Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, A History by Joseph Yacoub (review)

This book deals with the little-known genocide of Ottoman Christians who were not Armenians or Greeks during World War I. The year at issue is 1915 although killing continued throughout the war and after. Under the ethnic concept Assyrians, Joseph Yacoub combines separate indigenous Oriental churches: the Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Chaldean, the Church of the East, plus Protestant converts. This ethnically defined Assyrian group differed from the Armenian through its Semitic language, and its settlement south of the Armenians and north of the Arabs. Assyrians primarily inhabited the southern parts of Diyarbakir, Bitlis, and Van provinces in Turkey, in Iran's Urmia region and in Aleppo and Mosul provinces of Syria and Iraq. Being subsistence farmers, craftsmen and shop-keepers, Assyrians lacked the economic importance of the Armenians. The Armenian autonomy movement made great impact with elected members to the National Assembly, but the Assyrians were divided among themselves according to time-worn religious rivalry. In late Ottoman times the Armenians created a rich urban cultural life. But the Assyrians raised hardly any voice inside Ottoman political or cultural life. However, like the Armenians they lived surrounded by Muslims and were increasingly at risk as the declining Empire saw religious tension grow. Enmity and violence directed for political reasons against the Armenians quickly spilled over on the Assyrians without explicit cause.

Yacoub is Emeritus Professor at the Catholic University of Lyon and has done considerable research on the modern history of the Assyrian peoples. This is his first attempt to write on the horrible atrocities committed on the Assyrians during the World War. Stories of the cruelty they were subjected to equal that to which the Armenians were subjected. Often the massacres of the two peoples were organized and perpetrated by the same officials. Since the Assyrian people in the Middle East are now very vulnerable targets of islamist jihad, this book fills a need.

The author's main line of reasoning is that Assyrians have from Sassanid times been afflicted by constant persecution because of their Christianity. He hardly mentions the role of political ideology and socio-economic motives, which makes it difficult to link his interpretation with the main current of comparative genocide scholarship.

The most attractive and successful aspect of the book is its extensive presentation of printed and unprinted primary sources: eyewitness testimonies, reports of missionaries and diplomats, and narratives of survivors. Literally hundreds of sources come to life, some of them rescued from very obscure conditions. Almost all come from pro-Assyrian Christian priests and missionaries. Sadly, Yacoub's long survey takes on the character of an annotated bibliography. The survey cries out for rudimentary source criticism. Lack of Turkish material hinders Yacoub from rising above the Assyrians' own religious-oriented speculations as to the intentions of the Young Turk regime.

This is not a general history of the Assyrian genocide. The historical narrative delivers a wide selection of stories about some of the most hair-raising atrocities taken at face value from the sources. Then follows a chapter with a discussion concerning the aftermath of the genocide including the manipulation of the displaced Assyrians by the British in mandate Iraq, and the frustrating inability of the League of Nations to find a new homeland resulting in massacres 1933 in independent Iraq.

Most of the testimony that Yacoub presents portrays the Assyrians as innocent victims rather than as agents inside conflicts they partially created. This particularly affects his treatment of the Assyrian tribes in the Hakkari Mountains as he neglects to discuss the political and military importance of their co-operation with Russia during the war. Thus his story remains that of unprovoked, sudden and disproportional ethnic cleansing by the Turkish government.

A question begging for an answer is: given the stunning amount of pro-Assyrian literature and newspaper articles cited by Yacoub, how was it possible that the genocide of the Assyrians became so quickly forgotten? Were these...