THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE ASSYRIAN FACTOR
By Nora Vosbigian
Assyrian International News Agency
Sept 27 2005
British historian, Ara Sarafian (Gomidas Institute, London), was one of
the main speakers at a recent commemoration of the Assyrian Genocide
(or Seyfo) of 1915 (AINA, 9-22-2005). The event was at Aula Magna,
Stockholm University on 24 September and was organised by the Assyrian
Youth Federation in Sweden, who asked Sarafian to give a lecture on
the 1916 British Parliamentary report, The Treatment of Armenian in
the Ottoman Empire 1915-16.
One of the central questions in Sarafian’s paper dealt with the
relative absence of the destruction of Assyrian Christians in the
British report. Was it an oversight or was the report prejudiced?
This question arose in more forceful terms at the conference, when a
member of the audience suggested that there was a 200 page Assyrian
section to the blue book which was stolen by Armenians and was never
published as a consequence.
Sarafian pointed out that the British blue book covered the Assyrian
issue within the context of what happened in North-West Persia, but
it missed the core of the Assyrian experience because there were no
key communicants and witnesses in the key Assyrian populated areas
of Mardin-Midiyat in Ottoman Turkey. Elsewhere, the destruction of
Assyrians was subsumed in descriptions of the destruction of the much
more numerous Armenian communities.
This lack of information about Assyrians was mainly because the
accounts informing the British about events in the Ottoman Empire
were communicated by United States consuls and missionaries. Since
there were no United States consulates near the main Assyrian regions
of the Ottoman Empire, there were no ready channels of open to the
outside world. Furthermore, the few American missionaries in Mardin
and Diyarbekir who might also have reported on the destruction of
Assyrians were expelled from these regions in the Spring of 1915.
Consequently, there was little information available about the
destruction of Assyrian communities to the British in 1916, except
from North-Western Persia, where American missionaries bore witness
to the carnage that took place.
Sarafian related some accounts of the destruction of Assyrians he had
read, such as the memoirs of Raphael de Nogales describing what he
saw in Siirt, or the private letters of Dr. Floyd Smith in Diyarbekir
describing Assyrian victims of a massacre at Karabash he treated in
Diyarbekir in May 1915.
Sarafian pointed out that since 1915 there has been a lot of
information about the Assyrian issue, but mainstream Armenian
historians have generally ignored the destruction of Assyrians due to
poor scholarship, chauvinism, or both. Consequently, many Armenians
today remain ignorant of the destruction of Assyrian Christians in
Ottoman Turkey in 1915. This is clearly wrong and should be changed
with education he argued.
However, it should be added that not all Armenian historians have
avoided the destruction of Assyrian Christians in Ottoman Turkey.
Only three years ago, the French Armenian Revue d’histoire armenienne
contemporaine published a special issue, “Mardin 1915: Anatomie
pathologique d’une destruction” (edited by Yves Ternon).