Armenians are escorted to prison by Ottoman soldiers in April 1915 (AP Photo, File)
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by Gerard Russell ,Thursday, 15 Sep 2016
Christian
militias are merely defending villages from an enemy that will show no mercy.
But in doing so they must make dangerous choices
We
are accustomed to seeing Christians in the Middle East as always being victims
of discrimination and violence. And so they are, and have been for centuries,
suffering from laws (even now) which reject their claims to equal citizenship,
and from sporadic but frequent and terrifying instances of persecution or mob
violence.
In
recent years sectarian violence has approached such a crescendo that the very
existence of Christianity in the region of its birth has been put in doubt.
Why
don’t Christians then take up arms, as some other persecuted groups have done?
The Druze of Lebanon, who offend Islamic orthodoxy by their belief in
reincarnation and liberal reinterpretation of the Koran, are famously ruthless
fighters. The Alawites of Syria proved such effective soldiers that they took
over first the country’s military and then its government.
Leaving
aside questions of principle – the region already has more than enough armed
men – the pragmatic answer is that it usually wouldn’t work. Christians are too
divided to form any kind of unified political party, let alone a military unit.
There are more than 20 different Christian denominations in the region and not
since the advent of Islam have they ever come together to act as one.
Furthermore,
most Christians are urban and many are middle class without military experience
and with the option of emigration to the West.
Finally,
the precedents are so ominous that they would hardly expect anything good to
come from putting their heads above the parapet in such an obvious way.
Chief
among those precedents is that of the Armenian and Assyrian Christians in the
early 20th century. Both groups, living under Ottoman rule but accused of
covert collaboration with the Ottomans’ Russian enemies, were subjected as a
consequence to a genocidal campaign of massacre, rape and deportation. In the beautiful
town of Mardin, southern Turkey, some years ago I took care to read the
inscriptions on the lintels of the local restaurants and hotels; they showed
that these had once been the homes of Assyrian Christians. None lives there
now.
The
Assyrians were a tight-knit group, bound together by ethnic as well as
religious ties. Survivors who fled to Iraq, then under British rule, hoped that
the British would give them some form of autonomy, or even independence.
Instead, history would repeat itself. After Iraq was granted independence,
clashes between Assyrian and Iraqi soldiers led to a general massacre of
Assyrians – an event which partly inspired the definition of “genocide”.
Another
more recent precedent is the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s and 1980s between
Lebanon’s former Christian ruling class and their Muslim opponents, which
ultimately led to the country’s domination by its neighbour Syria.
So
what should we make of the existence of Christian militias in Syria, fighting
alongside the Kurds to defeat ISIS? Many are composed of Assyrians, the same
group that suffered in Iraq. Will it end differently for them this time?
There
are quite a few of these militias, all of them aimed at fighting ISIS. These
groups are doing what most of us would do if we lived in such a lawless place:
defending their villages from an enemy that will show them no mercy and brooks
no compromise.
In
doing so, however, they enter a web of tangled moral choices. Such groups need
weapons and support. Some find that by aligning with Bashar al-Assad’s
blood-soaked regime. Others look to the rebel Kurdish forces operating in the
country’s north-east. So they are unified now by a necessary war against
radical Islam; but one day, if the Syrian state and the Kurds come to blows,
they will be divided again. Life in the Middle East can often involve rawer,
more dangerous choices than we will ever have to make.
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