The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> chaldeans and assyrians

chaldeans and assyrians

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, May 29 2015, 18:10:49 (UTC)
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This summer there will be three fund-raisers just in the Bay Area alone for aid to Christians in Iraq. I've been conflicted about participating from the beginning, over fifteen years ago. Of course one wants to help, but what is the best way, the best help? In the beginning of these atrocities it was said that local Christians wanted to stay in Iraq. I doubted all of them did but, ok, let's send them food and medicine and money. As things got worse it became hard to imagine any parents caught there did not at least want to get their small children out. I suggested setting up means by which we could get children out and into homes in the US and elsewhere. I was told Assyrian families were way too loving to part from their children and besides there were plenty of relatives, in Iraq, who would take in orphans. Yes, but that was not the point. The point was not to shift kids around in Iraq but to get them out...at least save the little ones and maybe families could be reunited later, when America had shed enough blood and drank enough oil.

During the London Blitz English families had sent their children to the countryside and to Canada, to safety. They loved their children too as newsreels at the time show plenty of weeping and anguish as trains full of young children left for the countryside or sailed across the ocean. Wasn't the greater love to secure the safety of those you loved?

But something else was at work in our case, something more sinister. It was and is, I am afraid, this ditzy notion we have that Iraq belongs to us, at least the oil-rich province of Nineveh does....because we are “Assyrians” and that Iraq is really ye olde Assyria. If the last remaining Christians leave, we will have no “presence in our homeland” and thus no “legitimate claim”, and that would be a tragedy, I suppose. At least it was viewed that way by several Aid Societies in the US and elsewhere. The policy was even more draconian...leave Iraq and become a starving refugee elsewhere and you could expect no aid from America or Europe or Australia. Aid was conditional on you remaining in the killing zone....so who, or what, was the aid really for? Was It for those in actual dire straits, physically, or was it for those who's mind's alone were “tortured” at the idea of no Christians left in Iraq?

It's that old conflict between morality/reality and ideology. The humane and wise thing to do is get people to safety. But the idea, the ideology of “Iraq is really Assyria” and therefore ours, led to, in essence, using those people to serve this national ideology, or idiocy. And here is yet another significant difference between us and Chaldeans. Chaldeans have never dreamed of or even thought of “raising Chaldea” again. To Iraqi Chaldeans Iraq was there country and they were loyal to it and comfortable among their non-Christian neighbors. The curse to Iraq was not Chaldeans or those Assyrians actually living within its borders. The mess was made by the Assyrian refugees from Iran and Turkey whom Iraq, as it turns out, unwisely allowed in...or so the record seems to indicate.

Assyrians came running because many of their menfolk had turned against their homelands, in Iran but mostly in Turkey, and fought on the British side....they arrived at refugee camps in Iraq still believing they had been promised a homeland in Iraq, by the Brits. When this did not materialize, they refused to settle and rebuild their lives but agitated for a fulfillment of the promise to the point where they became a real thorn in the side of the new and struggling Iraqi state...so much so that Agha Poutrous was bundled off to France to get him away from the scene. Their agitation and illegal activity brought about Semele and a decision by the Iraqi government that no Assyrians would be allowed into universities and so most of them remained dirt poor and hostile. This core of disaffected Assyrian refugees never felt at home or loyal to Iraq...having not lived among “Arabs” they kept to themselves and did not mingle with the greater community. They remained poor and illiterate and unsophisticated in the ways of their new world for the most part while the Chaldeans, who were always at home in Iraq and had no qualms about dealing with Muslims continued to prosper and learn how to succeed.

To put it simply Chaldeans were well practiced in dealing with the reality of their world while the core Assyrian refugees cherished only their dreams of a new Assyria. They concluded that life on earth, on this Iraqi earth, was worthless and only the dreamed of heaven of Nineveh had any meaning.

Chaldeans brought their successes, their ability to see clearly what was important and was not, their skills in business and politics, to the United States with them and their communities flourished, because they had a solid background, not as whining refugees demanding “their rights” but as people who understood how to succeed in getting them for themselves.

When the war on Iraq began Chaldeans did not hesitate...they set up routes by which Chaldeans could get out and make it to safety...and their community helped refugees, not by feeding them, but by providing a fund out of which loans were made to set new arrivals up in business...a revolving fund which has truly helped many many refugees. To Chaldeans there was no question of ideology but of saving lives. Iraq had become a death trap, it was obvious it would only get worse, and so they didn't wait, they didn't see any purpose to be served, in human terms, in keeping a “presence in Iraq”...especially as that presence more and more became in a cemetery.

I try not to think too much of the bright, eager and beautiful faces of Christian children in Iraq...of how we could have gotten many of them out instead of sending them books printed in Aramaic....instead of encouraging, if not downright forcing, their parents to remain where life was impossible and growing worse. And it is not true that we had “hopes” that Iraq would stabilize, or at least we had no reason to think that...Chaldeans are no dumber than Assyrians and yet they saw clearly that this was a time to save lives by getting people out, not by providing just enough so they stay, to be done in later...to Chaldeans it wasn't worth the risk, lives were more important than ideology.

How, I wonder, would those of us safely in the West feel about our brethren insisting that we remain in a war torn Iraq? How would we have felt if told by relief agencies in the West that our children had to stay with us, even though there was murder all around, and that help would only come to those who remained, children included? Certainly we were glad our families got us out in time...and none of us would want our children to be left behind to “keep a presence” in Iraq for all those safely out of it.

This nationalist business has been a disaster for our community...it has only brought grief and misery, as many wiser people knew it would...as it has to so many equally starry-eyed dupes of Western manipulation.

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