YEAR OF THE SWORD JOSEPH YACOUB Year of the Sword The Assyrian Christian Genocide, A History Translated by James Ferguson A A Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Copyright © Joseph Yacoub 2016 All rights reserved. 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ISBN: 9780190633462 Printed in India on acid-free paper “I am determined to record the martyrdom of a small people, the most worthy of interest yet at the same time the most abandoned, arising out of a great empire of the world’s most ancient civiliza- tion, whose country, like Armenia, was the stage for Turkish abominations in which men were tragically murdered, women, children and the aged deported into the desert, pillaged, martyred and subjected to the worst atrocities. This people is the Assyro-Chaldean people.” Joseph Naayem, 11 November 1919 “The persecutions and sufferings that the Nestorians undergo from time to time are similar to those that have been endured by the Armenians and the Jews, and their treatment by the hostile nations is identical. Of the troubles of the Armenians and the Jews, however, we hear quite often, while the Nestorians in Persia and Turkey, probably due to their small number and lack of liter- ary representatives, have excited almost no interest.”* Abraham Yohannan, September 1916 To my paternal grandparents, Yacou Auchana and Mariam, from the village of Khosrava in Persia, massacred by the forces of hatred in 1915. To my paternal aunt, Angèle, who shut herself in a tanoura (a clay bread oven) for a week, trying to escape the carnage. When she emerged from her hiding place she discovered, to her stupefaction, that nobody was left alive in the village. Forced into exile, she fol- lowed other fugitives from her community towards Iraq and then Syria, where she was reunited with my father at Hassakeh, in 1933. To my maternal grandparents, Gaurié and Sara, from the village of Pataver, near Khosrava, who in January 1915 took the gruelling road of collective exodus towards the Caucasus, where they found sanctu- ary in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in Georgia, together with other members of the family who had preceded them. To my father Paulus (Bablo), who died in Beirut in July 1974 after a long sojourn in Syria and Lebanon, via Georgia, Argentina and France, always homesick for his native land. Wandering across oceans in search of work, he had not seen the village of his birth since 1911. To my mother, Bosha, who found her last resting place in Lyon in November 1975. Happy with her children and grandchildren in Syria and Lebanon, she always carried within herself the sadness of having been separated from her parents, whom she never saw again after 1922. To the Assyrians-Chaldeans-Syriacs, three parts of the same people, who have been ceaselessly migrating since 1915, the fateful Year of the Sword (farman, seyfo), which saw half of this resilient nation anni- hilated by the murderous madness of Ottoman power, driven by a hideous form of unbridled nationalism and by a tyrannical strain of religious fanaticism. To Claire, my wife, who has been part of this work from its conception to publication. Her presence can be felt within the pages of this book. CONTENTS Preface xi Author’s Note xvii Introduction: A Forgotten Genocide? 1 Nation, people and churches 2 On the eve of the massacre 6 The genocide of 1915 13 Contemporary documentation 16 Ethnocide and extermination 18 Oblivion and its causes 21 An international issue 22 Renewal and memory 28 1. Witnesses to Genocide 33 A terra incognita? 33 Reporting the genocide 37 The range of witnesses 67 The Paris Peace Conference, 1919 86 International solidarity 88 The national and international press: an essential 95 intermediary Humanitarian aid 98 2. The Scenes and Acts of the Tragedy 101 A centuries-old persecution 101 The first centuries 102 Ottoman antecedents to the 1915 massacres 108 ix 1915: historic Mesopotamia 113 Overview of the massacres 120 The invasion of Hakkari by Turco-Kurdish forces 124 The Syriacs 133 Extermination and deportation: the children of the Desert 138 3. Strategy and Methodology of Eradication 145 Genocide and ethnocide 167 Lamenting a tragedy 170 The massacres and the United Nations 172 4. After 1915: The Tragedy Continues 177 1918: from Salmas and Urmia towards Hamadan and Iraq 177 Assyrians at arms 179 The Assyrian Levies 184 The Turkey-Iraq frontier (1925) 186 Fleeing Turkey 194 Conclusion: Returning to the Stage of History 207 The impact of the diaspora 209 Preserving memory 211 Iraq: homeland or safe haven? 214 Notes 219 Bibliography 245 Index 253 PREFACE I am delighted to be able to write this preface for an English-language edition of this book. In 2015, mankind commemorated the centenary of the Armenian and Assyro-Chaldean genocides perpetrated by Ottoman Turkey in 1915. Both of these peoples have known the adversity of fate and the iniquities of history. The echoes of this tragedy still sadly persist. Known under different names—Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Nestorians, Jacobites, Arameans, and sometimes, erroneously, Syrians—called Aïssors or Assoris by the Armenians, Suriyani by the Turks, the Assyro-Chaldeans consider themselves the descendants of the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates whose history reaches back 5,000 years. Living since time immemorial in this scarred land, they have always been known as a nation, a people, and for their Churches. Differences in denomination can be traced back to mainly theological divisions in which several fac- tors were mixed (notably the 431 AD Council of Ephesus and the 451 AD Council of Chalcedon), but these no longer apply, since collaboration and ecumenism based on common principles of faith now prevail. This people of Aramean culture lived on the periphery of both the Persian and the Ottoman Empires, their ancestral territory in the north-west of present-day Iran xi PREFACE and in eastern Anatolia—Hakkari, Bohtan, Tur Abdin, Midyat, Mardin, Diyarbakir, Urfa (Ourhai) and Nusaybin— and in the north of Iraq: Mosul and the Nineveh Governorate. The Anglo-Saxon world knows them best under the name of Assyrians—the term used in this book—because of longstanding historic ties between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Assyrian Church of the East, a link reinforced by their political relations with Britain under the British Mandate in Iraq and before. The British had also established a relationship with the Syriac Orthodox Church from the nineteenth century. British religious, political and diplomatic support was hence important and persists in this people’s memory. As a case in point, the Anglican William A. Wigram (1872–1953), a well-known specialist in the Church of the East, enjoyed considerable esteem, and his work, translated into Arabic, continues to attract interest among Assyro-Chaldean and Syriac intellectual circles, not least his short, evocatively titled Our Smallest Ally: A Brief Account of the Assyrian Nation in the Great War. Elsewhere, the material concerning the Assyrian mas- sacres in the official “Blue Book” published by the British government in 1916, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16, edited by the MP, historian and statesman Viscount James Bryce (1838–1922) with the assistance of the young historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975), remains a seminal work of refer- ence. In his preface to the English translation of Father Joseph Naayem’s book (Shall this Nation Die?) Lord Bryce wrote in July 1920: “It was the sufferings of the Armenians that chiefly drew the attention of Britain and America because they were the most numerous among the ecclesias- tical bodies, and the slaughter was, therefore, on a larger xii PREFACE scale. But the minor communities, such as the Nestorian and Assyro-Chaldean churches, were equally the victims of the plan for exterminating Christianity, root and branch…” The assacresm took place over a large area from January 1915 to July 1918, in eastern Anatolia, northern Persia, the province of Mosul and elsewhere, almost in the same places and in the same way as those inflicted on the Armenians, and according to a similar plan that aimed to homogenize the Ottoman Empire and Turkify the country by eradicat- ing all non-Turkish and non-Muslim groups. The physical genocide and the seizure of land and prop- erty were accompanied by grievous attacks on the Assyro- Chaldean-Syriac cultural patrimony, as is now happening in Iraq and Syria.