Missions, Minorities, and the Motherland: Xenophobic Narratives of an Ottoman Christian “Stab in the Back”

This roundtable focuses on the marginalization of ethnicities or religious denominations within Middle East studies, and in the larger realm of history writing. Without a nation–state of their own to preserve their language and history, the Assyrian people and the Church of the East denomination of Christianity fell subject to repression in Turkey, only recently finding a voice. Marginalization in history books and educational curricula is one symptom of broken treaty commitments and lack of equal access to state institutions and funds. In our century, marginalization has given way to something perhaps even worse: vilification and expulsion even from countries outside of Turkey where the Assyrians reside, during a neo-Ottoman period in which parts of Iraq and Syria came to more closely resemble Turkey, a resemblance that included the presence of Turkish arms.

The Marginalization of Assyrians within Middle East Studies

Within Middle East studies, and even in history generally, the modern Assyrians have been disproportionately ignored as a putative national group, and as a community with ancestral roots in the Mesopotamian basin (the Fertile Crescent, or historic Assyria and the headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, southeast to the Persian Gulf and southwest to historic Phoenicia). Frequently the region is subsumed within larger blocs: the Arab world, Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire or the Roman-Persian border, Kurdistan, or Armenia.

The reigning hierarchies of importance within the field appear to consist of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Arab nationalism generally, the modern Iranian and Turkish states and their discourses, imperial history and wars, and to a lesser extent Kurdish, Armenian, and Maronite history. Even in books dealing with historic Assyria and northeastern Persia, Assyrians often go unmentioned, or nearly so. When they do merit attention, Assyrians appear as a fleeting curiosity, an amorphous pressure group disrupting the salutary evolution toward Arab, Turkish, and Kurdish nations.¹ The formal study of the Assyrian plight within the Ottoman Christian genocide lags behind Armenian genocide scholarship by decades.² Gabriele Yonan observed in 1989 that the Assyrian genocide had been forgotten, even though it had claimed more than 250,000 lives and emptied the Assyrian villages of Hakkari and the Urmia region, among other places.³ Special editions of this journal on World War I and contemporary forced displacement, respectively, made little mention of the Assyrians or Yezidis even when it was clearly relevant.⁴

From Marginalization to Xenophobic Threat Discourse

Although marginalization may be a human rights violation and a characteristic of historical amnesia, some sources of law conceive of xenophobia as even more dangerous. According to international law, xenophobia may violate human rights by intimidating persons of specific nationalities, religions, or ethnicities, keeping them from exercising their fundamental rights, and by contributing to climates of persecution and plunder of private and cultural property, as suffered by European Jews, Slavs, Africans, and Roma/Sinti people around 1930 to 1950. Members of the European Union purportedly undertook an obligation in November 2008 to prohibit “publicly inciting” hatred or violence based on “national or ethnic origin,” descent, race, religion, or color, albeit in legislation that conforms to existing principles of the freedom of expression.⁵ The directive also calls for criminalizing the intentional condoning or trivialization of crimes against humanity that could incite hatred or violence against such groups.⁶

Turkey has taken an active part in the debate around xenophobia. In February 2008, leaders within the Council of Europe engaged in a remarkable debate in the press. Appearing before an enthusiastic crowd in Cologne, Germany, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned “assimilation” into another culture as a “crime against humanity,” a crime committed when a minority's ancestral language is “neglected.”⁷ He had previously condemned both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as crimes against humanity, defining them as a display of disrespect for “religious convictions.”⁸

Assimilation and ethnocide are commonplace within Turkey and Turkish-occupied territories, despite Prime Minister Erdogan declaring them to be crimes against humanity.⁹ As I explain below, after an initial phase in which the significance of non-Turkish cultures in Anatolia and Mesopotamia was denied, legal means of repressing these cultures were developed, and a variety of tactics led to the Assyrians in particular being driven out of large swaths of the Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Finally, attempts to remember the fate of the Armenians and Assyrians were branded as terrorist propaganda. Ironically, this occurred during a major terrorist assault by the Islamic State group and its allies on the remaining compact Assyrian communities in the former Ottoman Empire, leaving in its wake the ruins of renewed genocide.

How Pro-Ottoman and Neo-Ottoman Xenophobia Works

The early Turkish republic possessed ideological institutions that attempted to justify the eradication of the Christian minorities of Anatolia, which nearly occurred in Mosul province as well. A disrespectful attitude toward the Christian Other emerged, and apparently inspired the content of Turkish Ministry of Education textbooks as well as Ministry of Foreign Affairs propaganda. Under this “Sun Language Theory,” Semitic languages such as Old Assyrian and neo-Aramaic (modern Assyrian) did not exist independently, but arose as dialects of ancient Turkish, the native language of Asia Minor. Presumably Sumerians, Ghaznavids, and the Huns were simply dynastic names the Turkish state adopted at various times, whereas Assyrians, Babylonians, Pontians, Thracians, Athenians, Romans, and Persians had little to contribute.¹⁰

Theory became practice as the Turkish government wrote Assyrian names out of birth certificates, identity documents, maps, politics, and schools and other buildings.¹¹ Article 81 of the Turkish Law on Political Parties (1983, amended 1999) repressed the very idea that there were linguistic or national minorities within Turkey as well as efforts to “promot[e] or disseminat[e] languages or cultures other than Turkish.”¹² The very constitution restricts non-Turkish languages, some of which are disappearing.¹³

In our time, the perpetrators of massacres directed against the Ottoman Christians—and even against related groups such as the Ottoman Yezidis—are often portrayed in official Turkish documents as innocent victims of Anglo-Russian, and later Anglo-American, hegemony and irrational violence.¹⁴ The Anglican mission to the Assyrians, the Russian missions, and the French and German missions are blamed for stirring up trouble. This disparaging portrayal of the Ottoman Christian resembles the Nazi Dolchstoßlegende or “stab in the back legend” that was so prominent in Munich and Berlin in the lead-up to the Shoah and the extermination war against the Poles, Roma/Sinti, Russians, and Serbs (all together, the Holocaust).¹⁵ That this was a canard in the Ottoman Armenian case is demonstrated by many German and Austro-Hungarian observers’ accounts.¹⁶ Still, a Turkish secondary school textbook that is in use refers literally to such a stab in the back.¹⁷ The backstabbing was considered all the more egregious because, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed on its website for many years, the Ottomans had never engaged in the sort of religious persecution that typified the Christian empires.¹⁸

The Ottoman aggressors in World War I, like the German militarists in that same conflict, are absolved of unprovoked attacks and massacres. Instead, Western missions are blamed for inventing “nationalism,” which is castigated in indigenous Christians while being lionized among Turkish fascist leaders. The Christian nationalists and their Western allies prompted an ordinary war against internal rebels, carried out simultaneously with a war against Russia, the British, and their allies. The nationalism of the Armenians (and presumably the other Christians, who are little mentioned in this regard), was basically invented by the British, the Armenians having no inherent “national feeling.”¹⁹

Certainly there were rebels against the Ottoman regime, some of the most successful in World War I being the governor of Mecca and his Levantine allies. The Arab and Armenian rebels, of course, were not the predominant target of the Ottoman and allied tribal attacks known as the Armenian genocide or more recently as the Ottoman Christian genocide, because Assyrian and Greek civilians were not Armenian but suffered from the same genocidal acts. As the allies of the Ottomans recognized, almost the entire Christian population fell victim to persecution, including the unarmed, children, the elderly, and female abductees.

Thus, the modern position of the Republic of Turkey (not to be confused with that of the late Ottoman regime, which admitted the truth) is that the British had invented the Armenian and other nations that sought in 1919 to claim their rightful places among the new Arab kingdoms, the components of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, etc., only to be rejected. These sects, or millets, which tried to steal the Turkish motherland, were mere tools of the great powers, rather than local victims of Ottoman officials.²⁰

So the Ministry of Foreign Affairs argued that there was no “systematic massacre” of Armenians (or of other groups, presumably) because although some Armenians died while being relocated, three to four million other Ottoman subjects died of “the same anarchic conditions.”²¹ Moreover, the ministry's website has long featured claims that Armenians killed most of the Muslims of Van and perhaps Erzurum as well.²² Although there may be documentary support for some of these claims, they are rather like emphasizing Jewish partisan activity or German victims of Jewish communists in the Soviet Union without mentioning the documentary and other evidence of a much larger proportion of Jews than Germans being intentionally killed in the 1940s. What is left out of such official Turkish or unofficial pro-Ottoman commentary is evidence—among other things, the following.

1. 1) Assyrians complained officially to the Paris Peace Conference of losing hundreds of thousands of their people to massacres, variously estimated as one-third to two-thirds of their total numbers; the Ottoman and the Kurdish delegations had the opportunity to make similar claims regarding Muslim dead in eastern Anatolia, but they did not do so.²³

2. 2) After World War I, there were still 870,000 inhabitants of eastern Anatolia, 540,000 or 60 percent of whom were Kurdish, a figure that grew markedly to 765,000 Kurdish speakers in the 1930s. But there were definitely fewer than 50,000 Assyrians in Turkey or Iran in 1920, and the number of Assyrian and other non-Greek Christians in Turkey declined by another 40 percent through 1935.²⁴

3. 3) The German and Austro-Hungarian allies of the Ottomans wrote, in documents in all likelihood not intended to be made public, that the whole Christian population of the empire was targeted for killings, and not merely the rebels, so that Assyrians (Syrer) and Chaldeans (chäldische Christer) were slain in Van, Mardin, Diyarbekir, Harput, Seert, Jezirah (Djeziret) ibn Omar, Fayshkhabour (Feischkhabour or Pesh-Khabur), Tur Abdin (Djebel et Tor), etc.²⁵

4. 4) A three to four million population deficit after the 1910s and 1920s may have been made up mostly of Christians, as Ambassador Henry Morgenthau observed, and many of the rest of were victims of what Mustafa Kemal deemed overreaching by the empire for which he fought, after it attacked Russia and tried to occupy parts of Persia, Europe, and Africa.²⁶

The Neo-Ottoman Revival and the Dwindling Prospects for Christians in West Asia

In a turn of events that has largely evaded the attention of many historians and area studies scholars, the Christians of the Fertile Crescent have been driven from their homes in the past three decades of conflict between the states of the region and the state-sponsored terrorist organizations and rebel groups active there. Still, there has been little academic study of the loss of numerous Assyrian towns and villages to terrorist attacks and bombardment in the war zone between Iraq and Syria and Turkish-backed rebel groups, and between Turkey and the Syria- and Kurdistan-backed rebel groups.²⁷ Many statements from leaders and even scholars indicate that this is not a major concern to the established order. One example was President Erdoğan's famous reference to the Christians of his country as terrorists and “leftovers of the sword,” which is a bit like calling contemporary German Jews or Slavs “leftovers of the camps” or “Bolshevik terrorists” or something equally derogatory.²⁸ The Ministry of Foreign Affairs implied that the recognition of the genocide of 1914–25 (a period extending to the renewed ethnic cleansing of the Hakkari Assyrians in 1924–25) would inevitably be followed by tearing away provinces from Turkey to give small Christian peoples a homeland, as the various Arab peoples received between 1919–77.²⁹

Turkey recognized the Free Syrian Army (FSA)–linked Syrian National Council as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people, and acknowledged that the FSA was created with the aid of Turkish intelligence.³⁰ The result was disastrous, first in Homs, Raqqa, and other rebel-held areas, then through a wide zone of Syria and Iraq that became dominated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and allied groups.³¹ By 2015, former Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki stated that Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan, the Saudi royal family, and other politicians had intentionally brought about the “disintegration” of Iraq.³² Syria also had been forcibly partitioned.

Mass refugee flight, revocation of land titles and passports, restrictive educational and religious policy, and violence contributed to Iraq, Syria, and Turkey losing most of their remaining Assyrian populations.³³ The persecution and displacement were such that a few states deigned to recognize the 2014–16 genocide against the Yezidis, Assyrians, Armenians, and even the Shabaks and Shiʿa in Iraq and Syria.

The Assyrian Question virtually disappeared from history. As the Assyrians were without a state, encyclopedias often noted that Assyrian history came to an end more than seven hundred years before the Common Era.³⁴ Assyrian claims were rejected out of hand at Paris and Lausanne.³⁵ The Assyrian army having disbanded or joined that of Iraq, it is difficult to see how Europeans could have behaved otherwise, their attitude being captured by Winston Churchill in 1941: “Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those that surrender tamely are finished.”³⁶

The marginalization of the modern Assyrians in history and area studies was inevitable given the absence of an Assyrian state, academy of sciences, or ministry of education. Meanwhile, it is unsurprising that Ottoman and neo-Ottoman rhetoric should creep into academic studies of the community (and of the nearby Yezidi and ʿAlawi communities). In Middle East studies, as in other fields, doing justice to Assyrian legal, political, and cultural history requires excavating forgotten testimonies, interrogating state-backed narratives, and building bridges across national borders.