emir Badrkhan Beg against the Nestorians of Tiyari and Tkhuma 6 (who became known in Germany with their appearance in Karl May’s Durchs wilde Kurdistan in 1892) took place. The state was close to collapse, not only from the fringes, regions like Egypt and the Balkan States, but also from inside out. Sultan Abdulhamit II (August 31, 1876 to April 27, 1909), under pressure by Europe, ended the period of reforms by asserting: ‘The Ottoman Empire is Islamic and will remain Islamic!’ 7 Commencing with Abdulhamit II, a period of policy islamization began which was associated with despotism and directed against other religions – the gayrimüslim ‘non-Muslims’ or, as they were also called, the milleti-mahkuma ‘the dominated nation’. This campaign culminated in the massacres of 1895 against the Armenian Millet (composed of Armenians and Assyrians/Arameans). 8 The Islamic-nationalist ideology adopted by the Young Turks before the Great War, had led to catastrophe – the well-known genocide of the First World War. This genocide is called Sayfo among Assyrians/Arameans.

SAYFO AND THE CULTURAL ASPECT OF THE GENOCIDE Until the Sayfo of 1915, Assyrians/Arameans predominantly lived alongside Armenians in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire (in 'L\DUEHNLU 9DQ 0RVVXO DQG 0DʲPXUDWX O-ʲ$]L]). In the main, they adhered different Syriac churches, namely the Syrian-Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, the Apostolic Church of the East (Assyrian Church), the Chaldean-Catholic Church and, Before his attacks against the Eastern Syrians of Tiyari and Tkhuma (1843–1846) the same Badrkhan committed massacres against the Christians of Turabdin in 1839–1841 which are less known in the literature (Talay 2014, 353). 7 $EGÙOKDPLW    7XUNLVK qýPSDUDWRUOXüumuz din, iman ülkesidir ve böyle kalacaktrr”) 8 Akyüz, Gabriel (2017) contains documents which discuss the difficult situation of the inhabitants of 15 Syriac Orthodox villages in the Batman region, who during the massacres of 1895–96 had been forced to convert to Islam. 6

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somewhat less in number, the Evangelical Church. Aside from the Evangelical Church, all churches in this region each had a patriarch and several dioceses. Although belonging to different Christian denominations, they all used Classical Syriac as their liturgical language. Many still speak different dialects of Neo-Aramaic at home as their native language. There are different statistics regarding the number of the Assyrians/Arameans in this geographical area, varying between 500 thousand to 1 million prior to the Sayfo. Again, according to estimates, two thirds of their number would not survive the genocide. With them, of course, their cultural distinctiveness has perished. In this introductory article, I will briefly focus on the impacts of Sayfo on the cultural heritage of the victims. In course of the first modern genocide of the twentieth century, unique cultural artefacts and sites, such as religious institutions and sanctuaries, libraries containing ancient manuscripts and gospel books of inestimable value, were destroyed. Furthermore, the immaterial culture, that is to say the language and oral tradition of the victims, shares the fate of its carriers and was irretrievably lost to humanity. The linguistic aspect Until 1915, Assyrians/Arameans were – to a large extent – natives of one of the many Neo-Aramaic dialects. Although we do not have exact details about the geographic expansion of the Aramaic language in Syriac Christian villages and towns, according to what we know from the survivors of the genocide we can reconstruct the state of art of Aramaic prior to Sayfo. According to these reconstructions, Aramaic was spoken in many different regions, such as the language of Turabdin (Surayt/Turoyo) and that of 'L\DUEDNLU 0ODʘVň  UHVSHFWLYHO\ RQ WKH ZHVWHUQ SDUW RI WKH Aramaic speaking region, and the languages of the districts of Van, Siirt, Bohtan, Hakkari, and Urmia on the eastern part of it. 9 The question whether even in Urfa/Urhoy/Edessa to a certain extent an Aramaic colloquial existed, can no longer be The language of the Christians of the Niniveh plain and Kurdistan Mountains is not included in the following statements. 9

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answered. The survivors who were forced by the Turkish army to leave the city in 1924 and later on settled in Aleppo’s As-6XU\ćQ neighbourhood were Turkish and Armenian speaking. Because of the displacement and massacre of its speakers, Aramaic has vanished from many regions. Numerous dialects and languages are therefore extinct. In Turkey, Surayt/Turoyo, which is the last Aramaic language still spoken in the country, is critically endangered and only known to approximately 2000 speakers. The oral culture of the Assyrians/Arameans, all of their medical, historical and literary knowledge which was until then only transmitted orally, is lost. On the other hand, after centuries of stagnation a national movement among the Syriac Christians emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. This movement aimed to revive Classical Syriac as a modern standard language, similar to the Arab literary and linguistic renaissance, the oQDKʡDp in the nineteenth century. In the cities of Kharput, Diyarbakir and Mardin the protagonists of this movement formed groups and circles that called for a national revival among Western Syriacs. They frequently denoted their movement with the old Turkish word ‘intibah’ or in Syriac ‘quyomo’ (meaning ‘revival’). They benefited from the reforms of the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, and established Syriac schools, published books and magazines, etc. In addition to the linguistic revival, these efforts aimed to promote the national identity of the Syriac Christians based on history, culture and language. After the war, all schools were closed, the teachers were killed or forced to flee their homeland. The embryonic movement was stopped before it could bear fruit. On the other hand, a considerable part of the Syriac Christians, in the above-mentioned geographic area, was Arabicspeaking, particularly, those in the western part of Turabdin and Mardin, and in the provinces of Diyarbakir and Siirt. They spoke dozens of very archaic Arabic dialects. These dialects are of utmost importance for the history and development of the Arabic language. With the Sayfo almost all these dialects disappeared and shared the doom of their Aramaic counterparts. The Muslim speakers of the same and similar dialects were not persecuted or displaced like the Christians, because at that time a division into linguistic identities did not exist. It was not the cultural or linguistic

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difference which distinguished the victims from their persecutors. Distinctions were along religious lines. In the summer of 2008, I discovered an Arabic speaking village in the mountains about 180 km northeast of Diyarbakir. From our available sources, 10 we know that several villages and towns in the vicinity of this village were inhabited by members of the Syriac Orthodox Church. They most likely were all Arabicspeaking. In allusion to the name of the village, Sine, one of my informants told me: ‘They killed all Christians, only, we have been left alive, because we are true Sunni Muslims’. Kurdish Sunni Muslims now inhabit this region. In Sine they call them ‘bafilla’. Bafilla is Kurdish and means ‘of Christian fathers’. This means they are descendants of Christians who were forcibly converted to Islam during the Sayfo. The cultural aspect In the course of Sayfo, Christian villages were pillaged and their churches, cultural objects, and liturgical books were destroyed. There are innumerable examples of this. There are ruins of churches or churches converted into mosques in almost every former Christian village (for example, in Turabdin or in the Hakkari region). A lot of them are also misused as stables or storage facilities for animals. Two remarkable examples are the residence of the patriarchs of the Apostolic Church of the East in 4RGVKDQʢʛ LQ +DNNDUL ZKLFK LV GLsused and in ruins, and the patriarchate of the Syriac Catholic Church in Mardin where the city museum is now located. Whilst the condition of churches is visible to the eye and can still be seen today, the fate of libraries and their contents can no longer be retrieved. Nothing is known about the great library of the famous Chaldean metropolitan of Siirt, Addai Sher, 11 who was ferociously murdered in 1915. Many of the manuscripts and books extant in catalogues of the Syriac-Orthodox patriarch Afrem

10 11

Bcheiry (2009: 65–67). See further E. Hunter’s article on Addai Sher in this anthology.

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Barsoum 12 and in the catalogues of the American mission in Urmia are lost. Not only did monasteries have large libraries, but churches, clerics and laity also possessed private libraries with books and unique manuscripts in almost all villages with Aramaic/Assyrian populations. Here, the fates of two large manuscript and book collections are worth mention: The orientalist Hellmut Ritter, who dedicated his work after his pension to research on the Neo-Aramaic of the Turabdin, was a translator to Collmar von der Goltz during the First World War, the commander of one of the field armies of the Ottoman Empire from 1915 onwards. On his way from Istanbul to Bagdad in fall of 1915, Ritter passed by Nisibin. In a letter from the 23th November of 1915 to Franz Frederik Schmidt-Dumont from Mossul, he reports on 40 to 50 manuscripts in an old church (Mar Yakob Church of Nisibin/Nüsaybin), which he unavailingly tried to save. 13 As a second example, I offer the fate of the books and the book collections in Bsorino (‘Haberli’ in Turkish), one of the most important villages in the Eastern Turabdin. Bsorino was called the ‘head of faith’ (Bsorino riše du dino) in Turabdin first and foremost because of its important scholars, calligraphers and copyists. 14 According to oral tradition, there were three or four private libraries in the village. The libraries can be understood as a common room with at least one wall furnished with bookshelves. All of those books were destroyed and burned by intruders. The books of the Mar-Dodo-Church, the main church of the village, were piled up on a midden heap and set on fire. That which was not burned was battered with bullets and eventually destroyed. The village’s most valuable treasure consisted of 12 old Gospel manuscripts. They contained illuminations and were written in golden ink on parchment. The villagers had built a cupboard for these manuscripts, inside the 1.5 m wide wall between the altar and the baptismal font in the church, in order to hide them from the aggressors. The valuable liturgical vessels were hidden in the same cupboard. The wall was plastered in a way that Barsawm (2008). Van Ess (2013, 15). 14 Talay (2015). 12 13

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nobody would expect anything behind it. The archdeacon of the church, however, converted to Islam during the Sayfo and revealed the hiding spot to the Muslim perpetrators. They came, opened the wall and took the manuscripts and liturgical utensils. It is not known what has happened to this treasure. This hatred and anger towards the tangible and intangible heritage of the Assyrians/Aramenas immediately bring to mind the practices of the terrorists of ISIS who have attracted the attention of the international community and media in recent years. During Sayfo, the local perpetrators against the Christians in Turabdin were first and foremost Kurds, among them the Hamidiye Battalions (+DPLGL\H $OD\ODUï), members of the special forces (7HÿNLODWLPDKVXVD), bandits called Çete who had been released from jail, and ordinary locals who were mobilized against their Christian neighbours with different motives. However, the religious discourse of Jihad was the main driving force behind this mass mobilization, often mixed with a material interest in confiscating and stealing the property of Christians. As an excuse, Kurds often insist that they had been ‘used’ by the Turks. The question, however, remains: to what extent can someone let him/herself be used to expel his/her neighbour, to kill and rob someone who adheres to a different religion? After all, is there any excuse for it? Can anyone abdicate his/her responsibility if someone else – demagogue, provocateur, or external power – command the felony?

A LESS RESEARCHED AND LESS-KNOWN GENOCIDE The issues concerning the history of the genocide of the First World War, commonly known and referred to as the Armenian genocide, have been widely discussed by scholars, activists and politicians for many years. However, very few know of the genocide of Arameans/Assyrians, which took place in the same region and at the same time. When dealing with the genocide of 1915 the Arameans/Assyrians and their fate is only treated marginally under ‘others’. In the aftermath of this genocide, Syriac Christians did not speak publicly for a long time about these traumatic events. They were both abandoned and left in the darkness of forgetting. This was partly related to the absence of intelligentsia in the aftermath of the genocide. Many of the

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representatives of the literary elite, the clerics and scholars, had fallen victims to Sayfo. Sayfo is less-known partly because the Turkish term ‘Ermeni’ was interpreted only as meaning ‘Armenians’. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and sometimes still today), all Christian from the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire were called ‘Ermeni’ [Armenian in Turkish]. The Turkish and Kurdish term ‘Ermeni’ therefore does not only mean ‘Armenian people’, but rather includes all Christians living in that region, namely the Arameans/Assyrians. The press in Europe, influenced by the notion of national states, could only understand the term ‘Ermeni’ and the genocide of the ‘Ermeni’, i.e. also of the Christians, as ‘the genocide of the Armenian nation’. This was also easier for readers to understand. Still today, we abdicate our responsibility to support persecuted Christians and prevent the blame of actions on religious grounds. This ‘political correctness’ has made it simply easier to speak of ‘Armenians’ than of ‘Christians’. In an appalling way, this is not only applicable to the media but also to the official position of the German Federal Government concerning the fate of the Christians in the Middle East until today. Similarly, the journalists from 1915 did not always comprehend the term ‘Ermeni’ to its full extent. Therefore, their confusion about how ‘not only Armenians, but also Assyrians/Arameans’ were victims of violence can be inferred from their reports. In a memorandum of the Austrian Capuchin-Superior Norbert Hofer, it is said: Together with the Armenians, all other Christians of different ordinances, including the Catholics, are exposed to persecution. The fact that the Syrio-Catholic bishop of Gedsireh, his clerics and believers were massacred shows that the invectives of the Turkish government were not only targeted at the Armenians… 15

15

Hesemann 2015, 295.

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In order to fully understand the genocide of the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, we must therefore take the sufferings of the Assyrians/Arameans and Pontic Greeks into account. Unfortunately, in context with all that has been achieved regarding the genocide of 1915, the fate of the Syriac Christians is far from having come to terms with the past. There is not enough material in any of the relevant fields of genocide research. Neither have the archives of, for example, the German Federal Foreign Office, or the Turkish military, or any other directly or indirectly involved state, been rendered systematically accessible for research, nor has the oral literature about the genocide been collected and edited. In Germany, no aspect of the Sayfo has ever been addressed in a scientific paper, a doctoral dissertation or a habilitation treatise of historians. 16 William Wigram’s statement in his essay Assyrians during the Great War seems to remain valid: The difference between the massacre of the Armenians and the one of the Assyrians lies therein, that for the former everything feasible has been done to make it known to the world, whilst for the latter every caution possible has prevailed to withhold this sad truth. 17

Afrem Barsawm, the representative of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch in the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920) complains of the designation of the massacres of 1915 as ‘Armenians Massacres’, thus neglecting the fate of the Assyrians/Arameans in a Memorandum published in February 1920: We regret bitterly that this ancient and glorious race which has rendered so many valuable services to civilization should be so neglected and even ignored by the European press and diplomatic correspondence, in which all Turkish massacres are called ‘Armenians Massacres’ while the right name should have been ‘The Christian Massacres’ since all Christians have suffered in the same degree. According to a speech by the German historian Dorothea Weltecke (Frankfurt) in Berlin, May 2015. 17 Citation after Yonan 1989. 16

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Furthermore, the literary account reveals the difference between the Armenian genocide and that of the Assyrians/Arameans. The Assyrians/Arameans have not received a Franz Werfel, which could have put their fate and their struggle for survival into the spotlight of worldwide attention, as it has been the case for the Armenians. An epic, for example, which could depict the struggle for defence of the villagers of Ainwardo or Azex in great detail, perhaps with titles such as ‘The Eighty Days of Ainwardo’ or ‘The Forty Days of Azex’ would have made the Sayfo known both to the international community and for generations to come. In these villages, the inhabitants did in fact revolt against the barbarity of the destruction in order to hold their ground against the approximately tenfold superiority of the attackers – among them the German military. Nowhere else could the Assyrians/Arameans remain in their homeland by means of their weapons at the end of the war. At a political level, the Sayfo together with the Armenian genocide has been recognized by the parliaments of several countries, including Sweden (2010), Armenia (2015), Germany (2016) and the Netherlands (2018). In 2015, the German Bundestag has already discussed three times the genocide of the Armenians. In the first joint motion of all factions in 2005, the Assyrians/Arameans are only mentioned in the rationale of that motion. The joint motion of the factions of CDU/CSU and SPD in the Bundestag on the 21st of April 2015 did include them in the text of the motion, however, only mentioned them once in a subclause. I will cite the beginning of that motion: The German Bundestag bows to the victims of displacement and massacre of the Armenians, which began a hundred years ago. It bewails the deeds of the government at that time, which almost led to complete annihilation of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, adherents of other Christian ethnic groups, especially Aramaic/Assyrian and Chaldean Christians were affected by deportations and massacres. 18 Deutscher Bundestag 18. Wahlperiode. Drucksache 18/4687 from April 21, 2015. 18

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Most speakers in the Bundestag did mention the Arameans/ Assyrians explicitly in their speeches, and so did the German president in his speech in the Berlin Cathedral on the 23rd of April 2015. In this speech, the president spoke of the suffering of the Armenian people and referred to the Syriac Christians as their comrades of suffering. All this shows that while German society recognizes the suffering of the Armenians, it still disregards the suffering of the Assyrians/Arameans and relegates it to subclauses. Even though the fate of the Assyrians/Arameans awaits its scientific and literary account, it has to a certain extent gained political attention. This has occurred thanks to the many campaigns on behalf of the same group to commemorate 100 years of the Sayfo all over the world. Although in the last two decades the Assyrians/Arameans worldwide have raised campaigns and taken initiatives for the recognition of this genocide, it is still very much unremembered. The worldwide activities for the recognition of the Assyrian/Aramean genocide attracted the attention and the anger of the Turkish government. Whenever the Turkish political elites face the recognition demands of Assyrians/Arameans, they choose to ignore even the discussion of the topic. Behind the doors, Assyrians/Arameans have been told: ‘We understand Armenians, what about you? There was nothing happened against you. During the turmoil of the events, local Kurdish tribes killed your grandfathers’. 19 The Turkish official standpoint is still based on

This was articulated openly by Turkey’s then EU minister Egemen %Düïÿ in a meeting with Assyrian/Aramean individuals and organizations in the Swedish FDSLWDO %Düïÿ VDLG YHUEDWLP oWhat are you Assyrians/ Arameans looking to gain by using the Sayfo question as masturbation and trumpeted it in the media and the Swedish Parliament?’ (http://aina.org/news/20130226154757.htm). %DüïÿpVDSSURDFKLOOXVWUDWHV how the superiority complex of Turkish political elites, who perceive themselves as the offspring (inheritors) of a dominant nation (MilletiHakime) and others (in this context Christians, millet-mahkume) as ‘second class’, a feeling which originates in Ottoman times. See the explanations of the terms ‘milleti-hakime’ and ‘milleti-mahkume’ in Baskin Oran’s 19

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pure denialism of the Sayfo. Victims and their descendants are still struggling for justice and recognition. Not only their physical existence, but also their distinct culture and languages have become endangered and traumatised following this genocide.

CONCLUDING REMARKS While commemorating the 100-year anniversary of their genocide, Assyrians/Arameans today are facing a new catastrophe in the Middle East. Assyrians/Arameans commonly refer to their tragic history as ‘history repeating itself’. Like their fate during the Great War, today, they are caught in a terrible process of extirpation from their historic homelands. Besides the community members, experts worldwide are discussing whether the ethnic and religious minorities have a future in the Middle East. We should not forget that one hundred years of denialism is one of the main reasons for the extinction of these indigenous peoples from Turkey and its borderlands. Paradoxically, in the twentieth century tolerance and coexistence between different religions in the Middle East has only been possible as long as dictators forced religious tolerance by means of their security apparatus. In Syria under both Assads, in Iraq under Saddam Hussein until 2003 and in Iran under the Shah, Christians, Mandaeans, Yazidis, Druzes, Alawites and also Jews and Muslims lived together in coexistence. In contrast, Christians, Yazidis, Alevites and Nusayris in ‘democratic’ Turkey have been victims of permanent discrimination. Turkish governments have not recognized this genocide, and there have been no steps taken towards reconciliation. The restrictive Turkish policy against minorities after the foundation of the Republic prevents any form of remembrance and commemoration of the victims until today. In Turkey and among a large number of Turkish citizens in Germany and other Western countries the term gavur (infidel) is still colloquially used to designate Christians and Jews. A denialist state policy has had an paper (2012): (http://baskinoran.com/konferans/IdentityDiversityand Cohesion-Bochum-2012-10.pdf)

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impact on both societal and cultural levels in Turkey and made the society less tolerant, and less aware of the other cultures, faiths and identities. Therefore, the recognition of the genocide of the First World War is not only the acknowledgement of a historical event, but more than that is part of present day Turkey’s democratization problem. If there had been a discussion about history, perhaps the religious bigotry in the Middle East would not have prevailed as it has now. This bigotry erupts in violence against dissidents, putting the ancient cultures of the Middle East at stake. Today’s bigotry deals a deathblow to the remaining Christian communities in Syria and Iraq, most of them survivors of the genocide of 1915. Most saddening is the fate of the remaining Christian communities in Syria, Iraq and in the overall Middle East. With deliberate attacks on the Assyrians/Arameans in northern Iraq, northeastern Syria and around Homs, the descendants of the survivors of the genocide of 1915 are expelled from the Middle East, their churches utterly destroyed, and hundreds have been kidnapped by the terrorists of the Islamic State and other Jihadist organizations. The annihilation of Christians of the Middle East started in the nineteenth century, peaked with the genocide of the First World War, and continued throughout the twentieth century through the exodus of these indigenous populations from their homelands. The recent attacks of the ISIS and other Jihadist organizations is yet another chapter; most likely the closing chapter of Christianity in the Middle East.

REFERENCES Abdülhamit, Sultan II. 6L\DVL +DWïUDWïm. 6th Edition, (Istanbul, 1999). Akyüz, Gabriel. ‘The Status of the Süranis in and around Mardin’ in Herman Teule et al. (eds.): Syriac in its Multi-Cultural Context. (Leuven: Peeters, 2017). %DUʛDZP$IUHPo0HPRUDQGXPp (Archive of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, Damascus, 1920). %DUʛDZP$IUHPCatalogue of Manuscripts [Syriac and Arabic], ed. by ,JQDWLRV=DNND,o,ZćʛYRO,ʝXUʰDEGLQ; vol. II Dayro d-Kurkmo (Dayr az-=DʰIDUćQ ; vol. III ŇPLʨ w Merdo (Diyarbakir and

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Mardin). 0DQxŠUćW'D\U0ćU$IUćPDV-6XU\ćQĪ0ʰDUUDWʛD\GQć\ć (Damascus, 2008). Bcheiry, Iskandar. The Syriac Orthodox Patriarchal Register of Dues of 1870. An Unpublished Historical Document from the Late Ottoman Period. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2009) Hesemann, Michael. Völkermord an den Armeniern. (München: Herbig, 2015) Talay, Shabo. ‘Politische und gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen im Turabdin des 19. Jahrhunderts: Rolle und Bedeutung der syrischen Christen’. In: Martin Tamcke/Sven Grebenstein (Eds.): Geschichte, Theologie und Kultur des syrischen Christentums. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), pp. 375–398. Talay, Shabo. ‘Das Schicksal der Bücher von Bsorino im Turabdin während des Sayfo, des Genozids an den syrischen Christen’ in: Sidney H. Griffith / Sven Grebenstein (Eds.): Christsein in der islamischen Welt. Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015), pp. 479–494. Van Ess, Josef. Im Halbschatten. Der Orientalist Hellmut Ritter (1892– 1971). (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013). Yonan, Gabriele. Ein vergessener Holocaust. Die Vernichtung der christlichen Assyrer in der Türkei. Göttingen. (Pogrom. Reihe bedrohter Völker, 1999).

I – THE SAYFO AND ARCHIVES

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1. THE OTTOMAN GENOCIDE OF 1914–1918 AGAINST ARAMAIC-SPEAKING CHRISTIANS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE TESSA HOFMANN This contribution attempts to answer the five Ws of genocide scholarship with regard to the crimes, committed during the First World War against Aramaic-speaking Christians: Who – the perpetrators involved Whom – the victims Why – the motives of the perpetrators and circumstantial causes Where – the location of the crimes and the affected territories When – the date of the crime and the number of times the act(s) occurred.

A further question relates to the modus operandi, while the seventh issue concerns the contextualization and comparability of the crimes in question. In other words, was the Sayfo a singular, exclusive occurrence, as the use of an Aramaic term instead of the legal term genocide suggests? Or was it part and parcel of the general destruction of indigenous Christian populaces of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia during the last decade of Ottoman rule? It seems that we have more questions than ready answers, starting with the definition of the perpetrators. Here, the regimes

21

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of the Committee of Union and Progress 1 (CUP), as well as the Kemalist nationalists of the 1919–1922 period, come to mind, as far as the Ottoman Greeks and surviving Armenians are concerned. While many members of the CUP, including its Central Committee, did not conspire to prepare and perpetrate a genocide, as a result of the patrimonial Ottoman system a large part of the Muslim population seems to have been actively involved in massive pillage, robbery, rape, enslavement, and killing of Christians. In the collective memory of Aramaic speakers, the destructive role of Kurds is especially highlighted, although the French-Armenian scholar Raymond Kévorkian concludes in his magnum opus about the Armenian genocide that the participation of the Kurds is overestimated in general. 2 In addition, regular and irregular Ottoman forces committed massacres of Christian civilians, both inside the Ottoman provinces of Van and Bitlis, and also in Northwest Iran during the temporary Ottoman occupations of 1914 and 1918. Who then were the victims? If we regard the Sayfo as an integral part of the overall destruction of Ottoman Christians, the two large Christian millets or ‘church-nations’ come to mind first, for they were the collectives strong enough in numbers and economics to challenge the Ottoman Muslim elites. These were the up to three millions romies or romiosyni, as the Orthodox heirs of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire continued to define themselves in the early 20th century, followed in numbers by 2.5 million ethnic Armenians, of whom most belonged to the Ermeni millet, i.e. the Armenian Apostolic Church. As early as 1909, the genocidal rhetoric of the Young Turks had been articulated against the Greek Orthodox Christians as a whole. The romies were not only perceived traditionally as hostile and a challenge to national security, but increasingly as economic competitors to the rising Muslim bourgeoisie. At least since the second Balkan War (1913), verbal threats were transformed into discriminatory practice and economically destructive restrictions, accompanied by early massacres of Greeks, such as in Phokea in mid-June 1914, and by 1 2

Turkish: ýWWLKDWYH7HUDNNL&HPL\HWL. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, p. 810.

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deportations first from Eastern Thrace and then from Ionia. However, the conflicting interests among Turkey’s allies and enemies prevented a general destruction of Ottoman Greeks during the First World War, limiting death marches and massacres to the Pontos region, until a temporary Russian occupation in 1917 saved the Pontic Greeks for the next two years. Starting with Mustafa Kemal’s disembarkation in Samsun in May 1919, the socalled Kemalist liberation struggle brought the last and decisive phase of the genoktonia en roi, ‘flowing, i.e., intermittent, genocide’, as the destruction of Ottoman Greeks has been named by Greek scholars. 3 Whereas the destruction of more than one million Greek Orthodox Ottomans took a decade, the destruction of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians, out of a pre-war population of 2.5 million, took just 19 months. Subsequently, the concentrated, systematic annihilation of more than 60% of a designated victim group became paradigmatic for the entire de-Christianization of Asia Minor. The genocide against the Ottoman Armenians undoubtedly represents the benchmark for comparative studies of the Ottoman genocide. How do the Aramaic speakers fit into this framework? First, any conclusions on this matter will be hampered by the fact that there is significantly less contemporary testimonial literature, media reporting, and subsequent research on the Sayfo than on the genocides against the two larger ethno-religious Christian groups. Brief and usually scattered mention of the plight of members of Syriac churches is attested in primary sources, autobiographical recollections, or other testimonies of the genocide against the Armenians. Second, information cannot be found if searching only under the key-words ‘(Syro)Arameans’ or ‘Assyrians’. Here, we must realize that most of the currently used collective terms were entirely unknown to non-Aramaic contemporaries, be they European or Ottoman. Not only were the Aramaic speakers the See Tessa Hofmann et al. (eds.) The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks; Hofmann, ‘The Genocide against the Christians in the Late Ottoman Period, 1912–1922’, pp. 43–67. 3

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quantitatively smallest victim group, but religiously they were also the most fragmented, though they would commonly self-identify as suryoye or suraya in Western and Eastern Aramaic respectively. In difference to this, European contemporaries, 4 as well as Ottoman authorities, did not perceive Aramaic speakers as a linguistic, cultural or ethnic unit, but as members of individual denominations. Thus, in German archival documents we must search for the terms Syriacs (‘Syrer’), Jacobites, Syriac Catholics, Nestorians, and Chaldeans in their various ways of spelling. Moreover, tribal names such as the Church of the East Tyari (German spelling: ‘Tiari’) tribe sometimes occur. For example, in early May 1915, German Ambassador Hans von Wangenheim reported to his government the ‘revolt of 2,000 well-armed Tyari’, who allegedly raided Muslim villages simultaneously to the Armenian uprising of Van. 5 Similarly, Ottoman official terminology related to the traditional denominational millets. However, in the context of deportation orders, even these were avoided and instead replaced by evasive paraphrases; in the case of the Ottoman Armenians, written deportation orders spoke merely of ‘suspect persons’; the ethnonym ‘Armenian’ occurs nowhere. In contemporary foreign terminology, ethnonyms and denominations are confused all too often, though they intersect only in part. The same goes for linguistic identities. Not all Aramaic speakers were ethnic Arameans. In his memoirs of 1924, the Venezuelan mercenary Rafael de Nogales noted the ‘village of Kisham, whose inhabitants proved not to be Kurds, as we had first With the significant exception of English speakers, who use the term ‘Assyrians’ either as a collective noun for all members of Syriac churches, or as a synonym for members of Eastern Syriac churches, wrongly called ‘Nestorians’. As early as 1961, the Assyrian-American historian John Joseph had pointed out the influence of Western missionaries in constructing Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Chaldean identities for Nestorians, who adhere to the Assyrian Church of the East, and Chaldean Catholics, respectively. 5 http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDoc s/1915–05–08–DE-003; http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/arm gende.nsf/$$AllDocs/1915–05–10–DE-001 (accessed 5.5.2016) 4

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thought, but semi-nomadic Israelites who spoke a language halfKurd, half-Aramaic and who practice polygamy’. 6 Mark Levene summarized the heterogeneous ethnicity of the Hakkari suraya as follows: ‘Modern ethnographic wisdom considers the Hakkari people to be of mixed Persian, Kurdish, Aramean and possibly more ancient origins’. 7 Another distinct feature at least of the Hakkari Syriacs would be their tribalism and a much lesser degree of urbanization, in comparison to Armenians and Greeks of Asia Minor. In exploring the reasons for the state-induced destruction of the Ottoman Christians, we must keep in mind that genocide usually serves several aims. This multi-functionality applies in particular to genocide committed in periods of war and/or social and political transformation, as it was the case in the Ottoman Empire. Today, most historians and scholars of genocide agree that national state-building in the late Ottoman Empire constituted the driving force behind demographic homogenization, In this process, the Christian elements of the Ottoman Empire were perceived as not adaptable to the future ‘Turkey of the Turks’. Interestingly, this aim of Turkification was already understood by foreign observers, such as the German teacher Dr. Martin Niepage at Aleppo: The Young Turk has the European ideal of a united national state always floating before his eyes. He hopes to turkify the non-Turkish Mohammedan races – Kurds, Persians, Arabs, and so on – by administrative methods and through Turkish education. The Christian nations – Armenians, Syrians and Greeks – alarm him by their cultural and economic superiority, and he sees in their religion an obstacle to turkifying them by peaceful means. They have, therefore, to be exterminated or converted to Mohammedanism by force. 8

Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, p. 97; the German edition of 1925 gives the language as ‘half Aramaic’ (‘halb aramäisches Idiom’), whereas the English edition translates falsely ‘half-Armenian’. 7 Mark Levene, ‘A Moving Target’, p. 11. 8 Niepage The Horrors of Aleppo, Seen by a German Eyewitness, p. 20. 6

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In a similar vein, the Venezuelan mercenary Raphael de Nogales, who fought on the side of the Ottoman forces and gained insight into the massacres of Armenians and Syriacs in the provinces of Van and Bitlis, concluded in his event-close recollections: There can be no doubt that the massacres and deportations took place in accordance with a carefully laid-out plan for which the responsibility lay with the retrograde party, headed by the Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha and the civil authorities under his orders. They aimed to make an end first of the Armenians, then of the Greeks and other Christians, Ottoman subjects, in the Empire. We glean ample verification of this from the massacres of Sairt, Djesiret, and the surrounding districts, during which perished no less than two hundred thousand Nestorian Christians, Syrio-Catholics, Jacobites etc., who had no connection whatever with the Armenians, and who had always been the Sultan‘s loyal subjects. 9

The decision of the ruling nationalist Committee for Union and Progress for genocidal schemes stemmed apparently from its earlier experience of the Second Balkan War in 1913, when two types of deportations had been applied against the Greek Orthodox population of Eastern Thrace. Mere expulsion beyond the state border into neighbouring Greece had been reversed when the refugees and those expelled had returned to their homes. In contrast to this post-war repatriation, genuine death marches into the interior of Anatolia resulted in fatality rates of about 50%. Adding to such criminal calculations was the demographic equilibrium of Muslims against non-Muslims, reached by the late 19th century. A demographic situation near equilibrium seemed to have incited Muslim elites to push matters towards a final solution.

9

Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, p. 118.

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Table 1: Minorization of Majorities: Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey (1820s–1920s) 10 Decade 1820s 1840s 1870s 1890s 1927 (First census of the Turkish Republic) 1935 (census) 2012 (estimate)

Percentage of Non-Muslims in overall Ottoman population (%) 68 63.9 57 52.5

Percentage of Muslims in overall Ottoman population (%) 32 36.1 43 47.5

2 0.1 0.1

The equilibrium of populations was not the result of natural growth, but of war, expulsion, and the subsequent immigration of up to seven million Muslim refugees 11 in the course of Russia’s genocidal conquest of the North Caucasus and related areas since the late 18th century, of the Russian-Ottoman War of 1877–8 and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Territorial losses, the experience of killings, rape, and pillage of the non-combatant Muslim population during these events, and also forced baptisms ‘aroused [among Ottoman Muslim elites] the feeling that in order to avoid being exterminated the Turks must exterminate others’. 12 In particular the descendants of North Caucasian immigrants and refugees from the Balkans were inclined to perceive Ottoman Christians, and especially Armenians, as allies of their Russian enemies. Subsequently, an above-average number of North Caucasian and Balkan Muslims joined the death squadrons of the 6SHFLDO2UJDQL]DWLRQ2WWRPDQ7XUNLVK7HÿNLO¿W-ï0DVXVD. 13 Karpat, Ottoman Population, p.72, quoted from: Ergun Özbudun, ‘Turkey – Plural Society and Monolithic State,’ 2012, pp. 61–94. 11 Astourian ‘The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity and Power’, p. 58. 12 Adivar, Memoirs, p. 333. 13 Hofmann, *HQRWVLG6DPR]DxăLWDLOL9R]PH]GLH", pp. 62–79. 10

28

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Another relevant component in the set of Ottoman motives for genocide was religiously motivated envy, even hatred against Christians. Such sentiments seem to emerge from the Muslim traditional law system that in its turn is based on the institutions of the dhimmi and jihad, as Jewish scholars in particular have emphasized. In his autobiography, the historian and jurist Raphael Lemkin, author of the UN Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, characterized the Armenian genocide as a ‘religious genocide’. 14 This has been recently repeated by the US genocide scholar Norman Naimark, who in April 2015 answered a question about possible racist motifs in a newspaper interview: No, racist motives played little role in the regime’s [the CUP; TH] decision. Religion was important. Furthermore, the Christians in the Ottoman Empire, including the Syriac Christians and the Greeks have been identified by the government as enemies. 15

In more detail the British Jewish scholar Bat Ye’or in her doctoral thesis characterized the Armenian genocide as a jihad: Although many Muslim Turks and Arabs disapproved of this crime, and refused to participate, it must be noted: These massacres were perpetrated solely by Muslims and they alone profited from the booty – the possession of the victims, their homes, their fields, which were left to the Muhajiroun [i.e., Muslim refugees; settlers], and the allocation of enslaved women and children. The selection of the boys from the age of twelve was in line with the rules of jihad – from that age the jizya must be paid. The four stages of the liquidation – deportation, enslavement, forced conversion, and massacre – reflect the historical circumstances in which the jihad since the

14 15

Frieze Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, p. 141. Wehner, ‘Das Wort Völkermord vermeiden ist töricht’.

1. THE OTTOMAN GENOCIDE OF 1914–1918

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7th century was conducted in the Dar ul-Harb 16 [‘the House of War,’ i.e. Non-Muslim countries]. 17

In fairness, it must be mentioned that the Ottoman proclamation of jihad on November 14th, 1914 had been instigated by German policy, whose mastermind was the Oriental scholar, wartime diplomat and archaeologist Max von Oppenheim, dubbed by contemporaries Abu Jihad, ‘father of Jihad’. However, Oppenheim’s imperialist plan to incite to insurgency the Muslim colonies of Britain and France failed. Ottoman War Minister Enver used the proclamation of jihad to inflate the religious hatred of Muslim people inside and outside the Ottoman Empire against its alleged ‘internal enemies’, i.e. the indigenous Christians. 18 About a year later Johannes Lepsius explained the Young Turkish concept of jihad in a non-public lecture for journalists in the German capital city: ‘The war is not a war of the believers versus the infidels, but simply a Turkish war, albeit against all non-Turks.’ 19 Two further relevant motives for the Ottoman genocide against Christians must be added. Like any genocide, but for the Ottoman genocide in particular, this was an amply-used opportunity for unpunished predatory murder. The above mentioned anti-Christian boycotts and restrictions that had been introduced in 1909 were directed mainly against the Greeks and secondly against the Armenians, who until the Young Turkish coup d’etat were the two millets most engaged into entrepreneurship and commerce. Finally, the Armenians’ seemingly successful fight for the implementation of administrative reforms, as enshrined in the Berlin Treaty of 1878, provided an additional motive for the Young In Islamic legal theory, humanity is divided into the ‘House of Islam’ and the non-Muslim ‘House of War’. The relationship of both spheres is hostile until the defeated non-Muslims are forced to submission and pay the jizya tax. 17 Bat Ye’or, Der Niedergang des orientalischen Christentums unter dem Islam, p. 221. 18 Bloxham The Great Game of Genocide, p. 132. 19 http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDo cs/1915–10–12–DE-001 (accessed 5.5.2016) 16

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Turks to finish off the Armenians once the Great War provided an opportunity. 20 Most of the motives in question, namely religious hate, suspicion of high treason, and revenge, are at least partly applicable to the three typical situations in which the Suryoye or Suraya found themselves. 1) Inside the Empire, the first massacre of Syriacs occurred as early as November 1914. On October 30th, 1914, 71 men from Gavar in the Van province had been arrested and were taken to the adPLQLVWUDWLYH FHQWUH RI %DÿNDOH %DVKNDOODK 3DVKTDOD .XUGLVK Elblak), where they were killed. As a consequence, the Catholicos of the Church of the East, Mar Shimoun XXI Benyamin, declared ‘war against Turkey’ according to the decision of a great tribal assembly, prompted by the advance of Ottoman forces and Kurdish auxiliaries. 2) In the Iranian province of Azerbaijan, Christians were targeted twice by Ottoman invaders, in January 1915 and again in January 1918. When the Turks learned about the withdrawal of Russian forces from Iran in December 1914–January 1915, the 36th and 37th divisions of the Ottoman army occupied the Iranian Northwest. During the subsequent occupation, both regular Ottoman forces and irregular Kurdish units, together with some of the Muslim natives, slaughtered the Assyrian and Armenian populations in the plain of Lake Urmia, destroying 70 villages in the course of five months. The director of the U.S. mission to Urmia, Rev. William Shedd, emphasised that Turkish regular troops participated in massacres. Previously, in November 1914, the Russian forces had expelled Kurds and other Sunni Muslims from villages near Urmia and had, at the same time, armed parts of the See the opinion of the Armenophile German Protestant missionary and theologian Dr. Johannes Lepsius, who mentioned the ‘Armenian reforms’ in his expert statement at the Berlin court trial of June 2nd, 1921 as a key motive for the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians: Der Völkermord an den Armeniern vor Gericht: Der Prozess Talaat Pascha. 2. Aufl. d. Ausg. Berlin 1921, hrsg. u. eingel. von Tessa Hofmann, 1980 (1985), p. 60. 20

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Christian population. Shedd reported, ‘The Turks in response expelled several thousand Christians from adjoining regions in Turkey. These refugees were settled in the villages vacated by the Sunni Moslems who had been expelled.’ 21 Shedd summarized the motives and responsibility for these crimes against Christians: There were various causes; jealousy of the greater prosperity of the Christian population was one, and political animosity, race hatred and religious fanaticism all had a part. There was a definite and determined purpose and malice in the conduct of Turkish officials. It is certainly safe to say that a part of this outrage and ruin was directly due to the Turks, and that none of it would have taken place except for them. 22

Overall, during the winter of 1915, 4,000 Eastern Syriacs (Assyrians) died from disease, hunger, and exposure, and about 1,000 more were killed in the completely undefended villages of the Urmia region. Like the other Non-Muslim citizens of the Ottoman Empire, the Assyrians both in the Ottoman Empire and in occupied Iran were compelled into forced labour and then killed. In February 1915, Cevdet, brother in-law of the Ottoman Minister of War Enver, replaced his father, ‘the cunning and plausible ostensibly philo-Armenian Hasan Tahsin’ 23 as governor of the Van province, where he had already served since 1914 as military governor. After being expelled from the province by the advancing Russian army at the end of May 1915, Cevdet, together with his 8,000 irregulars, fled southward, followed by general Halil, Enver’s uncle with his defeated 5th Expeditionary Corps of 18,000 men. 24 When entering the district town of Siirt (Sahirt, Sa’irt, Seerd, Srerd) in the Ottoman province of Bitlis, Cevdet and Halil conducted, together with local Kurdish tribes, massacres in Siirt and its vicinity that lasted for a month. There were about 60,000 Bryce, The Treatment of the Armenians, p. 100. Ibid., p. 104; emphasis by Tessa Hofmann. 23 Walker, The Armenians: Survival of a Nation, p. 206. 24 http://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/1915/bryce/a04.html (accessed 5.5.2016) 21 22

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Christians (25,000 Armenians, 20,000 Syriac Orthodox, and 15,000 Chaldeans) in that district, Turkish: sancak. Rafael de Nogales, who was under Halil’s command, became a witness of the massacre of June 18th, 1915 in Siirt and visited other places immediately after massacres had been committed there. Of the Siirt massacre he wrote, that: Among the least edifying pictures which I was forced to witness with a smile on my lips was that of a procession headed by a picket of gendarmes which led along a venerable old man. His black tunic and purple cap clearly indicated that he was a Nestorian Bishop. Blood-drops trickled over his brow, and flowed down his cheeks like scarlet tears of martyrdom. As he passed us, he fixed his gaze upon me in a long look as if divining that I was a Christian, too. But he kept on toward that ghastly hill beyond. When he reached it, he stood with folded arms among his flock who had preceded him on along the road to death, until he too fell under the irons of his assassins. Soon afterwards another mob appeared, dragging along the corpses of several children and old men, whose heads bumped along the cobblestones, while passers-by spat upon them and sped them on their way with curses. 25

About 70,000 Ottoman Eastern Syriacs escaped from the border regions of the Ottoman Empire into neighbouring Iran, from where a part of the people was deported by their Russian allies into the Caucasus. Those remaining fled towards Hamadan, under tremendous losses of lives due to continuing Kurdish attacks, in order to seek shelter under the rule of the British. By mid-1918, commanders of the British Army had convinced the Ottomans to let them have access to about 30,000 Assyrians from various parts of Iran. The British decided to deport all remaining 30,000 Assyrians from Iran to Baquba (Iraq). Although the transfer took just 25 days, at least 7,000 of the deportees died en route. Two thousand more perished during the following two years in the miserable camps at Baquba, which were closed by the British in 25

Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, p. 109f.

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1920. The majority of surviving Suraya decided to return to their homeland in the Hakkari Mountains, while the rest were dispersed throughout Iraq. Repatriation to Hakkari never materialized due to the heavy resistance of the Kurds.   7KH JHQRFLGDO VLWXDWLRQ RI 6\ULDFV LQ 'L\DUEDNïU SURYLQFH differed largely from that of Eastern Syriacs in Ottoman occupied Iran or in the Ottoman provinces of Van and Bitlis where they became victims of military and civilian revenge killings. While Syriacs were, at least in the Hakkari district, independent political and military players to a certain degree, challenging the Ottoman government with a declaration of war and their pro-Russian alliance, in the Diyarbakir province they became collateral victims of the genocide against the Armenians. In this province were situated ancient centres of Western Syriac culture and spirituality. Aramaic-speaking Christians suffered there alongside the Armenian population, being ‘subsidiary victims’, as Mark Levene has coined this spill-over effect of the genocide against the Armenians. It did not escape the attention of German diplomats, that under vali Dr 5HÿLGþDKLQJLUD\WKHHOLPLQDWLRQRIWKH$UPHQLDQVH[SDQGHGLQWRD general destruction of Christians. Vice Consul Walter Holstein reported on 13 June 1915 from Mossul: […] In the districts of Mardin and Amadia the situation has evolved into a real Christian persecution. For the government must surely be held responsible: apparently the Christians here are outlawed; one of many cases would be the one of the old and revered Chaldean Patriarch – I have just come back from visiting him – who was summoned without reason to the war tribunal by an ordinary policeman. From the side of the government 26 this is a tasteless provocation of Christendom today.

The word ‘government’ (Regierung) in German diplomatic correspondence from the Ottoman Empire relates not only to the central government in Constantinople, but in this and many other cases also to local or regional authorities. 26

34

TESSA HOFMANN A government like the one today, whose civil servants frequent the lowest females and who direct the execution of their office after the wishes of whores, should not provoke like that at this moment. Soon we will see the most violent uproars everywhere, if the central government does not change its program of Christen persecution. The massacres on the Armenians should be ended immediately. 27

9LFH &RQVXO +ROVWHLQ GHPDQGHG 5HÿLGpV LPPHGLDWH LPSHDFKPHQW As a result of German diplomatic protest the Minister of the ,QWHULRU 7DODDW UHSULPDQGHG 5HÿLG LQ KLV WHOHJUDP RI -XO\ th, 1915 not to apply the ‘penalties’, Turkish: tedabir-i inzibatiye, on Christians other than Armenians, because such an inclusion could be ‘harmful to the country’. 28 Several scholars inferred from this telegram that the inclusion of Aramaic-speaking Christians UHPDLQHG OLPLWHG WR WKH 'L\DUEDNïU SURYLQFH +RZHYHU VXFK DQ DVVXPSWLRQGRHVQRWVWDQGXSWRVFUXWLQ\5HÿLGQRWRQO\UHPDLQHG in office, but allowed massacres and deportations of Christians to continue far into September 1915. 29 Furthermore, the inclusion of other Christian denominations into the Armenian genocide was not limited to the province of Diyarbakir. US Consul Leslie Davis reported on a general deportation order from the province of Mamüret-ül-Aziz, or Harput: ‘On Saturday, June 28th [1915], it was Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (PA/AA), File Botschaft Konstantinopel, 169. http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDocs/1915 –06–13–DE-011 (accessed 5.5.2016) 28 Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919): A Political Doctor’, p. 267. 29 Cf. the report of special envoy Hohenlohe-Langenburg, based on Holstein’s information, of September 11th, 1915 about the massacre of the approximately 5,000 Christian residents of Cizre, in early September 1915. Among the victims were 250 Chaldeans and 100 Syriac Orthodox Christians: http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDocs /1915–09–11–DE-011 (accessed 5.5.2016) 27

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publicly announced that all Armenians and Syrians were to leave after five days’. 30 In conclusion, the initial question on the singularity of the Sayfo may be answered in the following way: Whereas the destruction of the suraya in occupied Iranian Azerbaijan and then in the Ottoman provinces of Van and Bitlis appears as a typical wartime and retributive genocide, the destruction of the Suryoye in tKHSURYLQFHVRI'L\DUEDNïUDQG0DPXUHW-ül-Aziz (Harput) was an integral part of the genocide directed against the Ottoman Armenians. Nevertheless, whether Aramaic-speaking Christians – Syriacs, Assyrians, Chaldeans – became primary or subsidiary victims of Ottoman massacres and deportations does not matter for their descendants, who mourn up to 500,000 victims. 31 Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, p. 144. While the estimated total of Aramaic-speaking Christians in Ottoman and Iranian territories differs by a factor of two, between 600,000 and 1,000,000, estimates of the death toll varies by a factor of five, between 100,000 and 500,000; again, there exists ambiguity due to diverging terminology. For example, it is not always evident whether estimates refer to all Syriac denominations when mentioning ‘AssyroChaldeans’. Furthermore, the discrepancy in the estimates may be explained by divergent concepts of victimhood. Whereas early estimates usually refer only to victims of direct killings: ‘massacres’, ‘slaughters’, etc., later estimates include also victims of indirect physical extermination due to starvation and disease, as given in Article IIc of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). For an overview of the diverging estimates see Martin Tamcke, ‘Der Genozid an den Assyrern/Nestorianern (Ostsyrische Christen)’, pp. 110–112. At the Paris Peace Conference, the Assyrian-Chaldean Delegation gave a medium estimated death toll of 250,000 (Tamcke, p. 111). In his doctoral thesis of 1985, Joseph Yacoub assumed that 275,000 ‘Assyro-Chaldeans’ perished between 1914–1918; cf. Hannibal Travis, Genocide in the Middle East, pp. 237–77, 293–294; David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, pp. 21–28, 300–3, 406, 435. At present, various Assyrian NGOs claim a death toll of half a million ‘Assyrians’; for example, an estimate of 500,000 survivors out of a total population of one million is given on the site ‘Der Völkermord an den Assyrern’ by ‘Bethnarin’: 30 31

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adivar, Halide Edip. Memoirs. (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, [London, 1926] 2005). Astourian, Stephan H. ‘The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity and Power’. In: Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman N Naimark, (eds.) A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 55–81.

http://bethnahrin.de/assyrer/voelkermord-an-den-assyrern/; see also, the website ‘Christen im Nordirak und Tur-Abdin’: http://nordirak-turabdin.de/2015/04/20/volkermord-an-den-armeniernartikel-16–04–2015/). Both online sources were accessed on 5.5.2016. According to US demographer Rudolph Rummel, ‘from 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians’ (Rummel, 1997, p.78). Rummel gives a medium estimate of 47,000 Nestorians, killed in ‘Turkey’s foreign genocide’ during the Ottoman occupation of Iran in 1915 and 1918 (p. 93, lines 234–241); in addition, perhaps one-fifth of the Christian victims killed by Ottoman/Turkish forces in the South Caucasus during 1918 and 1920 were Nestorians (p. 82). In his memorandum of April 2nd, 1920, the Syriac-Orthodox archbishop of Syria Aphrem Barsoum presented the losses of the ‘Syrian (church) nation (Jacobites)’ to the Paris Peace Conference and gave in Annex 2 a figure of 90,212 ‘massacred souls’; however, this death toll does not include Syriacs who had died from starvation and diseases. See also Sébastian de Courtois, The Forgotten Genocide, p. 336. In his doctoral thesis, S. de Courtois presents the two main sources for assessment of Syriac Orthodox victims on SURYLQFLDODQGGLVWULFWOHYHOVLHWKH2WWRPDQSURYLQFHRI'L\DUEDNïUDQG the district of Mardin, in his chapter, ‘Contrasting the Assessments’, (pp. 194–200). This includes a table of vulnerability of the various denominations, as suggested by the French Catholic Father Jacques Rhétoré (p. 198).

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Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman). Der Niedergang des orientalischen Christentums unter dem Islam; 7.-20. Jahrhundert. (Grafeling: Resch-Verlag, 2002). Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. (New York: Oxford, 2005). Bryce, James (ed.). The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–16. 2nd ed. (Beirut : G. Doniguian & Sons, 1972). Courtois, Sébastian de. The Forgotten Genocide: Eastern Christians, the Last Arameans. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2004). Davis, Leslie A. The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917 (ed. by S.K. Blair). (New Rochelle, New York: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989). Frieze, Donna-Lee (ed.). Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2011). Gaunt, David. Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim–Christian relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006). Hofmann, Tessa, Matthias Bjørnlund, and Vasileios Meichanetsidis (eds.). The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks: Studies on the StateSponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor, 1912–1922 and Its Aftermath: History, Law, Memory. (New York: Melissa International Ltd., 2011). Hofmann, Tessa (ed.). Der Völkermord an den Armeniern vor Gericht: Der Prozess Talaat Pascha. 2. Aufl. d. Ausg. Berlin, 1921. 2nd edition of Berlin 1921 (Göttingen, Wien: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, 1980). ––––––– ‘The Genocide against the Christians in the Late Ottoman Period, 1912–1922.’ In: George N. Shirinian (ed.), The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide. (Bloomsdale, Ill.: The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center, 2012), pp. 43–67. ––––––– *HQRWVLG 6DPR]DxăLWD LOL YR]PH]GLH" 2S\W YRMQ\ L L]JQDQLMD musul’man do Pervoj mirovoj vojny [Genocide: Self-Defence or Revenge? The Experience of War and the Expulsion of Muslims before the First World War]. Bibleysko-Bogoslovskiy

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Institut sv. Apostola Andreja. Tom 19, Vypusk 1. (Moskva: Stranitsy, 2015), pp. 62–79. Karpat, Kemal H. Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Kévorkian, Raymond. The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. (New York: Tauris, 2011). Kieser, Hans-Lukas. ‘Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919): A Political Doctor.’ In: Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller (eds.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah – The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah. (Zürich: Chronos, 2002), pp. 245–280. Levene, Mark. ‘A Moving Target, the Usual Suspects and (Maybe) a Smoking Gun: the problem of Pinning Blame in Modern Genocide.’ Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 33, No. 4 (1999), pp. 3–24. Niepage, Martin. The Horrors of Aleppo, Seen by a German Eyewitness. (London: Adelphi Terrace, 1917). de Nogales, Rafael. Four Years Beneath the Crescent. Translated from the Spanish by Muna Lee. (London: Charles Schribner’s Sons, [1926] 2003). Özbudun, Ergun. ‘Turkey – Plural Society and Monolithic State.’ In Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan (eds.), Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 61–94. Rummel, Rudolph. Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900. (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1997). Tamcke, Martin. ‘Der Genozid an den Assyrern/Nestorianern (Ostsyrische Christen).’ In Tessa Hofmann (ed.), Verfolgung, Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Christen im Osmanischen Reich 1912–1922; 2nd ed. (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007), pp. 103–118. Travis, Hannibal, Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2010). Walker, Christopher. The Armenians: Survival of a Nation. (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).

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Wehner, Markus. ‘Das Wort Völkermord zu vermeiden ist töricht – Norman Naimark im Gespräch’. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 23rd, 2015. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/aus land/asien/norman-naimark-im-interview-ueber-voelker mord-in-armenien-13546077.html Yacoub, Joseph. La Question Assyro-Chaldéenne, les Puissances Européennes et la SDN (1908–1938). 4 vols. (Thèse Lyon, 1985).

2. THE TARGETING OF ASSYRIANS DURING THE CHRISTIAN HOLOCAUST IN OTTOMAN TURKEY THEA HALO Were the Assyrians simply caught up in the attack on the Armenians due to their often close proximity to Armenian communities in Asia Minor? Or were they specifically targeted? Until recently, it was rare, if not impossible, to read or hear about the Ottoman genocide of Assyrians 1 in Anatolia. 2 Decades after the genocide, any historical mention of the Assyrians concentrated on their extraordinary conquests in ancient times, their empire and its subsequent fall, and their contributions to art, architecture, science, and law. In the New York Supreme Court rotunda, the Assyrians are depicted among the great civilizations of lawgivers. Yet during most of my own lifetime, I have been corrected many times, even by teachers, if I referred to myself, or my father, as Assyrian. And it’s no wonder: decades after the Assyrian massacres, ‘Assyrian’ or ‘Assyro/Chaldean’ is often used as an umbrella term to denote numerous peoples with closely related ethnic and Christian identities. Here, the term Assyrian is used to include (Catholic) Chaldeans, Syriacs, (Chalcedonian Orthodox) Syrians, Nestorians, Jacobites, and Arameans, unless the document cited specifically names the denomination. 2 ‘Anatolia’ meaning ‘eastern (land),’ where the sun rises, is a term used by the ancient Greeks to define Asia Minor, present day Turkey. The term is still used in Turkey today. [ŸÌÇÂţÝ wurde als Ortsname erst im Mittelalter attestiert. Die Griechen der Antike nannte das Festland der heutigen Tuerkei ÊţÝ, in der Spätantike ÷ ÄĘÁÉÛ ÊţÝ.] 1

41

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THEA HALO

displacements, and death marches that took place during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the Assyrians ceased to be mentioned – except in the context of ancient history – which apparently gave the impression that the Assyrians had ceased to exist. The atrocities committed in the Ottoman Empire between 1914–1923 became known exclusively as the Armenian Genocide. For the greater public, they are still known by that narrow definition. Except perhaps in their own communities, Greeks and Assyrians who had suffered the same fate as the Armenians under Ottoman rule, during the same period, were rarely included in scholarly papers, or were relegated to the ‘also mentioned’ category of Ottoman citizens who suffered. In what can be described as a virtual ‘final solution,’ one account of the period by historian and past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Robert Melson, writing in 1987 and again in 1992 on the Armenian Genocide, went so far as to deny the very existence of Assyrians and Greeks in Anatolia during the genocidal period when he wrote: ‘The Greeks and then the Balkan Christians had seceded, leaving the Armenians as the last of the great Christian minorities still under Ottoman rule’. 3 As if to drive the message home, versions of this erroneous claim were repeated three times in Melson’s 16-page paper, thereby effectively wiping away four millennia of Assyrian and Greek presence in Asia Minor. With such misrepresentations by a noted scholar who teaches the Armenian Genocide, it should come as no surprise that young scholars might come away believing that, as the only ‘Christian minorities still under Ottoman rule’, the Armenians were the only victims of the genocide. At one IAGS conference in 2003, two young scholars giving papers on the Ottomans and the Armenian Genocide admitted during Q&A that they had not realized Assyrians and Greeks existed in Asia Minor at the time.

Melson, ‘Provocation and Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry into the Armenian Genocide of 1915’, p. 72. Also see Melson’s, Revolution and Genocide, p. 161. 3

2. THE TARGETING OF ASSYRIANS

43

In fact, the erasure of Assyrians from the record began almost immediately by Lord Bryce when he changed the title of a report compiled from eyewitness accounts from: Papers and Documents on the Treatment of Armenians and Assyrian Christians by the Turks, 1915– 1916, in the Ottoman Empire and North-West Persia, to The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–16. 4 Although the Assyrian accounts remained in the document, their removal from the title leaves the impression that their treatment was incidental to the genocide of the Armenians. News articles at the time, eyewitness reports, and research in the Ottoman archives have revealed that all Assyrian groups, including Nestorians, Chaldeans, Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholics, were affected. As one ciphered telegram from the Ministry of the Interior to the province of Van shows, as early as October 26, 1914, months before attacks on Armenians, the Nestorians along the border with Persia were targeted. 5 Although Persia, today’s Iran, was neutral during the war, neither the Ottomans nor Russia honored her neutrality. Both governments hoped to annex Persia’s Urmia region to their own territories. The document, posted and translated by Racho Donef, states in part: The position of the Nestorians have [sic] always remained doubtful for the government [due to] their predisposition to be influenced by foreigners and become a channel and an instrument. Because of the operation and efforts in Iran, the consideration of the Nestorians for the government have increased. Especially those … found at our border area with Iran, due to the government’s lack of trust of them resulting in punishment … their deportation and expulsion…to

Compiled by Arnold Toynbee and originally titled: Papers and Documents on the Treatment of Armenians and Assyrian Christians by the Turks, 1915–1916, in the Ottoman Empire and North-West Persia; London 1916, Foreign Office Archives, 3 Class 96, Miscellaneous, Series II, six files, FO 96*205–210. Also reported in the British government’s Blue Book. 5 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors. p. 447. From a ciphered telegram of the Ministry of the Interior to the Province of Van. Private: 104 4

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THEA HALO appropriate provinces such as Ankara and Konya, to be transferred in dispersed manner so that henceforth they will not be together in a mass …with the proviso that the government will not undertake to provide any type of support… 6

The wording of this telegram, which does not mention massacres, only ‘deportation and expulsion’, with a clear message that the administration feared disloyalty, may be seen by some as relatively benign, and the measures taken justified, in that fear required extreme measures. However, it would be naïve to conclude that the motives of the Young Turks were benign. A study of the entire genocidal period, 1913–1923, reveals a pattern of abuse leading to an escalation of violence against all the Christian communities in Anatolia and Thrace, in a kind of a ‘learn as you go’ genocide. Beginning in 1913, after the Balkan Wars, Thracian Greeks were raped, robbed, and even murdered, forcing them to abandon their homes and belongs. Beginning in the spring of 1914, again claiming security concerns, Anatolian Greek families were driven from their homes and villages and denied support for their survival. Thousands of Anatolian Greek men were drafted into the dreaded labour battalions, where tens of thousands were worked and/or starved to death, or died from exposure. US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, Sr. reported that the Young Turks were so successful against the Greeks, they decided to target the other Christian ‘races’, as Morganthau called them: the Armenians and Assyrians. 7 Deportation and induction into labor camps in the wartime period, was later extended to the Assyrians, Armenians, and Pontic Greeks. ‘Some 250,000 serving in the Labor Battalions, … perished from hunger and deprivation’ in the wartime period alone. 8 Some were simply murdered. 9 BOA.DAHýLýYE þýFRE KALEMý Nu: 46/78, Babiali, Ministry of the Interior Office of the Directorate of Public Security General … Private: Number: 104, Ciphered Telegram to the Province of Van. 26 October 1914. Posted and translated by Dr Racho Donef. 7 Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, p. 323. 8 Akçam, A Shameful Act. p. 251. 6

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Perhaps emboldened by a lack of consequences from abroad when the Greeks of Phocea were massacred in June of 1914, by 1915 attacks on Assyrians and Armenians also turned violent. On March 10th, 1915, Russian undersecretary of foreign affairs Pavel Vvedenski found the remains for the adult Christian male population of an entire district. … hundreds of corpses [were] lying exposed everywhere. All … were mutilated … most had been decapitated. … The vice-commander of Russia’s First Caucasus Army, K. Matikyan, counted the corpses and came up with a total of 707 Armenians and Syriacs (or Aisori as he called them) who had been murdered by Ottoman soldiers and Kurdish volunteers on the orders of the Kaymakam [governor of province]. 10

On April 29, 1915, the New York Times also reported massacres of Nestorians: More than 800 native Christians have been massacred by Kurds, and not less than 2,000 have died of disease at Urmiah, Persia, … Dr. W. S. Vanneman, head of the Presbyterian Mission Hospital at Tabriz, who is the Chairman of the relief committee appointed by the American Consul…wrote: ‘About 10 days ago the Kurds in Salmas, with the permission of the Turkish troops, gathered all the Nestorians and Armenian men remaining there. … They were held for a few days and then all of them tortured and massacred. Many of the women and children were taken away and maltreated. … 11

As with earlier Young Turk tactics in the Balkans against Greeks and Bulgarians, leaders in the Christian communities were targeted first. Priests and bishops were particularly targeted. The New York Times goes on to report: Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 67. Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors. p. 81. 11 Aprim, Assyrians, p. 384. Quote is from The New York Times. April 29, 1915. Headline: Says Turks aided recent massacres. Troops allowed Kurds to kill Hundreds, American Missionary Reports. 9

10

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THEA HALO Fifty-one of the most prominent men of this village were taken out at night to the cemetery and shot. The women and girls who could not escape were violated. This was done by the Turkish soldiers. … It is practically the extermination of the Syrians (Nestorians) and very bad for the Armenians also. The only hope is occupation by Russia. 12

In July 1915, Assyrians of Mardin, my father’s town, were attacked. In 1915, the Assyrians in the vilayet (province) of Diyarbekir numbered more than 102,000. Between 1915 and 1916, almost 86,000 of that population had ‘disappeared’. Of the 72,500 Armenians of the Diyarbakir vilayet, 68,500 had ‘disappeared’. 13 Fearing to enter the prosperous walled city of Diyarbakir, the vali, Rashid Bey and his men had devised a scheme to separate the influential men and heads of big families by inviting them to meet the vali. Around 700 of these notables were then arrested and imprisoned. Witnesses saw groups of notables being taken out in boats on the Tigris River, robbed of their gold and even their clothing, then shot and thrown overboard. 14 This Ottoman tactic of first inviting prominent leaders to talk had also previously been used against notable Serbs and Bulgarians in the Balkans. 15 The accounts of clergy who were killed give an idea of the immense and systematic devastation the Assyrian and Armenian communities and their leaders suffered. Of the 96,000 Jacobites who disappeared in these districts, which included the vilayet of Diyarbekir, it was reported that hundreds of priests and bishops were murdered and 111 churches or monasteries were occupied and destroyed by the Kurds. 16 Reports of priests being crucified and burned alive were numerous. In Siirt, where thousands of Assyrians were massacred, tens of thousands of books from the The New York Times. Says Turks aided recent massacres. Troops allowed Kurds to kill Hundreds, American Missionary Reports, April 29, 1915. 13 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, pp. 433–434. 14 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 399. 15 Reid, ‘Batak 1876: A Massacre and its Significance’, p. 396. Also see: Seton-Watson, The Rise of Nationality in The Balkans, p. 38. 16 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, pp. 435–436. 12

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library and archives of the church, once an ancient Nestorian monastery, were deliberately destroyed. Some of the books, written in Classical Syriac and Chaldean were rescued, which allow us to see the quality and content of this loss. 17 A survivor from Siirt, who was ten years old at the time of the massacres, gave the following account to Isho’ Qasjo-Malke in November 1993: In Siirt, the government began by gathering men. … When they failed to return to the village, we knew that the men of the village had been killed. After a while, the killings occurred openly, and we started to hear that we ought to leave the village. Groups and groups of Christians were expelled. The old woman said that she was expelled in a group led by some Kurds. …Thirsty and hungry they stayed on top of a mountain. The Kurds asked the women in the group if they knew where the supplies were kept in the [Chaldean] Sayr-Salib Church. … Two Kurds, two women, and I went to fetch supplies. …A Kurd kicked the door open … They ate and took food to the others. A Kurd saw a door leading to larger rooms full of old books. It was the Church library [and archive]. … They told the women to take the books and put them in the churchyard. They set the pile of books on fire and took children from their mothers and threw them into the fire while the women wailed and screamed. Those who tried to flee were shot down and devoured by the ferocious fire. When the Kurds ran out of bullets, they started killing us with daggers until they became very tired and couldn’t kill any more. So they left us to die slowly. I was thrown into the fire, but I survived. The books that we took out were more than twenty or thirty thousand books. 18

The New York Times had been reporting on the massacres of both Armenians and Assyrians in Eastern Anatolia at least since 1915. In November 1916, however, The New York Times published the following report, in an apparent effort to combat the

17 18

Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 396. Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 396.

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impression that the Armenians were the only victims of the genocide that was taking place: The Armenians are not the only unfortunates; the Syrians also have been decimated. There are many varieties of Syrian Christians. Some lived near the Persian border and in ancient Assyria, and are known as Nestorians, or Assyrian Christians. Some of these living north of Mosul have been massacred. The Nestorian Highlanders, who, according to figures I communicate from a pamphlet now in press, claimed before the war to number 90,000, had to fight their way out to Persia in the Autumn of 1915. Our committee fed during November and December, 1915, no less than 30,000 of these refugees from Turkey, in addition to an equal number of destitute Christians whose homes were on the Persian side of the boundary. … Before the war there were from 160,000 to 200,000 Syrian Christians (inclusive of Nestorians, Roman Catholic Uniats, Protestants, and some scattered communities of Jacobites) living in the Tigris region, exclusive of Diarbekir, in the Highlands of Kurdistan, and in Northwestern Persia, [note: the province of Adarbaijan.] Great numbers have perished, but no one knows how many. During the Turkish occupation of Urmia (January 2nd – May 20th, 1915) 4,000 died of want and of epidemics in that town, and 1,000 were killed in outlying villages. That is the outstanding item in the long roll of death in Persia. 19

Throughout eastern Anatolia and northwestern Persia, Assyrians and Armenians were massacred or sent on death marches to expulsion. Murdered victims were often thrown into the village wells, which insured that the drinking water would be poisoned. A ciphered telegram from the Ministry of the Interior to the governors of the provinces of Bitlis, dated October 30th, 1915, gives permission for the settlement of immigrants – most likely Muslim from the Balkans – in villages around Mardin, Midyat, and The New York Times, Current History Magazine, New York, November 1916. http://www.cilicia.com/armo10c-nyt191611b.html (accessed 1.6.2017) 19

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Diyarbekir. The telegram uses the word ‘deserted’ to describe the condition of the villages, which had undoubtedly been populated by Assyrians and Armenians who were massacred or ‘deported’. 20 The London Times reported that, in Urmia, 150 Christian Nestorian villages had been completely plundered and burned to ashes by Turks and Kurds. Women and girls were carried off by Persians. Their homes and property were almost all taken away by neighbours. 21 The massacre of Assyrians and Armenians would continue in 1916, as would the massacres and death marches of Pontic Greeks and other Anatolian Greeks. The final assault on Christians was by Mustafa Kemal’s army in September 1922 in the ancient city of Smyrna, much of which Kemal’s army burned to the ground. While it is important to examine each case in depth, it becomes evident that it is also important to look at the whole picture if we are to understand the methods and reasoning used for the genocide. Just as focusing solely on the Armenians has distorted the public’s understanding of the period and the full extent of the genocide, focusing solely on Assyrians may leave us with the uneasy notion that the Assyrians must have done something to warrant such wrath. In fact, accusations of treason and of plotting revolt were used against Assyrians and Armenians to encourage neighbours, some of whom had once protected the Christians, to turn on them during ‘the year of the Sword’ (Sayfo). However, even if we concede that there were those in the Assyrian and Armenian communities who aroused the ire of the Young Turks by fighting to protect their communities or, more drastically, fighting for independence to end the centuries old Ottoman subjugation, the question would remain: Could the Assyrians have avoided their annihilation had they not entered into any kind of activity deemed to be subversive? And were accusations of treason the only motivations used by the Young Turks to pit formerly friendly Muslims against their Christian neighbours? Again, a look at the entire period gives an insight into the answers to those questions, and the motives for genocide. 20 21

Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 449. The London Times. October 9th, 1915.

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Soon after the inspirational speeches by Young Turks in Salonica’s 22 Liberty Square in 1908, and the restoration of the constitution, the Young Turks abandoned their professed ‘under one blue sky’ policy of ‘Liberty, Fraternity, Equality’ for a more onerous, nationalistic policy that would become ‘Turkey for the Turks’. Terming it an ‘Ottomanization’ policy, the Young Turks developed a plan to ‘Turkify’ the multi-ethnic elements, or as British ambassador to the Porte Gerald Lowther expressed it, ‘pounding the non-Turkish elements in a Turkish mortar’. 23 As early as June 24, 1909, German Ambassador Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim reported that the Young Turks had already decided to ‘wage a war of extermination against the Christians of the Empire’. 24 At a ‘secret conclave’ at Salonica in 1910, Talaat Bey (later Talaat Pasha) and Finance Minister Cavit Bey gave speeches concerning the ‘Ottomanization’ of the Christian populations, during which a vote was taken to opt for either ‘deportation’ or ‘massacre’. Austrian, French, and British observers reached similar conclusions, that recourse to violence was most likely if ‘peaceful efforts to achieve the unity of Turkey (met) with failure’. 25 As to allegations of Assyrian treason, a number of honourable Muslim officials in Mardin and elsewhere refused to endorse those accusations. 26 Some others, though reluctant at first, succumbed to entreaties, or perhaps succumbed to threats and anti-Christian propaganda, to join in the massacres. U.S. Consul General George Horton, who was stationed at Smyrna from 1911 to 1917 and again from May 1919 to September 1922, reported that in the spring of 1914, the Aegean Coast Greeks were demonized to induce the Turkish population to destroy them. Horton wrote: Today Salonica is known by its original name of Thessaloniki. Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, p. 33. 24 Kaiserlich Deutsche Gesandtschaft Bonn PAAA, Turkei Nr. 168, Bd. 6, f. Bd. 7. 24/6/1909. No. 48, A. 10963. Wangenheim zu Seiner Durchlaucht Dem Herrn Reichskanzler Fürsten von Bülow. p. 54. 25 Akçam, A Shameful Act. p. 76. 26 Gaunt, ‘The View from the Roofs of Mardin: What Everyone Saw in the ‘Year of the Sword’. 22 23

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[V]iolent and inflammatory articles in the Turkish newspapers appeared unexpectedly and without any cause … so evidently ‘inspired’ by the authorities … Cheap lithographs … executed in the clumsiest and most primitive manner … represented Greeks cutting up Turkish babies or ripping open pregnant Moslem women, and various purely imaginary scenes, founded on no actual events or even accusations elsewhere made. These were hung in the mosques and schools. … and set the Turk to killing…. 27

If we compare an account of the actual killing of Assyrians with the above-mentioned propaganda against the Anatolian Greeks, we see a striking similarity. … pregnant women had their bellies slit open and babies taken out to be crushed like grapes under the feet of soldiers…soldiers raped pretty girls and women in front of their families. 28

As many in the general public were poor and illiterate, permission to loot certainly played a role in inducing some to take part in the massacres of Christians. The Young Turk regime’s confiscation of Christian properties and wealth for their own aggrandizement also played a role in Young Turk decisions. That doesn’t answer the more fundamental question, however, of why the regime resorted to genocide. In today’s Islamophobic atmosphere, there are those who blame religious extremism for the genocide of the Christian populations. In fact, Moise Cohen (aka Tekin Alp) (1883–1961), an ideologue from Salonica, who was one of the founders of Turkish Nationalism, and a proponent of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanism, candidly admitted that religion was used as a tool to draw in the masses. He wrote: They [the Young Turks] realised only too clearly that the still abstract ideals of Nationalism could not be expected to attract Horton, Blight of Asia, Chapter V, ‘Persecution of Christians in Smyrna District (1911–1914)’. 28 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 398. 27

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THEA HALO the masses, the lower classes, composed of uneducated and illiterate people. It was found more expedient to reach these classes under the flag of religion. 29

However, it was clear to the Young Turks that Islam in its practiced form could not serve their purposes. The Islam of the Arabs, which had been adopted by the Turks, could not satisfy the political agenda of the Young Turks, ‘because’, Tekin Alp explained, ‘it is written in the Koran that Islam knows no nationalities, but only Believers’. Tekin Alp, who later also became known as a Kemalist ideologue, added, ‘Although the Nationalists proclaim themselves the most zealous followers of Mohammed, … They maintain that the Turks cannot interpret the Koran in the same manner as the Arabs…. Their idea of God is also different.’ 30 In essence, the Young Turks had to reinterpret Islam, and perhaps even fashion their own god to support their genocidal agenda. Therefore, although religion was also used to induce the uneducated masses to join in the Young Turk plan, that all too easy answer misses the point. The failure of the Ottoman government to educate its Muslim citizens also had other repercussions. Rather than religious zeal, Horton and others believed there were deeper, more political motives for the destruction of the Christian communities. Horton observed that had the Young Turks kept their campaign promise of a truly multi-cultural, multi-ethnic federation, the worker bees [the Christians] would have taken over the hive, and the Young Turks knew it. Horton wrote: … Christians would speedily have outstripped the Ottomans, who would soon have found themselves in a subordinate position commercially, industrially and economically. It was

Tekin Alp, The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal, Constantinople, Admiralty War Staff, Intelligence Division (I.D. 1153). p. 22. Qatar Digital Library. 30 Tekin Alp, The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal, p. 16 & 17. 29

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this knowledge which caused the Turks to resolve upon the extermination of the Christians. 31

Dr Martin Niepage, a German teacher at the German Technical School in Aleppo seemed to agree. He observed: The Christian nations – Armenians, Syrians and Greeks – alarm him [the Mohammedans] by their cultural and economic superiority, and he sees in their religion an obstacle to Turkifying them by peaceful means. They have, therefore, to be exterminated or converted to Mohammedanism by force. 32

Tekin Alp, summed it up when he wrote, ‘…The real motive… was the longing of the Turkish nation for independence in their own country’. 33 This theme was echoed by Ittihadist National Assembly member Feyzi who tried to provoke reluctant Muslims in Mardin to join in the killing of Assyrians and Armenians. Feyzi admonished: ‘Let us get rid of the Christians so we can be masters in our own house’. 34 An important link that guaranteed the success of the genocidal aims of the Young Turks should not be overlooked. Germany’s commercial interests in Anatolia, which began in the 1880s, and the commencement of the First World War, which gave the Young Turks and Germany cover for their nefarious aims, played an important roll in the destruction of the Christian communities. Numerous articles in the German press defending attacks on Armenians, even during Sultan Abdülhamid’s rule, revealed a disturbing German willingness to support violent Ottoman policies towards its Christian subjects. In fact, Kaiser Wilhelm II had personally set the tone for German racist propaganda. Alfons Mumm, a Foreign Official of Germany, had excused the Hamidian Horton, Blight of Asia, Chapter XXIII, ‘The Responsibility of the Western World’. 32 Niepage, The Horrors of Aleppo Seen by a German Eyewitness, p. 20. Dr Niepage resigned his appointment at the school as a protest against the Armenian atrocities in 1915. 33 Tekin Alp, The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal, p. 24. 34 Gaunt, The View from the Roofs of Mardin. 31

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massacres of 1894–1896 as an act of Turkish ‘self defence’, asserting, ‘… one must not forget that the characteristics of this race, [the Armenians] its cunningness, and its rebellious activities had to provoke the rage of the Turks…’ 35 At the beginning of 1915, the Deutsche Palästina Bank circulated pamphlets in Turkish in eastern Anatolia and elsewhere, ‘exciting the fanaticism of the Mussulmans, recommending hatred of the Christians, and recommending cessation of all commercial relations with them’. 36 German propagandist, Alfons Sussnitzki, writing in 1917, spread propaganda against Armenians and Greeks, claiming ‘that usury and the exploitation of foreign protection… contributed to the economic ascendancy of these groups’. 37 Sussnitzki went so far as to advocate ‘the exclusion of Armenians and Greeks,’ for being ‘under British and French influence,’ then proposed using ‘Ottoman Jews, Arabs, and dönmes (Jewish converts to Islam)’ in their place since, according to Sussnitzki, ‘Turks lacked the racial aptitude for trade.’ Sussnitzki and others reminded readers of ‘the Ottoman Turkish need for German aid’. 38 The Young Turks were well aware of the educational deficiencies of the Turkish public. Horton wrote: …they are jealous of the Christians whom they regard as thriving at their expense. I have heard Turkish politicians make Kaiser, Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories, p. 10. D.J., ‘Turkey and Greeks. Record of Persecution. Complicity of Germany,’ 1/26/17. News article found in and addressing documentation from the archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 37 Kaiser, Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories. p. 32. From Alphons J. Sussnitzki, ‘Zur Gliedderung Wirtschaftlicher Arbeit nach Nationalitäten in der Türkei’, [On the Division of Labor According to Nationalities in Turkey] Archiv für Wirttschafisforschung im Orient 2 (1917), pp. 382–407. The author was a journalist who between 1911 and 1918 reported for several German newspapers on Ottoman Affairs. Contributing to the Allegemeine Zeitung des Judentuns, he reported on affairs of the Ottoman Jewish community and the Zionist movement. In 1918 his articles appeared in the Welwirtschaftszeitung, where he discussed problems of the Ottoman economy. 38 Kaiser, Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories, p. 31. 35 36

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speeches at Salonica in which they affirmed that if the Christians were exterminated and driven out, the Turks would of sheer necessity progress and develop schools, commerce and industry. Then followed the great massacre. 39

Many others independently shared Horton’s view. The Christian nations—Armenians, Syrians and Greeks— alarm him [the Mohammedans] by their cultural and economic superiority, and he sees in their religion an obstacle to Turkifying them by peaceful means. They have, therefore, to be exterminated or converted to Mohammedanism by force. 40

As noted in The Times headline, ‘Extermination of Greeks in Turkey. A German Plot Disclosed’, German engineering of the genocidal policies was widely recognized. 41 German historian Hilmar Kaiser asserted that the ‘German World War I propaganda [was] addressed to both Ottoman and German audiences … the mass murder of Armenians had opened up new opportunities for German trade and investment’. 42 This held true for the mass murder and displacement of Assyrians and Anatolian Greeks as well. By March, 1912, the ‘Turk Ojaghi’ (Home of the Turks) was founded in Constantinople. Only Turks were allowed to attend. It’s stated aim was: To work for the national education of the Turkish people which forms the most important division of Islam; to work for

George Horton, Report to Secretary of State, The Near Eastern Question, September 27, 1922. Published by The Journalists’ Union of the Athens Daily Newspapers, 1985. p. 17. 40 Martin Niepage, The Horrors of Aleppo Seen by a German Eyewitness. (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1917) p. 20. Dr. Niepage was a teacher in the German Technical School at Aleppo, who resigned his appointment as a protest against the Armenian atrocities in 1915. 41 The Times, ‘Extermination of Greeks in Turkey. A German Plot Disclosed,’ August 23rd, 1917. 42 Kaiser, Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories, p. 32. 39

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THEA HALO the raising of her intellectual, social, and economic standard, and for the perfection of the Turkish language and race. 43

To accomplish this ideal, the Young Turks set their sites on Germany as their chosen ‘educator’. Turkey, as leader of the Mohammedan world, most urgently requires European science and the modern developments of European civilization and intellectual life in all branches of human activity, in intellectual, social, administrative, and especially in economic spheres. Germany is the only country to whom she can apply for this without endangering her national independence and territorial integrity. Germany’s national ideal is economic expansion. Who could suggest a wider field for this than the inexhaustible regions of Anatolia, Asia Minor, and all Turkish territory both before and after the war? 44

When German Ambassador to Turkey Count Matternick attempted to intervene on behalf of the Christians in 1917, an outraged Enver Pasha and the German military authorities in Constantinople demanded he be recalled by the Kaiser, claiming, ‘intervening in favour of the Christians wounded the amour propre of the Turks and badly served German interests’. 45 Exact figures of deaths in each community are difficult to ascertain. Scholars suggest that approximately 275,000 Assyrians, (more than half their population), up to 1.2 million Greeks, 353,000 of whom were Pontic Greeks, and 600,000–800,000 Armenians were murdered by various methods during the genocidal period from 1913–1923. Some scholars assert that Armenian deaths reached as high as 1.5 million, which would bring the total loss of life to almost three million Christians. Tekin Alp, The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal, p. 19. Tekin Alp, The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal, p. 31. 45 Mr. Zalocostas, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, dated March 28, 1917 (Ministerial Archives, No. 2338). Also see: D.J., ‘Turkey and Greeks. Record of Persecution. Complicity of Germany,’ 1/26/17. News article found in, and addressing documentation from the archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 43 44

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Of the 1,221,849 Christians who were transported to Greece, 100,000 were Armenians, 9,000 Circassians, and 1000 Assyrians. 46 Scholars writing on behalf of the Armenians often claim that denial is the final stage of genocide. However, denial of the Assyrian Genocide would have at least kept the Assyrians in the public consciousness. Silence during most of the last one hundred years has rendered the Assyrian, Pontic Greek, and other Anatolian and Thracian Greek victims invisible to the general public, as if they had never existed, or existed only in Antiquity, so that, until recently, silence of this heinous crime against the Assyrian and Greek people of Anatolia became the final killer, rendering their genocide complete. The passing of the 2007 Resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), which recognized the genocide of the Assyrians, Pontian and other Anatolian Greeks as comparable to the genocide of Armenians during the same period has begun to end the silence and has encouraged a more detailed look at the work of Racho Donef, David Gaunt, and others who have made available their research and writing on the Assyrian Genocide. Because of the IAGS Resolution, and the important work of activists who petitioned their members of parliament, in 2010 Sweden became the first nation to recognize the genocide of these three historic Christian peoples: Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians, in one historic resolution. In 2013, the Parliament of New South Wales, Australia, followed suit, as did the Netherlands, Austria, and Armenia in 1915. Germany initiated its own recognition of these genocides in a June 2, 2016 resolution. Others will surely follow. The IAGS Resolution reads as follows: WHEREAS the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides; Edward Hale Bierstadt, The Great Betrayal: Economic Imperialism & the Destruction of Christian Communities in Asia Minor. Reprinted by The Pontian Greek Society of Chicago. First published in 1924. Pp. 248–249. 46

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THEA HALO WHEREAS the Ottoman genocide against minority populations during and following the First World War is usually depicted as a genocide against Armenians alone, with little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire; BE IT RESOLVED that it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Association calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Akçam, Taner, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). Tekin Alp, The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal, Constantinople, Admiralty War Staff, Intelligence Division (I.D. 1153). P. 22. Qatar Digital Library. Aprim, Frederick A., Assyrians: From Bedr Khan to Saddam Hussein. Driving into Extinction the Last Aramaic Speakers. (Xlibris Corporation, 2006). Edward Hale Bierstadt, The Great Betrayal: Economic Imperialism & the Destruction of Christian Communities in Asia Minor. Reprinted by The Pontian Greek Society of Chicago. First published in 1924. D.J., Turkey and Greeks. Record of Persecution. Complicity of Germany. Archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1/26/17. Gaunt, David. Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006).

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——— ‘The View from the Roofs of Mardin: What Everyone Saw in the ‘Year of the Sword’.’ The Armenian Weekly, January 7, 2015. Horton, George. The Blight of Asia, an Account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers, with the True Story of the Burning of Smyrna. (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1926). Kaiser, Hilmar, Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories. The Construction of a Dominant Paradigm on Ottoman Armenians. (London: Gomidas Institute, 1997). Kaiserlich Deutsche Gesandtschaft Bonn PAAA, Türkei Nr. 168, Bd. 6, f. Bd. 7. 24/6/1909. No. 48, A. 10963. ‘Wangenheim zu Seiner Durchlaucht Dem Herrn Reichskanzler Fürsten von Bülow’. Melson, Robert. ‘Provocation and Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry into the Armenian Genocide of 1915.’ In Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 61– 84. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987). ——— Revolution and Genocide. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Morgenthau, Henry Sr. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918). Niepage, Martin, The Horrors of Aleppo Seen by a German Eyewitness. (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1917). Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. originally titled: Papers and Documents on the Treatment of Armenians and Assyrian Christians by the Turks, 1915– 1916, in the Ottoman Empire and North-West Persia; London 1916, Foreign Office Archives, 3 Class 96, Miscellaneous, Series II, six files, FO 96*205–210. Also reported in the British government’s Blue Book. ——— Turkey – A Past and a Future. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917). Reid, James J., Batak. ‘1876: A Massacre and its Significance.’ Journal of Genocide Research (2000), 2(3), p. 396. Rockwell, William Walker. ‘The Total of Armenian and Syrian Dead.’ Current History Magazine, November 1916. http://www.cilicia.com/armo10c-nyt191611b.html

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Seton-Watson, Robert William. The Rise of Nationality in The Balkans, (University of Michigan Library, 1918). Sussnitzki, Alphons J., ‘Zur Gliedderung Wirtschaftlicher Arbeit nach Nationalitäten in der Türkei’ [On the Division of Labor According to Nationalities in Turkey]. Archiv für Wirttschafisforschung im Orient 2 (1917), pp. 382–407. The London Times. October 9, 1915. The New York Times. ‘Says Turks aided recent massacres. Troops allowed Kurds to kill Hundreds.’ American Missionary Reports, April 29, 1915. The Times. ‘Extermination of Greeks in Turkey. A German Plot Disclosed.’ August 23, 1917. %2$'$+ý/ýþHILN@%H\ZDVDOVRUHPRYHGIRUQRW following orders. Finally, Bedri Bey who was willing to carry out Reshid’s RUGHUV ZDV DSSRLQWHG DV 0DUGLQpV 0XWHVDUUïI 6HH 'RQHI o5LJKWHRXV Muslims during the Genocide of 1915’. 36 Lepsius, Bericht zur Lage, p. 76. 32 33

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[c]onditions in the districts of Mardin and Amadia in the Vilajet Diyarbekir have turned into a real persecution of the Christians. This is undoubtedly the government’s fault. Christians have been undoubtedly declared almost outlaws; many people mentioned that today the local old and dignified Chaldean Patriarch – I was just with him – was called before the court-martial by an ordinary policeman verbally without giving any reason. This is based on the government’s childish provocation of the local Christendom. 37

Separating men and women was a measure constantly used to weaken the deportees. Holstein reported from Mosul: ‘Until now, about six hundred women and children (Armenian, [As]syrian, Chaldean), whose male relatives in Seert, Mardin and Feihshahbur were massacred, have arrived here; the same number is expected during the next few days.’ 38 The German embassy informed the Ottoman government in a memo handed over by the German Ambassador Hohenlohe on August 9th that it regrets having to ascertain that ‘in certain places such as Mardin, all Christians, irrespective of their race or confession, have suffered the same fate [as the Armenians].’ 39 Van Lepsius reported that irregular militias looted and slayed Armenian and partly Assyrian Christians in large numbers in the ‘Armenian villages of Abak, Khatschan, Tschibukli, Gahimak, Khan, Akhorik, Hassan Tamra, Arsarik and Naschwa … and in the Abagha plain. It is estimated that 2,060 Armenians and 300 [As]syrians were killed.’ 40 The result of this systematic looting and these massacres in Christian villages was a mass exodus of Christians across the Russian border. In the spring of 1915, the army of Khalil Bey, an uncle of Enver Pasha and commander of the corps, invaded Persia and PA-AA, BoKon/169, no. 3 dated June 13th, 1915. PA-AA, BoKon/169, no. 14 dated July 21st, 1915. 39 As attachment to PA-AA, R1408, no. 501 dated August 12th, 1915. 40 Lepsius, Bericht zur Lage, 76. 37 38

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advanced into the region of Urmia and Dilman in northern Persia. 10,000 Kurds from the upper Zab region had joined the 20,000 regulars. Djevdet Bey, the Vali of Van and a brother-in-law to the Turkish Minister of War, Enver Pasha, took part in these operations. Lepsius reported that the ‘troops devastated Persian territory and all the Christian villages. The [As]syrian population of the Urmia region and the Armenian population of Salmas plain, around Dilman, was, as far as they could not take refuge on Russian territory or found in the American mission protection, mercilessly massacred by the Kurds.’ 41 Lepsius quoted Djevdet Bey, the Vali of Van, who had returned in mid-February from Salmas and Urmia, with a statement that he had made in a meeting of Turkish notables: ‘We have made a clean sweep with the Armenians and [As]syrians of Azerbaijan (North West Persia) and we must do the same with the Armenians of Van.’ 42 Urmia Lepsius depicted an account of the German-American Pastor Pfander from Urmia dated July 22nd, 1915: As soon as the Russians were gone, the Mohammedans began to rob and loot … Some [As]syrians abandoned all their household belongings and their winter supplies and fled … 15,000 [As]syrians found shelter within the walls of the Mission, where the missionaries provided them with bread … diseases broke out, the death rate rose to 50 per day. The Kurds killed nearly every man in the villages, which they could get hold of… 43

Pfander’s report further stated that Turks ‘had built gallows on the main road in front of the gate and hanged many innocent [As]syrians and shot others…’ 44 Lepsius, Bericht zur Lage, pp. 80–81. Ibid., p. 81. 43 Ibid., pp. 104–105. 44 Ibid., p. 105. 41 42

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Lepsius quoted further from a report that he received from Miss Anna Friedmann, the former head of the German orphanage in Urmia. She was forced to vacate her orphanage at the beginning of the war: The latest news say that (in Urmia) 4,000 [As]syrians and 100 Armenians died because of the diseases at the (American) missionaries alone. All villages around [Urmia] have been looted and burned to ashes, especially Göktepe, Gülpartschin, Tscheragusche. 2,000 Christians have been massacred in Urmia and the surrounding area; many churches have been destroyed and set on fire, as have been many houses of the city. 45

A letter Miss Friedmann received stated that … in Heftewan and Salmas alone 850 corpses have been pulled out of pumping wells and cisterns, with no head. Why? The supreme commander of the Turkish troops had set a bounty for every Christian head. The wells are saturated with Christian blood. …Flocks of Christians were imprisoned and forcibly compelled to accept Islam. The males were circumcised … In the Catholic courtyard of the mission [of Sautschbulak] in Fath-Ali-Khan-Göl 40 [As]syrians have been hung on the gallows erected there… 46

It is important to point out that Lepsius underscored explicitly that ‘…according to the reports, no distinction was made during the massacres between the Armenian and [As]syrian population in the Van region and in the Persian districts of Salmas, Urmia and Sautschbulak.’ 47

THE PAN-ISLAMIC PROGRAM OF THE YOUNG TURKS Lepsius elaborated 48 on the “pan-Islamic program” of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as the only plausible Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 106. 47 Ibid., p. 108. 48 Ibid., p. 217. 45 46

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internal political motivation for the implementation of the deportations. He tried to find clues and sufficient evidence in the propagated policies of the Committee of the Young Turks and their leaders. On April 27th, 1909, the Young Turks deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid II and enforced a rigorous one-party rule. A shadow government seized the official administrative apparatus. The vocation of the highest officials of the kingdom and all main administrative bodies were governed by decisions of the Committee. Lepsius argued that their nationalist and centralist tendency targeted not only the various non-Muslim nationalities of the Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and Jews, but was also directed against non-Turkish nations. 49 As a result, a Pan-Turkism was erected as an idol and the harshest measures were taken against all non-Turkish ethnic elements. Lepsius pointed to a report of the CUP Congress held in Thessaloniki in 1911, in which the Committee notes with satisfaction that it was able to fill almost all the important positions in the Empire with its followers. 50 Already in the autumn of 1911, the program of the CUP formulated the mission of the Committee: Sooner or later the complete Ottomanization of all Turkish subjects would have to be carried out, but it is clear that this could never be achieved by persuasion, but one must take refuge to armed violence. The character of the empire has to be Islamic and respect must be procured to Muslim institutions and traditions. Other nationalities must be deprived of their right of organization, because decentralization and self-government are treason against the Ottoman Empire. The nationalities are a negligible quantity. They can keep their religion, but not their language. The spread of the Turkish language is one of the main means to

49 50

Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 221.

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secure Mohammedan/Islamic supremacy and assimilate the other elements. 51

Lepsius concluded that it is clear that the actions against the Armenians [and other Christians] are, in every respect, based on the principles expressed in that program. 52

THE ANNIHILATION OF THE CHRISTIAN POPULATIONS It is obvious that, for the Young Turks, the events of the First Word War appeared as an opportunity to carry out a nationalistic program they had fixed years before the war at a congress in Thessaloniki: the ethnic and religious homogenization of Anatolia. Even worse: Turkish nationalist fanaticism did not shy away from the hardest measures to achieve its goal. Many Christians of all ages and sexes were left alive only if they converted to Islam. Those not circumcised or slaughtered or sold into slavery were ‘resettled’, namely driven into the Arabian desert, where they died due to thirst, starvation, and disease. The property and wealth of the victims was liquidated and squandered like peanuts to the members and minions of the Young Turk Committee. Lepsius’ Report and the German Foreign Office Documents prove without any doubt that the German Government was best informed with respect to the horrific incidents taking place against the Christian population on a large scale in the Ottoman Empire. However, the German public was systematically kept in the dark. In addition, the press was supplied with Turkish war propaganda which denied the atrocities against the Christians. In a telegram of July 27th, 1915, which the German Consul of Aleppo, Walter Rößler, sent to his embassy, he raised concerns about the matter: ‘…I request respectfully to inform the Foreign Office that official Turkish denials [about the extermination of the Armenians] should not appear in the German press, which would arouse the appearance of German approval.’ 53

Ibid., p. 222. Ibid. 53 PA-AA, BoKon/170, no. dated July 27th, 1915. 51 52

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This continued to be the case through August of 1915. ViceConsul Holstein from Mosul complained to his embassy about what he is reading in various German newspapers: I read … official Turkish denials of the atrocities committed against the Christians and I am surprised at the naivety of the Porte in believing they can obliterate facts about the crimes by Turkish officials simply by telling downright lies. Up to now, the world has not experienced such atrocities, which have been proven to be and are still being committed by officials in the Vilayet Diyarbekir! 54

Both the Lepsius Report and the reports of German diplomats provide clear evidence that the measures against the Armenians, such as deportation, terror, and killings, did not spare Assyrians in any way. Both the German embassy in Constantinople and the government of the German Reich were well in the picture since the late summer of 1915. The Ambassador in Constantinople, Hohenlohe-Langenburg, in his report dated August 12th to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, pointed to the fact that Christians other than Armenians were not spared: The systematic slaughter of the Armenian people, who had been deported from their homes, has taken on such an extent over the past few weeks that a renewed, forcible representation on our part against this coarse action, which the government not only tolerated but apparently supported, appeared to be imperative, particularly as in various places the Christians of other races and confessions were also no longer being spared. 55

Rößler, the Consul in Aleppo, reported to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg on September 3rd, ‘Apart from the Armenians, not only the Nestorians, but also Ancient Syrians (Jacobites), Catholic Syrians and other Christians have also been deported in the eastern

54 55

PA-AA, BoKon/170, no. 24, dated August 14th, 1915. PA-AA, R14087, no. 501 dated August 12th, 1915.

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provinces. For a longer period of time it has been indicated here that such Christians were also being killed.’ 56

FINAL REMARKS Germany certainly was not keeping track of the fate of Assyrians in the same detail as the massacre of Armenians. However, descriptions in Lepsius’ report and in German Foreign Office documentation are representative enough to support the claim that the Armenians and the Assyrians suffered the same fate. As outlined, the selected reports not only explicitly mention Assyrians as victims, they clearly speak about general persecution and massacres of the Christian population in all Ottoman provinces. The German documents provide clear evidence that deportations and killings were in most cases done indiscriminately. Hence, Germany had a rough picture of what was occurring in the shadow of the Armenian genocide, which resulted in the destruction of the Assyrians as a native Christian population of Turkey.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Miryam A. German Recognition of Armenian, Assyrian Genocide: History and Politics, Berlin, June 6, 2016 See: http://aina.org/releases/20160606170745.htm accessed November 23, 2017 Dadrian, Vahakn N. German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide. A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity. (Watertown: Blue Crane Books, 1996.) Donef, Racho. Righteous Muslims during the Genocide of 1915. Sydney, November 5, 2010 See: http://www.atour.com/history/1900/20101105a.html accessed November 23, 2017 Gaunt, David. Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I. (Picsataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006). Gottschlich, Jürgen. Beihilfe zum Völkermord: Deutschlands Rolle der bei 56

PA-AA, R14087; R14095 no. 90 dated September 3rd, 1915.

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der Vernichtung Armenier. (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag GmbH, 2015). Lepsius, Johannes. Armenien und Europa. Eine Anklageschrift wider die christlichen Großmächte und ein Aufruf an das christliche Deutschland. (Berlin-Westend:Verl. der Akad. Buchh. Faber, 1896). –––––– Bericht zur Lage der armenischen Volkes in der Türkei. (Potsdam: Der Tempelverlag, 1916). –––––– Deutschland und Armenien 1914–1918. Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke. (Potsdam: Der Tempelverlag, 1919). –––––– Der Todesgang des armenischen Volkes. Bericht über das Schicksal des armenischen Volkes in der Türkei während des Weltkrieges. 2. Vermehrte Auflage. (Potsdam: Der Tempelverlag, 1919). Mühsam, Kurt. Wie wir belogen wurden. Die amtliche Irreführung des deutschen Volkes. (München: Albert Langen Verlag, 1918). Sefer, George D. A Dream of a Long Journey. Jersey City. (NJ: New Assyria Publishing Co., 1918). Yonan, Gabriele. Ein vergessener Holocaust: Die Vernichtung der christlichen Assyrer in der Türkei. (Göttingen: Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker, Reihe Pogrom, 1989).

5. LETTERS ON THE SAYFO FROM ASSYRIAN EYEWITNESSES MARTIN TAMCKE In the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, young Assyrian theologians came to Germany in order to study Lutheran theology. Generally, after completing their studies, they returned to their homes in northwest Iran to begin working as priests of the Church of the East. In the past decades I have presented numerous examinations of the most important representatives of these Lutheran-influenced theologians. Included among these theologians is Pera Johannes, the founder of this movement and a priest in the village of Wasirabad, which was destroyed during the Sayfo. Spiritually crushed by this experience, he fled over Georgia and Turkey to France, where he died a broken man, leaving behind his wife and disabled daughter. 1 Another theologian, Johannes Pascha, struggled in vain to find sufficient financial support in Germany and moved to America where he died from cancer without ever again seeing the family that he had left behind in Digalah near Urmia. 2 The most important Sayfo correspondent and reporter was Luther Pera, the son of Pera Johannes. 3 He had been a priest in Urmia and fled with his family first to Germany, then relocated to Alsace, which was becoming increasingly French, and finally settled in America. Jaure See also Tamcke ‘Pera Johannes’ (1994) and (2001). See also Tamcke ‘Johannes Pascha (1862–1911)’. 3 See also Tamcke ‘Urmia und Hermannsburg’ (1996) and ‘Luther Pera’s Contribution to the Restauration of the Church of the East in Urmia’ (1995/96). 1 2

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Abraham, who was most profoundly influenced by the Sayfo, reported his horrible experiences whenever it was possible for him; his reports can be found in the journal of the mission, Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien. His son, Lazarus Jaure, along with Luther Pera, brought these events to light in Germany, Sweden, and the United States. 4 The others that had studied in Germany also played vital roles in spreading knowledge regarding these incidents: the sons of Pera Johannes: Augustin Pera and Theodor Pera; the son of Johannes Pascha: Philippus Pascha, and others. Of course, Karl Röbbelen, the chairman of the association for the Lutheran mission in Persia, ceaselessly reported everything that he knew about the events. 5 The priest, Kascha Ablachat, who cooperated with the mission, was horrifically murdered in his home village. 6 Most of the letters are reports of the Sayfo. However, some letters go beyond a mere report and aim directly to move the Europeans to help the survivors of the persecution. One such letter, written by Lazarus Jaure, gives us insight into the content of the Sayfo-related letters in general. 7 All of these priests belong to the so-called “Lutheran Nestorians,” a designation that can be traced back to Julius Richter. Some changed their church affiliation and became pastors of the Lutheran Church of North America. 8 In addition to the letters that I personally possess, I have viewed all of the relevant archives in Germany. The remaining documents of the small mission of Otto Wendt will be published by a colleague in Marburg, Karl Pinggéra. 9 Tamcke ‘Eingeborene Helfer oder Missionar?’ (1995). See also Tamcke ‘Karl Röbbelen’ (1994). 6 See also Tamcke ‘Wie Kascha Ablachat zu einem Pferd kam’ (1998). 7 Tamcke ‘Ein Brief des Lazarus Jaure aus dem Frühjahr 1916 zu den Geschehnissen in Urmia’ (2005). 8 See also Tamcke ‘Die Konfessionsfrage bei den lutherischen Nestorianern’ (1993: 521, note 3). 9 See Tamcke ‘Der schwere Weg zum Akademiker’ (2006) for the most recent research; see also Macuch Geschichte der spät- und neusyrischen Literatur, p. 338. 4 5

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Lazarus Jaure’s letter, which will be introduced here, was composed in Sweden. 10 It is written on paper from a Swedish hotel. The pre-printed letterhead displays the address, ‘HOTELL TREMONT, 42 VASAGATAN 42, RIKS 11668 11668 ALLM. 16830’. This hotel was located in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, and Lazarus Jaure, with his own handwriting, added May 24th, 1916 as the date when the letter was composed. With the words, “Dear Pastor,” Lazarus begins the letter to his former superior. “At the urgent demand of my father and through my own sense of duty I have been prompted to give up my work in Russia and travel here.” This journey must have been very dramatic and it must have preceded the Assyrian’s experiences that would haunt him for the rest of his life. We know this because later, while in America and then in Germany, he tried to have his experiences during the war and his eyewitness accounts of the fate of his people published in book form. 11 The accompanying letters are still preserved, but unfortunately the book that the Americans refused to print has been lost. German companies would certainly have had a greater interest in publishing the book. It had the title, My Experiences in Persia during the World War. 12 Lazarus Jaure had submitted it to the Lutheran Publication House in Philadelphia, where his work made quite an impression; even Pastor Moltzahn thought so. It was he, then, who, thinking of its potential readers, referred Lazarus Jaure to Germany. The letter in question, which Lazarus drafted on May 8th, 1932, is still preserved. 13 The book and its publisher cannot be located today, which is a painful loss, but some of that which was lost with the book is still found, in part, in the letters. All quotations from this letter according to Tamcke ‘Ein Brief des Lazarus Jaure aus dem Frühjahr 1916’ (2005), where the original German text is published. 11 See Tamcke ‘Eingeborene Helfer’ oder Missionar?’ (1995: 380, note 89). 12 Ibid. See also Yonan’s Ein unvergessener Holocaust (1989: 202). Although the title suggests otherwise, the book deals with the incidents both in Turkey and in Persia. 13 Ibid. 10

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Unlike Lazarus Jaure, who even before the First World War had a falling out with his German employer, the Hermannsburg Mission, his father, who was the priest of the apostolic Church of the East in Gogtapa, remained in constant contact with the mission. He was a distinguished man, who, after his flight to Bombay and Iraq and a few years in America as a priest, returned home and formed a congregation one last time. 14 It was there where Helmut Grimmsmann found his gravestone years ago, which bore the year 1938 as the date of his death. 15 Bearing in mind the close contact that his father kept with Röbbelen by way of mail, we proceed to the following remark in the letter: ‘I would have gladly presented my father’s own letter, but unfortunately I could not bring it with me across the border and must content myself with imparting its content to you.’ It is here that Lazarus Jaure brings us along in the experiences of the Assyrian Christians of Gogtapa during the war. My father allowed the church that was burned to the ground in Gogtapa to be entirely rebuilt and promises the best for the progress of the congregation, as it will be protected by our esteemed young patriarchs, who hold resolutely to their beliefs. He had the steadfast hope that that for which he had worked his entire life and would set everything in motion could develop all the more blessedly and effectively after the storm had passed. And so he continues, confidently and undeterred, to work on this through all sorts of difficulties. He requests that you allow him, if possible, to at least receive his withheld salary, or even only a part of it, be it through a Swiss or a Swedish mission, so that he, in this present critical moment, may also see to the upkeep of the church and congregation materially.

Since the start of the war, transferring money from Germany to Persia in the Urmia region was difficult, and since the incident in 1915 it became nearly impossible. This explains the outstanding salary. In July 1915, Röbbelen had informed the readers of the 14 15

Tamcke ‘Die Arbeit im Vorderen Orient’, pp. 532–534. Grimmsmann ‘Im Nordwesten Irans’ (1979).

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mission newsletter that the German embassy’s preacher had written to him in Constantinople on May 26th, 1915 to tell him that the German envoy in Tehran, Prince Reuß, had left the American ambassador 1,500 reichsmarks to pay the Assyrian colleagues of the Hermannsburg Mission 16 – there was no other way. The reference to the burned church points to an incident that is extensively described in the other letters. On July 3rd, 1915, Luther Pera reported to Germany. 17 In the middle of December 1914, the Russian Army had withdrawn from Urmia. Many Assyrian Christians would have liked to leave the region with them. By January 2nd, 1915, all of the Russians were gone. On January 3rd, a Sunday, ‘all of the Christians, defenseless, [were] exposed to the furious wrath of the Muslim people’. He reports that All of the Christian villages and homes from Dilguscha to Urmia and the surrounding area were ransacked, all men, women, and children were robbed of their clothes and money. All of the men and young people from the villages farther removed from the city were gunned down by the Muslims. As soon as the Kurds had received the news from the Muslim inhabitants of the city that the Russians were gone, they overran the region. Gogtapa, where people from twenty different Christian villages had searched for protection, was sparred entirely from the slaughter through the heroic acts of the American mission-doctor, Dr. Packard, and two Assyrian youths, Joesph Khan and Dr. David Khan. He rode with his companions on Monday, December 23rd [January 5th New Style] to the Kurdish leaders that attacked Gogtapa. After many hours of negotiations, Dr. Packard was able to get the Kurds to agree only to allow the residents of Gogtapa to surrender and leave with their souls, i.e. merely their lives, which were given to Dr. Packard as a gift, but all of their possessions would have to belong to the Kurds … In this way Röbbelen ‘Die Mitgliederversammlung’, p. 11. Excerpts published in Röbbelen ‘Ein Bericht aus Persien über das erste Kriegsjahr’, pp. 14–16; on Luther Pera cf. Tamcke ‘Urmia und Hermannsburg’ (1996). 16 17

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The city itself had thus fallen into the hands of the soldiers, but its people did not. In other places it did not go as well. Luther Pera writes about the approximately 46 people from the French mission that were arrested, bound arm to arm, and shot to death by the orders of the Turks. In Gulfaschan more than 80 people were killed. The women and girls were subjected to the impure lusts of this wild pack … even though the Turkish consul and the Kurdish sheik had promised complete safety to the village of Gulfaschan. In many villages, like Ada and Supurgan, unspeakable atrocities took place. Many died as martyrs for the sake of their beliefs, and many women and girls were kidnapped by the Kurds and the Muslims. 19

What is striking about Luther Pera’s description is that for him, there was no doubt that these atrocities were committed by the Turks and the Kurds together, and the order to shoot dead the prisoners from the French mission in Urmia was issued, according to him, unquestionably by the Turks. Luther Pera put the number of dead at 8,000. Following this comes the fact that was illuminated by the news in Lazarus Jaure’s letter: ‘All of the churches, even ours in Wasirabad and Gogtapa, were burned down.’ 20 That being said, the inhabitants of Gogtapa still fared relatively well, not only because of the presence of the American mission-doctor; even the material damage was limited. At least there was something upon which one could build. ‘In Gogtapa, the houses, doors, and windows were left alone because there was too much to rob from this village. Even Brother Jaure’s house and the school remained untouched.’ 21 18

Röbbelen ‘Ein Bericht aus Persien über das erste Kriegsjahr’, p.

14. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. 21 Ibid., p. 16. 19 20

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On January 1st, 1916, Röbbelen reported to the readers of his newsletter that Jaure Abraham was once again in Gogtapa and reunited with his family. But the people from the mission still devoted themselves to illusions regarding the next developments. To this Röbbelen wrote in the news, ‘There do not seem to be any more attacks on the Urmia-wide level. There is also hope that actions against the Assyrian Christians will stop in the future. The royal ambassador in Constantinople made some suggestions to the Turkish government and it promised that orders would be given to protect our Assyrian brothers at the proper military areas.’ 22 However, such promises were left unfulfilled. Röbbelen called for donations for those affected, and one generous family even gave their six silver spoons to help the Assyrians. Lazarus Jaure’s report that his father had rebuilt the church and was confident about the future of the community was given on June 21st, 1916 during the meeting of the association for Lutheran missions in Persia. On October 1st, Röbbelen was able to report to his readers that the Swedish missionary alliance had taken over money transfers for the Hermannsburg Mission. 23 We now find an odd parenthetical note in Lazarus Jaure’s letter: ‘As a precautionary measure, my father was not readily able to report anything about the unfortunate members of the congregation in Wasirabad.’ Behind this remark hides the tragedy of an entire village and a priestly family. The tragedy began to unfold already in the summer of 1914. 24 On June 18th, the foreign office reported to the Hermannsburg Mission in Berlin that the local Father Pera Johannes was removed from his church, which had been maintained with funds raised in Germany. 25 The news had reached the foreign office via telegraph from the German envoy in Tehran. The envoy also reported that the priest was removed from the church by the Russian bishop and thrown in Röbbelen ‘Nachrichten aus Urmia’, p. 3. Röbbelen ‘Die Mitgliederversammlungen 21. Juni 1916 in Hermannsburg’, p. 3. 24 See Tamcke ‘Die Zerstörung der ostsyrischen Gemeinde in Wasirabad’ (2006); Pera Johannes served as priest in Wasirabad. 25 Röbbelen ‘Eine Trauerkunde aus Wasirabad’ (1914). 22 23

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prison along with the church elders. The bishop had been accompanied by a contingent of horsemen that, at the urging of the Russians, had been provided to him by the Persian governor in Urmia. On June 13th, the bishop came to the village. He took possession of the church and consecrated it on June 14th. To suppress resentment among the villagers, not only were priests and vestrymen arrested, but, in order to intimidate the inhabitants, the riders were quartered with the members of the congregations, thereby eliminating any resistance. 26 The governor had previously tried to bring the priest and his supporters to leave the church voluntarily. Subsequently, on the Thursday after the Pentecost, he sent an official messenger with the order to hand the church over to the Russians. The priest tried in vain to speak to the governor. He was not let in. The Assyrians no longer controlled their destiny. ‘We live in the most hard-pressed circumstances. I have no other support aside from the Lord above me. The most insignificant slander can put one’s life in danger’, said the son of the priest, who tried in vain to ensure the release of his father. 27 After the priest was finally released, there was a deep sense of uncertainty. The priest was depressed about the loss of his church and did not trust himself to serve his congregation in a different building. ‘Everything was marked by fear’, said the director of the German orphanage house in Urmia, Anna Friedemann. 28 At the end of 1915, Luther Pera reported that the village church had been burned down. Because of the persecution, the region found itself in a terrifying situation. ‘Wasirabad is completely devastated, the houses torn up, doors and windows destroyed’ 29 – a blow from which the village would never recover.

Röbbelen in ‘Die gewaltsame Wegnahme der Kirche in Wasirabad’ (1914) published excerpts of the reports from Luther Peras and Johannes Peras with the specified date of Luther Peras’s letter: 19 June 1914; the letter quoted from Pera Johannes is missing a date. 27 Ibid., p. 15. 28 Röbbelen ‘Wie steht’s auf der Urmiaebene’, p. 7. 29 Röbbelen ‘Ein Bericht aus Persien über das erste Kriegsjahr’, pp. 15–16. 26

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In January 1917, Röbbelen published all of the relevant news that Lazarus Jaure had communicated to him. ‘The congregation in Wasirabad was not able to gather again because the village is for the most part destroyed. The church that had been burnt down was not restored by the Russians.’ 30 Nevertheless, there remained a few Christians there during the short pause before the renewed surge of violence. These Christians lingered now around Gogtapa. However, the village priest, Pera Johannes, had fled to Armavir in southern Russia and then to Tbilisi. 31 He remained from this point on a broken man and was never able to conduct a worship service again. However, he narrowly escaped the atrocities. His son had been hidden with his family in Urmia in the house of a young Muslim after he was attacked in his own house by a marauding group of Muslims. Concern for his parents and siblings plagued him because after the withdrawal of the Russians in December the Kurds ravaged and plundered the villages. ‘But after three days they came to the American mission house completely robbed of everything, even their clothes. I took them with us to the Mohamadan house.’ 32 Pera Johannes never saw his longtime place of pastorship again. His congregation had disappeared, and everything that he had attained and achieved along with it. He died in 1924, poverty-stricken, supported by the Hermannsburg Mission in a home in Alsace where he ended up after finally being permitted to leave Georgia, which had been beset with revolutionary upheaval. He left behind his wife and disabled daughter who were cared for by a member of the Hermannsburg Mission for the rest of their lives. Given the increasing misery of the Assyrians, Lazarus Jaure could not remain in Russia any longer. What prompted me to come here was my father’s heartrending allusion to the tremendous hardship and boundless Röbbelen ‘Neue Nachrichten aus der Urmiaebene’, p. 1. See Röbbelen (1916a: 3), resp. (1916c: 2–3), (1917a: 2), (1917b), (1919: 2, 4); (1920: 4). 32 Letter of his son Luther Pera from 3 July 1915 in Röbbelen ‘Ein Bericht aus Persien über das erste Kriegsjahr’, pp. 14–15. 30 31

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MARTIN TAMCKE misery that our poor Assyrian brothers now endure, brothers whose lives are, apart from this, also threatened by terrible diseases and epidemics. And, furthermore, he reminded me of my unavoidable duty. And, honorable pastor, this had been a terrible burden for me for a long time until it finally brought me here. In light of this dreadful ordeal that we saw and experienced and that still affects our people with its entire severity, I was compelled to set aside all of my own thoughts and wishes and to humbly follow my inner voice and the demands of my father. Alas, I do not know if you have learned of the true barbarity that our people endured in this time of war!

This is Lazarus Jaure’s opening for his public appearances to help his persecuted people. It became his mission, one to which he remained true until his death. Unfortunately, the letter does not have any further details after that about the events affecting the Assyrians, but only this unrelated sentence, ‘But I do not want to write about that’. This may not completely satisfy those who long for more information, but in spite of this, we may now view Lazarus Jaure as the organizer of the help his people desperately needed. I now ask only for your help. And perhaps you will acknowledge my request by contributing to our efforts to help those of my people who are poor, hungry, and dying, for this is the sole reason that I came here. Now I understand what could prompt Paul to wish himself to be doomed in place of his Christian brothers. – Yet, I would rather shelve all of my own thoughts and wait here for your instructions and advice without which I am lost. I would like to note that only through intervention of the Swedish mission that possibly, as I hope, will readily lend a hand, can something be done against this.

And, in fact, this is how it did happen as the Germans sent their help through the intervention of Lazarus Jaure to the Swedish mission. 33 33

See Grimmsmann ‘Im Nordwesten Irans’ (1979).

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In one of his closing remarks, Lazarus Jaure shows that he was aware of the successful flight of one of his fellow priests in the Church of the East, Luther Pera. ‘Pastor Luther Pera already left Russia months ago and can only be in Germany now. Please give him my regards.’ The previously-mentioned epidemics had even reached the writers of the letters themselves. Luther Pera had already become acquainted with cholera during his first flight to Tabriz in the summer of 1915. 34 Then his son, Friedrich, died from typhus during the course of the epidemics in Urmia. 35 Luther Pera’s story and his adventurous flight to Germany via Sweden also deserved a detailed description. He was spared death through the help of Muslim acquaintances and with the new Russian evacuation of Urmia, he left the region, never to return again. 36 He, too, had thought of publishing his experiences and is said to have tried to have them published in the newspaper of Dr. Johannes Lepsius in Potsdam, but these recollections never appeared. The reconstruction of the church in Gogtapa during the First World War did not last long. The patriarch, whom Lazarus Jaure praised, was murdered by the Kurds in an ambush along with 25 members of his escort. The English did not appear quickly enough when relieving the Russians in the north, and the Turks and Kurds together ravaged the region as they had done before. Now Jaure Abraham also had to flee. He compares this strange exodus of his people to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Here it also becomes apparent how the hardship of hungering and sick people completed the work that the tormentors and murders began. On 18 July 1918 we left Urmia and fled south to Hamedan. This flight took 22 days. The masses went with their carts, horses, and possessions. En route we were surrounded by enemies eight times; some thousands were killed or taken away. On the fourth day of our flight we left behind our carts, to which four oxen were attached, all of our best things, the Röbbelen ‘Nachrichten aus Urmia’, p. 3. Röbbelen ‘Ein Bericht aus Persien über das erste Kriegsjahr’, p. 15 and Röbbelen ‘Ein Bericht aus Persien über das erste Kriegsjahr’ (1916). 36 Tamcke ‘Urmia und Hermannsburg’ (1996). 34 35

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MARTIN TAMCKE books, etc. My wife rode a horse that we still had; the others and I fled by foot. In the first day, in the summer heat, we travelled approximately 70 km on foot without shoes and socks along the sandy paths of Persia. Obviously, thousands of people were in the same position as I. The fleeing group was comprised of about 90,000 souls. Nursing women left their small children on the path and fled. The entire time we encountered children that had been abandoned by their parents. They ran into the packs of fleeing people and called out crying to the strangers: “daddy, mommy, take me with you!” But nobody could help them. Even new-borns were abandoned. Elderly parents that were weak were left behind. Others died along the way and were allowed to lie along the path, unburied. We were hungry because we had to abandon all of our supplies on the way; for three days we had no bread nor water, for the thousands of people with their cattle drank up all of the water. Almost the entire group suffered from dysentery; cholera also caused many deaths. As we approached Hamedan my wife became ill, but we had respected relatives there who took us in as guests in their house. My wife lay sick in bed for one week. On 10 August the Lord took her. Her burial, on the 11th, was well attended, both by many respected men in Hamedan as well as the fleeing Assyrians. I fell into a deep sadness. We remained in Hamedan for four months. Then we decided to travel in the winter to Tabriz, a journey that would take one month. I arrived sick and weak. I was sick there for two weeks, my chest and knees in pain because of the cold. As I became healthy, my son contracted typhus. Now he has also recovered. But it became very difficult for us to live in a foreign city without money under these conditions. 37 For a while they cleared the city’s Armenian church for Jaure Abraham’s public services. Eventually, however, he had to

Röbbelen in ‘Ein Brief aus Persien’ (1919: 3–4) published a large portion of Jaure Abraham’s letters; the mission had not had direct contact with him for five years. 37

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immigrate to America via Bombay, again destitute, and could only return to his home in 1930 as an old man of 76. 38

As a clergyman amongst his fellow countrymen in Philadelphia he saw to the reconstruction of his home village and its church. It is a miracle that this old man could be buried as the priest of his congregation in his native ground in 1938. 39 In contrast, his son, Lazarus, whose letter is in the focus of this discussion, could not return to his home. The Germans responsible for the association in Hermannsburg considered a renewed effort in this region completely pointless and also feared the financial burdens which they would thereby incur. 40 However, Lazarus Jaure stood by his mission to make the public aware of the Sayfo. In 1962, when he published the story ‘Uncle Sälu and Qämbär’ with the orientalist Johannes Friedrich, Friedrich did not merely admire Lazarus Jaure’s excellent knowledge of German, indeed, he ‘practically considered [him] to be a scholar of German’. More important for our context is that Lazarus Jaure did not grow tired of explaining to Friedrich that the background of such stories had been overwhelmingly inspired by the suppression of the Assyrian Christians before the First World War on the TurkishPersian border. As a writer, Lazarus Jaure supported the conveyance of the details of this event for over half a century, thus securing a place for himself in the line of eyewitnesses, along with the other authors 41 who were mentioned in the beginning of this paper.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Friedrich, Johannes, and Lazarus Yaure. ‘Onkel Sälu und Qämbär. Eine neusyrische Verserzählung von D. Iljan’. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 112, (1962: 6–49). Röbbelen ‘Neue Schritte auf alten Bahnen’ (1930). See also Grimmsmann ‘Im Nordwesten Irans’ (1979). 40 Tamcke ‘Hermannsburg, die Assyrerfrage und der Völkerbund’ (2005). 41 Friedrich & Yaure ‘Onkel Sälu und Qämbär’, p. 6 [explanatory note]. 38 39

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Grimmsmann, Helmut (ed.). ‘Im Nordwesten Irans. In Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionswerk in Niedersachsen’. Jahrbuch des Evangelisch-Lutherischen Missionswerkes in Niedersachsen 1980. (Hermannsburg: Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionswerk in Niedersachsen, 1979, pp. 80–86). Macuch, Rudolf. Geschichte der spät- und neusyrischen Literatur. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1976). Röbbelen, Karl. ‘Eine Trauerkunde aus Wasirabad’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien 1(2), 1914, pp. 11–12. –––––– ‘Die gewaltsame Wegnahme der Kirche in Wasirabad’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien 1(4), 1914, pp. 13–16. –––––– ‘Wie steht’s auf der Urmiaebene?’ Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 2(2), 1915, pp. 6–7. –––––– ‘Die Mitgliederversammlung’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 2(3), 1915, pp. 9–12. –––––– ‘Ein Bericht aus Persien über das erste Kriegsjahr’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 2(4), 1915, pp. 13–16. –––––– ‘Nachrichten aus Urmia’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien 3(1), 1916, pp. 2–4. –––––– ‘Ein Bericht aus Persien über das erste Kriegsjahr’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien 3(2), 1916, p. 4. –––––– ‘Die Mitgliederversammlungen 21. Juni 1916 in Hermannsburg’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 3(4), 1916, pp. 2–4. –––––– ‘Neue Nachrichten aus der Urmiaebene’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 4(1), 1917, pp. 1–3. –––––– ‘Bericht des armenischen Missionars M.A. TerAsaturiantz’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 4(2), 1917, p. 3. –––––– ‘Ein Brief aus Persien’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 6(2), 1919, pp. 1–4. –––––– ‘Bericht über die lutherische Mission in Persien für das Jahr 1919’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 7(3/4), 1920, p. 4.

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–––––– ‘Neue Schritte auf alten Bahnen’. Nachrichten aus der lutherischen Mission in Persien, 17(2), 1930, pp. 2–4. Tamcke, Martin. ‘Die Konfessionsfrage bei den lutherischen Nestorianern’. Aram 5, 1993, pp. 521–536. –––––– ‘Karl Röbbelen’. In T. Bautz, (ed.) BiographischBibliographisches Kirchenlexikon. Vol. 8. (Herzberg: Bautz, col. 1994, 503–504). –––––– ‘Pera Johannes’. In R. Lavenant, (ed.) VI Symposium Syriacum 1992. (Roma: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1994, pp. 361–369). –––––– ‘“Eingeborene Helfer’ oder Missionar?” Wege und Nöte des Lazarus Jaure im Dienst der Mission’. In M. Tamcke, W. Schwaigert, and E. Schlarb, (eds.) Syrisches Christentum weltweit. Festschrift Wolfgang Hage. (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1995, pp. 355– 385). –––––– ‘Luther Pera’s Contribution to the Restauration of the Church of the East in Urmia’. The Harp 8/9, 1995/96, pp. 251–261. –––––– ‘Urmia und Hermannsburg, Luther Pera im Dienst der Hermannsburger Mission in Urmia 1910–1915’. Oriens Christianus 80, 1996, pp. 43–65. –––––– ‘Wie Kascha Ablachat zu einem Pferd kam. Eine Episode aus dem Jahr 1911 zur Mentalität des ostsyrisch-deutschen Kulturkontaktes’. In B. Beinhauer-Köhler, (ed.) Religion und Wahrheit, Religionsgeschichtliche Studien. Festschrift Gernot Wießner. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998, pp. 401–410). –––––– ‘Johannes Pascha (1862–1911): Der Leidensweg eines “kollektierenden Syrers’”. The Harp 11–12, 1998/99, pp. 203– 223. –––––– ‘Die Arbeit im Vorderen Orient’. In E.A. Lüdemann, (ed.) Vision: Gemeinde weltweit. 150 Jahre Hermannsburger Mission und Ev.-luth. Missionswerk in Niedersachsen. (Hermannsburg: Verlag der Missionshandlung, 2000, pp. 511–548). –––––– ‘Pera Johannes’. In T. Bautz, (ed.) BiographischBibliographisches Kirchenlexikon. Vol. 18. (Herzberg: Bautz, col. 2001, pp. 1136–1138).

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–––––– ‘Ein Brief des Lazarus Jaure aus dem Frühjahr 1916 zu den Geschehnissen in Urmia’. In M. Tamcke and A. Heinz, (eds.) Die Suryoye und ihre Umwelt. 4. Deutsches Syologen-Symposium in Trier 2004. Festgabe Wolfgang Hage zum 70.Geburtstag. (Münster: Lit Verlag, 200, pp. 59–72). –––––– ‘Hermannsburg, die Assyrerfrage und der Völkerbund’. In G. Gremels, (ed.) Die Hermannsburger Mission und das ‘Dritte Reich’. Zwischen faschistischer Verführung und lutherischer Beharrlichkeit. (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005, pp. 151–166). –––––– ‘Der schwere Weg zum Akademiker: Die Nöte des Lazarus Jaure während seines Universitätsstudiums in Deutschland’. In S. Talay, (ed.) Suryoye l-Suryoye. Ausgewählte Beiträge zur aramäischen Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006, pp. 191–212). –––––– ‘Die Zerstörung der ostsyrischen Gemeinde in Wasirabad im Kontext von religiöser Konkurrenz, Weltkrieg und ökonomischer Not’. In W. Beltz, & J. Tubach, (eds.) Expansion und Destruktion in lokalen und regionalen Systemen koexistierender Religionsgemeinschaften. (Halle an der Saale: Orientalisches Institut, 2006, pp. 191–202). Yonan, Gabriella. Ein unvergessener Holocaust. Die Vernichtung der christlichen Assyrer in der Türkei. (Göttingen / Vienna: Pogrom, 1989).

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6. THE INCREASING VIOLENCE AND THE RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI (1900–1915) FLORENCE HELLOT-BELLIER No one can deny that the massacres of the Christian populations – Armenian, Assyrian-Chaldean, and Greek – in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 were due to the intention of the leaders in Istanbul to displace and exterminate Christians from the Ottoman Empire. For this reason, these massacres fall within the definition of genocide. On the Iranian side of the Turkish-Iranian border, the Armenian and Assyrian-Chaldean populations living to the West of Lake Urmia were also the victims of massacres in 1915, some of which were part of an extermination plan and others not. The massacres perpetrated in January and February 1915, before the extermination of Christians in Eastern Anatolia had ignited, were repeated again in July 1918 and May 1919. During the 1919 massacre, the Ottomans were no longer located there. In addition, the Christians in Sanandaj, in the Iranian Province of Kurdistan, were left unharmed. Thus, other causes are obviously responsible for these massacres. The letters and reports from the period show that there are a variety of factors which triggered the massacres on both sides of this border: the position of the Christian villages at the crossroads of three increasingly weak Empires, the turmoil in the societies of these Empires which were challenging the absolute rule of their leaders, the development of nationalist movements and aspirations, and the First World War, during which violence reached its peak. The rampant violence in the years leading up to 1914 resulted in an explosion which swept through the regions of 107

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Eastern Anatolia and Iranian Azerbaijan in the context of the confrontations between the Russians and the Ottomans. The letters and reports which make it possible to understand the situation west of Lake Urmia and in the Ottoman Hakkari Mountains in 1915 were mainly written by missionaries living in Urmia, who had stayed there due to Iran’s neutrality during World War I. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s missionaries had left the region. Archimandrite Sergius and the Russian Orthodox priests had followed the Russian army back to the Caucasus in January 1915. The Presbyterians, Lazarists, Sisters of Charity and directors of the orphanages who remained behind sent letters and reports to Europe and the United States as the events unfolded, letters which can be read still today. The Russian Vice-Consul of Urmia, Pavel Vedenski, left the city on January 2nd, 1915. His replacement, Vassili/Basile Petrovich Nikitine, arrived in Urmia on June 21st, 1915. At the end of that summer, along with the Presbyterians and the Russian Relief Committees, V. Nikitine provided refuge to the Assyrian tribes from Hakkari who were being harassed by the Ottoman army. Although his reports and those drawn up by the Relief Committees demonstrate their opposition to the Ottomans, they remain a good source of information on the situation of Christians in the region and that of Assyrian tribes who found refuge on Iranian territory. In Tabriz, a number of consuls, including the British consul H. Smith Shipley, the American consul Gordon Paddock, the French consul Alphonse Nicolas, and the Russian consul Arkadi Alexandrovich Orlov echoed the words in the letters sent by the missionaries. The same was true for the consuls stationed in Tiflis (Tbilisi). Their reports can be found in the archives at the foreign affairs office of the relevant countries. Some of the missionaries’ and consuls’ letters were published in the volume by Brice and Toynbee, but not always in full. Finally, the governors and the Iranian civil servants in charge of dealing with foreigners (karguzar) sent telegrams to Tehran which have been

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 109 published in part. 1 This wealth of documentation is completed by the letters written later by the Christian themselves. 2 In order to grasp the forces of destruction at work not only in 1915, but also in 1918 and 1919, an analysis of all these documents makes it possible to briefly review here the various factors which led to a weakening of the social fabric, whereby inhabitants were stuck between the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Empires.

CHRISTIAN ASPIRATIONS IN EMPIRES IN TURMOIL The massacres which took place in the Urmia Region led to the deaths of between 40,000 and 50,000 Armenian and AssyrianChaldean Christians who were living in villages west of Lake Urmia and along the rivers which flow from the Kurdistan Mountains. Also caught up in the massacre were a little over 70,000 Assyrians from the Hakkari tribes, who were living among Kurdish tribes according to a tribal system dating from the 15th century. A step above the maleks, at the head of the tribes, was the CatholicosPatriarch of the Church of the East, each of which bore as part of his regnal title Mar Shimun. The Catholicos was the temporal ruler of the Assyrian tribes and the spiritual ruler over all the Christians of his church, the Church of the East. Too often this church and its adherents are incorrectly called ‘Nestorian’. The mountains were not a barrier to the movement of people and goods, and the Christians from Hakkari and Azerbaijan often walked to the Caucasus and in particular to Tiflis/Tbilisi. Since the beginning of the 1900s, the challenges against the Tsar’s absolute power in Russia, against the power of Sultan Abdulhamid in the Ottoman Empire and against the Qajars in Iran resonated and were even strengthened among the populations living in these three Empires. So-called ‘Revolutionary’ parties Kasravi, Tarikh-e Hejdah Saleh-ye Azerbaijan; Bayat (ed), Iran va Jang-e Jahani Avval. Esnad-e Vezarat-e Dokhela; Motamed el-Vezara, Urumia Dar Mohareba-ye Alamsuz; Moez od-Dowla, Namaha ye Urumia. 2 D’Bait Mar Shimun, Assyrian Church Customs and the Murder of Mar Shimun; Shimmon, ‘Urumia, Salmas and Hakkiari: Statement by Mr. Paul Shimmon’. 1

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claimed new aspirations – Armenian parties, the Young Turks and the Union and Progress Committee, and the Iranian Democratic Party. Their ideas were spread via new newspapers. Among the Armenians in Urmia and Salmas, the Dashnak Party was better represented than the Hunchak Party, though both parties had participated in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution from 1906 to 1909, interrupted by the Russian crackdown in Tabriz. 3 The Armenians were allowed one representative in the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) in July 1909, but they successfully requested two representatives. The Assyrian-Chaldeans from Urmia and Salmas were not united; they were allowed one representative in the Majlis in 1909. One group of AssyrianChaldeans from Urmia joined the movement and published the Star newspaper, written in Syriac and independent from the Church, while claiming their ‘Assyrian’ identity at the same time: 4 Our Syrians are being affected by the new spirit of things in Persia and are talking about a national assembly, etc. It is all very well if they only have the sense not to go too fast and get themselves into trouble. Residence in America does not altogether fit the young men for understanding the state of things in Persia or for judging the best course to follow here.

But all of them, the Armenians and the Assyrian-Chaldeans who had participated in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and had hoped for a better personal status, were very disappointed when they did not obtain civil equality with Muslims.

Kasravi, Russian General Snarski entered Tabriz in April 1909. Philadelphia Historic Society Archives, [PHSA], 202, January 1907, W.A. Shedd to R. Speer. 3 4

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THE UPSURGE OF VIOLENCE ALONG THE TURKISHIRANIAN BORDER Many events attest to the upsurge of violence along the TurkishIranian border since the end of the 19th century. These include the massacres of Armenians by the Kurds in 1894–1896; the assassination of the Bishop of Ardishahi, Mar Gauriel/Gabriel, in June 1896, probably ordered by the Shaykh of Neri with whom he spent the night after visiting the metropolitan archbishop of

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Shemsdin, Yosip Khnanisho; the assassinations of Christians and the theft of herds of animals by the Kurds in the Hakkari Mountains; as well as the impunity the groups of Kurds benefited from when they raided villages in the plains. These raids were often carried out by lower-level Kurdish leaders from the Hamiddiye Battalions against which the Iranians did not have the resources to fight. The Ottomans themselves did not prevent the raids of the Kurdish tribes when they occupied the region between the mountains and Lake Urmia from 1907 to 1912. It is interesting to study how the inhabitants organized the defence of their own villages: the Armenians, along with the fedayan (Arabic: ‘(armed) fighters’) whose weapons were provided in Armenian arm factories in Tabriz and in Salmas Valley; and the Assyrian-Chaldeans who chose four bigger villages where the population could flee for safety and which were defended using weapons provided by the Iranian governor. The AssyrianChaldeans from the Tergawer District, who were the most vulnerable as they lived on the Turkish-Iranian border, were the first to resist the Kurdish raids and to organize their defence. Thus, if the violence continued to increase constantly on both sides of the Turkish-Iranian border throughout the first decade of the 20th century, the populations organized themselves to fight back. In particular, the Christians were well defended on the eve of the First World War.

COMBAT BREAKS OUT IN THE REGION OF URMIA, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 1914 When the Ottomans entered the war alongside the Quadruple Alliance on November 1st, 1914, the Iranians declared they would remain neutral. It is likely that they would not have participated in the war, had their territory, specifically the triangle between the Caucasus, Lake Urmia and the Kurdish mountains, not constituted such extremely high stakes from a strategic standpoint for those countries at war. The Russians exercised formal influence over and militarily occupied the Iranian province of Azerbaijan since the AngloRussian Convention of 1907, and in 1912 positioned their troops along the border, replacing the Ottoman troops. They were therefore ready to attack the Ottomans and the emissaries they had sent to Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Shimun XXI Benyamin in 1913

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 113 and 1914 supported the disturbing rumours that – wrongly – the Catholicos was an ally of the Russians: 5 The affairs along the border have not been going very smoothly. Shaykh Sayyid Tahir has been put in charge by the Persians and the Russians. He has his feud with his relatives across the border in Nochea (Turkey) where he has large proprieties [sic] rights. […] Another fact that is being kept quiet but that may have political significance is that there are negotiations going on between the Nestorian Church through the Mission here towards the ‘conversion’ of the Nestorian Church to the Orthodox faith. Such ‘conversion’ is pretty sure to follow the extension of Russian political authority, but there is more doubt whether the ‘conversion’ is likely to precede the other change. If it does, it would not be strange if is resulted in trouble for the Christians across the border. The details are not clear, but it is certain that the patriarch was ready to fall into lice but some of his people were opposed strongly and for the present at least it has passed over. It shows that we may expect if there is Russian political advance.

These rumours further strengthened other rumours spread by the Young Turks about the alleged relations between the Armenians and the Russians. Once World War I broke out in Europe, the Ottomans and Russians moved their troops along the Turkish-Iranian border between Van and Urmia, as described by Zacharia, a Christian worker for the customs authorities in Salmas Valley: 6 22 August: the entire Russian army is at the border. Big movement of the Russian army all the way down to Somaï Baradost Valley. The Cossacks have advanced towards the South of Somaï almost up to the Turkish garrisons in Gaver (district of Diza in Turkey). Regiments made up of Armenians, Georgians and Chaldeans have shown up in the country. PHSA, RG 91–5, W.A. Shedd, Urumia January 1913. French Foreign Office’s Archives, [FFOA], Nouvelle Série, [N.S.], Perse, XI, Tabriz September 5th, 1914, Nicolas. 5 6

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FLORENCE HELLOT-BELLIER Already almost 600 soldiers like this are stationed in tents in Zevajik, and some of them were spread out to other areas between Urumia [Urmia] and Salmas. Simko remains calm for the moment, with the entire border area of Urumia in Qotur invaded by the Russian army. Kohnehshehr signed a petition asking for Russian protection. Apparently, General Voropanov has 35,000 Russian troops stationed in Khoy.

Giorgi Vassilevich Chirkov, the Vice-Consul of Khoy, and the Archimandrite of Urmia were dealing with both the Iranian Governor of Dilmaqan and the Kurdish leader, Simko: 7 No one is sure what will happen right now because everyone predicts that after the skirmishes with the Kurds, a real war certainly [will] be declared. In this case, the Persian and the Turkish Kurds will start up with their devastation and massacres again not only in Urumia, but in Selmas as well. The Vice Governor of Selmas, feeling reassured by the recent arrival of the Russian Bishop in Urumia, sent messengers to announce to Diliman that anyone ௅ holding any nationality at all [sic] ௅ who tries to leave Selmas will be severely punished! No one is supposed to move and this order was also posted in Urumia. For the last week, not only the number of Cossacks has increased in Selmas, but the number of Dragons as well. All of this proves that war is imminent. Simko’s cavalrymen have rounded up all the horses in the Kurdish villages by force and are setting up a strong cavalry against the Kerdari Kurds.

In Urmia, the spokeman for the Christian members of the National Assyrian Committee, Dr Yonan Melik, 8 asked Governor Itimad odDowleh to organize the defence of the city against the Ottomans. However, as the governor was dependent on the Russians, he advised they accept the weapons being distributed by the Russians FFOA, N.S., Perse, XVIII, letter from Kohnehshehr to Nicolas on 19 September, Tabriz 8 October 1914. 8 See further FFOA, N.S., Perse, XVIII, Tabriz, 14 September 1914; Congregation de la Mission's Archives (CMA), Note; Nikitine, La Nation Assyrienne et ses Relations avec les Alliés dans la Guerre Actuelle, pp. 149–150. 7

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 115 and to follow the instructions of Vice-Consul Pavel Vedenski. This is what both Consul Nicolas wrote in 1914 and Dr. Packard had to say in 1919: 9 The Lazarists are claiming loudly that Vedensky pushed many Chaldeans to fight against the Turks, promising they would be supported by Russian soldiers. Then when the soldiers started to fight, they left without notice and abandoned the Chaldeans on whom the Turks later took revenge.

At the end of September 1914, there were major clashes in Hakki near Mawana between Ottoman Kurds from Piru Bey and Russian Cossacks. 10 Groups of Kurds and inhabitants of the Iranian Sunnite villages along the border attacked the other villages. They were pushed back to the Turkish side, to the west of the MargawerSomaï line, by the Russians, and a battalion made up of Christians from Erevan and Georgia. The Russians retaliated by burning Muslim villages and dignitaries and leaders of the Sunnite villages were hung in vengeance. 11 Villages were caught in the crossfire. The Lazarist Nathanaël Dinkha shared his fear with Pavel Vedenski that a war between the Russians and Ottomans would escalate into a massacre of Christians. 12 On his side, Colonel Andreevski, chief-of-staff of the Russian forces in Van-Azerbaijan asked the Assyrian-Chaldeans to side with the Russians if war broke out. The National Assyrian Council of Urmia, chaired by Dr. Ishaï Bet Yonan, did commit itself if the Assyrians were acknowledged after the war: ‘Our people fell blindly into the arms of the allies, without anything in exchange.’ 13 On October 7th, 1914, Roman Catholic Archbishop FFOA, N.S., Perse, LIV, Tabriz 25 April 1915, Nicolas; Asie, Perse, 1918–1940, XXV, Tabriz April 1st, 1919, Dr. Packard. 10 FFOA, N.S., Perse, XVIII, Van October 21st, 1914. 11 PHSA, RG 91–5, W.A. Shedd, Report January-June 1915; Dr. Packard, Medical Report 1915. Toynbee & Bryce, W.A. Shedd’s Report 1915. 12 CMA, Annales, LXXX, Urumia September 26th, 1914, Dinkha to Villette. FFOA, N.S., Perse, XVIII, Urumia 4 October, Archbp Sontag, Tabriz October 8th, 1914, Nicolas. 13 FFOA, Levant 1918–40, Irak, XIL, Memorandum. 9

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Sontag informed Consul Nicolas of potential attacks against Christians by Kurds and the ‘populace’, while placing the responsibility on the Russian Orthodox priests and Archimandrite Sergius whose initiatives had exasperated the population of Urmia in his opinion. 14 In addition, during the night of October 9th–10th, groups of Kurds moved closer to the city of Urmia and attacked the villages of Seir and Anhar. The Cossacks fought back with the Christians before the Russian infantry arrived: 15 The trouble started with the arrival of word that the Russian post of Cossacks in Tergawar had been attacked by Kurds […]. The Russians dealt out rifles to Syrians, hundreds of them I suppose. A Company of Syrians went to Seir with the Cossacks to fight the Kurds […]. An order had been issued that the Syrians would not wear the Mountaineers headdress, because it would make it difficult to distinguish them from Kurds. Many Moslems of the city and the villages are suspected of having intrigued with the Kurds.

From Van, Vice-Consul Henry de Standford interpreted the Kurdish attacks on the Urmia region as revenge taken by Kurdish tribes who were on the Ottomans’ side against those tribes who sided with the Russians: 16 The groups of Turks sent to Persia to stir up trouble with Russia were joined by the Kurdish Ashiret Tribes living at the border who were only too happy to find an excuse to take revenge on enemy Tribes who had sided with the Russians.

FFOA, N.S., Perse, XI, Urumia October, 7th, Archbishop Sontag, Tabriz 12, October 22nd, 1914, Nicolas. Archbishop Sontag was the leader of the Lazarist mission and Apostolic Delegate in Iran. 15 PHSA, RG, 91–5, Urumia October 15th, 1914, H. Müller; Urumia October 23rd, 1914, McDowell; December 12th, 1914, McDowell, Report. FFOA, N.S., Perse, XI, Tabriz 22, October 28th, 1914. Coakley, pp. 333– 334. 16 FFOA, N.S., Perse, XVIII, Van October 21st, 1914, Henry de Standfort. 14

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 117 When attacked by the Ashiret Heriki ad Hedareh, the Russians were forced to evacuate the villages of Herki and Mavana, leaving behind 10 dead and 15 wounded on the battlefield. The Kardanli Tribe was able to push out the Audvanlis from Somaï where over 400 Cossacks were based. Border control posts were captured and lost successively by the Russians and the group of Kurds. Spurred on by these Ashiret stormed the city of Urumia but were surrounded by the Audvanlis and by 600 Cossack troops. They were forced to hastily withdraw under heavy artillery fire.

The Christians in the villages under attack sought refuge in the Urmia missions. On November 1st, 1914, the Ottoman Empire officially entered the war on the side of the Quadruple Alliance. From a military standpoint, the Western Anatolia-Urmia RegionCaucasus triangle became one of the new fronts in the beginning of 1915, where enemy armies confronted each other, flouting Iranian neutrality. The destiny of the civil population was totally dependent on the results of battles and the momentum of the pendulum swang from victory to defeat. The Assyrian-Chaldeans from Urmia were armed by the Russians and paraded in the streets behind Agha Petros, who was originally from the Baz Tribe, asserting their attachment to the Triple Entente: 17 When war was declared in 1914, we ௅ the Assyrian Christians ௅ joined the Allies and organized massive demonstrations in Urumia. Groups of people carrying the flags of the Allies marched down the street and applauded the Entente. These demonstrations were followed by active participation in the Russian armies’ operations against the Turks.

In this statement written after the war, Agha Petros also mentions the promises of independence given by the Vive-Consul Vedenski and Colonel Andreevski to the Assyrians in exchange for participating in the combat on the side of the Russians. He recalls FFOA, Levant 1918–40, Iraq, XIL, Baghdad March 10th, 1919, Agha Petros; PA-AP Gout, VIII, May 22nd, 1919. 17

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how he improvised a speech in Urmia to assure the Russians, the French and the British that they had the support of the Assyrians. 18

IN THE SALMAS VALLEY NORTH OF URMIA NOVEMBER– DECEMBER 1914 The battles which took place in the Salmas Valley in the direction of Bashqaleh in November and December 1914 give an idea of the conditions involved in these struggles throughout the region until the end of the First World War: fugitive and opportunistic alliances of Kurdish tribes ready to plunder villages, no consideration for borders, the blatant inertia and inability of the Iranians to defend their territory and their neutral position, forcible or willing participation of Armenian and Chaldean groups in combat, Agha Petros and Andranik Ozanian – the latter at the head of the 1st Battalion of Armenian Volunteers – being recognized as leaders in the war, the fighting spirit of the Christians in Mawana who had not lowered their guard since 1907, and above all, the reckless strategies of the Russians who gained short-lived victories over the Ottomans and then pulled out of positions previously occupied leaving the Christian populations on-site even weaker. As a response to the Kurds being rejected by the Russians on the Turkish side of the border, the Ottomans removed the populations of Christian villages in Nochea to locate Kurds there, while forcing metropolitan archbishop Khnanisho, to remain. Almost 500 Christians from Nochea fled to Urmia. They were temporarily housed by Vice-Consul Vedenski in the Kurdish villages that had been abandoned. 19 The Russian General Chernozubov assembled troops near Dilmaqan for the purpose of marching on Van. These troops were composed of Russian and Armenian soldiers, fedayan from the region and volunteers. This led to successive advances and retreats FFOA, Levant 1918–40, Iraq, Agha Petros, Report on the participation of the Assyrian-Chaldean Nation in the general War alongside the Powers of the Entente. 19 FFOA, N.S., Perse, XVIII, Tabriz November 25th, 1914, Archbishop Sontag to Nicolas. 18

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 119 by Russian, Armenian and Kurdish forces between Diliman in Iran and Bashqaleh, Van and Sarikamish, in the Ottoman Empire, territories which the Russians coveted. On November 28th, the Russians, coming from the Salmas Valley, were joined outside Bashqaleh by Andranik’s Armenian battalion and Agha Petros along with the cavalry from Mavana. 20 However, even if the Russians had made advances into Ottoman territory, they could not hold their positions. In December, the Ottoman commander again rallied a combined force of Muslims against the Russians in Sawjbulagh, south of Lake Urmia. 21 In December 1914, the Christians in Albak and Bashqaleh were slaughtered by the Kurds. The survivors poured into the Salmas Valley while the Ottoman troops led by Enver Pasha were fighting the Russian troops in Sarikamish, near Kars. 22 Victory was uncertain. General Alexander Mishlayevski then ordered the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Azerbaijan towards the Caucasus. A Russian retreat appears not to have been official before December 31st 1914 or January 1st, 1915. Then, on January 2nd, the Russians suddenly evacuated Urmia. General Khalil Pasha leading the Second Army of the Ottoman Empire, together with the Kurds who spread in the villages, invaded the outlying mountainous areas before directing his troops into the territory of Urmia. The Ottoman army entered the city of Urmia on January 4th, 1915.

CHRISTIANS FLEE THE SALMAS VALLEY Groups of Christians decided to flee before the arrival of the Ottoman army. The first to flee to the Caucasus were the Armenian and Assyro-Chaldean Christians from the Salmas FFOA, N.S., Perse, XVIII, Salmas November 28th, December 5th Tabriz December 9th and 14th, 1914., F. Hellot-Bellier, 2014, pp. and 431–434. 21 FFOA, N.S., Perse, VVIII, Tabriz December 9th and 22nd, 1914, Nicolas. 22 FFOA, N.S., Perse, XVIII, Urumia December 14th, 1914, Archbp Sontag to Nicolas, Khosrowa December 15th, 1914, Decroo. GolnazarianNichanian M., 2009, p. 114. Hellot-Bellier F., 2014, pp. 429–437. 20

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Valley. 23 Guided by three priests: G. Decroo, F. Miraziz, and A. Clarys, along with seven Chaldean seminarians, together with Armenians who had found Bishop Melik Tanguian from Tabriz, ‘Ten thousand Khosraw Abadis, the old, young, women and children fled on foot during the night in minus-eighteen-degree temperatures, sleeping in the snow.’ 24 ‘Twenty thousand Assyrian and Armenian Christians abandoned the Northwest side of the Urumia plain, the Persian Valleys in Kurdistan and the Salmas plain […] the majority of Christians in Urmia were unable to flee.’ 25 The Lazarist, Georges Decroo, subsequently solicited aid from the Caucasian authorities to shelter the refugees and provide them with work and pay. Neverthess, over 200 families, 709 people, had already reached Tiflis/Tbilisi and did not want to leave again. Thus, the offer of the lazarist Decroo did not meet with the success expected. These figures are very similar to the estimate given by Magdalena Golnazarian based on statistics from the Erevan Commission: ‘On January 30th, 1915, the number of Armenians and Assyrians from Azerbaijan dispersed among the villages of Nakhichevan and Sharur-Daralagiaz was estimated to be 7,965 and 7, 942,’ respectively’. 26

CAMPAIGN OF TERROR IN THE VILLAGES COMMITTED BY OTTOMAN AND KURDISH SOLDIERS The Christians who had not fled were taken by surprise in the villages and ruthlessly slaughtered by the vanguard of the army composed of irregular soldiers and Kurds. This can be seen as the Golnazarian-Nichanian, 2009, pp. 115–122. Certain testimonies use the dates of the Gregorian calendar. Thirteen additional days must be added to correspond to the dates of the Julian calendar. 24 CMA, Annales, Urumia 25 January 1915, Archbp Sontag to Superior Villette, Tiflis February 2nd, 1915, Abel Zayia to Villette. FFOA, N.S., Perse, LIV, Tiflis January 13th, 1915, Nicolas. 25 FFOA, Perse, LIV, Tiflis February 4th, 1915, Decroo. CMA, Annales, LXXX, Baku 27 February 1915, Decroo. 26 CMA, Annales, LXXX, Baku February 27th, 1915, Decroo to Villette. GOLNAZARIAN-NICHANIAN 2009, pp. 117–119. 23

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 121 application of the extermination plans designed by Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha, entrusted to these irregular soldiers (chetta), executioners who were forced onto each regiment as members. 27 Some of the neighbouring Iranians attempted in vain to protect the Christians. Outside of Urmia, Christians’ lives depended on the good will of the Kurdish chieftains. When passing through Ardishahi, the Kurd Karini Agha’s troops killed 80 villagers. In January, fifty villagers of Ada were taken to the mosque where the men were forced to choose between apostasy and death. In the village of Abdullahkandi, the priest Mushil was stabbed to death and his body exposed outside in front of the mosque for three days. 28 Was it the Kurdish and Iranian alliance working with the Democratic Party of Iran, or only the Iranians supporting Bakhsh Ali Sultan who were responsible for executing 50, or according to Archbishop Sontag, 85 Christians from Gulpashan and Iriawa who were brutally assassinated in the cemetery on February 24th? 29 On Wednesday night, a still more horrible deed was committed at Gulpashan. This village and Iriawa had been shielded, partly through the efforts of a German; but on Wednesday night a band of Persian volunteers, arriving from Salmas or beyond, went there, took fifty men and, according to reports, shot them in the graveyard nearby. They then plundered the village, took girls and young women, outraged them, and acted in general as one might expect Satan to do when turned loose. […] Friday 5th March: Mr. Allen went to Gulpashan with permission from the Turkish Consul to bury those who have been murdered. He found 50 bodies. When he came back, a crowd of 64, mostly women and girls, came with him. Akcam, 2006 and 2012; H. Bozarslan, 2013. FFOA, N.S., Perse, LXXX, Baku February 27th, 1915, Decroo to Villette. 29 PHSA, RG 91–4, Miss Mary Lewis, The War Journal of a Missionary, Saturday, February 27th; Shedd, Statement, Urumia, July 25th, 1915. Kasravi, p. 608. 27 28

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In April 1915, sixty-three Christians from Gavar in the Ottoman Empire, who had been requisitioned by the Ottomans to transport cables for the telegraph that was supposed to hook up Urmia to Ottoman territory, were cynically executed during their return: 30 The most diabolically cold blooded of all the massacres was the one committed above the village of Ismael Agha’s Kalla when some sixty Syrians of Gavar were butchered by the Kurds at the instigation of the Turks. These Christians had been used by the Turks to pack telegraph wire from over the border and while they were in the city of Urmia they were kept in close confinement without food or drink. On their return, as they reached the valleys between the Urmia and Baradost plains, they were all stabbed to death as it was supposed, but here again, as in the two former massacres, a few wounded bloody victims succeeded in making their way to our hospital.

THE OTTOMANS ENTER THE CITY OF URMIA ON 4 JANUARY 1915 Almost 18,000 Christians, among them those who had no time to flee, abandoned their villages and sought refuge in the Presbyterian and Lazarist missions of Urmia in January 1915. Many of them died from illness, though their presence was tolerated by the Ottoman commanders and they were protected by Urmia dignitaries. They remained there until the Russians returned on May 24th, 1915. The Sisters of Charity and Miss Mary Lewis described respectively in their Journal des troubles à Ourmia de janvier à mai 1915 and Diary of Miss Mary E. Lewis. The War Journal of a Missionary in Persia the amazing feats performed by many to survive under particularly difficult conditions in a city where all decisions depended on the whims of the Ottomans. Their stories help to complete the picture painted in the letters of Archbishop Sontag and W.A. Shedd. As soon as the Russians left, W.A. Shedd went to the First mojtahed of Urmia, Mir Masih Agha. Together with prominent

30

PHSA, RG 91–4, Dr. Packard, Medical Report 1914–1915.

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 123 Iranian local figures in the city, both religious and secular, in order to ask about the measures that should be taken: 31 The next two days I was in constant communication with the chief nobles and ecclesiastics of the city. […] Urmia has an unusual number of high officials in title; but there is neither unity nor efficiency in the lot and it was impossible to get vigorous action even for the protection of the city itself. Only one man in the crowd was ready to do anything himself, Arshad-ul Humayun, who immediately went out with his men and stopped looting so far as he could.

The Lazarists benefitted from the support of their Sayyid neighbours and their friend Shahab od-Dowleh Ghassemlu Afshar, as well as the empathy of the governors and even that of Arshad Humayun who was at the head of armed men: ‘When the Turks first arrived in Urmia and the Russians first left ௅ which happened in 1915 ௅ Arshad Humayun came to console Archbishop Sontag and gave him his word that he would protect him.’ 32 William A. Shedd and Arshad Humayun came to Rashid Bey on Tuesday, January 5th, and he prevented the pillaging from continuing in Urmia. William A. Shedd had the feeling that the Ottomans were pursuing two objectives. They wanted to bring the Iranians into the war and take advantage of the situation to collect their share to the booty. It was only General Khalil Pasha and his officers who seemed to obey military objectives. 33

31

PHSA, RG 91–4, Urumia July 27th, 1915, W.A. Shedd. Avedissian,

p. 131. FFOA, Inquiry, 20th meeting, 15 Rebi el-Ewel 1338H/December 1919, Statement by Qasha Shlimun Badal. 33 PHSA, RG 91–4, W.A. Shedd, A Statement of Politiocal relations and Conditions in Connection with the Work of Urumia Station, Presbyterian Mission Urumia, January to June 1915, Urumia July 27th, 1915. The following quotations are excerpted from this Report. 32

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RESCUING THE CHRISTIANS IN THE VILLAGES OF WAZIRAWA AND GOGTEPA Despite the horrors of war and the massacres, there were some demonstrations of solidarity. Dr. Packard was able to rescue 1,200 Christians who were refugees in the large village of Gogtepa that was under siege by the Kurds because he had cared for members of their families. However, he was powerless to save at least 100 Christians who were assassinated in Gulpashan by the Kurds and the Iranian ‘revolutionaries’. Dr. Packard left Urmia on horseback to search for the Kurdish Chief Karini Agha whom he knew well. He was accompanied by Dr. Yusep Khan and Dr. David, who had been caring for the Kurds in Sawjbulagh and Yusep Badal for the previous twenty years. Accomanying them was Haydar Ali. They carried two flags, Turkish and American. When they approached the village of Wazirawa, they were able to obtain authorization for the 300–400 Christians placed in the village to seek refuge in Urmia. In Gogtepa, Dr. Packard availed of his understanding with the Kurdish chieftains and at the end of the day was successful in obtaining authorization to take to Urmia the Christians who were assembled in the church, on the condition they gave up their weapons. Six hundred Christians, who had lost everything, were led that very night to Urmia by Packard, who was thanked by the Iranian governor. Packard’s report was similar to that of Archbishop Sontag: 34 The New Year opened quietly with more than the usual number of calls from our Muslim and Christian friends and little did we dream that for months we would not have another day so peaceful and free from alarms. The evacuation, completed so quickly on Jan. 2nd and 3rd made it impossible for the distant villages to learn of it until it was over and the frightened Christians fled from their homes in all directions to save their lives. Some hid themselves for days and made their way to us after a week or more. Some took refuge in PHSA, RG 91–4, H. Packard, Urumia 1915, Medical Report, The Relief of Goegtapeh. Kasravi, p. 607. 34

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 125 neighboring Muslim villages. As many as could, perhaps 8,000 or 10,000 made their way out to Russia with the retiring army. The great mass of the people however, some 20,000, found their way to our yards and to those of the French Lazarist Mission. Most of these came by themselves, alone or in groups; some were brought by Muslim friends; but two crowds were rescued by direct missionary intervention when some 400 were sent in from Wuzerawa and perhaps 600 were brought in from the village of Goegtapa. Personal enmities flashed into flame. Holy War had been proclaimed by the leaders of Islam so that the looting of Christian property was the natural right of Muslims and the taking of Christian life their heaven-sent commission, and since the power was entirely in their hands it would be difficult to exceed or even duplicate the stories of heartless plundering and old blooded slaughter of innocents that we have seen here.

THE LIVES OF CHRISTIANS IN THE MISSIONS DURING THE OTTOMAN OCCUPATION OF URMIA According to William A. Shedd, there remained in Urmia 5,600 families, together with another 800–1,000 families coming from the Ottoman border region since the Autumn of 1914, amounting to a total of roughly 25,000 Christians. 35 Twelve to thirteen thousand refugees were crowded together in three sites owned by the Presbyterian mission and 3,500 with the Lazarists and the Sisters of Charity. 36 Although the Presbyterians were very efficient in managing the situation, this did not prevent promiscuity, the rapid spread of epidemics, the death of the weakest members, the convoys which took around 40 dead bodies to the cemetery every day and the burials in the courtyard. Dysentery and diarrhea prevailed before typhoid fever broke out in January and spread quickly throughout to overcrowded rooms. In the Presbyterian hospital, rooms designed for eight patients held up to 120 people. Shedd, Report dated June 23rd, 1915 to the Persian War Relief. CMA, letter from Archbishop Sontag to Émile Villette, Urumia, January 25th, 1915. 35 36

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Typhus carried by vermin was spread along with the outbreak of typhoid fever. On February 12th, the Ottomans arrived to arrest 151 men who had found refuge in the Lazarist mission. They were led to the Ottoman Consulate located in the buildings of the Russian Orthodox mission. After an agonizing wait, there was a glimmer of hope when 90 of them were released on February 13th, followed by the release of five more. Yet, during the night of February 23rd– 24th, shots were heard near the Hill of the Jews behind the Chaharbash Gate and eight survivors were able to confirm that 44 of them had been slaughtered, tied together two-by-two. Their bodies were exposed for two days. At last, gallows were set up at the Kurdish Gate. Four Christians were hung there, including two who had converted from Islam and the Bishop of Tergawer, Mar Dinkha. On February 27th, the Presbyterian E. W. McDowell was authorized to bury their bodies. The Lazarist Chatelet noticed that the victims of the tragic night of February 23rd–24th were villagers from the Mavana region who had risen up between 1907 and 1914 to organize the defence of the villages against the brutality of the Kurds, during the occupation of the region by the Ottomans from 1907 to 1912. 37

MASSACRES IN DILMAQAN, FEBRUARY 1915 No missionary was present in the Salmas Valley to protect the Christians in January and February 1915. The eldest Christians in Salmas did not leave for the Caucasus. In February 1915, they were joined by the Armenians from Van who were trying to escape deportation. Many of these Christians had found refuge with Muslim families or with the karguzar in Dilmaqan who provided shelter for 400 of them. The governor, appointed by the Ottomans, was ordered to make them sign a request for protection. The Iranians were forced to give up the men and they were assassinated on the main square (meidan) in Dilmaqan. In Khosrowa and Haftvan, the arrival of Jevdet Pasha, the vali of Van and brother-inThe Ottomans had made a census of the population and they knew the names of the men. 37

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 127 law of Enver Pasha, led to the massacre of the men who had remained there. Their bodies were thrown down wells and into trenches. These two massacres perpetrated in the Salmas Valley in February 1915 were clearly related to the extermination orders from Constantinople. In March 1915, when the Ottomans moved back in the direction of Van, Pavel Vedenski, who had become the vice-consul of Khoy and Dilmaqan and Agha Petros, who had returned from the Caucasus, went to the villages and ordered the bodies to be removed from the wells. A report signed by ‘Petris Ellyah, A.O. Samuel, Yuel Daniel, Yohanan Pera Beg, Shmuel Sayad and Paulus Badal regarding the situation in Urumia and Salmas’ and written by Agha Petros describes the horror of the massacre of ‘712–720 Christian men in Salmas three days before the Russian army arrived.’ 38 When the Lazarist Georges Decroo returned to Khosrowa in mid-March 1915, he deplored the death of ‘over 700 Christians, including the priests Israel, Absalon the father of the Lazarist Miraziz, our poor Yonan, and old Guiegu,’ but he also insisted on the solidarity of some Muslim Iranians. He reported that certain Iranians in Dilmaqan had provided help by refusing to give up the Christians to the Ottomans. 39 The Christians who had found refuge in the Caucasus came back to their villages in May and June once the Russians had returned. They found the villages plundered and destroyed.

RESISTANCE AND THE EXODUS OF THE ASSYRIANS FROM HAKKARI As reported by Surma, the sister of Catholicos-patriarch Benyamin, in her Assyrian Church Customs and the Murder of Mar Shimun (1920), during the summer of 1914 the vali of Van, who exercized authority over Hakkari, asked the catholicos to commit himself not to side with the Russians. Benyamin then consulted the maleks of the FFOA, N.S., Perse, LIV, Tabriz March 26th, 1915, Nicolas. FFOA, N.S., Perse, XI, Tabriz April 9th and 12th, 1915, Nicolas, Khosrowa April 8th, 1915, Decroo. 38 39

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Assyrian tribes. The family of the catholicos was divided in their opinion. Some wanted to remain loyal to the Ottomans, while others had seen the massacres elsewhere and wanted Russian protection, but held back their opinion at the time. In January 1915, the Kurds cut off the roads between the Assyrian tribes and Qodshanes where Mar Shimun lived. In February, Surma and her youngest brother left Qodshanes, escorted by 300 men from the Tiyari tribe. 40 The Assyrians from Hakkari were attacked by Kurdish and Ottoman troops. Benyamin gathered the maleks together in April. Facing an increase in the number of attacks by Kurds and cognizant of the assassinations and deportations of the Armenians and Assyro-Chaldeans, the massacre of Christians from Gavar, and the establishment of the plan devised in Istanbul against the Christians, they had no choice but to call on the help of the Russians. According to Surma, the catholicos-patriarch’s decision dated back to May 10th, 1915: Thus an official letter was sent through the kaimakam to the Vali of Van, to the effect that, because of the massacres and oppression to which their rayat brethren had been subjected, the six free districts (Tiyari, Tkhoma, Jilu, Baz, Ishtazin, Dizazn) felt obliged to sever political relations with the Ottoman government.

Moreover, Hormuz, Benyamin’s brother, who had been held hostage by the Ottomans, was executed. The Kurdish tribes attempted to block the Assyrian tribes. An attack by the vali of Mosul, Hayder Bey, was stopped by the tribes. In June, Benyamin came to ask for the help of the Russians in Moyanjik, in Salmas valley. There he met with the Russian general Chernozubov who promised his support, but which never came. Vice-consul Basile Nikitine, on his way from Tabriz to take over the Russian viceconsulate in Urmia, saw the patriarch in Salmas, together with Agha Petros, shortly before June 21st: 41 Bohas and Hellot-Bellier: Testimony of Malek Yako, pp. 89–116. D’Bait Mar Shimun, p. 30–31. Nikitine V., 1941. V. Nikitine entered Urmia in company with the new governor Yamin od-Dowla on June 21st, 1915. 40 41

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 129 Mar Shimun [Benyamin] was still holding out in the mountains, but his war materials were insufficient. It was agreed that we would supply him with guns and ammunition and that we should attempt to divert the Turks in the direction of Guiaver to lower the pressure.

In the middle of the month of June, the church of Bishop Zaya Sargis of Jilu was attacked by several Kurdish tribes shortly before the combined attack of the Ottomans based in Mosul and Julamerg against the Tiyari tribe on June 23rd. There was no choice but to abandon not only Mar Zaya but also the church of Mar Sawa of Tiyari in the Tiyari tribe. Ishay, the catholicos’ other brother, died and was buried in haste. The women and children fled to the high peaks of the mountains. In July, the catholicos-patriarch wanted to warn General Chernozubov. He sent malek Khoshaba from the Lizan tribe and Bishop Mar Yalda Yahwallah of Barwari to Tabriz to meet the consuls. On July 19th, the Lazarist Father Decroo reported an influx of refugees to Khosrowa coming from Gavar, Qodshanes and Jilu and the empty promises of the Russians. 42 During the summer, the tribes were surrounded by the Kurds and the combined action being taken by Hayder and Jevdet. They fled to the mountains peaks. The catholicos-patriarch again called on the Russians for help. He knew then that there was no time to lose. On August 10th, the family of the catholicos reunited with Bishop Mar Audisho of Tal decided to attempt to join the Russians. The Assyrians fought heroic battles to protect families and their herds of animals during their exodus to Bashqala, where the Russians were camped. From there, the Assyrians crossed the border in October 1915. In Iran, they were welcomed by the Russian Vice Consul Vassili Nikitine and Relief Committees organized by the Russians and a few Americans. According to the estimations of Basile Nikitine, about 45,000 Assyrians from the Hakkari Tribes crossed the border. E.W. McDowell listened to the

FFOA, N.S. Perse, XI, LIV, Khosrowa July 26th, 1915, Decroo to a fellow lazarist. 42

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stories of battles led by the Assyrians, which he summed up as follows: 43 They came down the Tal and Kurdistan valleys followed by the Kurds. They found the Kurds in force at Julamerk bridge and were forced to turn down the stream. They turned down the Zab to upper Tiary, they crossed the Zab and went into hills (Servan and Elay). They made their way around back Jumalerk, but near Qodshanes the Kurds fought.

The tribes were dispersed in the Salmas, Khoy and Urmia Valleys: 44 According to Mr. McDowell’s estimate, not far from 20,000 refugees were scattered in Salmas, Khoï and Bashkally regions. Those in Salmas were living in about 20 villages, some Moslem, some Christian. It is estimated that over 1,000 Jilu people with their bishop were living in Khosrova alone, while nearly as many Tkhuma people were in Moyanjug, and the Kod Chainis [sic] people were largely settled in Ula. It was a pleasant surprise to find most of the people housed, and great credit is due to the good governor in Salmas who took great pains to see that they were not left in the open.

A group of inhabitants of Jelu went up to the Caucasus led by Malek Kambar Warda, Nemrod’s son-in-law. The whole region was under control of Russian army. The Russians prevented the Ottomans from entering the region of Urmia from August 1915 to February 1918. The Christian population from Urmia and from Hakkari could feel safe. However, the Iranians tolerated the Russian army of occupation with difficulty. The exodus of the Assyrians from Hakkari became an exile, begun three years before the exile of Christians from Urmia in 1918. The distress of the deaths of their family members and of their exile has filled the survivors’ memories. FFOA, N.S., Perse, XI, Khosrowa July 19th, 1915, Decroo; Levant 1918–40, LI, p. 193. PHSA, RG 91–4, 91–24, E.W. McDowell Mountain Fields 1916; August 18th, 1915, October 8, October 15th, 1915. 44 PHSA, RG 91–4, Personal Report of F.G. Coan, August 1915–August 1916. 43

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 131

CONCLUSION At the start of the First World War, the Christians in the valleys of Urmia and Salmas who had made a place for themselves in the society of Iranian Azerbaijan throughout the course of the first decade of the 20th century were caught up in a spiral of violence that affected them more than the rest of the population. Victims of the war between the Ottomans and the Russians, they also experienced the plans for genocide designed by Enver Pacha and Talaat Pacha in the villages and surrounding areas of Dilmaqan, the ambiguous strategies of the Russians, the desire for revenge that arose during the war, and the inability of the Iranians to defend them, as well as the protection which some of their neighbours, the Afshar dignitaries of Urmia and even certain Kurdish chieftains, attempted to provide. During the summer of 1915, the spontaneous refuge offered to the Assyrian tribes who had been chased from Hakkari by the Ottomans and Kurds was more a question of humanitarian aid. However, their presence contributed to worsening the situation in the region. The populations who had moved back to the villages when the Russians returned in May 1915 were even more vulnerable once the Russians retreated from Iran in the beginning of 1918. The massacres of 1918 and 1919 demonstrate the degree of violence and resentment which had accumulated throughout all of these years of war and the break-up of the long-standing links between the inhabitants of the Urmia region.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Akcam Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). ––––––– The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Avedissian Onnig, Du Gamin d’Istanbul au Fedaï d’Ourmia. Mémoires d’un Révolutionnaire Arménien. (Paris: Thaddée, 2010). Bayat Kava (ed), Iran va Jang-e Jahani Avval. Esnad-e Vezarat-e Dokhela [Iran and the First World War. Documents from the Iranian Home Office]. (Tehran: 1369h/1990).

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Bohas, Georges and Florence Hellot-Bellier. Les Assyriens du Hakkari au Khabour, Mémoire et Histoire. (Paris: Geuthner, 2008). Bozarslan, Hamit. Histoire de la Turquie. De l’Empire à nos Jours, (Paris: Taillandi, 2013). Bryce, James and Arnold Joseph Toynbee. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Falloden. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916). Coakley J.F., 1992. The Church of the East and the Church of England. A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Congregation of the Mission’s Archives, [CMA] D’Bet Mar Shimun Surma. Assyrian Church Customs and the Murder of Mar Shimun. (London: Faith Press, 1920). French Foreign Office’s Archives, [FFOA] Golnazarian-Nichanian, Magdalena. Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan. Histoire Locale et Enjeux Régionaux, 1828–1918. (Paris: Centre d’Histoire Arménienne Contemporain, 2009). Hellot-Bellier, Florence. Chronique de Massacres Annoncés. Les AssyroChaldéens d’Iran et du Hakkari face aux Ambitions des Empires, 1896–1920. (Paris: Geuthner, 2014). Kasravi Ahmad. Tarikh-e Hejdah Saleh-ye Azerbaijan [Eighteen Years of History in Azerbaijan]. (Tehran: Sepehr, 1378H/1988). Moez od-Dowla, Muhammad Sadeq. Namaha ye Urmia … 1333– 34H [Letters from Urmia Sent by the Governor Muhammad Sadeq Moez od-Dowla, 1333–34H]. (Kava Bayat ed. Tehran: 1380h/ 2001). Nikitine, Vassili/Basile, Souvenirs, la Perse que J’ai Connue. (Unpublished, 1941). Philadelphia Historic Society’s Archives, [PHSA] Shimmon, Paul. ‘Urumia, Salmas and Hakkiari: Statement by Mr. Paul Shimmon’ in Arthur Toynbee and James Bryce (eds) The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16, (1916).

6. RESISTANCE OF ASSYRIANS IN URMIA AND HAKKARI 133 el-Vezara, Motamed. Urumia Dar Mohareba-ye Alamsuz, 1298–1300H [Urmia Fighting against Annihilation, 1298–1300H]. (Kava Bayat ed. Tehran: 1379H/2000).

7. ʰ,WARDO: A STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE ABLAHAD LAHDO ʲ,ZDUGR ,QZDUGR $\QZDUGR $\LQYHUW DQG 7XUNLVK *ÙOJÓ]H  LV built on a hill some two hours walk east of Midyat. When DSSURDFKLQJʲ,ZDUGRIRUH[DPSOHIURP0LG\DWRQHFURVVHVDORQJ broad valley at the end of which a fortress-like construction appears. 1 The colossal buLOGLQJ RI WKH FKXUFK RI 0RU ʗušabo stands on the peak of the hill and it is surrounded by strong walls and defense towers. At time of the massacres of 1915, 200 families lived in this exclusively Syriac Orthodox village. By the summer of the same year, between 6000 and 7000 Syriac Christians from nearby villages, as well as from Midyat took their refuge in the village. Many of the refugees from Midyat could escape through secret underground tXQQHOVOHDGLQJRXWRIWKHFLW\DQGWRZDUGVʲ,ZDUGR2QFHVDIHO\LQ ʲ,ZDUGR WKH UHIXJHHV UHSRUWHG DOO WKH KRUULI\LQJ GHHGV WKDW WKHLU relatives had suffered and the destiny that their villages had met.

BACKGROUND A state of permanent insecurity revolved around Christian villages. Between the massacres of 1895 and the terrible years of 1915–  WKH 6\ULDFV RI ʝXU ʲ$EGLQ SDUWLFXODUO\ ZHUH H[SRVHG WR violence. 2 By giving the Kurdish chieftains carte blanche, the Sublime Porte had, for the last few years, been pursuing its goal of gradually

1 2

Hollerweger Turabdin – Living Cultural Heritage, pp. 118–119. De Courtois, The Forgotten Genocide, p. 141.

135

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annihilating the Christian inhabitants of the Empire. 3 While the massacres of 1895 were stiOO IUHVK PHPRULHV IRU PDQ\ LQ ʝur ʲ$EGLQ WKH GHYDVWDWLRQV RI WKH VR-FDOOHG +DPLGL\H $OD\ODUï ‘Hamidian Regiments,’ Abdulhamid II’s own border cavalry, spread even more terror in the region. 4 One among the many perturbing actions is mentioned by De Courtois, where he cites from diplomatic dispatch 2 about an incident of Friday, December 20th, 1901, where colonel Mustapha Pasha himself at the command of a detachment of Kurdish horsemen attacked the village of Babekka, one hour from Azekh. Five men were killed and seven were wounded and all the flocks of the village were stolen. When the people of Azekh decided to come to Babekka’s rescue, they fell into a trap and lost eleven men with seven wounded. The news of this attack reached Jezireh and fear spread through the Christian region that a new wave of massacres would break out again. 5 In addition, rumours of preparations for a general massacre of Christians had circulated for some time before Feyzi Bey, the National Assembly deputy, arrived in Jezireh on April 15th, 1915. Rashid Bey had sent him to coordinate the Kurdish tribes. Ten days after he left Jezireh, Kurdish tribes and Turkish military could be observed surrounding the Syriac villages of Garessa and Kuvakh. 6 In the international arena, Bosnia was annexed to Austria and the Ottomans lost much territory in Europe through the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. Large waves of Muslim refugees streamed into Istanbul and western Anatolia. The refugees needed land and a place to live. The Ottoman authorities developed a scheme of demographic engineering that would enable also the Turkification of those refugees who were not yet Turkish-speaking. The refugees would be resettled in eastern Anatolia, on land confiscated from people suspected of disloyalty. Thus, orders came to move these populations. 7 Ibid., p. 141. Bengtsson, Svärdets år, p. 21. 5 De Courtois, p. 143. 6 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 277. 7 Gaunt, ‘The Complexity of the Assyrian Genocide’, p. 98. 3 4

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In the light of these details and listening to the refugees’ H\HZLWQHVVVWRULHVLQʲ,ZDUGRLW becomes clear that it was not only Armenians who were the victims of the genocide, but Christians in JHQHUDO 0DVʲXG 0]L]D[L D ORFDO OHDGHU LQ ʲ,ZDUGR VWDUWHG preparations to defend the village. He assembled in a relatively short time 700 fighters from all the men that were now sheltered in the village. At night they would dress in black and carry out risky operations to rescue people who had survived execution squads or escaped from deportation convoys. 8 After conquering Midyat, the Kurds, Turks, and Muhallami prepared WRDWWDFNERWKʲ,ZDUGRDQG$Qʘel, where there were also many Christian refugees. Midyat’s Kurdish leader, Azizke 0DKPDGRVXJJHVWHGWKDWDOOMRLQIRUFHVWRVWULNHDJDLQVWʲ,ZDUGRDV a first priority. One of the reasons for Mahmado’s recommendation may have been based on the news about the UHVFXH VTXDGV RI ʲ,ZDUGR +HQFH WKH PDMRULW\ RI WKH DJJUHVVRUV FRQFHQWUDWHGRQʲ,ZDUGR 9 On an unspecified Friday in the middle of July 1915, a force RIXSWRPHQEHVLHJHGʲ,ZDUGR7KLVIRUFHZDVFollected by Turkish officials from Kurdish tribes from the Midyat and Mardin areas, and some of the Muhallemi as well as the Rama tribe further to the north. The force was equipped with weapons, ammunition, and food supplies from the government’s warehouses, and bitter battles began immediately with casualties on both sides.

THE PREPARATIONS :KHQ LW EHFDPH FOHDU WR WKH 6\ULDFV RI ʲ,ZDUGR WKDW WKH\ ZRXOG DOVR EH VODXJKWHUHG 0DVʲXG EHJDQ SUHSDUDWLRQV DQG VHW XS D strategic plan for the defence. 10 The major elements in his preparations were strengthening the village’s defence, storing food VXSSOLHVDQGSURFXULQJZHDSRQVDQGDPPXQLWLRQ6DEUL0DVʲXGpV grandson, related in an interview that:

Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 202. Ibid., p. 203. 10 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 202. 8 9

138

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7KH\ZHQWWRʲ,ZDUGRUHIXUELVKHGLWVVXUURXQGLQJVHQFORVHGLW and prepared it. This means that they had prepared for this. If they wouldn’t have prepared themselves, they wouldn’t have been able to last that long. They went there and repaired all the walls and reinforced them and so on.

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Furthermore, the Syriacs had harvested and prepared their crops before the arrival of the aggressors. Some of the people of Midyat even brought their crops and stored it there. 'XULQJ WKH WLPH RI SUHSDUDWLRQ 0DVʲXG LV VDLG WR KDYH contacted the Syriac leaders of Midyat in order to collect money to buy weapons. It is unclear how much help he received there. /HDYLQJWKHPHHWLQJ0DVʲXGZDVDSSURDFKHGE\DFKLOG$V6DEUL recounted: N̸WZD ьD QDષLPR W-N̸WZD \DWLZR, V-L

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7. ʲ,WARDO: A STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

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There was a child that was living close to the [military] barracks. He said to my late grandfather: I saw where they stored the munitions. I know where they store the munitions. Then, during the siege, my uncle Šabo took about 40 men together with this child and went there, to the barracks, at three o’clock in the morning. They took the munitions and came back.

De Courtois writes that the inhabitants of Tur ‘Abdin were used to living in difficult conditions and to fighting against the Kurds, and thus developed a fierce character and a tenacity in their resistance. 13 Father Armale states further that on Monday June 21st, soldiers started to circulate in the Christians’ houses, searching for weapon. 14 These assertions indicate that the Syriacs already had weapons, most probably flintlock rifles, as well as ammunition to defend themselves. Furthermore, from oral testimony we learn that they were able to manufacture JXQSRZGHUDQGEXOOHWV5ʢVTR%Dxxe recounted: PDOPLZRDQ

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They used to gather dog excrement and the white gunpowder that grows in caves. So they also put charcoal and smashed it together and manufactured it; they smashed it till it was done. And they also tested it; they used to dig such a pocket and added a live coal, if it “said” bang and caught fire, then it was ready, if not, they smashed it further.

Bullets were manufactured from copper or lead. In this matter, Armale states that there was no copper or lead left in the village that they did not melt, form, and use against the enemy. 16 Even the De Courtois, p. 189. Armale, De kristnas hemska katastrofer, p. 375. 15 5ʢVTR%DxxHZDVLQWHUYLHZHGE\-DQ%HW-Sawoce in July 1993. 16 Armale, p. 385. 13 14

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enemy bullets that hit the walls and fell down were collected, melted down, formed, and reused. DQ

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The women and children used to collect the bullets, … that used to hit the walls and fall down; they used to become piles, … They used to fill their petticoats, … and come back. They brought them, melt them down and prepared them so that they could be used in the war.

Now, if we assume that the YLOODJHUV RI ʲ,ZDUGR SUHSDUHG themselves in any way they could, i.e. restored the walls, stored food supplies, prepared their weapons and manufactured gunpowder and bullets, it is still inconceivable that 700 men could resist up to 13,000 fighters of both regular army and paramilitary troops for nearly two months. In warfare there is a principle called the “three-to-one-ratio” which means that in order to conquer a city and move forward, the aggressors ought be three times stronger than the defenders. However, in this particular case, the defenders were just a tenth of the attacking force. What were the elements that enabled them to resist for that long?

PRINCIPLES FOR DEFENCE: CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ AND MASʰUD MZIZAXI The military thinker Carl von Clausewitz is widely acknowledged to be the most important of the classical strategic thinkers. Even though he has been dead for nearly two centuries, he remains a powerful living influence, and in many respects the most modern of strategic theorists. In his 1812 book, Principles of War, which is still one of the most applied theories in officers’ training, Clausewitz writes about “General Principles For Defence.” :KHWKHU0DVʲXG0]L]D[LZDVIDPLOLDUZLWK&ODXVHZLW]pWKHRULHVRU not is hard to determine. What is clear, on the other hand, is that WKH PDMRU SDUW RI 0DVʲXGpV SODQ IRU WKH GHIHQFH ILWV ZHOO LQWR 17

Sabri Be-0DVʲXG

7. ʲ,WARDO: A STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

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Clausewitz’ theories. Below, I will try to account for some of these principles that may have been essential for this resistance. Clausewitz writes: … we must at every instant be on the defensive and thus should place our forces as much under cover as possible. If we have troops to hold in reserve, … they can attack the enemy which is seeking to envelop us. … this is done advantageously in a terrain chosen in advance, where we have arranged things to our advantage. 18 0DVʰXG 'XULQJ WKH SUHSDUDWLRQV 0DVʲXG UHVWRUHG WKH ZDOOV DQG reinforced them to secure the cover needed during the siege. The so-called kozʠkat ‘revetments’ were manned by well-covered men determined to die rather than surrender. When opportunity was JLYHQ 0DVʲXG VHQW PHQ ZKR ZHUH QRW GLUHFWO\ LQYROYHG LQ WKH defence to stage counterattacks in order split the enemy and create confusion among them. Some of these attacks were especially successful because these men knew the terrain well, and most probably also by using the secret, underground tunnels. 19 During one of these counterattacks, the defenders managed even to seize the battle flag of the enemy. 20 Success of this kind must have raised combat moral immeasurably. It is probable that they also tried to seize as many weapons and food supplies as possible during these counterattacks. War trophies such as these were also essential for battle moral. 21 Clausewitz was convinced that effective command performance in war is the product of genius, where genius is defined as the capability of the commander in chief, consisting of a combination of rational intelligence and subrational intellectual and emotional abilities that make up intuition. 0DVʰXG had obviously qualities of a dedicated leader. Armale GHVFULEHVKLPDVWKHEUDYHOHDGHURIʲ,ZDUGRWKDWJDWKHUHGWKHPHQ and the young men and infused in them the spirit of enthusiasm Clausewitz, Principles of War, p. 15–20. Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 330. 20 Ibid., p. 204. 21 Gaunt, ‘The Complexity of the Assyrian Genocide’, pp. 91–92. 18 19

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and proudness. He made them rise to defend themselves against the Turks till the last breath. 22 Rʢsqo Bašše informs us about how this leader could use emotional appeals to encourage the villagers, stating: L QDTTDG-̸KЖ̸PPHO-DN NXUPDQЖ«PD̸߮QO-0RUѽušDER«TD\̸P a߭L X

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Go up and [pretend to] crush burgul! Sing the ʚʠPPDZKD\H so that the people [enemy] think that we still have burgul … so the women pretended to crush it with the crushers, like this: bang, bang, bang on the roofs, and sang the ʚʠPPD Z KD\H … The Turks asked the Kurds: what are these [people] doing? They answered: they are preparing fresh burgul [meaning they still have lots of food supplies].

Clausewitz: the element of surprise plays a great role in tactics. In our present case, Midyat had been attacked and refugees were 22 23

Armale, pp. 383–384. Sabri Be-0DVʲXG

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VWUHDPLQJ LQWR ʲ,ZDUGR VHHNLQJ VKHOWHU +HQFH WKH DWWDFN RQ ʲ,ZDUGRZDVH[SHFWHGDQGWKHYLOODJHUVZHUHQRWWDNHQE\VXUSULVH when the aggressors marched towards the village. The aspects mentioned above are considered as general principles for a defence. Other factors that may have played an essential role are the following: Tactical Background In general, the defenders were villagers; nonetheless some of them had served for years in the Turkish army and thus had gained experience. During one assault against the village, they killed 50 Turks including one high-ranking officer, possibly concentrating their fire on him in the knowledge that this would result in confusion and shock among the aggressors. 24 Furthermore, these men were able to interpret enemy signals, such as the bugle call, which made it easy to understand the enemy’s intended moves. 25 Moreover, the aggressors seemed not to have gathered any kind of intelligence for this siege, and hence were stunned by the defenders’ ability to resist. Motivation For a long time, the Christians had been living under harsh conditions. They were often terrorised by Kurds who wanted to confiscate their villages and lands. With the massacres of 1895 in fresh memory, and with the Kurdish horsemen, the Hamidiye $OD\ODUï, who were terrorizing Christians in the region, and finally with the fall of Midyat, there was no doubt what needed to be done. These were now facts that motivated the villagers and made them determined to fight and die in battle than surrender and be slaughtered. Furthermore, the bishop, Mor Filiksinos Ablahad, preached in the church of Mor Hušabo, telling his congregation that it was their sacred duty to resist even though they were outnumbered.

24 25

Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 204. Ibid., p. 348.

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Strategic location ʲ,ZDUGRpV ORFDWLRQ RQ D KLOO ZLWK WKH Iortress-like construction of the church of Mor Hušabo on the top of the hill, must have played an important role in the defence. From the top of the church, the enemies’ moves were seen easily in the surrounding terrain and measures against such possible moves were taken.

THE AFTERMATH 7KHHIIHFWRIWKLVGHIHQFHZDVWKDWʲ,ZDUGRZDVQHYHUFRQTXHUHG Nevertheless, after 52 days of fighting the whole village was exhausted. Many women and children had starved to death. Their bodies were stretched on the ground and stank and infected the combatants. Food supplies were running low and the villagers had already been forced to slaughter the better part of their cattle. At the same time, while the aggressors seemed unable to conquer the village, they sent messages to the defenders that the Christians of $Qʘel had converted to Islam and thus received amnesty. 26 Hence, the defenders found themselves forced to negotiate for a ceasefire. According to oral testimony the aggressors at first asked for 500 rifles in order to lift the siege, but at last the two parties agreed on the number of 300 guns and thus the siege was lifted. 27 Despite the guarantee of amnesty, most of the Syriacs remained in the village and did not dare return to their original villages. 28 This may be due to all the stories the villagers had heard from the Armenian and Syriac refugees, telling how the Kurdish tribes and government forces played tricks on them. They could be told that they would be safe if they handed over their weapons, but after complying they were massacred. Thus, the Christians stayed in the village, not daring to leave because of the ambushes from the warriors of the neighbouring Kurdish villages. Indeed, those who dared to go back to their villages were killed. Armale states that the number of those who died after the siege was greater than those Armale, p. 286. Yusef talks about the Sayfo in a video interview. The interview ZDVPDGHLQʲ,ZDUGRLQ 28 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, p. 205. 26 27

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who died during the siege. 29 Hanna Savaro recounts what he heard from his father: E̸̸߭U P̸-G-TD\LPR L ષDVNDU, « N̸ʻષDW X O̸

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After that the army had left … as you know … when a man is kept as a prisoner, there won’t be any salt left, there won’t be any flour left, there won’t be any firewood left, so our people went out, each one went somewhere. One day … nineteen men went to Xalbube to gather firewood … There, where they put the pile [of the firewood] the Saliyye came and killed all of them … They killed nineteen men in one single day.

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