To The handsom, thank you for posting this, thought this might be of interest to you too:
Assyrian genocide studies
The Assyrians Surviving Genocide After World War I
Prof. Anahit Khosroyeva Armenia
Prof. Khosroyeva is a specialist in the Assyrian genocide studies and has published a book on this topic. The following is the complete text of Prof. Khosroyeva´s speech at the Assyrian National Convention, held in September 2005 in Boston.
During the World War I along with the Armenians the Assyrians, one of the most ancient nations of the Middle East, also underwent the cruel massacres under the influence and direction of the Young Turks´ government. In the Ottoman Turkey and the adjacent territories, where more than one million Assyrians lived, a real genocide was implemented according to the criteria of international law. But the tragedy of Assyrians did not come to the end with this. Both during the World War I and after it the Assyrian nation bled both from the Europe´s incitements and from the slaughters and oppressions organized by Turkish, Kurdish, Iranian and Arabian tyrants.
The end of World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire gave a birth to hopes of gaining autonomy among the Assyrians. Doomed to unbearable conditions because of the policy implemented by Turkish government, they had to pin certain hopes on Russian and British authorities, which made lavish promises that in return for their military support, after the triumphal end of the war the countries of Triple Entente will enable the Assyrians to establish an independent state. Lulling them with these promises both the Russians and the British resolved a number of their strategic and political problems of primary importance at the cost of the Assyrians´ blood both in Turkey and in Iran, and eventually did not fulfill their promises.
Part of the Assyrian refuges, who escaped Turkish yataghan as early as in 1918, reached an Iraqi town Baqubah, and the other part that together with the Armenians made up about 50-60 thousand people, reached Baghdad[1]. Here they were lodged in camps constructed by the British army, were they lived in tents. Although the refugees had enough food, but the conditions of life were unbearable. One of the eyewitnesses testified that "in the beginning the number of dying people in average reached 70-80 people a day. Corpses of the Armenians and Assyrians were taken from hospital straight to the cemetery. And as here the number of Assyrian refuges was greater than that of Armenians´, the number of the dead among them was also greater.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SiyasetMeydani/message/51589
|