Our recent history here is unenviable. In keeping with the rhetoric of Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Sako who first warned of the dangers of arming Assyrians, and then condemned the US for supporting the endeavor, Archbishop of Erbil Bashar Warda committed to the same line in a recent interview with NCRegister regarding the formation and recruitment of all “Christian militias”.

Interestingly, Bashar Warda (a man once identified as ministering “Kurdish Christians” in an unamended article) claims that he is not a politician in the latter half of the clip, yet first says he “encourages [our] people to join either the Iraqi Army or the Peshmerga and not the militias”.

If Warda condemns violence, the hegemony of “tribes” or “people who solve their problems with guns”, how can he encourage Assyrians to enlist into the peshmerga and justify it under the pretense it is one of the two legitimate forces in Iraq? The peshmerga is not one force, but several. It is entirely divided on Kurdish party political and tribal lines, and everyone knows this. Just because it is a recognized institutionally within the Iraqi state does not mean it is a “unified” modern force capable of fulfilling the ambitions of Assyrians in the Nineveh Plain — an area, I love repeating, that is outside the KRG.

Religious leaders meeting with EU Parliamentarians

I’m sure many of us cannot even name one Kurdish religious leader based in the KRG, yet ours occupy the media both here and there with alarming regularity. Not only do we have KRG-created political proxies, we have to contend with this slew of religious leaders-turned-politicians who envision Kurdistan as our future. In a way (and putting aside Church politics for my own sanity), this has been allowed to happen because of the lack of a inclusive, unified nationalist movement. And it is here I appropriately turn to the party which is colloquially known as such.

The Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM)

Yonadam Kanna signing an autograph for Alaha Ashur.

Last weekend, Yonadam Kanna was re-elected as Secretary General of the ADM in bizarre circumstances. I say bizarre because it isn’t really an election if there is the only one candidate— something rightly frowned upon in each and every democratic election, whatever the scale. Yet, Kanna was the only candidate and was celebrated for winning all 340 votes.

ADM Illinois Branch summary of the re-election of Yonadam Kanna, in which they stipulate nobody had put themselves forward or nominated anybody else to lead the party.

I want to take this opportunity to highlight how disappointing this is. Admittedly, it was inevitable; Kanna was never going to be seriously challenged in the present circumstances. I had the faint hope that maybe there would be some desperate manifestations of dissent spontaneously take shape after his ascendance became increasingly likely. There wasn’t. His grip on Assyrian politics not only remains intact, but his mandate has been rendered absolute. We all suffer for this in my humble opinion, even his supporters.

Let me be clear with an anecdote: I have been a staunch supporter of the ADM for a long time. As recently as the 2009 Iraqi elections, I queued alone for six hours surrounded by boisterous Arabs and Kurds waiting to enter a makeshift voting center in London set up for those legally allowed to vote provided they met certain requirements. I stood there wearing an ADM lapel pin in hope it would attract a curious stranger or fellow Assyrian and waited patiently. None such interest came.

I was however approached by a man who spoke to me in a language I did not know. I proceeded to casually brush him off: “Sorry, I don’t speak Arabic.” He replied and said “that isn’t Arabic, its Kurdish”, to which I replied “Sorry, I don’t speak Kurdish.” Puzzled, he asked “so what are you?” I replied “Assyrian”. His expression immediately transformed into one of confusion and mockery. He said no more and walked away.

Eventually, after being hassled by the Arab volunteers at length about my documents (they didn’t hassle anyone else), I entered and voted for the ADM. Through all of the nonsense I had endured that day (and far from it being a fun day out, like it was for many Arabs and Kurds I saw smiling and laughing among each other, waving their flags), I walked away feeling that I had done something of mild importance. I have not voted since.

Coming back to Kanna: so much of our pressure and resistance against this one man show (and there is precious little that is meaningful and constructive) is handled by external actors invariably considered to be on the fringes of reality. We are subjected to the usual slurs of knowing nothing, being in diaspora and not appreciating the situation — sadly, all things Kurdish agitators accuse me of when publicly criticizing the KRG.

Our response to KRG abuses is relatively muted from party political sources. We had seen the split between a group of members from the ADM with the formation of political protest group, Abnaa Nahrain. These individuals should have stayed and fought, but, and I say this with the utmost respect for some of their principles: they took the easy way out and reduced our struggle to one across parties. What has now happened to the ADM is a complete gutting of divergent opinion and a lack of criticism — this is unity in the very worst sense.

Kanna is a political genius. Nobody stays in power for over 20 years does so reluctantly, much less make a section of our people believe that — such a term is always engineered and orchestrated as such, sometimes delicately and emotionally, and sometimes through force. He has mastered the manipulation of narrative from 2003 until now: everything good that could have happened did not happen, and everything bad that could have happened did so. We realize this when we look around us, yet we are supposed to be uncritical and thank him for his contributions.

I understand all of the words Kanna uses individually, but I understand none of them when he puts them together. He is a man who could take off one hundred suits and still be wearing one more underneath. Under his watch, the movement died and became a political party with the signing of an Islamic Constitution, normalizing of relations with the KRG and the surrendering of Nohadra. It has now died as a party in 2017 with the full ownership of it handed over to this allegedly reluctant hero.

This is what is crucial: for Kanna, what is more important than anything else, is the aforementioned seat at the table. The world could burn all around him and we could all leave Iraq, but the important thing is that our ashes are represented in the Iraqi parliament.

2014: In the infamous interview rejecting a “racist” Christian Nineveh Plain Province, another answer regarding Assyrian marginalization in Iraq.

Again, for Kanna, “marginalization” is primarily defined as political remoteness to power. Nevermind the long list of abuses suffered in Iraq and in lands administered by the KRG (both of which have included even the softening of terms from ethnic cleansing to “demographic change”); the first thing that came to mind for Kanna was how many seats do we have at the table. This kind of thinking has hollowed out any impetus we could have had to forge a sustainable future for ourselves in “Free Iraq”. This rhetoric kills popular movements and the energy behind them — people don’t resist and mobilize for a seat at the table, they do so for their lands and rights.

In some ways, Kanna is one of the strongest believers in Iraq, more than any Arab or Kurd I have ever known. The reason for this, as I can only presume, is that his position in the allotted quota for minorities has been rendered unassailable since his only opponents are other Assyrians. Whereas ordinary politicians must fight for their seat with huge advertising campaigns and relentless canvassing, Kanna essentially has political tenure. Iraq is the fountain from which he sustains himself and from which we are repeatedly poisoned. I am not claiming that we should cease our participation, all am I asking is what has it achieved so far to warrant us continuing with the same formula?

Jeopardizing relationships with Arabs and Kurds for the sake of our nation is a dangerous, and often fatal course of action but these relationships must be analyzed and assessed for what they are and what effect they have had on us, not what we hope they could be or what they could yield for us. Kanna wears his golden lapel pin of a map of Iraq and tries to convince us of the latter.

The Assyrian Democratic Movement was Assyrian, but it now readily uses the “Chaldean Assyrian Syriac (Christian)” booshala name; it used to be Democratic until a room full of hundreds of people could not see another option other than a man who has led them for 20 years with precious little to show for it; and it used to be a movement until it became a club which resents criticism and interference from both Assyrian non-members and members alike. Its transformation is all encompassing.

The ADM needs to reverse this. It needs to become a healthy political party again — one that can inspire a movement. Failure to do so will threaten its survival post-Kanna. Its many dissenters need to gather the confidence to struggle internally for a better party and liberate it from what it has become. I write all of these things about the ADM not because I am compelled to by another ideology, faction or group, but because I, like many people disillusioned with the course the ADM has taken since 2003, simply want it to be better.

Maybe I am wrong to express any optimism about a resurgent ADM, but one thing that it has produced and sponsored that is of priceless value to us as a nation is the NPU. However, this one glimmer of hope can easily be extinguished via compromise or a lofty decree, as has been the case in the past with the ADM under Kanna.

All of those things considered, its difficult to chart its path back to becoming, once again, a powerful political unit fit for our modern plight but I truly believe it needs to in order to take its place as the most effective voice for the Assyrian nation in Iraq. One of the first things it needed to do in order to recapture its purpose was to grow out of Kanna. The time was ripe for his apprentices and proteges to gracefully surpass him and submit their own vision of the future for scrutiny and discussion, but none of them even attempted to. We are left with the same gatekeeper, who holds a key that is out of sight and succumbing to rust.

Criticizing this sadly produces one of two effects: it either consolidates Kanna’s supporters around him even tighter, or feeds the flames sparked by those who criticize out of hatred or vested interests. This makes the situation unbearable for those like me who do wish that the ADM and its members were strong enough to respond to internal and external pressures with thoughtfulness rather than paranoia or obfuscation.

Conclusion

All of the signs are there for catastrophe. From the situation regarding oil reserves in the region, to an unpredictable and dysfunctional Federal Government and the actions of our cultish political and religious leaders — there does not seem to be enough space left on our back for another knife. Our nation cannot take much more before it becomes something which retreats into the shadows of Iraqi society, surrendering itself to history and becoming a fading remnant of Iraq’s 21st C shame.

In what is now Iraq, Assyrians have gone from demanding a sovereign state to protesting a ban on alcohol.

Iraq and all of the suffering it has entailed for us has shaped and shrunken our national consciousness. The identity of a victim is often determined or shaped by the oppressor, and we have internalized all of the bad things and punishments we have endured in Iraq for being Assyrians and haven’t converted them into anything positive. We have internalized this suffering within the borders of Iraq, and that has led us to believe that our liberation from it lies entirely within the same borders and state apparatus.

Through this lens, Assyrians simply don’t understand the urgency and care with which we need to approach our plight. We need to expand our national horizons to encompass all Assyrian national ambitions. Assyrians don’t necessarily need to become superstar activists, they just need to become activated in some way. They need to make a contribution. We need to organize on a global level with a view to building our own power and capacities in diaspora and in our homelands.

The only way to expand our national consciousness and our sense of purpose to meet this ambition is to think Assyrian: that is to say, not Iraqi, or anything else for that matter. We have to understand and accept the fact that we are alone. Once this thought penetrates our consciousness, we can truly begin the work necessary that will transform all of our lives.

Unless we manufacture something this drastic which reconstitutes power in our own hands and not the hands of others, we will lie broken on the field along with our ancestral guardians who have watched over us since our birth as a people. Here is my twist: the final betrayal will come from all of us individually. Let us not recline in our chairs in our twilight years and reflect on this impending regret.