Posted by andreas from dtm2-t8-2.mcbone.net (62.104.210.95) on Thursday, December 19, 2002 at 1:46PM :
Wall Street Journal discovering Assyrians?
I've received this article from a still unchecked source.
Furthermore I couldn't check the orginal source so far which is claimed to be:
Wall Street Journal
Dec 19, 2002
page A14
Thus I still cannot vouch for the authenticity of the article.
1) Note the typo "realtionship "in the last telling paragraph:
" For reasons both moral and tactical, the Bush administration and Congress
should continue, and heighten, its concern for the Assyrians in northern
Iraq. America now has a golden opportunity to safeguard the rights of one
of the Near East's most persecuted peoples, and to create a new reality
that could redress various 20th-century injustices that have been
perpetrated against them.
Mr. Lewis, a New York-based political analyst, is working on a history of
the realtionship between Great Power politics and ethnic minorities in the
20th-century Middle East."
2) But if true, then the scenario of the looming instrumentalization of Assyrians - I pointed to earlier - seems already on the way to materialize.
Please, make your own follow up researches.
---------------------------
Iraq's Christians
By JONATHAN ERIC LEWIS
With the aim of attracting support from Muslim states, Saddam Hussein has
sought to portray himself as a defender of Islam against an imperialist
West. To that end, he has abandoned long-standing secularist policies and
stoked anti-Christian sentiment within Iraq-not to mention his support for
Hamas in its war on Israel. As a showdown looms with the U.S., no group
within Iraq has been more negatively affected than the Assyrians, Iraq's
indigenous Christians , who are likely to be pivotal in any long-term U.S.
plan for the region. Indeed they might make the difference between
stability and simmering civil war in northern areas which are too broadly
(and ignorantly) considered exclusively Kurdish.
* * *
The Assyrian Christians , a non-Arab, Semitic people with a 5,000-year
presence in northern Iraq, constitute some 5% to 10% of the Iraqi
population. Despite constant threats from Muslim neighbors, they have kept
their ethnic and linguistic identity alive and maintain a flourishing
diaspora in Australia, Europe and North America. During the British
Mandate that lasted from 1920 to 1932, the British employed the Assyrians
as protectors of the Crown's interests in Iraq, only to abandon them
shamefully when a newly independent Iraq entered the League of Nations in
1932. A year later, using the Assyrians' prior alliance with the British as
a pretext for violence, the new Iraqi government launched an anti-Christian
jihad in which scores of Assyrian civilians were murdered and their
villages set on fire. Arab nationalists have continued to draw upon this
Assyrian-British connection as evidence that Assyrians are agents of the
Christian West.
Saddam's Baath Party, which came to power in 1968 as an Arab nationalist
movement with ideological roots in European fascism, officially denies the
existence of the Assyrians as a separate ethnic group and has implemented
numerous policies in order to both ethnically cleanse the Assyrians from
Iraq and to erase their identity as a distinct people. Iraqi officials,
seeking to physically obliterate Assyrian civilization, have been involved
in the looting and smuggling of priceless Assyrian artifacts. Speaking
Assyrian in public carries great risks. The recent savage murder and
beheading of a nun in Baghdad indicates the lengths to which the regime
will go in order to terrify its Assyrian population.
The regime has likewise manipulated the U.N. sanctions to further their
persecution of Assyrians. In order to participate in the oil-for-food
program, Assyrians (like their neighbors, the Turkmens) must deny their
identity on all government documents and register as either Arabs or Kurds,
the two officially recognized Iraqi ethnic groups. Should they refuse, they
face the prospect of starvation, or banishment to the Kurdish-controlled
region in the northeast, where they face educational discrimination and
general persecution at the hands of predominantly Muslim neighbors who
sometimes derogatorily refer to Assyrians as "Christian Kurds." Indeed,
Assyrians have bitterly accused Kurdish authorities, particularly the
Kurdish Democratic Party, of deliberately working to undermine their rights
in northern Iraq.
Given that the majority of Iraqi-Americans are Assyrians and not Arabs,
Assyrian-American organizations should be given ample voice in shaping
certain aspects of American foreign policy for a post-Saddam Iraq. It is
thus to his credit that President Bush, in his Oct. 7 speech to the U.N.
General Assembly, formally addressed Iraq's repression of its Assyrians.
The Bush administration has taken specific steps to ensure that Assyrian
rights be respected. Partially in response to pressure from Congressman
Henry Hyde's advocacy on behalf of Assyrian-Americans, the State Department
has welcomed Assyrian participation in planning for an Iraq free from
Saddam's grasp. However, despite the fact that several Assyrian
representatives are involved with Foggy Bottom's "Future of Iraq Project,"
the predominantly Muslim Iraqi opposition groups have been generally
reluctant to partner with the Christian Assyrians.
This has not stopped Assyrian-American organizations from launching an
extensive advocacy campaign on behalf of their brethren in Iraq. This has
involved countering Kurdish attempts to declare much of the northern region
their own, including the oil-rich towns of Kirkuk and Mosul, a land-grab
which they have tried to sweeten by offering the Assyrians and Turkmens
representation at a Kurdish parliament-to-be. Understandably, the
Assyrians have rejected the offer. But not many Americans are aware of
these behind-the-scenes tensions.
The recently formed Assyrian-American League, which calls for a secular and
democratic Iraq, has hired former Illinois Congressman Michael Flanagan to
be their lobbyist in Washington. Congressmen and policy planners seriously
interested in the democratization of the region should reach out and work
with this organization, as well as with other credible Assyrian
organizations. At the very least, officials tasked with planning for both
the coming war and its aftermath should seek out Assyrian-Americans'
invaluable knowledge of Iraqi society. Assyrian-Americans have, likewise,
courageously voiced their willingness to work with their Jewish compatriots
to shape a democratic Middle East.
Given that both Saddam and Persian Gulf-based Islamists might incite mass
violence against the Assyrians in the advent of an American-led attack on
Iraq, the U.S. has a particular responsibility to prevent a repetition of
the aforementioned 1933 massacres, in which the British stood idly by as
their former allies were ruthlessly slaughtered. Indeed, the potential for
massive ethnic violence in northern Iraq between Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds,
and Turkmen remains high, particularly if the Baath regime were to fall
quickly. The Bush administration must, therefore, remain cautious in
endorsing an officially recognized Kurdish autonomous region for a federal
Iraqi state without first providing legal safeguards for Assyrians, as well
as for all other ethnic groups in the area.
The dearth of reliable census material and the results of decades of
forcible assimilation in the region combine to make it extremely difficult
to evaluate competing land claims for oil-rich territories in northern
Iraq. Nevertheless, under the auspices of the 1932 Declaration of the
Kingdom of Iraq, Assyrians arguably have viable land claims in the oil-rich
Mosul Vilayet, a former Ottoman territory that the Council of the League of
Nations annexed to Iraq in 1925. Given the fact that Assyrians in northern
Iraq have been constant victims of ethnic cleansing, the international
community should take their legal claims for land rights and due
compensation as seriously as the competing Kurdish and Turkmen claims on
Kirkuk, another oil-rich city whose dominion is hotly contested, and which
could be witness to ethnic strife in the months and years ahead.
* * *
For reasons both moral and tactical, the Bush administration and Congress
should continue, and heighten, its concern for the Assyrians in northern
Iraq. America now has a golden opportunity to safeguard the rights of one
of the Near East's most persecuted peoples, and to create a new reality
that could redress various 20th-century injustices that have been
perpetrated against them.
Mr. Lewis, a New York-based political analyst, is working on a history of
the realtionship between Great Power politics and ethnic minorities in the
20th-century Middle East.
-- andreas
-- signature .