The Assyrian Democratic Organization
* * *
The Assyrian Christians, a non-Arab, Semitic people with a 5,000-year
presence in northern Iraq, constitute some 5% to 10% of the Iraqi population.
Despite constant threats from Muslim neighbors, they have kept their ethnic
and linguistic identity alive and maintain a flourishing diaspora in
Australia, Europe and North America. During the British Mandate that lasted
from 1920 to 1932, the British employed the Assyrians as protectors of the
Crown’s interests in Iraq, only to abandon them shamefully when a newly
independent Iraq entered the League of Nations in 1932. A year later, using
the Assyrians’ prior alliance with the British as a pretext for violence, the
new Iraqi government launched an anti-Christian jihad in which scores of
Assyrian civilians were murdered and their villages set on fire. Arab
nationalists have continued to draw upon this Assyrian-British connection as
evidence that Assyrians are agents of the Christian West.
Saddam’s Baath Party, which came to power in 1968 as an Arab nationalist
movement with ideological roots in European fascism, officially denies the
existence of the Assyrians as a separate ethnic group and has implemented
numerous policies in order to both ethnically cleanse the Assyrians from Iraq
and to erase their identity as a distinct people. Iraqi officials, seeking to
physically obliterate Assyrian civilization, have been involved in the
looting and smuggling of priceless Assyrian artifacts. Speaking Assyrian in
public carries great risks. The recent savage murder and beheading of a nun
in Baghdad indicates the lengths to which the regime will go in order to
terrify its Assyrian population.
The regime has likewise manipulated the U.N. sanctions to further their
persecution of Assyrians . In order to participate in the oil-for-food
program, Assyrians (like their neighbors, the Turkmens) must deny their
identity on all government documents and register as either Arabs or Kurds,
the two officially recognized Iraqi ethnic groups. Should they refuse, they
face the prospect of starvation, or banishment to the Kurdish-controlled
region in the northeast, where they face educational discrimination and
general persecution at the hands of predominantly Muslim neighbors who
sometimes derogatorily refer to Assyrians as “Christian Kurds.” Indeed,
Assyrians have bitterly accused Kurdish authorities, particularly the Kurdish
Democratic Party, of deliberately working to undermine their rights in
northern Iraq.
Given that the majority of Iraqi-Americans are Assyrians and not Arabs,
Assyrian-American organizations should be given ample voice in shaping
certain aspects of American foreign policy for a post-Saddam Iraq. It is thus
to his credit that President Bush, in his Oct. 7 speech to the U.N. General
Assembly, formally addressed Iraq’s repression of its Assyrians . The Bush
administration has taken specific steps to ensure that Assyrian rights be
respected. Partially in response to pressure from Congressman Henry Hyde’s
advocacy on behalf of Assyrian-Americans, the State Department has welcomed
Assyrian participation in planning for an Iraq free from Saddam’s grasp.
However, despite the fact that several Assyrian representatives are involved
with Foggy Bottom’s “Future of Iraq Project,” the predominantly Muslim Iraqi
opposition groups have been generally reluctant to partner with the Christian
Assyrians .
This has not stopped Assyrian-American organizations from launching an
extensive advocacy campaign on behalf of their brethren in Iraq. This has
involved countering Kurdish attempts to declare much of the northern region
their own, including the oil-rich towns of Kirkuk and Mosul, a land-grab
which they have tried to sweeten by offering the Assyrians and Turkmens
representation at a Kurdish parliament-to-be. Understandably, the Assyrians
have rejected the offer. But not many Americans are aware of these
behind-the-scenes tensions.
The recently formed Assyrian-American League, which calls for a secular and
democratic Iraq, has hired former Illinois Congressman Michael Flanagan to be
their lobbyist in Washington. Congressmen and policy planners seriously
interested in the democratization of the region should reach out and work
with this organization, as well as with other credible Assyrian
organizations. At the very least, officials tasked with planning for both the
coming war and its aftermath should seek out Assyrian-Americans’ invaluable
knowledge of Iraqi society. Assyrian-Americans have, likewise, courageously
voiced their willingness to work with their Jewish compatriots to shape a
democratic Middle East.
Given that both Saddam and Persian Gulf-based Islamists might incite mass
violence against the Assyrians in the advent of an American-led attack on
Iraq, the U.S. has a particular responsibility to prevent a repetition of the
aforementioned 1933 massacres, in which the British stood idly by as their
former allies were ruthlessly slaughtered. Indeed, the potential for massive
ethnic violence in northern Iraq between Arabs, Assyrians , Kurds, and
Turkmen remains high, particularly if the Baath regime were to fall quickly.
The Bush administration must, therefore, remain cautious in endorsing an
officially recognized Kurdish autonomous region for a federal Iraqi state
without first providing legal safeguards for Assyrians , as well as for all
other ethnic groups in the area.
The dearth of reliable census material and the results of decades of forcible
assimilation in the region combine to make it extremely difficult to evaluate
competing land claims for oil-rich territories in northern Iraq.
Nevertheless, under the auspices of the 1932 Declaration of the Kingdom of
Iraq, Assyrians arguably have viable land claims in the oil-rich Mosul
Vilayet, a former Ottoman territory that the Council of the League of Nations
annexed to Iraq in 1925. Given the fact that Assyrians in northern Iraq have
been constant victims of ethnic cleansing, the international community should
take their legal claims for land rights and due compensation as seriously as
the competing Kurdish and Turkmen claims on Kirkuk, another oil-rich city
whose dominion is hotly contested, and which could be witness to ethnic
strife in the months and years ahead.
* * *
For reasons both moral and tactical, the Bush administration and Congress
should continue, and heighten, its concern for the Assyrians in northern
Iraq. America now has a golden opportunity to safeguard the rights of one of
the Near East’s most persecuted peoples, and to create a new reality that
could redress various 20th-century injustices that have been perpetrated
against them.
Mr. Lewis, a New York-based political analyst, is working on a history of the
realtionship between Great Power politics and ethnic minorities in the
20th-century Middle East.
Source:Wall Street Journal, 19.12.2002
