THE ASSYRIANS’ EXODUS.

Evening Star, Issue 22142, 24 September 1935, Page 8

THE ASSYRIANS’ EXODUS.

The plan, which the British Government is specially assisting, to transfer 10,000 Assyrians from northern Iraq to Syria promises to make the end of a chapter of troubles which has lasted since the war. It is likely also to mean the end of a race. The Assyrians boast of being the oldest Christian sect in the world, a claim that is only disputed by the Coptic Church of Egypt, of which the Church of Ethiopia is a branch. They have been extolled also as “a race whose glorious past goes back to the beginnings of history.” During the war they threw off the yoke of tho Turks and fought well for the British. They were too pro-British for the people of Iraq when they were settled in that country, not in one, but in several communities, after the war. Settlement in one community would have made the restless highlanders from the north, Christians among a Mohammedan population, a danger to their past enemies, the Kurds. Dispersed settlement left them helpless when tho British mandate was withdrawn and Iraq became an independent State. Tho Iraqui Government had given the usual assurance guaranteeing protection to minorities. That did not prevent an Iraqui commander, in tho absence of King Feisal, letting loose on certain Assyrian villages a force of Kurdish irregulars, who wiped out 600 of their inhabitants with gunfire. After that it was agreed that tho Assyrians must be moved from Iraq. They seem to have been incapable of forming any common idea in their own minds as to where they should go. Their patriarch, who led them, chiefly complicated their case by insistence on “ temporal ” claims which could not be granted, and had to be exiled to Cyprus. The corollary of temporal power would have been an autonomous Assyrian State. There was a plan first to settle the threatened remnants of a race in Brazil, but that broke down alter much discussion. Then room was to be found for them in British Guiana, but that scheme also proved not feasible. Now it is proposed to transfer 10,000 of tho total number of 35,000 first to tho Khabur River district, in Syria, then, after a probationary period, to tho more fertile valley of the Orontes —historic name—where it is hoped that they will settle down peacefully to agriculture. They will be disarmed, as a condition of their emigration. It is to be seen how they will faro under a French mandate. Others will be scattered among tho other inhabitants; small parties of 200 of them are being shifted now across the frontier. It is taken for granted that they will lose their identity as a race. Tho . plan, which is being worked under the auspices of the League of Nations, involves a financial cost to which Britain is making a special extra contribution of £250,000, in acknowledgment of past services of the Assyrians. But, according to some witnesses, it is a race whose spirit has been broken for whom a new home is now being sought. Symptomatic of the distrust which they feel now for all the world, would-be helpers as well as enemies, was the remark of a Mosul Assyrian to a missionary who was giving him hints on how to plant potatoes —“ Do you think we believe a word you say?”