David Gaunt, Naures Atto, and Soner O. Barthoma, Let Them Not Return: Sayfo â The Genocide against the Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017, 274 pp., (ISBN: 97817853349869).
Over the last few years, the study of what increasingly is called (the) âSayfoâ has finally gained some traction, within the community of Syriac, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, and in the wider scholarly community. For a long time, the massacres, expulsions, rape and enslavement that befell these communities during the First World War in the Ottoman Empire and northwestern Iran were well-known among scholars but little was published, and public recognition, distinct from the Armenian genocide that overshadowed what happened to other Christians, was very limited. This changed in 2015, with the 100-year commemorations of the genocide of 1915. These commemorations, new monuments, scholarly conferences and publications built upon work of the preceding decades to which the current volume testifies. This new wave of research had started with the publication of primary sources, which, although some were produced in the period following the First World War, began to be published more widely after a major part of the Syriac Orthodox community had resettled in Europe after leaving Eastern Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. In Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany these communities found technical possibilities, money and readership for publications dealing with what happened during the First World War. In 2006, David Gaunt, one of the editors of the current volume, published Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press). This was the first full-length monograph devoted to what happened to the West and East Syriac Christians of the Ottoman Empire, as distinct from the Armenians, but as an integral part of the genocidal practices of the Young Turks. In 2014, Florence Hellot-Bellier added a crucial analysis on what happened in the Eastern provinces and especially in Iran: Chronique de massacres annoncés: Les Assyro-Chaldéens dâIran et Hakkari face aux ambitions des empires (1896â1920) (Paris: Geuthner).
The current volume, which publishes essays first presented at a conference organised in 2011, constitutes an important follow-up to these earlier publications which focused on chronicling the events, as to numbers, perpetrators, witnesses, conspirators, victims and consequences. The current volume adds to the documentary and analytic work that is as yet unfinished, as in the articles by UÄur Ãmit Ãngör, âHow Armenian was the 1915 Genocide?â, Florence Hellot-Bellier, âThe Resistance of Urmia Assyrians to Violence at the beginning of the Twentieth Centuryâ, and Jan J. van Ginkel, âMor Dionysios Ê¿Abd an-Nur Aslan: Church Leader during a Genocideâ. However, its editors have chosen to broaden the topic by including post-genocide history, in the article by Naures Atto and Soner O. Barthoma, âSyriac Orthodox Leadership in the Post-Genocide Period (1918â26) and the Removal of the Patriarchate from Turkeyâ, by discussing intra-Syriac interpretations, by Shabo Talay, âSayfo, Firman, Qafle: The First World War from the Perspective of Syriac Christiansâ, Sebastian Brock, âA Historical Note of October 1915 Written in Dayro D-Zafaran (Deyrulzafaran)â, and Simon Birol, âInterpretation of the âSayfoâ in Gallo Shaboâs Poemâ. The volume also includes a discussion of todayâs ongoing psychological effects by Ãnver A. Cetrez, âThe Psychological Legacy of the Sayfo: An Inter-Generational Transmission of Fear and Distrustâ, and by examining current political discussions about the genocide, by Racho Donef, âSayfo and Denialism: A New Field of Activity for Agents of the Turkish Republicâ, Abdulmesih BarAbraham, âTurkeyâs Key Arguments in Denying the Assyrian Genocideâ, and Christophe Premat, âWho Killed Whom? A Comparison of Political Discussions in France and Sweden about the Genocide of 1915â. Most importantly, many of the articles deepen earlier interpretations of what happened, in the context of genocide studies more general, in the Introduction by the editors and in âSayfo Genocide: The Culmination of an Anatolian Culture of Violenceâ (Gaunt), and against the background of the Armenian genocide (Ãngör).
One of the most important findings of recent research, following up on Gauntâs initial findings, is the great diversity of what happened to the Christians of the Syriac tradition. In some places, they were killed and deported together with the Armenians, in other places some Christians (Catholics, Protestants) were killed and deported, while others (Syriac Orthodox), were left alone. Despite such instances, the overall number of victims (those massacred and those perishing during deportation or immediately afterwards) is estimated to be between 180,000 and 250,000, one average (but with considerable local variation) about half of the total population of Syriac Christians. The largest numbers of Syriac Christians were killed in the Diyarbakir province, whereas the Assyrians of Hakkari, although suffering great losses during military fights as well as during massacres of civilians, survived in slightly higher percentages. However, different from the small surviving Syriac Orthodox communities in Tur Ê¿Abdin, the Hakkari mountains were completely cleansed of Assyrians.
These different experiences make it difficult to tell a unified story, and even more difficult to pinpoint straightforward causes for what happened. A number of the contributions describe how most of the Syriac Orthodox Christians interpreted the events as grounded in anti-Christian rather than in Turkish (ethno-)nationalist motives (Birol, Talay). This interpretation is still the overriding one in most Syriac and Assyrian communities and to some extent is supported by the fact that in so many places not only Armenians, who were seen as âdisloyalâ to the state, were killed, but that other Christians were included indiscriminately. The fact that in other places Syriac Christians were spared because of their supposed loyalty to the state indicates that the motives, whether of the Young Turk government, local governors or the Kurdish Hamidiye troops complicit in the massacres, in fact varied widely: from anti-Christian, anti-Armenian or anti-Syriac sentiments to Turkish ethnocentrism, but also including very local rivalries over land and power, or over real or assumed foreign support of Christian communities (Gaunt, Ãngör).
This variety of possible motives for the Sayfo is addressed in the editorsâ Introduction as well as in Gauntâs chapter, but it is here that the limits of the present volume come to the fore. While it provides an excellent introduction to the topic of the Syriac/Assyrian Sayfo and successfully widens the perspective by bringing in new topics (which hopefully will encourage new and ongoing research, such as into the specific experience of women, as touched upon in Hellot-Bellierâs article), it is its overall analysis that is in particular need of further research. Especially the distinction, as put forward by the editors (p. 16), between synchronic ânationalâ, and diachronic âcolonialâ (in the sense of âtargeting native populationsâ) explanatory models, the first focusing on ethnic and national motivations, the second on long-term religious motivations, overlooks important work on Ottoman studies that shows how earlier episodes of genocidal violence that targeted Christians (in Mount Lebanon, Damascus, Aleppo and, indeed, Hakkari) were part of larger geopolitical movements where groups of Christians (or other so-called âminoritiesâ) were targeted because of a complex interplay of religious, local socio-economic and geopolitical factors, something that the Sayfo brings out even more clearly than the Armenian genocide. Seen from that perspective, the genocidal violence of the First World War is part of a long history of violence at the intersection of outside (imperial) pressures and inside insecurities and discussions about the nature of the state. Therefore, the genocidal violence in the decades up to as well as during the First World War is perhaps better understood as a combination of diachronic increase of geopolitical and local sectarian tensions, with very local synchronic events that lead to the actual violence playing out in different ways and different forms, despite being part of an overall ideology. Such an approach can do justice to the different interpretations of the causes of those involved (essentialist anti-Christian ideologies in Islamic societies, local rivalries over socio-economic resources, exclusivist ethno-nationalist ideologies, and geopolitical concerns and rivalries) without having to pit one interpretation against another.