From the 14th to the 16th of June, Syriac people (Aramean-Chaldean-Assyrian) and with them all people who are striving for a just and peaceful world commemorate the genocide on the Christian people in 1915 , called ‘Sayfo’ in the Syriac language, which means ‘sword’.
The genocide was carried out by the newly formed political elite that would later build the Turkish state, the Committee of Union and Progress, which was in power in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.
As the Ottoman Empire gradually collapsed, with Christian peoples in the Balkans gaining their independence in 1912, peoples in Africa and Arabia also rebelled. The Ottoman state took advantage of the outbreak of WWI in 1914 to carry out massacres of Christians in the Aegean, Thrace and in Van and Hakkari. In 1915, the Ottomans started a genocide of Syriacs and Armenians in Van, Bitlis and surrounding areas, then extending this to Diyarbakır, Hakkari and Tur Abdin.
The Ottoman Empire that were, as an ally of Germany, in war with Russia, feared the support of the Christian people within its border for the Christian tsarists empire. This is one of the thousand sad examples how the people of the Middle East become the victims of the war between empires.
This genocide launched against the Syriac, Armenian and Hellenic peoples of Mesopotamia and Anatolia killed more than a million Armenians, half a million Syriacs and 300 thousand Greeks. Hundreds of thousands of others were displaced or forcibly converted to Islam. In the process, the property of the Christian peoples was seized.
Even though a genocide could never be described it numbers, it still is horrifying to see the results of these massacres: In the beginning of the 20th century, there were over 500 thousand Syriacs living in these lands, but as a result of the massacres and forced migrations that started in 1915 and continued until 1924, two thirds of the population was destroyed. As a result of the pressures and assimilation policies that continued afterwards, the Syriac language, identity and culture came to the point of extinction.
Hundreds of churches and monasteries belonging to Syriacs were destroyed, many immovable properties belonging to institutions and individuals were confiscated, the names of settlements were changed and schools providing education in Syriac were closed.
Due to these oppressive practices, most of the remaining population was forced to migrate abroad. Today, the Syriac population living in Turkey has declined to 20 thousand. A lot of people fled also to today’s North-East Syria and settled close to the river of ܓ݂ܰܒܽܘܪ / Xabûr (engl. Chabur). After the Turkish occupation of the town of Serê Kaniyê they were again forced to flee.
We know from examples in the world that condemning crimes against humanity and confronting the truth are extremely important steps in the construction of social peace and the development of conscience and feelings of justice. The demand and expectation of the Syriac people is the realization of a sincere confrontation.
