The Assyrian Democratic Organization
The ChaldoAssyrians
(also known as Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs) are the indigenous people of
Mesopotamia and have a history spanning over 6700 years. Today’s ChaldoAssyrians
are the descendants of the ancient multiethnic Assyrian empire and one of the
earliest civilizations emerging in Mesopotamia. Although the Assyrian empire
ended in 612 B.C., history is replete with recorded details of the continuous
persistence of the ChaldoAssyrian people till the present time. Assyrian
civilization at one time incorporated the entire Near East most notably the area
of the Fertile Crescent.
The heartland of
Assyria lays in present day northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern
Turkey, and northwestern Iran. The remains of the ancient capital of Assyria,
Nineveh, lie next to Mosul in northern Iraq. Until earlier this century prior to
the ChaldoAssyrian Holocaust of 1915, the major ChaldoAssyrian communities still
inhabited the areas of Tur Abdin and Hakkari in southeastern Turkey, Jazira in
northeastern Syria, Urmi in northwestern Iran, and Mosul in northern Iraq as
they had for thousands of years.
The world’s 4.5
million ChaldoAssyrians are currently dispersed with members of the Diaspora
comprising nearly one-third of the population. Most of the ChaldoAssyrians in
the Diaspora live in North America, Europe and Australia with nearly 400,000
residing in the United States of America and 200,000 in Europe. The remaining
ChaldoAssyrians reside primarily in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and to a lesser
extent in Iran, and Turkey.
ChaldoAssyrians
constitute the third largest ethnic group in Iraq. They represent the
historically indigenous people of the region. Estimates of the total
ChaldoAssyrian population in Iraq range between 1.5-2 million people. Most
ChaldoAssyrians currently in Iraq reside in and around the Baghdad area with
750,000- 1,000,000 ChaldoAssyrians within central Iraq. An additional
300,000-400,000 ChaldoAssyrian reside within the area in and around Mosul
(ancient Nineveh). Approximately 100,000 ChaldoAssyrians reside in the former
northern UN Safe Haven. Another community of ChaldoAssyrians numbering in the
range of 25,000 resides in Karkuk while the remainder of the population is
scattered in smaller concentrations in the remainder of the country. Due to
disproportionate emigration, ChaldoAssyrians from Iraq constitute the largest
group of Iraqis in the U.S. with estimates ranging between 80-90%.
ChaldoAssyrians are
not Arabs but rather have maintained a continuous and separate ethnic identity,
language, culture, and religion that predate the Arabization of the Near East.
Until today, the ChaldoAssyrians speak a distinct language (called Syriac or
Aramaic by some scholars), the language spoken by Jesus Christ. As a Semitic
language, the ChaldoAssyrian language is related to Hebrew and Arabic but
predates both. The Syriac or Aramaic language of the ChaldoAssyrians remains the
oldest continuously written and spoken language of the entire Middle East.
The ChaldoAssyrians
were among the first people to accept Christianity in the first century A.D.
through the Apostle St. Thomas. Despite the subsequent Islamic conquest of the
region in the seventh century A.D., the various ChaldoAssyrian Churches
flourished and their adherents at one time numbered in the tens of millions.
ChaldoAssyrian missionary zeal was unmatched and led to the first Christian
missions to China, Japan, and the Philippines. The Church of the East stele in
Xian, China bears testament to a thriving Church of the East as early as in the
seventh century A.D.
Early on,
ChaldoAssyrian Christians developed into two ancient branches, the Syriac
Orthodox Church and the Church of the East. Over time, divisions within Eastern
Christianity led to the establishment of various Syriac Churches including the
Chaldean Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Syriac Orthodox and Syriac
Catholic Churches, the Syriac Maronite Church, and the Melkite Churches.
Persistent persecution under Islamic occupation led to the migration of still
greater numbers of Assyrian Christians into the Christian autonomous areas of
Mount Lebanon as well. With the arrival of Western Protestant missionaries into
Mesopotamia, especially since the nineteenth century, several smaller
congregations of Assyrian Protestants arose as well. Over the course of several
centuries, some ChaldoAssyrians came to identify themselves by these varying but
closely related names.
Despite some
differing self-identifications, ChaldoAssyrians still overwhelmingly consider
themselves one people irrespective of whether they refer to themselves as
Assyrians, Chaldeans, or Syriacs. In the 2000 U.S. Census, mainstream
organizations from the different communities including the Assyrian Universal
Alliance (AUA), the Assyrian American National Federation (AANF), the Chaldean
Federation of America (CFA), and the Syriac Universal Alliance (SUA) endorsed
the Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriac category that tabulated all respondents as one
people independent of their preferred term of self-identification. Letters from
the Bishops of the Chaldean, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, and Syriac
Maronite Churches encouraged their parishioners to support the unified category
in order that all segments of the community are tabulated together.
A direct consequence
of ChaldoAssyrian adherence to the Christian faith and their missionary
enterprise has been persecution, massacres, and ethnic cleansing by various
waves of non-Christian neighbors which ultimately led to a decimation of the
ChaldoAssyrian Christian population. Quite tragically, Great Britain invited the
ChaldoAssyrians as an ally in World War One. The autonomous ChaldoAssyrians were
drawn into the conflict following successive massacres against the civilian
population by forces of the Ottoman Empire consisting of Turks and Kurds.
Although many geopolitical and economic factors were involved in provoking the
attacks against the ChaldoAssyrians, a jihad or "holy war" was declared and
served as the rallying cry and vehicle for marauding Turks, Kurds, and Persians.
Although the Muslim holy war against the Armenians is perhaps better known, over
three-fourths, or 750,000 ChaldoAssyrian Christians died by outright murder,
starvation, disease and the all too familiar consequences of genocide between
1914-1923 during the ChaldoAssyrian Holocaust along with a significant number of
Pontic Greeks.
The conflict and
subsequent ChaldoAssyrian Holocaust led to the decimation and dispersal of the
ChaldoAssyrians. Those ChaldoAssyrians who survived the Holocaust were driven
out of their ancestral homeland in Turkish Mesopotamia primarily toward the area
of Mosul Vilayet in Iraq, Jazira in Syria, and the Urmi plains of Iran where
large ChaldoAssyrian populations already lived. The massacres of 1915 followed
the ChaldoAssyrians to these areas as well, prompting an exodus of many more
ChaldoAssyrians to other countries and continents.
The ChaldoAssyrian
Holocaust of 1915 is the turning point in the modern history of the
ChaldoAssyrian Christians precisely because it is the single event that led to
the dispersal of the surviving community into small, weak, and destitute
pockets. Most ChaldoAssyrians in the Diaspora today can trace their emigration
from the Middle East to the ChaldoAssyrian Holocaust of 1915. Many who fled from
their original homes into other Middle Eastern countries subsequently, just one
generation later, once more emigrated to the West. Thus, many ChaldoAssyrian
families in the West today have experienced transfer to a new country for three
successive generations-beginning, for instance, from Turkey to Iraq and then to
the United States.
On account of the
ChaldoAssyrians siding with the victorious Allies during World War One, Great
Britain had promised the ChaldoAssyrians autonomy, independence, and a homeland.
The ChaldoAssyrian question was addressed during postwar deliberations at the
League of Nations. However, with the termination of the British Mandate in Iraq,
the unresolved status of the ChaldoAssyrians was relinquished to the Iraqi
government with certain minority guarantees specifically concerning freedom of
religious, cultural, and linguistic expression.
Many of the
ChaldoAssyrians surviving the Holocaust had been gathered in refugee camps in
Iraq pending final resettlement in an autonomous ChaldoAssyrian homeland. In
1933, however, the Iraqi government declared an ultimatum giving the
ChaldoAssyrians one of two choices: either to be resettled in small populations
dispersed amongst larger Muslim populations that had recently been violently
antagonistic or to leave Iraq entirely. Some ChaldoAssyrians chose to leave to
neighboring Syria and so notified the Iraqi government of their intention. In
response, the Iraqi government dispatched the Iraqi army to attack the
ChaldoAssyrians fleeing into Syria. In their subsequent defeat, the retreating
Iraqi army massacred over 3,000 ChaldoAssyrian civilians in Simele and other
surrounding towns in northern Iraq in August of 1933. Upon his return to
Baghdad, the commanding officer ordering the massacre was hailed as a conquering
hero. Thus, the first official military campaign of the Iraqi army served as the
newly independent government’s final solution to the ChaldoAssyrian question.
The demoralized ChaldoAssyrian refugee population in Iraq was thereby resettled
in dispersed villages while the other surviving isolated communities languished
in the areas of Tur Abdin, Turkey; Jazira, Syria; and Urmi, Iran. The lessons of
World War I remain fresh in the ChaldoAssyrian psyche. On the one hand, deep
apprehension about the peaceful intentions of our neighbors is coupled with
profound suspicion about the reliability and commitment of Western powers.
The Baathist
government of Iraq was not any more sympathetic to ChaldoAssyrians. Under Saddam
Hussein, over 200 ChaldoAssyrian villages were razed in northern Iraq in order
to resettle ChaldoAssyrians into urban areas such as Baghdad in a bid to better
assimilate and "Arabize" the population. ChaldoAssyrians were denied recognition
as an ethnic minority and instead categorized as Christian Arabs. The Iraqi
state routinely interfered in Church matters. Eventually, one Assyrian Patriarch
(of the Assyrian Church of the East) left Iraq under intense pressure and
settled near Chicago, thereby moving the Holy See outside of Mesopotamia for the
first time in nearly 2000 years. Under the Baathist regime, Koranic instruction
was also introduced into school curricula. In 1984, dozens of ChaldoAssyrian
activists were imprisoned and three leaders of the Assyrian Democratic Movement
(ADM) were hanged in an attempt to squelch a burgeoning ChaldoAssyrian
awareness.
Following the first
Gulf War, the ChaldoAssyrian experience in the Kurdish occupied Northern
provinces or UN administered "Safe Haven," was not significantly better. In the
Northern provinces, Kurdish tribal and feudal groups occupied ChaldoAssyrian
areas and expropriated over 50 villages in whole or in part. Overly proactive
ChaldoAssyrian leaders were assassinated as in the example of Francis Shabo, a
ChaldoAssyrian Member of Parliament in the Kurdish Parliament of northern Iraq
from the ADM who had been assigned the task of adjudicating land disputes
between ChaldoAssyrians and Kurds. According to Amnesty International, Mr. Shabo
was killed by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) headed by Mazsoud Barzani.
Similar to their Baathists neighbors, the Kurds denied ChaldoAssyrians their
ethnicity and referred to them as Christian Kurds.
Within the northern
area, however, the ChaldoAssyrians were able to establish political parties,
who, as long as they did not threaten Kurdish occupation of the Northern
provinces, were able to operate schools, and, to a limited extent, administer
some reconstruction and humanitarian aid projects. Also, during that time, the
ADM was able to transform from an underground clandestine political organization
into a legitimate political party free of direct Iraqi government threat
although the threat from the KDP remained. Through the assistance of other
affiliated political organizations in the US known as the Assyrian Coalition, as
well as through the direct lobbying efforts of the Assyrian American League (AAL);
the ADM gained legitimacy in Washington DC as the official representative of the
ChaldoAssyrian people in Iraq. In the lead up to the second Gulf War, the ADM
was included in opposition meetings consisting of the eight major opposition
groups and was included by the US government in the Iraqi Liberation Act. Mr.
Yonadam Kanna, the Secretary General of the ADM, was included as the sole
ChaldoAssyrian member of the 25 member Iraqi Governing Council.
In a historic first,
the ADM along with the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO) on October 22-24,
2003 cosponsored a conference referred to as the Chaldean Syriac Assyrian
General Conference in Baghdad to declare the political aspirations of the
ChaldoAssyrian people of Iraq. Among the diverse list of attendees was Dr. Imad
Chamoun as the representative to Maronite Patriarch Sfeir. The conference
affirmed that the various names of Chaldean, Syriac, and Assyrian refer to one
people. "Due to the pressing need imposed by the critical situation that our
people and cause are going through, the Conference highlights the importance of
concurrence on one unified national appellation." The Conference attendees
"agreed on appellation of ‘ChaldoAssyrian’ to designate our people and the
appellation of ‘Syriac’ to designate our language and culture to be incorporated
into the Constitution."
Furthermore, on a
political level, the Baghdad Conference "stressed the need to designate an
administrative region for our people in the Nineveh Plain with participation of
other ethnic and religious groups, where a special law will be established for
self-administration and the assurance of administrative, political, cultural
rights in towns and villages throughout Iraq where our people reside." Referring
to past policies of resettlement and destruction of villages, the Conference
also stressed the redress of such policies that "altered the demographic
structure of several regions that belonged to our people. 1957 Census and
earlier should be used as benchmarks." The conference also demanded the right of
return for Iraqi ChaldoAssyrians.
From October to
March, ChaldoAssyrians mobilized to meet the challenge of incorporating their
political platform into the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) — the
presumed precursor of the future Iraqi Constitution. The final version of the
TAL left ChaldoAssyrians both hopeful and apprehensive. On the one hand, the TAL
was an historic first in the modern history of Iraq since ChaldoAssyrians were
recognized as an ethnic minority as an integral part of the Iraqi mosaic
including among others Arabs, Kurds, and Turkman. Notably, they were recognized
as one people with the combined name declared by the Baghdad Conference. Also,
in line with the Baghdad platform, the TAL stated in Article 53, paragraph D
"This law shall guarantee the administrative, cultural, and political rights of
the Turcomans, ChaldoAssyrians, and all other citizens." The TAL also
established the legitimacy of the Iraqi Property Claims Commission which may
potentially allow the resettlement of ChaldoAssyrians as well as other displaced
people to their original homes and villages.
The TAL, however,
left some cause for concern as well. First, the reference to ChaldoAssyrian
rights was vague and did not specify a territory — namely, the Nineveh Plain.
Secondly, the TAL acknowledged the KRG’s effective control and occupation of the
three northern provinces of Arbil, Dohuk, and Sulmaniyah including additional
areas in Nineveh, Kirkuk, and Diyala provinces. Dohuk, Nineveh, Kirkuk, and
Arbil provinces include many ChaldoAssyrian towns and villages with Nineveh and
Dohuk including the bulk of the Assyrian heartland. Especially, troubling in the
context of rising Islamic fundamentalism was the TAL’s recognition of Islam as
"the official religion of the State and is to be considered a source of
legislation." Moreover, "No law that contradicts the universally agreed tenets
of Islam, the principles of democracy, or the rights cited in Chapter two of the
Law may be enacted during the transitional period. This law respects the Islamic
identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious
rights of all individuals to freedom of religious belief and practice."
With the handover of
sovereignty in June, the US sponsored UN resolution 1546 recognizing the
legitimacy of the interim Iraqi government did not include the TAL. However, it
is believed that much of the TAL will remain an important starting point for the
upcoming constitution following general elections.
In summary,
ChaldoAssyrians would like to see a democratic and secular Iraq with proper
recognition of Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs as a unified indigenous people of
Iraq. ChaldoAssyrians aspire to have the same political rights as other
constituent groups at a minimum, such that autonomy granted to some groups
should be afforded ChaldoAssyrians within the Nineveh Plain as well. There must
be a proper accounting of ChaldoAssyrians both within and without Iraq coupled
with a genuine right of return. There must be equitable allocation of the
nation’s resources and reconstruction aid to allow necessary infrastructure aid
to allow infrastructure development and rehabilitation of destroyed villages.
Moving forward, the
remaining challenges include formulating an Iraqi constitution that preserves
the gains of the TAL — namely recognition of ChaldoAssyrians as a people —
while specifying the rights and geography of the ChaldoAssyrian
self-administered area. Serious problems that remain include rising Islamic
fundamentalism, growing Kurdish hegemony, concern over increasing emigration,
fair and equitable appropriation of reconstruction and development aid to
ChaldoAssyrian areas, internal sectarian and name-based tensions, and,
American/Western resistance to helping ChaldoAssyrian Christians out of concern
over an Islamist backlash.
Now, why is the
ChaldoAssyrian cause important to Lebanese Christians in general and Maronites
in particular? Change is coming to the entire Middle East and the first stage of
that change has begun in Iraq. Successes and failures of minorities i.e.
ChaldoAssyrians in Iraq will have profound reverberations throughout our
communities in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon and Syria. The federal
model of democracy with emphasis on a self-administered area is the only model
that can help ensure the cultural survival of the various communities of
Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs in the Middle East. In Iraq, the emphasis on the
Nineveh Plains where our villages and towns still remain must be internationally
sanctioned by law in order to allow the language, religion, culture, and
geography to survive intact.
Maronites and
Lebanese Christians as a whole face similar challenges that ChaldoAssyrians are
now experiencing. We all are concerned with Islamic fundamentalism, demographic
and political hegemony (albeit from different groups), the need for fair and
equitable economic development and reconstruction, internal sectarian tensions
(even within Christians groups), and a growing realization that the "Christian"
West has been reluctant to advocate on our behalf out of fear of alienating the
regional Muslim majority. Finally, we all face the prospects of increasing
emigration from our homelands and a potentially overwhelming challenge to
register and count all of our people in the diaspora.
We share a common
history, culture, religion, Syriac language, and, at one time, a contiguous
geography. But most importantly, we share an intimately tied future fate. When
we ignore the dire situation of one of our communities in the region, we
diminish from our own interest and magnitude as a people. We must now begin to
present ourselves to the world as a people with a regional, international
problem rather than as isolated groups with internal domestic problems.
Though many of us
believe we are indeed one people, we must not delude ourselves that this has
been universally adopted by all of our people. However, from a simply strategic
and tactical perspective, we cannot allow the beatings and disappearances of
Lebanese students, as one example, to be viewed by the world community as an
internal Lebanese affair anymore than we can allow the loss of another
ChaldoAssyrian village in northern Iraq to be so seen. We need to evolve to a
level of cooperation where any such instance in one area draws criticism from
all of our groups.
A practical approach
to allow us to develop such communication and a common understanding involves
increasing contacts between our leaders and people at such conventions and
meetings as these. Organizing joint conventions and symposia will help to
"connect the dots" of our various scattered and isolated communities and
increase cross pollinization of ideas and strategies. Such approaches will send
the signal to our neighbors as well as the world community that we are linked as
a regional issue, not simply an internal domestic nuisance. Sponsoring research,
position papers, research centers, and think tanks through the collaborative
efforts of our organizations at the academic level will also have a synergistic
effect. Organizing joint delegations of our leaders to our governments and
representatives in the diaspora as well as to international organizations on the
political level will undoubtedly augment our standing.
On behalf of the
Assyrian Academic Society, we look forward to further collaboration with
like-minded organizations from across the spectrum of our people.
References and
Further Reading
Assyrian International News Agency (AINA)
Assyrian Academic Society (AAS)
Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM)
Assyrian Democratic Organization(ADO)
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