Jan 26, 2015

Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan sent a “Letter to the Syriac People” from his prison cell last week, calling on Syriacs and Kurds to join forces in building a joint nation in Mesopotamia. “It is the foremost duty and responsibility of the Kurdish people to help overcome the tragic history of this ancient Mesopotamian people and to enable its resurrection,” Ocalan wrote of the Christian minority that has been largely driven out of its homeland in southeastern Anatolia over the last century. The PKK leader was underscoring a minority policy adopted by the Kurdish nationalist movement in recent years, in which it has sought to embrace the Syriacs and present itself as a multiethnic democratic force.

At the political level, this policy has worked to some extent, with several Syriacs elected to public office on the ticket of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), Turkey’s largest Kurdish party, which has links with the PKK. But at the grass-roots level, it is a different story. The alliance has led to bitter divisions within the Syriac community, where distrust of the Kurds runs deep. The Kurdish movement, on the other hand, has not been able to translate its outreach policy into neighborly relations on the ground, with violent attacks on Christians, land grabs and intimidation still very much the order of the day in the Tur Abdin region, the historic homeland of the Syriacs.

A century ago, Syriacs numbered around 200,000 in Tur Abdin, which straddles the Turkish provinces of Mardin and Sirnak. Of these, around 100,000 were slaughtered in the massacres of Anatolian Christians during World War I by Ottoman troops and Kurdish irregulars. The remaining Syriacs hung on for another few decades, before fleeing persecution, poverty and the war between Kurdish rebels and Turkish forces later in the century. Today, 200,000 to 300,000 Syriacs live in Western Europe, while only 2,000 to 3,000 remain in Tur Abdin.

“The erasure of the Assyrian-Syriac-Chaldean people is a great loss for the culture of the Middle East,” Ocalan wrote in his letter carried by the pro-PKK Firat news agency. “It is of the highest importance that the Assyrian-Syriac-Chaldean people, who have been dispersed all over the world, participate in the process of laying the foundations of a common homeland and democratic nation and that, accordingly, they should come back together.”

At its political top, the Kurdish movement has gone to some lengths to implement this policy in recent years. BDP leaders like Ahmet Turk, the mayor of Mardin, have publicly apologized for the Kurdish part in the 1915 massacres of Christians. Syriac candidates have been sought by the BDP to run on its tickets, and Syriacs have in this way attained public offices for the first time in the history of the Turkish Republic. Syriac councilors now sit on the district councils of both Midyat and Idil, two towns in the heartland of the Tur Abdin, while the nearby city of Mardin has a Syriac woman as a co-mayor alongside Ahmet Turk, the Kurdish tribal chief who holds the office. Thanks to the Kurdish party, Syriacs are even represented in Turkey’s national parliament in Ankara for the first time since the foundation of the republic, with Syriac deputy Erol Dora elected to the Grand National Assembly on the BDP ticket in 2011.