What happened in Artsakh is a grim lesson for Assyrians
My good friend and fellow activist Max J. Joseph said the following in his closing keynote speech at the 2020 Assyrian Policy Institute’s Virtual Conference:
For Assyrians, there is a major lesson here. I want to repeat what I had written recently: the sovereign, democratic state of Armenia with its diaspora and global advocacy base, multi-billion dollar economy, trade links, a professional army, celebrity power and the ability to raise millions of dollars overnight couldn’t leverage enough support from any world power near or far to protect a tiny piece of land almost fully populated by Armenians from the advance of forces deployed by two despots and their autocracies. Assyrians should be under no illusion that any US administration, or any other power, will ‘save’ us and help us prosper in our homeland as we, a minority absent all of the above which Armenians have collectively developed over the last century, continue to beg at the feet of our adoptive states for scraps of aid and acknowledgment, and sing and dance about the systems, both in the East and the West, which legitimise and perpetuate our oppression.
We are witnessing this unravel in the Northern Kurdish controlled region of Iraq. The timeline of atrocities committed against the indigenous Assyrian population in Iraq is a long and catastrophic one. For the sake of this written piece, let’s focus on the ISIS invasion and where it left us, a disenfranchised minority.
Unsurprisingly, when ISIS rolled through the Nineveh Plain in 2014, the people of those townships found themselves disarmed by the Kurdish Peshmerga forces who promised to protect the towns. They were sitting ducks. Paul Jeffrey in the Catholic News Service described it as follows:
Disarmed by the Kurds, who had promised to protect religious minorities from the Islamic State, the Christians watched nervously as the caliphate’s troops advanced. Despite reassurances that they would stay and fight, the Peshmerga suddenly pulled out in August 2014, forcing tens of thousands of Christians, Yezidis and others to run for their lives. Thousands who didn’t make it out were reportedly executed. Many women who remained behind were forced to become sexual slaves by Islamic State fighters.
Three years ago we saw the ousting of two democratically elected mayors of predominantly if not entirely Assyrian townships of the Nineveh Plain: Mr. Faiz Abed Jahwareh of Alqosh, and Mr Basim Bello of Tel Keppe. In their place were installed two Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) affiliated pawns to promote KDP policies. The details were covered here.
What is more troubling for me to accept is our own people being used as pawns to perpetuate the false narrative that our safety and security is best handled by our overlords. We know this to be a lie as we witnessed when ISIS mercenaries crossed into Iraq from Syria on their way to establish the Islamic caliphate in Mosul.
To add insult to injury we are facing a PR juggernaut in the West backed by an endless supply of illegal oil revenues by the ruling families of Iraqi Kurdistan. This ties in to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in a series of tweets I recently published on Twitter:
Public relations firms have been used by oppressive oligarch regimes for decades to either control the narrative or supply the public and international community with answers to draw attention away or towards a particular situation. We’re witnessing this in the case of #Artsakh.
For Assyrians living in Iraq and Kuwait in the 90s, we saw this play out flawlessly leading up to the Persian Gulf War. The Bush administration had to sell the American people on sending their sons and daughters to die for oil-rich sheikhs.
On the website prwatch.org it states that “US Congressman Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana — a conservative Democrat who supported the Gulf War — later estimated that the government of Kuwait funded as many as 20 PR, law and lobby firms in its campaign to mobilize US opinion and force against Hussein.”
The lies worked and we are still suffering from the consequences of that war. The Armenians of Artsakh will have what happened that year on their conscience for a long time. We as Assyrians, mourn for them and all the soldiers that died defending Artsakh only to surrender their ancestral lands.
I used to believe that truth would ultimately prevail in the end. But in this post-truth era, we are witnessing crimes against humanity disguised under the veil of effective PR campaigns.
As I write this article, bots are already actively replying on my Twitter account to create a counter narrative. This occurs when we try to shine a light on the reality on the ground whether it’s in the Nineveh Plain or in Artsakh. Politicians in Iraq are busy fattening their pockets as are the ruling Kurdish families in the North while selling the international community on the lie that everything is ok, and there’s no cause for concern.
We know that the lobbying group Kurdish Development Corporation chaired by Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, for example, was set up to keep the facade up and represent the KRG’s interests in the West. As Assyrians don’t control legal and illegal oil revenues, it would be an unsurmountable task to keep up with the KRG’s propaganda firms. In essence, this leaves one party dominating the false narrative in perpetuity.
We are victims but let’s stop allowing ourselves to be victimized and look inwards. Nobody will save Assyrians but Assyrians. Nobody will fight and die for their land but the people inhabiting those lands. There is no super power that will arrive to save the day and when they do, somehow, we emerge worse off. What happened in Artsakh and the Nineveh Plain is a tragedy, and we must rely on ourselves to fight for our survival.
