The Assyrian Dream

By Marianne Brückl   

Pressemitteilung — Freedom on native ground, a life in peace and the preservation of their historically valuable language — this is the dream of every Assyrian. But expulsion and fear of torture or death is destroying this dream.

The people who populated the Osmanian Empire for thousands of years are being expelled from their native territories or tortured, are being forced to pay protection money, and worst of all, they are being executed in the cruellest manner since 1915. These facts can be considered from either the political or religious perspective.

The disastrous effect of the interaction between politics and religion has been illustrated once more by the case of the two Israeli soldiers who were abducted in 2006. It is a fact that politically stirred terror is much more powerful than peace. Terrorists who have killed others are set free to carry out further killings. To call this a swop of prisoners can only be described as a mockery of the dead. Two dead bodies in exchange for five living persons whose life means killing others! The suffering of the afflicted families is immeasurable.

In a bomb attack in the town of Talafar in northern Iraq at least 15 people lost their lives. Nearly 100 persons were injured in a detonation of a dynamite-filled car, reported the news agency Aswat al-Irak. As the condition of many seriously injured was considered to be critical, the authorities are expecting an increase in the number killed.

Yesterday in Mossul two people were murdered and another 15 injured. (Source: dpa-message, 17.07.2008) That in this manner people such as the Assyrians, who want to live without violence and in peace, will be caught more and more in the crossfire of the battle between cruelties and extermination must be clear to anyone. World politics is producing a breeding ground for downright terroristic organizations, and peaceful minorities are forced to suffer in their shadow. Hate is growing between populations from one country to the next, although the terrorists, extremists and last but not least the politicians are the real murderers.

When will people wake up to reality and understand that this world will be doomed if they do not stop domineering and killing others? Have they forgotten the Assyrian genocide? The same as happened with the Jews in the despotism of the assimilation maniac Hitler? Day after day people are being abducted, tortured or murdered.

This accumulation in cases during the last few years ought to initiate a new direction in thinking. Indeed it is strongly propagated to allow persecuted Christians into Germany, but the refugees’ asylum applications are rejected one after the other and they are only granted the status of “toleration of stay”.

Once this toleration has expired, these asylum applicants are officially forced to return to that very country for a visa which they had left as refugees. This corroborates at least the abuse of political power for the purpose of remaining in the world public limelight as a patron of Christian refugees from countries controlled by the Islamists and the Kurds.

On the other hand, really endangered people will not be officially deported, but the step outside Germany is also the step towards distrustfulness about the urgency of asylum. It’s an unfair political game. This way of working of the political machinery is also illustrated by the case of an Assyrian priest living with his family here in Germany.

Should this priest return to his ancient motherland of Syria, this would mean a death sentence — first imprisonment and then, sooner or later, death — for the sole reason that he is a member of a minority who are resisting the dictatorial and degrading measures of a country which in the historical past was owned by all the inhabitants of the Osmanian Empire and that he has held onto his Christian beliefs.

Is getting a visa to become a deadly trap? If governments were to fulfil their human obligations, then agreement between nations and human rights, unity and peace, togetherness and not one against the other would be the highest dictates of our time. Accommodating terrorists and extremists through politics and as a consequence the oppression and also murder of minorities cannot and must not be the ultimate aim. Only humanity and justice can be the fundamental prerequisites for peaceful coexistence of all peoples!

Shall the Assyrian dream remain a dream forever?