Assyrians and Syriacs in Turkey

Ottoman Assyrians/Syriacs

The Ottoman Empire, before it began to decay, had an elaborate system of administering the non-Muslim "People of the Book." That is, they made allowances for accepted monotheists with a scriptural tradition and distinguished them from people they defined as pagans. (Buddhists and Hindus as well as some African groups were the ones with which they came in contact.) As People of the Book (or "dhimmi"), Jews, Christians and Mandaeans (in some cases Zoroastrians) received second-class treatment but were tolerated.

In the Ottoman Empire, this religious status became systematized as the "millet" administrative pattern. Each religious minority answered to the government through its chief religious representative. This is a system that the Ottomans adopted from previous Muslim empires who in turn had gotten it from the Sassanian Iranians. That is how the Hebrew term "Resh Galuta" (the head of Diaspora) comes to being.

The Christians that the Ottomans conquered gradually but definitively with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 were already divided into many denominations, usually organized into a hierarchy of bishops headed by a patriarch.

The Assyrians/Syriacs under the Ottomans started out under the Armenian patriarchate but petitioned the Sublime Porte for separate status, mainly as western contacts allowed them a voice of their own. Thus the Assyrian Apostolic Church of Antioch and all the East (Jacobite, later changed to Syrian) received recognition as a separate community "millet" as did the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syrian Catholic and the Church of th the East. The last was the most remote of the Churches in distance from the Porte (in Istanbul).

The interest of Tsarist Russia and the western powers in the fate of the Christians of the Middle East, especially in the Maronites of Lebanon, gradually brought an elevation in culture during the 19th century, while at the same time causing schisms in denominational affiliation. The economic, educational and professional advancement of the Assyrians aroused the envy of their Muslim neighbors, especially the Kurds. Although not fanatically inclined as some Muslims, the Kurds have used their Islamic status to justify the attack on Assyrians in Tur Abdin, in Iran, in Iraq and in Turkey.

The Assyrians who had converted to Protestantism did not want to pay an annual tribute to the older churches through local bishops who then passed some of it up to the Patriarch who then passed some of it to the Porte in the form of taxes. They wanted to deal directly with the Porte, across ethnic lines (even if through a Muslim administrator), in order to have their own voice and not be subjected to the rule of the Patriarchal system. This general Protestant charter was granted in 1850. [ John Joseph, Muslim-Christian relations and inter-Christian rivalries in the Middle East: the case of the Jacobites in an age of transition, State Univ of New York Press, 1983, ISBN 0-87395-600-1] )

At the turn of the 20th century, the Assyrians living in Ottoman territory (all of them except those in Persia and those who had left for the Tsarist Caucasus and Transcaucasus) behaved like separate and competing communities organized along religious lines. The beginnings of national secular identity were beginning to emerge among such intellectual leaders as Dr. Freydun Bit Abram (Atturaya)(Tbilissi), Prof. Ashour Yosep (Harput), Malfono Naum Faiq (Diyarbakır), and John Mooshi (Urmia).

When World War I decimated the Assyrians in both the Ottoman Empire and Iran, the friction among churches was not as strong as the friction between the secular leaders and the patriarchal leadership. [ Eden Naby, "The Assyrians of Iran: Reunification of a ‘Millat,’ 1906-1914", International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 8. (1977), p. 237-249]

Late Ottoman massacres and other issues

Turkish nationalists in the Young Turk (or C.U.P.) movement, in control of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, began their systematic elimination of Christian minorities, beginning with the deportation of Greeks from eastern Thrace in January 1914. As early as December 1914, the Assyrians and Syriacs were also being forced from their homes. In northwestern Iran, Kurdish tribes descended on Assyrian and Syriac villages on the Urmia and Salmas plains when Istanbul entered the war in July 1914. The pillaging, looting, killings and abductions began the series of attacks and counterattacks that culminated in the final Ottoman military subjugation of northwest Iran in 1918. [Rev. Joel Werda, The Flickering Light of Asia or the Assyrian Nation and Church, 1924]

In 1915 Assyrians and Syriacs, like Armenians and Greeks, were massacred by the Turks in the cities and villages of the Ottoman Empire; mainly the Hakkâri region in southeastern Anatolia and the Urmia region in northwestern Iran. To justify its massacres, Turkey wrongly accused the Assyrian Christians of having thrown themselves under the protection of the British, who had forces in the field in Iraq and Syria. Such propaganda, publicized in Istanbul newspapers as confirmation of Christian treachery, contributed to the butchery. Thousands fled into exile. By the middle of 1915 the deportations and killings were in full swing. About 500,000 to 750,000 Assyrians, or about three-fourths of the entire Assyrian population, were killed during the "Year of the Sword" ("Shato d'sayfo"), bitterly recalled by minorities today.At the turn of the century and at the post-WWI international conferences where the future map of Western Asia ("Near East") was redrawn among European powers while various "national committees" lobbyed each in favour of one's own "homeland", several Assyro-Chaldean committees were formed to foster the idea of a "Mesopotamian" state, later named "Beth Nahrain", whose claimed territory was included in the revendications of several other similar committees: Arab, Armenian, Kurdish.

Assyrians and Syriacs in Turkey

The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, a sequel of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's military and political victories in Anatolia and Rumelia, durably buried all the hopes of the various Ottoman minorities, abandoning all the projects of Armenian, Syriac, Kurdish or Assyro-Chaldean homelands while in the same time it consecrated the creation of a Turkish homeland, ethnically cleansed of most of its non-Muslim minorities and trying to impose a single Turkish-Muslim identity on the non-Turkish Muslim minorities, such as the Kurds and the Lazs.

References