Ishtartv.com - morningstaronline.co.uk
STEVE SWEENEY, WEDNESDAY,
MAY 20, 2020
SYRIACS, a Middle Eastern ethnic
and religious minority, have launched a campaign demanding the European
Parliament officially recognises the 1915 Sayfo genocide, in which at least 500,000
men, women and children were killed under Ottoman rule.
The European Syriac Union (ESU)
wants the European Union to “side with historical truth and justice” by
commemorating June 15 as Sayfo (“sword” in the Syriac language) Martyrs Day in
recognition of the atrocities committed more than a century ago.
The body hopes to show the
international community that there is sufficient popular support for them to
take the issue seriously; so far the Swedish, German, Dutch, Austrian, Syrian
and Armenian parliaments have officially recognised the genocide.
According to the ESU the Sayfo
genocide began in 1914, with the predominantly Christian Chaldean, Syriac,
Assyrian and Aramean communities subjected to mass killings, deportations and
forced conversions to Islam. Hundreds of churches, monasteries and other holy
places were desecrated by Ottoman forces that plundered cultural, social and
economic assets.
Community leaders and
intellectuals were among the first to be targeted, with atrocities carried out
in Turabdin, Hakkari and Van, along with Urmia in modern-day Iran and the
Adiyaman region.
In 2007, the International
Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) agreed that the “Ottoman campaign
against Christian minorities of the empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a
genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks.”
The ESU is pressing for the
massacre to be recognised as a separate event to the more widely known Armenian
genocide, which took place at the same time.
Ottoman soldiers were brutal in
their treatment of Assyrians. Beheadings, drowning, shooting and stonings were
common, and homes were destroyed to prevent their occupants’ return. Local
officials who carried out the killings are reported to have kept collections of
body parts, such as ears, noses and “female body parts.”
The genocide is seen as the
responsibility of Turkey and the precursors of today’s Kemalist Republican
People’s Party. But as with the Armenian genocide, the Turkish state denies the
massacre.
|