I am an Assyrian American. I was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago in September of 1981. I was raised in Chicago and Des Plaines. Eventually we moved further into the suburbs before I moved back to Chicago when I was 17.
My people, the Assyrians, one of the oldest ethnic groups in human history, is on a countdown to extinction. Our numbers have dwindled to between four million and seven million worldwide, dispersed by geography, religion, and petty infighting.
As this very real genocide of indifference rages, those who have sworn to protect the oppressed willfully ignore our struggle, encouraged to do so by political expedience.
The existence of my people on Earth is a trifling inconvenience for some considerably influential people. Our very small numbers only hastens our imminent destruction. While academics play semantics, we tear ourselves apart. While religious leaders grab for power, we are rapidly approaching zero.
I came to DailyKos because it is where I have, over the last four years, found the most kindred spirits. And as an American, it is where I see the best examples of Americanism. Belief in justice, belief in the right of equality and self-determination all mankind is given as a birthright, and an activist mentality.
I will catalogue here this countdown to extinction as it proceeds. I will catalogue it here because so many Assyrians refuse to engage the world around us out of insecurity, ignorance, or lack of political will. Those who do make efforts to engage the larger world community are met with hostile reactions equally from the leaders of the genocide as from the supposed guardians of freedoms and basic human rights. The program of deleting us from the planet is centered in Iraq, but its tentacles spread across the globe.
Do you have a minute to read about the extinction of the mothers and fathers of civilization? The tillers of the Fertile Crescent? The intellectual forbears of algebra, geometry, optics, agriculture, academia, imperialism and warfare?
Allow me to introduce you to my race.
I am not an "Iraqi Christian." I am not an "Arab Christian" "Kurdish Christian" "Nestorian" "Syriac Speaker" or any of the other dozens of euphemisms that those who have butchered us for a millennia have applied to us—and that the Western Powers, and their allies in the Middle East, continue to apply to us as a political favor. I am Assyrian. I am not a Chaldean, Aramaean, Jacobite, or anything else. These are various identities used by people who are Assyrian. In the language we speak—what academics call "neo-Aramaic" but what is Assyrian—we call ourselves "Atoraya." Arabs corrupted it to "Ashurie" and Greeks to "Assurie". Assyrians are native to Mesopotamia, and have ancestral lands in pockets of what are now called "Iraq", "Iran", "Turkey", and "Syria."
Assyrians are, by cultural tradition and history, Christians. We are proud that we are considered the first non-Jews to become Christian, in the time of Jesus. The apostle called Thomas, or Doubting Thomas, whom we call Mar Toma, or Saint Thomas, was the father of our Church who later proselytized India.
There are four primary churches in the Assyrian nation, which is the cause of no little infighting. There is the ancient Holy Apostolic Church of the East, often mistakenly called the "Nestorian Church". We call it the Eita d’Medinkha. That means "Church of the East." As we hurtle towards extinction, the patriarch of this Church, in which I was baptized—Mar Dinkha IV—is locked in a legal and moral struggle with one of his bishops, Mar Bawai Soro. The rift developed when this Bishop expressed publicly his support for a political party, Zowaa Demokratiya Atoraya, the Assyrian Democratic Movement. We call it Zowaa for short. Zowaa is the primary Assyrian political player in Iraq, and its General Secretary, Yonadam Kanna, is the sole Assyrian Member of Parliament. So within the "Church-of-the-East Assyrians" there is a rift, particularly in the American Diaspora, between "pro-Mar Dinkha" and "pro-Mar Bawai" factions. This rift is essentially meaningless—a fight between the Chiefs, really, not the Indians—but it has made it impossible to unify political leadership. For a glimpse into this petty and ridiculous fight, take a scan of this. These "Eastern" Assyrians settled largely in Chicago, central California (Modesto and Turloc), Australia, Canada (Windsor and Toronto) and the UK.
A splinter from the Church of the East, that still uses the Julian calendar, has a sizable following.
There is a Catholic rite of Assyrians, called by Rome the Chaldean Church. Chaldeans comprise a large majority of Assyrians, but often self-identify as Chaldeans rather than Assyrians—this is in large part due to the fealty of Roman Catholic Assyrians to their Church leaders, who for their own reasons, insist on a separate "Chaldean" identity, despite a clear and explicit common language, common traditions, common physical features, common names, etc. This is troublesome because Chaldeans are a huge population—especially around Detroit and southern California.
There is a "Western" group of Assyrians, who are Orthodox—their church is Jacobite. The Assyrian spoken by the Mebawaio ("Western") Assyrians is closer to the Akkadian origins of the language and takes some listening to understand for Eastern Assyrians—imagine a workingclass Englishman landing in a Creole neighborhood, and you get the idea. The Western Assyrians were hard hit by a series of massacres in Turkey in the early part of the 20th Century (what we refer to as "Seyfo"). They have resettled in the Eastern United States (Massachusetts and New Jersey primarily), the Netherlands, and Sweden, where they founded a successful soccer club ("Assyriska"). They often self-identify as "Suryoyo", with a similar rationalization as Chaldeans.
There are also segments of Assyrian dispersed across various Evangelical and Protestant sects.
There is a region in Iraq we call "Dishda d’Nineveh." That means, "The Nineveh Plains." It is located northwest of the city of Mosul, in what is unofficially referred to as Kurdistan. Certainly, the Kurds in their own fight for self-determination are determined to Kurdify the area, buying up properties and ejecting Assyrians and otherwise terrorizing the Assyrian population—while, of course, building churches, to demonstrate to the international community that they are friendly to Christians.
Building churches is nice. Building homes for our religious leaders and parading their handpicked Kurdish Democratic Party Assyrian houseboys—such as Sargis Aghajan, a KDP official of Assyrian extraction—is very nice, in a meaningless, public relations sense. But it is part of an effort to stress our religion over our ethnicity, because the existence of a separate ethnic group in the Nineveh Plains is problematic for them. They want the land, and so long as we are there our claim is superior to their own.
Despite the occasional mention in a speech—typically modified by "Christian" which is irrelevant—Assyrians, and our imminent destruction, has been left out of the conversation about Iraq. Despite a mountain of evidence that the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) has a policy of Kurdification, we are ignored by the media (who prefer a good "Muslims v. Christians" narrative), shrugged off by governments, and shunned by human rights groups.
The Kurds are a great ally to the West because they are well organized and can effectively govern their region. The history of Assyrian and Kurdish relations is complex and varied. They were alternately allied and at odds, and bloodshed common. But their superior numbers meant that with the fall of Saddam, Assyrians would more or less be at their mercy, particularly due to their support from the West. The Kurds true goal, of course, is a greater Kurdistan—but Turkey, a key NATO ally, will never stand for that, since much of what are considered by Kurds their ancestral lands are really in Turkey, not Iraq. Is Turkey a natural ally for Assyrians? You’d think so, except for the uncomfortable reality that that Armenian genocide they’re always denying? Well, they also wiped out well over half of the Assyrians on Earth with that massacre.
So the Kurds continue to "Kurdify" Assyrian lands, terrorizing Assyrian families while simultaneously passing nominally pro-"Christian" programs. For every school or daycare built by truly Assyrian organization, the Kurds will build a competing one. This is to ensure Assyrian dependence on Kurdish money. Groups like the Assyrian Student Union (Khoyada d’Yolapeh Atoraya) struggle to remain independent. They recently had to discontinue their publication, Mezaltaa, for lack of funds. The Assyria Foundation is collecting money to help them restart it: Assyria Foundation . (Full disclosure: my sister founded and operates Assyria Foundation with some other Assyrians. One hundred percent of donations go to Iraq).
Once we are completely obliterated from the lands of our ancestors, it is only a matter of time before the Diaspora swallows us completely.
I have a tattoo on my right arm. It reads, in Assyrian script, "Atra." That means "country."
We have none. We are rootless. I inked it into my flesh to make it real someplace on Earth.
Please come back and join me as the people of my flesh and blood are marched to zero.
More reading:
US Commission on International Religious Freedom (ugh) Letter to Condi Rice
http://aina.org/ (Assyrian International News Agency)
http://zindamagazine.com/ (Zinda Magazine – Zinda means "The Spark")
http://assyriafoundation.org/ (Assyria Foundation, still in development)
Update [2007-9-14 10:11:3 by ChicagoLife]: : Comme ca.
http://www.aina.org/...
CHICAGO (UPI) -- An Iraqi-American near Chicago is overseeing the finishing of the Pentagon memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Abe Yousif's Bucthel Metal Finishing Corp., has less than a year to complete grinding, finishing and polishing three long arcing castings that will contain 184 seats, one for each person who died when American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon's west wall.
Each seat will bear the name of the 125 people who died in the building and 59 aboard the flight, The Washington Post reported.
Yousif, a 54-year-old Assyrian Christian, told the newspaper he left Baghdad in 1979 at age 24, and he hasn't been back.
"Being an Arab-American, you feel so sorry," Yousif said. "It's a feeling like you can contribute something good to this horrible thing if you can make (the benches) look beautiful."
The $23 million project is being funded by private donations to the Pentagon Memorial Fund, which is $8 million short before the memorial's scheduled unveiling on Sept. 11, 2008, the report said.