The news mounts; Assyrian homes are found empty. Kurdification progresses; money earmarked for our survival may be rerouted to the Kurdistan Regional Government. Assyrian woman are forced into lives of prostitution to feed their children; half a million, or more, refugees clog Jordan and Syria, treated as refuse. (If you are not weak-hearted, I suggest reading Nuri Kino’s amazing report, By God: Six Days in Amman.) We are not Burmese monks or Pakistani lawyers. We are just an ancient people, divided by our church leaders, dying in Diaspora.
The voices that sang some of the first songs in human history will soon be silenced forever, while the world yawns.
The myth of the Iraqi Christian is a useful one because it neutralizes annoying claims to indigeneity. We are not "Iraqi Christians," any more than Mexican immigrants are "Catholic Americans". We are Assyrians. We have several identities—"Chaldeans", "Syriacs", etc., but we are Assyrian. We trace our history back to those Assyrians whom the Hebrew God proclaimed were the "rod of my anger." The Assyrian empire, like all empires, did some horrible things back then. So much so that the Jews of the Old Testament felt the need to compare us to pestilence. In fact, if it weren’t for us, those Jews of yore would never have had to rely on those eight days and nights of candles. Such are the vices of empire, I guess. Sorry about all that. For a background of our current political situation, you can read part one of this column here.
I am writing this "Countdown to Zero" because Assyrians face a real threat of extinction through a combination of murder and assimilation. We’ve done a good job of a people of arguing with each other, but we remain too timid to bring our voice to bear to our fellow Americans, Canadians, etc. Assyrians, like most people from the Middle East, are consumed by the politics over there to the detriment of focusing on what we can do here where we are. Rather than raging against the immoral indifference of the West to our impending disappearance from the face of the planet, we meekly, hat in hand, ask for compassion from the world. Look at all these nice ancient Christians getting massacred.
Our history of backing the wrong horse is hurting us yet again: Diaspora Assyrian support for the invasion of Iraq was over optimistic. I’m as guilty as the next Assyrian of that, despite my otherwise impeccable Leftist credentials. I want to tell you why.
I want you to imagine a typical home in West Rogers Park, in Chicago, in 1988, as the Iran-Iraq war ended. I want you to imagine a group of wide-eyed Assyrian children sitting and watching their parents, perhaps six couples, drinking whiskey or tea, chomping sunflower seeds. Some of the men, their eyes deep set, finger tezbiya, "worry beads". Wives and husbands sit together. Assyrian music plays quietly, though they’ll occasionally turn it up. I remember some of the singers (and still listen to many); like Sargon Gabriel, or Evin Agassi (who would also travel "back home" and bring back haunting VHS tapes of his interviews with the suffering Assyrians there); perhaps Juliana Jendo or Linda George. They talk, incessantly and exclusively, about life back home. About Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athine. They recollect stories of the daring and severely repressed Assyrian Cultural Club, among the first groups to insist on an Assyrian ethnic identity, back in the 1960s. They debate the value of a Kurd. They speculate about the involvement of the CIA, or the Mossad, or the English, in world events.
Imagine those kids, bored and confused, bewildered at their parents’ cloistered lives focused on back home.
"What about right now," they’re thinking without knowing it, "What about what’s going on here!?"
How could those children have really known the sadness in that room, of a group of people resigned to a certainty that they’d never walk on the land they were raised on, land not damp but sopping with their ancestors’ blood? How can a child know, really know, what it means for a brother to say farewell to a brother forever? Or for a mother to send her child to a new continent, with no hope for a reunion? To, so late in life, sever every meaningful connection of one’s life, likely forever, and suppress your language, your culture, your worldview in order to assimilate? How can a child understand how desperate the need to recreate something familiar in an alien world?
It breaks my heart to even imagine the profound sadness that became a permanent ache in our parents’ hearts. There is a phrase for that particular pain in Assyrian: "m’khlusta d’libba." It means "the squeezing of the heart."
We were so eager to end that for our parents and families. Removing Saddam Hussein, at any cost, seemed reasonable. But really, supporting an illegal, preemptive war wasn’t "reasonable": quite the opposite. It was irrational and visceral.
This is not just the typical immigrant experience. It is the tragedy of the Diaspora. A tragedy intensified by the willful ignorance of the so-called defenders of freedom and democracy. A tragedy more horrific because in the information age we can watch it happen, know it is happening, watch it close in on us, like approaching floodwaters. A tragedy more profound because we share so much blame in it.
Assyrians are not only victims of massacres and land theft by their various historical rulers—the Arabs, Turks, Arabs again, and now Kurds and Arabs again. We’re victims of our own passivity, our own obedience to our churches, who prefer the trappings of their own power—such as leveraging cash and mansions from the Kurds—over the survival of their people. We allow the churches to splinter our movements. Petty personal grudges balloon into major international rifts. We try to kneecap our already puny political efforts. Our rulers know the right strings to pull, and of course we all dance.
Assyrians are among the fathers and mothers of our human civilization. Those fingers that dug into the earth to plant ancient crops; the hands that struck iron into tools. The eyes that first saw the arch, the lens, and, of course, beer, when looking only at wild nature.
I write about this at Daily Kos because I’m most at home among my fellow Leftists who, like me, believe in the universal truths of the Enlightenment. That all men and women are created equal, endowed by birthright with unalienable rights. Among those rights are self-determination. I come to Daily Kos because here, I know you all will understand that it is not acceptable to watch as a people vanish from the planet because it would be "politically unintelligent" to come to their aid.
Out of desperate friendship with the Kurds of the north, our government refuses to acknowledge the crisis partially of their making that will lead to our complete deletion as a people from the lands we civilized millennia ago.
More:
Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project
Assyrian Democratic Movement
Zinda Magazine
Assyrian International News Agency