Assyrian genocide

“The ethnic and religious balance that could have contributed to the well being of all the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamia was terminated because their Islamic neighbours lost the will to co-exist with the Christian Assyrians. This development claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and ultimately contributed to driving the remaining Assyrians from the land of their ancestors.”

“While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the extermination of innocent civilians in Turkey (the Armenians, but also Syrian and Assyrian Christians and large portions of the Greek population, especially the Greeks of Pontos, or Black Sea region) was reaching 1 million.”

“[T]he East Syrians [Assyrians] were twice the victims of a general genocide - first in the late fourteenth century by Tamerlane, and then in 1915/1918 by the Turks and Kurds.”

“A very rough estimate of the total of Ottoman Assyrian dead as a result of massacre before and after April–May 1915, and of wartime starvation and the conditions of flight, might be in the region of 20,000–30,000, to which should be added perhaps 7,000 Persian Assyrians.”

“The full-scale Ottoman invasion of Persian Azerbeijan at the beginning of 1915 was accompanied by killings of both Armenians and Assyrians....”

“Continuing working on a book on Danish-Armenian relations of course during the Armenian Genocide, but also before and after that spanning from 1900 to 1940, and as I work in genocide I’m thinking of writing about other aspects of Young Turk policies like the destruction of the Ottoman Greeks and the Assyrians.”

“Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole”

“… Haydar Bey, the Governor of Mosul, came with Turkish units and cannons.... The Turks occupied our villages and burned them down. Now Assyrians live on the mountain peaks.... They are dying from hunger, because they have no food. We have no bullets, we are surrounded by the Turks, and we have no solution.”

“WHEREAS the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides;”

“The Assyrian population throughout the empire was subjected to massacre, deportation, dismemberment, torture, and other atrocities. Whole cities were depopulated, and, when not killed outright, the inhabitants were send on the aforementioned death marches.”

“Historians, perhaps concerned not to magnify these events by comparison with those of 1915-16, tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them. In my formulation, however, these events would”

“Unlike the Armenian case, in each of these other instances the scope, scale and intensity of the killings was limited, though this does not rule out comparison...The persistence of genocide or near-genocidal incidents from the 1890s through the 1990s, committed by Ottoman and successor Turkish and Iraqi states against Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek communities in Eastern Anatolia, is striking....”

“I myself stayed for six months in Seert serving the governor, whose predecessor had ordered the massacre. The Turks of the town attested to their joy that all the Christians in Seert had been annihilated and expelled.”

“A large part of the deportees were killed in the villages, which were Shukri’s property, and the rest near the town bridge. The murderers took the victims’ belongings. Suchproceedings occurred several times, together with deportation marches from Diyarbakir.Many Chaldeans from our parish were among the victims. Meanwhile, the central government in Constantinople issued an amnesty for the Syrians and the Chaldeans. Only a small portion of them were still alive to benefit from it.”

“The massacre of all the Diyarbakir Christians lasted four months.”

“Finally, I should briefly mention the Young Turk slaughter of Armenians, Nestorians, and other Christians during their futile invasion of Caucasia and Northern Persia.... [T]hroughout the [Urmia] region they also exterminated most of the Nestorians, perhaps 47,000 of them.”

“To this day, Turkey rejects the charge of intentional destruction of the Armenians, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge a historical truth that may ultimately cost it membership in the European UnionFN11.”

“The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious. Historians who realize that the”

“The Young Turks’ overall aim was a demographic reorganization of the Ottoman Empire. All deportations were planned and supervised by the “Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants” that belonged to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior. A relatively small number of government administrators were thus chiefly involved in the coordination of the murder and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other minority groups.29”

“The Chaldean diocese of Jazire, including its archbishops, priests and residents, has been completely exterminated. Only two priests, one from Peshkhabur [Fayshkhabour] and one from Guerke, managed to escape with 400 or 500 people and were the last to arrive in Mosul. His Holiness, the patriarch, has taken them under patriarchal protection.”

“The Ottoman and Kemalist Nationalist massacres of the Anatolian Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Yezidis, as well as of the Mesopotamian Assyrians and Yezidis, constituted genocide under the initial definition and international criminal application of the term.”

“Hilmar Kaiser deepened this notion and demonstrated in pioneering research that thetreatment of the Armenians and Syriacs [Assyrians], nothing short of genocidal destruction, and the deportation of Kurds and Greeks were integral parts of the CUP scheme of social engineering.”

“Do not worry over my death--it is God's will--I am going to protect the rights of the Assyrians at the hands of the biggest and greatest Judge. The books and the work I had started about our nation's education remain unfinished. I am afraid they will be destroyed in the very short time....”

“The Genocide Convention of 1948 and other United Nations Conventions strengthen the claims of genocide victims, including the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians of Asia Minor.”