Michigan Remembers Armenian and Assyrian Genocide
By Cal Abbo
The office of Governor Gretchen Whitmer proclaimed April 24 a day of remembrance for the tragedy of the Armenian genocide.
“Armenians, as well as Greeks, Assyrian-Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians were subject to torture, starvation, mass murder, lethal human medical experimentation, and exile from their historic homeland,” it said. “Over 1.5 million lost their lives.”
The Armenian genocide is a well-documented historical event in which the Ottoman Empire began a policy of removing or killing Christians and other minorities in what is now Eastern Turkey and Northern Syria. Assyrians remember the event which annihilated 250,000 of their own and forced many more from their ancestral homes as The Sayfo.
While most genocides of this scale leave enough documentation and depth of evidence so they are easily recognized and undisputed, the Armenian genocide stands out. A certain portion of the world denies the occurrence of the genocide or blames the victims for causing the violence. Virtually all historians agree that these claims are absurd and specifically ignore a multitude of evidence associated with the killings.
Yet there remains a large group of genocide deniers which makes proclamations like this and other education efforts all the more important.
No Strangers to Genocide
Assyrians are no strangers to genocide and senseless violence, and The Sayfo was not an exceptional incident. Assyrians faced genocide and displacement at almost every major point in Middle Eastern history, including Islamization, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, and many more.
In the 1800s, Assyrians were frequent victims of targeted attacks by Ottoman officials and Kurdish militias. Many Assyrians and other Christians were slain in 1895 in the Massacres of Diyarbekir, a province just north of Syria.
On Nov. 1, 1895, shots were fired outside of the Great Mosque. The French consulate later received a report that a policeman had shot a Chaldean walking during mid-day prayer. Quickly, Muslims began attacking minority Christians in the surrounding areas. Anti-Christian sentiments pushed even more people to join the mob that would lay waste to the city, especially Assyrian and Armenian communities.
The Assyro-Chaldeaan delegation to the Paris Peace Conference following WWI proposed an independent Assyria.
Mobs viciously targeted surrounding villages for several weeks following the first incident. In the village of Sa’diye, only three people out of 3,000 survived by hiding among the dead bodies. Four people out of 300 families survived in Qatarball. One Syriac Catholic priest said more than a dozen Assyrian villages were completely erased.
In total, around 25,000 Assyrians were slaughtered by Kurdish and Ottoman mobs in this event. Many more were forcibly converted to Islam and forced to relocate. 20 years later, it was repeated on a much larger scale.
The Sayfo cut the Assyrian population in half, leaving a quarter million people dead. Assyrian leaders, even back then, knew their tragic fate would follow them if there was nothing done, so they proposed an Assyro-Chaldean state at the Paris Peace Conference following World War I.
Hopes for a sovereign Assyria are all but gone these days. There remains a strong nationalist sense in the northern region of Iraq. The most recent genocide, however, affects the movement in two ways. First, it brutally reminds the world of the desperate need for an independent Assyria. Second, it has spawned another wave of emigration that leaves the goal almost impossible to achieve.