Before World War I, about 500,000 Assyrian Christians lived in what is now southeast Turkey, northwest Iran, and northern Iraq, and Syria. By 1918, half were dead, massacred by Ottoman forces; Kurdish militias; and an assortment of “pardoned criminals, local jihadists, and specially formed death squads” (3), who interpreted wartime orders to scatter Christians as carte blanche for assault. Afterwards, Assyrian survivors called the war years, and especially 1915, the “Sayfo.” Meaning “sword,” Sayfo offers a metonym for the horrors of this era.
Let Them Not Return is a powerful collection of essays about this tragic and poorly understood part of Assyrian history. Its title recalls a telegram that the Ottoman Interior Minister, Talaat Pasha, sent to governors in Mosul and Van provinces in June, 1915. “We should not let them return to their homelands” (1), he directed, in what many authorities interpreted as a call to eliminate Anatolian Christians. At the time, Russian and British forces were pressing into Ottoman terrain; American missionaries in the region were active (though the United States had not yet joined the war); and the regime's supporters were gripped by a fear that was “nothing short of apocalyptic” (33).
Armenians far outnumbered Assyrians in Anatolia before World War I, and about one million Armenians died in the onslaughts. Uğur Ümit Üngör therefore poses the title of his chapter as a question: “How Armenian Was the 1915 Genocide?” He answers that while Ottoman elites harbored special contempt for Armenians because of their foreign lobbying and political demands, the Ottoman elite's wartime anxieties “amplified the anti-Armenian persecution into a more general anti-Christian persecution” that engulfed Assyrians, too (35). The governor of Diyarbekir, a pathological hater of Christians named Mehmed Rashid, stoked the violence. In his province in 1915, for example, in the village of Tell Ermen, local militiamen pursued Christians into their church and there decapitated some with swords, dismembered others with axes, and raped and killed dozens of women (see 39).
David Gaunt explains why the violence happened at this juncture. “For perhaps the first time ever in Anatolia[,]” the Ottoman state was able to “mobilize provincial elites” to achieve what it wanted (57): getting Christians out of the way. In return, local Muslim notables were able to grab the Christians’ wealth and property while demoting them from positions of influence.
Many Ottoman officials saw local Christians as potential traitors in wartime who could rally international Christian support to settle scores and gain advantages. Assyrians (like Armenians) certainly had scores aplenty to settle. Since the 1840s, they had been “victims of increasing violence and dispossession” (2)—attacks, rapes, and abductions—which Ottoman authorities had done nothing to stop.
Paranoia about Christians notwithstanding, the Ottomans were firm allies of Germany, a country well-stocked with Christians. German leaders gave little trouble when German diplomats and military men reported atrocities as they unfolded. After the war, the British government, too, showed little interest in the “Assyro-Chaldean” cause, and adopted what Naures Atto and Soner Barthoma call “a fawning attitude” towards Turkey (121). International Christian solidarity meant little for the Assyrians.
The Assyrians themselves also lacked Christian solidarity. They belonged to several churches: the Syrian Orthodox Church, Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic Church, Syriac Catholic Church, and various “Protestant offshoots” (ix). “All of these sects were small, and their leaders bitterly reviled their opponents as dangerous heretics … ” Assyrians were also geographically scattered and prone to “inter-ethnic clan conflicts” (4). We can see this disunity chapter by chapter: the authors use different words—Nestorians, Chaldeans, and more—to describe their subjects. As the editors explain, the collective term “Assyrian,” which straddles churches and bears secular overtones, has arisen only recently among Assyrians in Western Europe and North America.
The ethnogenesis of Assyrians in the West has accompanied a growing conviction that the Sayfo amounted to genocide. Writing on the Turkish government's “denialism”—its adherence to denial as an ideological principle and platform—Racho Donef cites an obscure event from Fall 2000 as a watershed for Assyrian consciousness. At a moment when the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C. was discussing whether to recognize an Armenian genocide, pro-government Turkish newspapers descended on a Syrian Orthodox church in Diyarbekir seeking a loyalty soundbite. To the Turkish government's dismay, the priest they questioned, Yusuf Akbulut, remarked in a recorded conversation not only that genocide had occurred, but that Assyrians—not only Armenians—had been victims. News of this episode galvanized Assyrians abroad.
Three factors explain why Assyrian public debates on the Sayfo are only happening so vigorously now. First, Assyrians who survived in Turkey or as displaced people in Muslim-majority states like Iraq and Syria tended to follow a “discourse of obedience” toward host countries (125). Like the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Elias III Shakir, who witnessed the Sayfo as bishop of Diyarbakir, Assyrians kept silent in order to “safeguard the living because the dead are not going to come back” and to “ensure that the swords are at rest” (118). Second, survivors suppressed memories of the Sayfo but often transmitted trauma to their descendants—a phenomenon that psychologists have observed among children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Third, many descendants of Sayfo survivors now live in countries like the United States, where they have freedom to speak.
Contributors to this volume use sources masterfully. One author draws, for example, upon a note that a Syrian Orthodox monk-in-training added, late in 1915, to a Lenten hymnal that he copied. He recorded “with grief and unspeakable suffering” (149) the names of monks who were slaughtered. Another mines memre, works in an ancient genre blending didactic poetry with chronicle and memoir. A third studies a poem about the Sayfo rendered in Classical Syriac and intended for singing as a dirge.
What should be the future of this tragic Assyrian past? In his study of multigenerational trauma in Sweden among resettled grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Sayfo survivors (many of whom came from Iraq after the U.S. invasion of 2003), Önver A. Cetrez suggests “liberation psychology”—an analogue of liberation theology—as a way to heal. The Assyrian community must “liberate itself and, as a result … liberate the oppressor” while overcoming feelings of victimhood. Reconciliation can then occur inwardly among Assyrians and outwardly towards “Turkish, Kurdish, Syrian, and Iraqi societies” (200). Cetrez's hopeful ideas suggest that Assyrians must free themselves for their trauma to pass.
Another critical element for reconciliation must be collective acknowledgement of the calamities that befell diverse Anatolian civilians. Denialism must cease, along with the tendency—found even among some established scholars—to dismiss Anatolian Christian mass deaths as a regrettable side effect of dealing with potential traitors-in-waiting.
A century has passed since World War I ended. Confronting the past is long overdue.
