The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Semele revisited

Semele revisited
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, February 17 2012, 4:23:54 (UTC)
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...some of the worst lies are spread about what caused semele....an historian by the name of Longrigg wrote two volumeson Iraq which were PUBLISHED, not printed....it´s worth revisiting...this is one of the SCHOLARLY soureces I´ll be using over at Wikipedia....


We come now to Semele…an admitted tragedy but one of ten million or more like it and hardly something out of the ordinary. If our own religio-nationalists can scoff at 700,000 murdered Iraqi children, done to death by Sanctions imposed by western Christian nations, calling their deaths “accidents of war”…then the far fewer numbers killed in cold blood at Semele can hardly rate higher.


“The King (Faysal, mine) invited to England on a well-timed State visit, left his son the Amir Ghazi, now aged twenty-one, as Regent. He arrived in London on 20 June accompanied by three ministers, Yasin Pasha, Nuri Sa’id and Rustam Haydar. The visit was completely successful. The King, after his stay at Buckingham Palace, visited Scotland and Devonshire, then spent some days in London and some in Switzerland. But his health appeared to be seriously affected by the strains of the last twenty years, and he willingly would have rested for a further period in Europe, had not grave events recalled him urgently to Baghdad.”



“These events rose from a small, alien, unhappy Assyrian community of whose dilemma and attempted settlement much has been said in these pages. The Mar Sham’un, who spent the last six months at Geneva but could accomplish nothing, returned in January 1933 to his restless and divided flock. Assyrian Levy officers, notably Yaqu son of Isma’il had conducted a strong campaign in the Mar Sham’un’s favor in the Dohuk-Amadiya area. The Iraqi authorities had, on the contrary, weakened his prestige by their strict limitation of his powers to the spiritual field, and their treatment of Assyrians as normal members of the public.”

It’s important to remember that it was only the Assyrians who’d recently fled to Iraq as refugees from Turkey and Iran who were clamoring for special treatment. This now being the day of self-determination but also of nation-states, a time when the Millet System of the Ottomans which gave special authority to religious minorities, was ended and where any such special treatment would run contrary to the requirements of a national identity and unity. For this reason the British could not and the Iraqis would not accept the idea that these recently arrived Assyrians had any “right” to special treatment in Iraq. It was difficult enough to secure them any lands at all and impossible to find enough free land to give them their own “nation”.

“A strong anti-Patriarchal faction led by Malik Khoshaba, with bishops and other Maliks, had secured the appointment of Khoshaba himself as President of the Advisory Committee for land settlement. The Mar Sham’un on his return, with his position weakened and all prospect of national migration or local consolidation dissipated, assumed an attitude of total refusal to co-operate with the Government-sponsored settlement, to conduct which the ‘foreign expert’, Major Thompson, arrived in Mosul in May 1933.”

Attempts had been made, with British co-operation, to send the Assyrians back to their Hakkari mountains or to Iran, both attempts failed. Many made it back on their own, but there was no more effort to move them en masse under British protection or sponsorship. All that was left was to settle them in Iraq where they would create the least hostility among the many already hostile elements and warring tribes within Iraq.

“ The Patriarch, not content with spreading false suggestions regarding the settlement itself, threatened excommunication to any Assyrian who might participate in it; he was ready, some observers could not but feel, to sacrifice the interests of the community to the claims of his personal or hierarchical ambitions and resentments. In Mosul city Muslim-Assyrian feeling showed no improvement. An incident of stone-throwing at the windows of Iraqi Army officers was attributed to the Assyrians.

“The Minister of the Interior, Hikmat Sulayman, at this point wisely invited the Mar Sham’un to Baghdad, hoping for a personal understanding. But the antagonism was irremovable. The Minister, intelligibly if perhaps on the broadest view needlessly, bade his visitor surrender all temporal power, even in the form urged by the Patriarch, which was that of adherence to the ‘traditional customs of his people’. The Mar Sham’un addressed a letter full of complaints to the King on the eve of his departure for Europe, accusing both Iraqis and British of persecution.”

Of course we can’t know the absolute truth of any of this…but how familiar it sounds when you consider the way our “leaders” behave today.

“Three weeks of vain conversations and waiting ended with irritation on both sides and the order of Hikmat Sulayman on 24 June that the Patriarch should not leave Baghdad until further notice. He remained accordingly at the Y.M.C.A. hostel. Telegraphed directions from King Faysal in London on and after 19 June (‘under British pressure’, as Baghdad statesmen averred) bade his ministers pacify and release the prelate; but these were not merely set aside as being too clearly destructive of Government prestige, but aroused anger in Baghdad at so misplaced an intervention. The Ihka Government (recently put in place, mine) was in fact already gaining credit even from its critics for firmness against the ‘Assyrian menace’. Moderating suggestions for the removal of General Bakr Sidqi from the military command at Mosul had been refused. This officer, a harsh and ambitious egoist not destitute of some social and considerable military gifts, had long been bitterly anti-Assyrian and already saw himself, perhaps, as their authorized destroyer.”


In this paragraph one sees in what aspect the Assyrians were “feared” as a “menace”…and that was their ability to prove destructive and non-cooperative, especially if and when they “united”. In other words they were “feared” as a serious annoyance and not as a military threat of any kind. It was their capacity as “spoiler” and not as creators of anything of their own that was dreaded.

“The situation in the Assyrian areas and in Mosul deteriorated as summer set in. Yaqu and his friends had for months been touring with a formidable armed party, flouting Government’s authority and orders and urging non-cooperation with the Settlement. Only after the dispatch of Iraqi troops to posts in the Dohuk area, with the object of assuring order and discouraging Yaqu, was it possible for Lieutenant-Colonel Stafford, the Administrative Inspector of Mosul liwa (and subsequent historian of these events) to make contact with Yaqu and with friendly firmness bring him to Mosul.

“News of this submission was telegraphed to the King in London, who again suggested the release of the Mar Sham’un, to be again refused. Yaqu’s submission, however hesitating and insincere, was clinched at Mosul by a written promise to desist from agitation. This was followed by a meeting on 10 July at which a full statement of the Assyrian position in Iraq, and the difficulties which confronted their emigration from it, was made to them by the acting Mutasarrif and by Stafford. The next day all was cordiality between Government representatives and those of the party opposed to the Mar Sham’un. The latter’s following, to whom the reasons for his detention in Baghdad were patiently re-explained, agreed to send spokesmen to visit him there. They left Mosul, Yaqu and Luqo among them”

“They proceeded, however, not as expected to Baghdad but forthwith across the Tigris into Syria, there to demand permission to enter from the French officer at Ayn Diwar post; nor can it now be certainly established whether this decision was a sudden unpremeditated gesture of despair (as upholders of the Assyrians allege) or part of a plan inspired by, or at least known to, either the Mar Sham’un (who denied it) or his family in Mosul. Without waiting for permission, for which the frontier officer telegraphed to Beirut, the impetuous leaders sent word back to their villages alleging, with patent falsity, that the French welcome to Syria had been cordial, land was available, taxes on crops would be remitted. The clansmen, to a number of 1000, leaving their homes and families unprotected-certain sign that no act of violence was at that time contemplated-swarmed across the river at Faysh Khabur and below it, at a point where frontier rectification was presently intended in accordance with the recent delimitation.”

Again; though we can’t be certain of these events, everything about the procedure and attitude of the Assyrians strikes a familiar chord.

“The news of these moves reached Mosul on 20 July. It was received with suspicion. Not unmixed with hopes that riddance of the Assyrians was in sight. Reports of river crossings multiplied, and qadha officials did nothing to check the welcome exodus. The Army command, who not unwillingly saw in these movements a menace by the redoubtable Assyrian fighting men, dispatched troops to the Tigris to watch events from forward posts, and to deal, by disarmament, with any parties who might return into Iraq.”

One has also to remember that Iraq had been in a constant state of turmoil since the end of the First World War with a foreign Arab King being imposed on the people by the British…a succession of cabinets and ministers, hostile tribes all clamoring for lands that may or may not have belonged to them and with a full complement of minorities making claims no one knew the validity of. Sorting all of this out to the general satisfaction of so antagonistic a population, with the presence of occupying British forces, backed by a colonial police force armed and paid by them would have taxed the mightiest statesman. To have, in addition, a group of Assyrians, well trained and armed and foreigners to Iraq, go wandering across borders and back, refusing to accept the best Government could do for them, was to invite disaster…and it came.

“A new phase opened with information, on 27 July, that the French were allowing no more Assyrians to enter: if indeed any had yet entered Syria, since the western river bank was at the moment still Iraqi territory, untransferred. They declined also to apply, as might have been possible and as the Iraqi Foreign Minister specifically requested from the French charge d’affaires, the Syrio-Iraqi Frontier Agreement whereunder tribal immigrants would be disarmed and moved inland from the border. A meeting between French and Iraqi officers was held at Faysh Khabur on 26 July, another on 2 August. At the latter, the French officer declared that the Assyrians would not be accepted in Syria, and that 336 rifles had been taken from the 415 armed men who had approached the frontier; and he took note of the emphatic request that no armed Assyrians should recross into Iraq or that, if recross they must, sufficient notice should be given to the Iraqi authorities. The failure to observe this agreement, due rather to inefficiency than to malice, was a main factor in the tragedy which followed, and caused much of the Iraqi bitterness against the French.

“ News of these events, represented as a dangerous movement, aroused violent anti-Assyrian and anti-Christian feeling in Baghdad. The Government, delighted to play the role of protector of Iraqi interests against a grave danger, did not minimize ‘the menace’, did not contradict whispers that Great Britain was behind the plot of their protégés, and let the public offer an indifferent welcome to the King as he returned alarmed and apprehensive from Europe on 2 August. He was to stay a month in his capital, powerless to influence a position whose facts he never appreciated, and whose emotional violence swept all before it.

“During the first three days of August a few individual Assyrians recrossed the river to Iraq to surrender their arms after angry quarrelling with their too hopeful leaders. On the afternoon of the 4th considerable parties, to whom the French had restored their arms, began unannounced to recross, determined to regain their unguarded families. Animated by whatever disastrous folly or malice, some individuals from among them discharged shots at Iraqi troops whose pickets faced the river and who were prepared to receive the surrendered arms. The scale of the fighting increased as the excitable mountaineers hurried to the front; the Army replied with spirit and substantially held their positions; and a hotly contested combat continued all night and until long after sunrise. The losses of the Army were some thirty killed and forty wounded, those of the Assyrians about half these numbers. In the early morning some 200 of the Assyrians made for the hills in small parties, seeking their homes; the rest with Yaqu and Luqo again crossed to the Syrian side where they were bombed by the Iraqi Air Force and, to a number of 533, were interned by the French. The broken stragglers together with villagers and wayfarers on the left bank were rounded up over a wide area and shot by the Army out of hand.”

“At no time, it is certain, could any Assyrian movement, however widespread and determined, have in any degree threatened the Iraqi State; yet such was the feeling aroused by past rancours, by fear and present anger, and by stories (not, it is probable, all untrue) of Assyrian atrocities to the dead or captured, that the Iraqi Army launched from this point onwards a campaign of singular truculence. It was accompanied by a wave of unprecedented bitterness against the British.

“Anti-Assyrian measures taken during the following days including the hasty arming of Kurdish irregulars, the search of all roads and tracks for stray Assyrians who were shot at sight, the raising of a force of supernumerary police, and the terrorization by the Army of civil officials who might attempt (as some did) to interfere. The Minister of Defense, Jalal Baban, and the Director-General of Police, Subih Najib, on a flying visit on the 7th showed zeal by projects to arm and inflame the Kurds against the Christians. Patrols of the R.I.A.F. vied with each other in reports of ‘dangerous concentrations’ of the now terrified Assyrian villagers. Iraqi Army troops in Dohuk and Zakho massacred in cold blood not fewer than 100 Christian peasants in those villages. The Kurdish and Arab tribes-of the Kurds, the Sindi, Quli, Sulayvani: of the Arabs, the Jubur, Shammar, Hadidiyin-and parties of Yazidis were allowed to understand that the Assyrian settlements would not be protected; and looting, wholesale and unchecked, stripped and ruined almost all their villages in Dohuk, Shaykhan, and Zakho qadhas. Those in the qadhas of Amadiya, Aqra, Zibar, and Rawanduz, where the civil Government could maintain its powers, were unmolested. Refugees, penniless and hungry, poured into Mosul and into the large central villages of Al Qush and Simayl (Simmel).

“The Minister of the Interior, Hikmat Sulayman, toured the affected areas from 11-15 August. He became aware that the immediate requirement of policy was not to continue the current butcheries and lootings but to conceal from the world the truth which with horror he learnt for the first time; for he had visited Simayl. Here, from 8-11 August, Assyrians belonging to the village and from outside it had clustered for safety round the police station, disarmed but solemnly reassured by the sergeant. Their terror increased when tribesmen were allowed unchecked to enter and loot their homes, their priest was removed, and their Arab fellow villagers moved out with the flocks.

“On the morning of 11 August, a motor machine company of the Iraqi Army entered the village in good order under its officers, and proceeded methodically to the massacre of every man in the village. The work was complete by early afternoon, and the troops withdrew in their vehicles. They returned next day to bury the dead, some 315 in number, including 4 women and 6 children.

“It is not doubtful that this operation, revolting in its senseless cruelty, was planned and ordered by the Commanding General, Bakr Sidiq Pasha, though he had arranged himself to be absent in Mosul on that day. He intended, it was believed, a similar exploit at Al Qush, but was dissuaded. The Iraqi official account of the Simayl massacre as the work of tribesmen is contrary to the facts.

“The historian (not hysterian, mine…sorry) has neither need nor wish to pass judgement on a series of events…not without their parallels, of St Bartholemew or Glencoe…which began with the foolish and provocative maneuvers of, or indeed the actual attack launched by, Assyrian fanatics and ended with the shocking climax of the Simayl massacre. With their motives of folly, falsehood, hatred and brutality they show humanity at its lowest.

“ The attitude of the Iraqi authorities, central and local, to the Assyrian problem and people had been up to 4 August forbearing and indeed generous: the conduct of the Iraqi Army thereafter was, in its sustained brutality, beyond defence. These actions were in large part concealed from the public, who were instead deceived by stories of widespread Assyrian rebellion, the gallantry of Iraqi troops, and the treacherous designs of Great Britain. This must explain the failure by Government or the public to give expression to any feeling of regret more forthright than the half-excuses of Yasin Pasha at Geneva, or to any condemnation of the guilty officers, These were, on the contrary, feted and promoted amid acclamation. The Mar Sham’un, on his side, was successful in disseminating an almost equally false picture of the Assyrian part and of his own misleading of his community; he sustained with complete success in Europe and America the part of the injured martyr.”


…ahem.


“As the storm passed gradually from the Mosul hills, troops withdrew and the villagers counted their dead and surveyed their ruined homes, a camp was opened at Government expense at Mosul for the destitute…strange reversion to the conditions at Ba’quba in 1919! Hunderds of Assyrian Levy dependants were transported to their lines at Hinyadi. Mosul filled with unemployed and unemployable refugees. Restoration of the villages was slow, the fields unsown, the population cowed and spiritless. Official orders for the restoration of the loot by tribesmen were almost wholly ignored, promised compensation was never forthcoming. The rift between the Assyrians and the Iraq Government was complete; hatred and mistrust had triumphed.

“ In Mosul anti-Assyrian popular feeling was rabid, and leading members of the now terrified community, including the father, brother and aunt of the Mar Sham’un were deported from the town. Fantastic rumors of impending British or French action were believed, and the press surpassed all previous exploits. The Amir Ghazi, visiting the town on 27 August, was hailed enthusiastically by the exponents of an anti-British bitterness without precedent. In the Kirkuk oilfield there was tension but no demonstrations; at Bayji some anti-Assyrian rioting cost lives and property. The political public of central and southern Iraq, fed on stories of rebellion gallantly mastered, raged against the British and the expectation that they would intervene on their protégés behalf. The Army soared heavenward in popular enthusiasm, its units and commanders returning to Baghdad were awarded the welcome of war-scarred heroes. The ministers indeed, rescued by this unifying enthusiasm from serious trouble on the Euphrates, dared adopt no other policy. The King, whose intervention on behalf of the Mar Sham’un in July was not forgiven, and from whom much of the ugly truth was concealed, found himself almost ignored amid the plaudits for his son and the generals; he returned, ill and dispirited, on 2 September to Europe for medical treatment.”

“The Mar Sham’un, whose personal safety in Baghdad could no longer be assured and was indeed hourly threatened, was removed to security in Cypress by the Royal Air Force, to be there joined by his family. The Iraqi Government granted him a monthly living-allowance on the condition of abstention from further provocative politics, a condition which he contravened from the first hour of accepting it. From Cypress he continued to bombard the League of Nations with petitions.

“The return of Sir Francis Humphrys to Baghdad on 23 August, with the realization that no British pro-Assyrian intervention was imminent, gave some relief, not least to the uneasy but defiant Cabinet. The tension and emotion of mid-August gradually died down. Then, on 8 September, the news reached Baghdad that King Faysal, with King Ali, Nuri Sa’id and Rustam Haydar at his bedside had died suddenly of heart failure at Berne.”

There are a few more references to the Assyrians towards the end of this excellent book, another one which our nationalists won’t read because their grandparents told them all they need to know…

“ But to one problem no approach to a solution appeared…that of the Assyrians. Their case, after the massacre of August 1933 , had been hurried on to the agenda of the League Council by the Mar Sham’un’s telegrams from Cypress; and in October the Iraqi Government, through the mouth of Yasin Pasha, offered a disarming admission of ‘unjustifiable severity’ by the Army and regrettable tribal looting. He pleaded for a fresh start for the Assyrians…in another country! The British attitude, disappointing to the more fervid partisans of the Assyrians, was determined by the desire to preserve and support the independent Iraqi State; by realization of the grave consequences of any physical intervention, to which anyhow British opinion could never be reconciled; and by awareness that the faults were far from being all on one side. The Council agreed, accordingly, that a Committee of six, composed of representatives of Great Britain, Italy, France, Denmark, Mexico and Spain, should by every means seek alternative accommodation, somewhere in the world, for the Assyrian community.

“The Committee’s attempts were immediate and vigorous, but sadly unsuccessful. A project for settlement in Brazil seemed promising, but fell to the ground when the Brazilian Government reversed its welcoming attitude. A British plan for settlement in Guiana , and a French project for the banks of the Niger, came equally to nothing after League missions, with Brigadier Browne, had visited the territories. By the end of 1934 no progress had been made.

“ In Iraq their resettlement on the land proceeded with weary slowness in spite of Government encouragement and the offer of a house-by-house subsidy. The great majority of the community favored withdrawal from Iraq; and false hopes of this were kept alive by the Mar Sham’un’s partisans, while the anti-Patriarchal party declared roundly that they would never settle in the same territory as the Mar Sham’un and his following. The camp at Mosul was, with increasing reluctance, kept in existence at Government expense, but was reduced by encouraged departures; its inmates fell from 1,250 to 650 during 1934. More hopeful was the French reception in Syria of the families of the 550 Assyrians interned there since August 1933. Aided by a grant of money from Iraq. These women and children joined their men on the upper Khabur in September 1934 to a number over 1,500. Movement from the Mosul camp and streets to the Khabur continued in 1935 to a number of some 1,500 and a more grandiose scheme for a large-scale settlement in the Ghab lands on the Orontes in Syria was formulated by the League Committee.

“A project for its finances, with Iraq and Great Britain as main contributors, was established and a Trustee Board appointed. In 1936 an immediate transfer of 15,000 Assyrians was planned, which would dispose of almost the whole remaining community except those NATIVE (mine) to Iraq; but the difficulties of the Ghab project were found insurmountable, and its abandonment made possible a move only of smaller numbers, 2,500 in all, to the Khabur settlements. No further progress was made under the Hikmat-Sidiq regime, and the permanence of the Assyrian remnant in Iraq was perforce accepted. Their economic rehabilitation was by now fairly advanced, and their final adaptation to Iraqi conditions and citizenship could be hoped.”

There is much to contemplate here and much of it runs counter to what our grandparents told us. The Assyrians who clamored for help from the British and spoke of broken promises for a homeland of their own, were all foreign to Iraq. Under what set of conditions they expected the people and government of Iraq to give them “their land back” is hard to imagine. The simple response was “why should they give them anything when they owed them nothing?”

The Assyrians native to Iraq were not making these demands..they were not the ones agitating, spreading disunion and mistrust or bearing arms against their fellows in the pay of the British,….this was all done by the Assyrian refugees form Hakkari and Iran , whom the Iraqis had welcomed into Iraq.

Diehard remnants of these refugees, still agitated by their religious leaders, have been the ones to continue this call for a “return” of their indigenous lands…this is, besides sedition, rank ingratitude for Iraq owed none of them nor their recently settled “ancestors” anything…in fact it is they who owed Iraq thanks and, one always hoped, allegiance…which they have never shown to this day.

Iraq was not behind the disturbances in Iran which caused some of the Assyrians of Urmia to flee to its borders for refuge…neither did Iraqis force or entice the Hakkari Assyrians to fight on behalf of the British, thereby making themselves unwelcome in Turkey. Iraq and its people, with all the turmoil they faced at the time, accepted these refugees and with British support did their best to accommodate and settle them. That this was not good enough, or that the refugees felt Britain had promised them “their own country”, was not Iraq’s fault.

The refuges from Iran and Hakkari were welcome, at any time, and would have been cheered on by the Iraqis, to return to their own villages…but they refused.. Every reasonable effort was made to placate them by people who owed them nothing…nothing but a humanitarian interest to see them settled as best as could be expected under those tumultuous circumstances. This ingratitude and subsequent pleas to the world to “do something”, aided by false stories of persecutions suffered since that time is what led the Iraqi government, then as now, to move against those responsible factions and elements among the Assyrians and not some inbred hatred of Assyrians or Christians supposedly taught to Muslims in their Quran.

The native Assyrian population of Iraq as well as all those refugees who agreed to settle in Iraq have suffered continuously because of the ingratitude and agitation of a foreign element among them descended, not from Ashurbanipal, but from those refugees to Iraq, not indigenous to it, who refused to consider themselves citizens of Iraq but rather as betrayed “martyrs”. The actions of the few have, as always, poisoned the air for the rest. As is still the case.



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