Since the middle of the last century, dangers began to close in on the Christian presence in this region of Upper Mesopotamia, and particularly in neighboring Armenia. The operations of Kurdification and Turkification multiplied in speed and violence with the growing disintegration of the Ottoman state and the expanding role of the European Russian powers ("neighboring Armenia to the north, which was subject to Turkey"), in addition to the competing Western powers—the English, the French, the German, and the American. The problem is that the activities of these Western powers took on a religious, "Christian," character, through the missionary missions: the Russian Orthodox, the French Catholic, and the English and American Protestant. Thus this region became, as has been its custom throughout history, an arena of bloody[?] conflict between the local powers and the great colonial powers—Britain, France, Russia, and Germany—in addition to the Ottoman state, the Kurdish feudal powers, and the Armenian and Syriac nationalist independence movements. This situation made it easy for the Ottomans to give the conflict a religious coloring and to encourage the Kurdish aghas and gangs, so that the Christians—"the Syriacs and Armenians"—would be regarded as the ideal scapegoat for the practice of bloody rites of revenge.

Contrary to what many would expect, these European "Christian" powers played no positive or protective role for the Syriac and Armenian Christians; rather, they did the very opposite, contributing directly and indirectly to inflaming the intensity of the violence, and even pushing and encouraging the Kurdish and Turkish forces to increase their repression against these Christians. There are numerous admissions and pieces of evidence proving, for example, that the men of the Catholic missionary missions used to pay some of the Kurdish aghas to assault the "Orthodox and Nestorian" clergy and to force them to abandon their "Eastern" rite and embrace "Catholicism." This European "Christian" conduct toward the Eastern Christian churches is nothing new; it is well known and clear to every reader of the history of Christianity, from the Romans and the Byzantines, through the Crusades, down to the present age.

Thus the European states, in coordination with their missionary missions, embroiled the Armenians in particular, and likewise the Syriacs, in political schemes and failed struggles against the Turks—and then abandoned them at the critical moments in order to preserve their interests with the Ottoman state and the Kurdish feudal powers.

The value of the book "al-Qusara fi Nakabat al-Nasara" ("The Utmost Account of the Calamities of the Christians") lies in the fact that its author was an "eyewitness" who lived through the events, recorded them, and conveyed them directly from those who had lived through them. Father Ishaq Armaleh the Syriac was born in the region in 1879 and died in 1954 in Beirut; in addition to his role as a great and cultured priest, he was the author of many books on the history and culture of the Syriacs, in both Arabic and Syriac. In this book the author gives us the vivid and painful details of the operations of killing and ethnic extermination carried out by the Turkish forces and the gangs of the Kurdish aghas against the Syriac villages and towns. We learn, for example, of what befell the village of "al-Saʿdiyya," east of the city of "Diyarbakir." Three thousand Syriac Christians ("along with some Armenians") lived in this village. In a single day the Kurdish gangs attacked, and no more than three persons of its inhabitants remained. Even the people who had managed to take refuge in the village church: "the Kurds and the soldiers came, bored through the roof of the church, poured petroleum over them, and burned them." When the spirit of destructive hatred flares up, it justifies its existence with all manner of flimsy pretexts—among them ignorance of history and language. As an example of these linguistic pretexts, the author tells us of the Syriac Christian "Dayr Umar" (the Monastery of Umar) in the region of Tur Abdin. What is curious is that the Kurds and the Turks claimed that this monastery, since it bears the name "Umar," proves that it had been a mosque built by the Caliph "Umar ibn al-Khattab" (may God be pleased with him). Because of this linguistic ignorance, the Kurds did not realize that the name "Umro" in Syriac means "the monastery"—that is, "the flourishing place." Because of this misunderstanding of the name, a group of Kurds attacked the monastery and killed all the monks and priests, along with seventy Christians with them, and they still reside in the monastery to this day. p. 75

Some of the events and tragedies recounted in the book remind us of similar practices that took place in our modern age in various countries—and these were not necessarily directed against people who differ in language and religion, but could be against people of the same language and religion, as is now happening in Algeria. "The defense of religion" appears as a flimsy pretext for justifying revenge, rape, and seizure: for example, in the Syriac village of "al-Qusur" south of the city of "Mardin," the Kurdish aghas and the Turkish soldiers attacked the inhabitants and slaughtered them, and they did not stop at that, as the author tells us; rather: "the sheikhs of the Kurds, and especially those who had let their beards[?] grow long and dyed[?] them, would stand at the mouth of the well, in their wicked right hand a blade or a knife, and they would pronounce the basmala over each individual, slaughter him, and lower him to the bottom of the well. And a savage man of the people came upon several children and climbed with them to the roof, and he kept seizing them one by one by the feet and hurling each like a slingshot to the ground below, saying to the boy, 'Go tend the lambs,' and to the girl, 'Go guard the cucumber patch.' In this manner he did away with fifty boys and girls." p. 110

Either the creation of a national identity that recognizes diversity, or keeping society at odds, united only by despotic governments through repression

So that our purpose in speaking of this book and of the tragic events that befell our Syriac brothers in the region of Upper Mesopotamia ("present-day Turkish Kurdistan") may not be misunderstood, and so that the discussion of these events may not be exploited to launch racist judgments and rancorous delusions against our Kurdish brothers and against our neighbors and brethren the Turks—who, for us, remain like all the peoples of the earth, with their glories and virtues and with their flaws and failings—our reading of the tragic events of this book prompts us to make the following observations:

First, it must be emphasized that these crimes of ethnic extermination and civil massacres did not take place in all the Kurdish regions, but only in the region of Upper Mesopotamia currently belonging to Turkey and now known as "Turkish Kurdistan." That is, these crimes were not an "ethnic-national" phenomenon encompassing all the areas of Iraqi Kurdish presence, as is proven by the fact that they did not occur in Iran. Moreover, these criminal practices did not occur in the rest of the regions of Turkey either, and particularly not in Istanbul, where hundreds of thousands of Greek and Armenian Christians and others lived alongside their Muslim Turkish brothers. From this we say that there are historical particularities and exceptional circumstances peculiar to this region that led to the commission of such crimes. If we take, for example, the case of the Iraqi Kurdish regions, we note that the Kurds of northern Iraq resemble the rest of the Iraqis in not being accustomed to waging civil wars and direct popular violence against other inhabitants. It may be observed that all the rebellions and wars that occurred in the region from the last century until now continued to take place between the armed Kurdish militias and the army of the central government in Baghdad. In the most intense cases of conflict, with the greatest numbers of victims, between the government [and] the militias, it never happened that the Kurds thought of practicing direct civil violence against the other inhabitants—the Arabs and Syriacs neighboring them. Likewise, despite the presence of Kurdish inhabitants throughout Iraq, and particularly in the capital Baghdad alongside the rest of the Arabic-speaking Iraqis, it never once happened that violence and killing were practiced between Arabs and Kurds ("as usually happens in India between the different communities"). This state of affairs is connected to the nature of the mentality of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who have been accustomed since the dawn of history to accepting the foreign migrations ("Semitic and Asiatic") that never ceased settling around these two fertile rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates—in addition to the decisive and enduring role that the central state ("national or foreign") has continued to play in the history of Mesopotamia, owing to the riverine, environmental, and geographic necessities. For this reason the history of Mesopotamia, despite its perpetual violence, did not know civil violence ("inhabitants against inhabitants"), but was always a regulated, governmental violence. Thus the absence of civil racist violence is one of the traits of the history of Iraq, with all its religious, sectarian, and linguistic diversities.

As for the region of Upper Mesopotamia ("present-day Turkish Kurdistan"), it differs almost entirely from the rest of Mesopotamia, in that plateaus and mountains are spread across it, isolating each region and each population group from the others and preventing communication and intermingling. This lack of communication led to little mixing among the inhabitants, created ignorance of the other, and helped to bring to the surface delusions, rumors, and rancor among the communities that were far apart linguistically and religiously. This mountainous geographic situation helped the inhabitants of Upper Mesopotamia ("the Syriac Christians") to preserve their religious and linguistic particularity and to resist the operations of Islamization and Arabization that occurred in the rest of Mesopotamia, as well as in Syria, after the Arab Islamic conquest—when the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the East ("the Syriac Christians") converted to Islam, spoke Arabic, and fashioned the Arab Islamic civilization in Damascus and Baghdad.

This geographic factor of the region of Upper Mesopotamia, and the density of the Syriac Christian presence adjacent to the Armenian Christian presence in the region of Armenia ("Lake Van"), which neighbors and interlocks with the region of Upper Mesopotamia—in addition to the interventions of the surrounding powers, the Iranian and the Russian, together with the activities of the Western missions—all these factors helped to inflame the atmosphere and to sow delusions and rancor among the neighboring Kurdish tribes, which were exploited and pushed by the Ottoman authorities, who encouraged the spirit of hatred and the acquisitive desires of the Kurdish aghas against these "wealthy Christian infidels," the agents of Russia and the West, in order to exterminate them and seize their possessions and their lands. We say that, in order to avoid issuing racist and hostile judgments against the Kurds and the Turks, one must take into account the historical, geographic, and political circumstances that led to these massacres. But this does not, of course, prevent us from condemning them, exposing them, and educating people about them, so that they may not recur[?] and in an attempt to repair their present consequences—and so that we may create the reasonable foundation that allows the various peoples, religions, and denominations of the region to live in peace, security, and brotherhood.

Second, the other lesson we learn from our acquaintance with this tragedy concerns the responsibility of the cultural and political elites in leading their peoples, either toward violence and self-destruction, or toward peace, stability, and progress. It seems that the plagues of violence that afflict peoples arise essentially from a state of repression, the accumulation of suffering, and the persistence of distortion[?] over decades; and depending on the role of the active elites ("the religious, the cultural, and the political") that influence the people and determine their inclinations and behavior, there are two possibilities for the people to discharge this repressed and accumulated violence. Either these leading elites succeed in instilling awareness in the people and in directing their rancor against the fundamental causes of the suffering—that is, against the ruling tyrants, whether foreign colonizers or "national" rulers—so that the revolution ("peaceful or violent") breaks out in order to be rid of injustice and to install the better alternative; and there are countless well-known cases of this in history. Or else the leading elites are weak, torn apart, and deformed by the ruling class ("foreign or national"); in that case the "rabble," the wretches, and the deformed are able, in coordination with the ruling class, to lead the "awareness" of the people and to succeed in making their accumulated rancor turn toward an imaginary enemy—either an "external enemy," such as a neighboring state, whereupon wars break out against this "enemy" people on flimsy pretexts, most of which turn on "usurped" borders; or else this rancor is directed against an "internal enemy," usually represented by a group that differs politically, religiously, or linguistically. This is the primary cause of the internal and civil wars that have occurred in all homelands and crises. We have many examples, among them Hitlerism, during which the ruling class was able to exploit the Germans' suffering from unemployment and famine and the humiliation dealt them by the European states, and to direct the rancor against imaginary enemies such as the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and the Slavs. And we have many other examples of well-known civil wars, such as Lebanon or Afghanistan, and much else. This is exactly what happened in the case of the Kurds in Upper Mesopotamia, where they directed their rancor, accumulated toward the Ottoman state, against their Christian Syriac brothers, and likewise against the Armenians to a greater degree, because of their greater numbers and the intensity of their independence movements. The tragedy that the Syriacs lived through has made us realize the necessity of creating a national historical awareness among all the children of the homeland, however much they may differ in religion, language, or denomination—an awareness that they all share in the land of the homeland with all it carries of history, civilizations, and religions. Without the creation of a shared national identity based on a sincere and genuine feeling that all the diversities of the homeland share equally in creating the homeland's ideal history and civilizations, it is impossible to speak of the possibilities of coexistence among the different religious and linguistic diversities. As long as each group believes that it has its own "nationhood," its own masses, dreams, and different "grand national" projects, it is impossible to speak of peace, security, democracy, and stability. The perpetuation of conflicts, civil wars, and despotic authorities in our countries stems, first and last, from the loss of this shared historical national identity. The great sin into which all the intellectual currents and political parties in the region of the East and the Arab world at large have fallen lies in ignoring the importance of creating the "national identity" particular to each country, and in becoming lost in imported, ready-made discourses—religious and secular—about nationalist aspirations, the right of self-determination, the defense of class interests, and democratic pluralism, along with the fantastical calls for grand national or religious unity, at the expense of realistic and reasonable national unity. It is like one who calls for union with his cousins, his friends, and his neighbors at the very time when he is practicing a policy of scattering his own children and brothers. If we take the example of Iraq: had our governments and our active elites thought, for generations, that before speaking of national rights, the right of self-determination, grand national unity, and other ready-made imported slogans, they ought to teach the Iraqi citizen the truth of his history and the details of the particularities of the groups that make up the Iraqi people—so that when the Kurd, the Turkmen, and the Syriac, as well as the Sunni and the Shiite, learns and feels that, since he belongs to the land of Iraq, the history of Iraq from the time human beings existed until now is truly and genuinely his history; and that his forebears, under their various names, religions, and languages, contributed to the making of all the civilizational stages of this country; and that all the Iraqi groups—religious, linguistic, and sectarian—together constitute the history, the culture, and the being of Iraq; that it should become a recognized legal right that the leadership of the state and of society is not the exclusive preserve of any group, and that all Iraqis, in their various diversities, have the right to share in the administration of the state and of society; and that for the head of state, or the minister of defense, or any senior official, it should suffice that he be a patriotic Iraqi, whether he be Shiite, Kurdish, Syriac, Turkmen, or Yazidi; that the citizen should learn in his school history books that the Arab Islamic civilization in Iraq is not "only" the making of the sons of the Arab nationality who belong racially, tribally, and historically to the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula!!—but rather that this Arab Islamic civilization that flourished in Baghdad is, first of all, an Iraqi civilization, a natural result[?] of the civilizations that sprang up on the land of Iraq, and that all the present-day Iraqi groups contributed to its making; that knowledge and education about the cultural and religious particularities of the different groups should be made widespread, so that it becomes entirely natural for the Kurd, the Turkmen, and the Syriac to see that their songs, their heritage, and their feasts are not confined within the group, but are spread and known to the same degree among the rest of the Arabic-speaking Iraqis, where they are celebrated and circulated in the media, in culture, in theater, and in cinema, like all national occasions and productions. We say that, after all this, no group would feel that it is a distinct and persecuted "nationality, or national, religious, or sectarian minority" oppressed by the "grand nationality"; rather, all would truly feel that they are Iraqis, however much their particularities may differ. At that point it would become strange for anyone to dare to demand autonomy, independence, the right of self-determination, or the realization of the project of "such-and-such a grand nation." Even the Arabic language, were it to be presented as the official prevailing language of the homeland, which history has granted us and which our forebears spoke for many long centuries, and as one that in no way represents "a national language created by our Arab forebears—we, the sons of the glorious Arab nation… etc."—at that point no group would feel that this Arabic language is "nationally" contrary to their mother tongue; rather, it is their language too, because it is the language of their country and their national cultural heritage, in addition to being a rich and great language that unites them with dozens of Arab and Muslim peoples. Even the goal of "Arab unity" would be acceptable to all the different national groups, were they to feel that it is a goal uniting their country with the other Arab countries for economic, cultural, and strategic ends—without expansionist nationalist hallucinations and conspiratorial interventions aimed at realizing the "eternal message"!—but rather a realistic, rational, and democratic rapprochement and solidarity, along the lines of the experience of European unity. This Iraqi problematic may serve as an example of the problematics from which all the Arab homelands suffer, in varying degrees of severity and complexity, and especially those distinguished by religious, sectarian, and linguistic diversity, such as Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, and Morocco. The experiences of our modern history, its disappointments, and its present catastrophes impose upon our intellectuals and our statesmen in the Arab world—and particularly in the Iraqi-Levantine East—that they rationalize[?] their arbitrary romantic nationalist theses and grant them the earthly, realistic, historical, national dimension that has been suppressed for many generations and until now. This national vision alone is capable of gathering beneath its banner all the different intellectual and political theses—religious, leftist, or liberal—and of creating the solid foundation for the unity of all the groups within a single homeland. Without the creation of a national identity that recognizes and knows diversity and particularity and makes everyone feel their authentic belonging to the homeland, its land and its history, we will remain forever scattered and at odds, united by nothing but the despotic governments that unite us and lead us, through repression, starvation, and humiliation, toward the catastrophes of their internal and international wars.