The Assyrian Democratic Organization
By Susan Abram
NORTH HOLLYWOOD – dailynews — The murder of more than a dozen Assyrians in Iraq this month and a mass exodus of Christians from their ancestral homeland drew 100 residents Sunday to a memorial service to pray for an end to what they call a systematic ethnic cleansing.
The gathering at the Assyrian Center in North Hollywood included clergy from several San Fernando Valley churches and members of the Assyrian Aid Society of Los Angeles, which raises funds to help rebuild schools and infrastructure in Iraq. “They are living in bad conditions, and nobody cares about them,” said Sargoun Issa, president of the local Aid Society chapter.
“We are asking, begging, any human rights organizations and the U.S. government to help us. “The responsibility for this is on everyone.” There are an estimated 30,000 Assyrians in California. In the past week, similar memorials and demonstrations have been held among Assyrian and Chaldean-American communities across the nation.
The groups call on the U.S. government to ensure the safety of Christians and other indigenous minorities of Iraq. Since the start of the war, fundamentalists have threatened: Convert to Islam or die, according to news reports. The recent escalation in violence has resulted in 13 deaths, and 15,000 Christians driven out of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, as well as a dramatic shift in the historical landscape of the Middle East.
Assyrians are the indigenous people of Mesopotamia, presently Iraq, where the last and largest concentration of Aramaic-speaking people in the world have lived for thousands of years. “This is a very silent genocide that is taking place,” said Jackie Bejan, executive director for the Chaldean Assyrian Syriac Council of America. “The current state of affairs proves the Iraqi government is dysfunctional.
They have not yet achieved democracy.” Christians, she said, have fallen in the middle of a complicated tug of war between the Kurds and the Arabs, both on a religious and political scale. When Iraq’s 275-member Parliament passed the Provincial Election Law last month, a key clause that would have reserved seats on Provincial Councils for Christians and other minorities was removed.
Assyrians feel their ancestral lands will be soon be gone. “They feel this is the last stand,” David Lazar, an Assyrian-American of Santa Clarita, told the group. “No matter where Assyrians are from, Iraq is their ancestral land. “If that piece (of land) is what I call Kurdified, we’re done. It’s a matter of time before it all disappears.”
