GENOCIDE SCHOLARS BECOMING MORE AWARE OF THE ASSYRIAN GENOCIDE
Assyrian International News Agency (AINA)
May 8 2011
In the next installment of the Assyrian Genocide Research Center’s
interviews with Assyrian Genocide experts, Joseph Haweil speaks with
one of the world’s foremost Assyrian Genocide scholars, Professor
David Gaunt.
David Gaunt completed his doctorate at Uppsala University 1975 and
is presently professor of history at Sodertorn University.
Professor Gaunt’s 2006 book Massacres, Resistance, Protectors:
Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I is
a seminal work on the Assyrian Genocide.
Can you tell us about your personal and academic background?
I was born in England during World War II and grew up in the United
States. My father’s family is all English from Yorkshire, my mother’s
family is Jewish from Ukraine. I came to Sweden in 1968 and have
lived here ever since.
I have taught at Uppsala, Umeå and Sodertorn universities. In addition
I have led research at the Swedish Institute for Future Research
and for Stockholm Social Services. I have written, co-written or
edited about twenty books and over one hundred articles. Most of my
early research was on Swedish social history or contemporary social
problems. Besides writing about the Assyrian genocide I have written
about genocide and mass violence against Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Kurds
and Armenians.
When did you initially learn of the Assyrian Genocide and what sparked
your interest in writing about it?
I was giving a lecture on the Jewish and Roma Holocaust sometime
in the late 1990s. Some of the listeners came up afterwards and
said they were Assyrians and asked me if I knew anything about the
Assyrian genocide. I said I knew nothing, but was willing to learn
if they had any literature, documents and so on. After a time one of
them came back with the only thing he could find at that time, which
was Suleyman Hinno’s collection of oral history of Seyfo in Tur Abdin.
This began my collection of literature and documents. The students
also introduced me to Jan Betsawoce who had a private collection of
works on Assyrian issues and we began to co-operate and he became my
assistant. Together we have tried to build up a complete collection
of books, articles and archival documents on Seyfo. We have collected
from Turkey, Lebanon, Syr ia, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, the Vatican,
USA, England, France and Germany. Both of us are very interested in
languages. From the beginning, the primary need was to make available
the books and documents that had been forgotten or were written
in unusual languages. We have translated quite a number of older
sources into Swedish or English and will keep on doing this. Usually
we get sponsorship for printing the books from local Assyrian groups
or associations, and for this we are very grateful. However, after
a while it became obvious that just publishing documents was not
enough and we began to analyze the findings and put them into modern
genocide research and began to publish articles and books based on
original research.
Are you currently undertaking Assyrian Genocide related research? If
so, what areas and sources are you presently examining?
At present I am working on making a sociological profile of the
perpetrators of the genocide in order to see what their motives were.
I am also examining the long-term relations between Assyrians
and Kurds as many sources mention that Assyrians were sometimes
aided and supported by individual Kurds and Yezidis and even whole
tribes. What was the background to this co-operation? Jan Betsawoce
and I are in the process of publishing translations of the rather
obscure French-language journal L’Action Assyro-Chaldeene, which
was published in Beirut in the early 1920s and was a major Assyrian
information channel for the politically engaged. It took us a very
long time even to find issues of this paper. Also we are preparing
a bibliography of books and articles dealing with Seyfo, we are not
yet finished, but it is more than 70 pages long. We think this will
be a very important reference work.
Your book ‘Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian
Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I’ can be considered
amongst the most important, if not the most important contemporary
primary-source work on the Assyrian Genocide. What advice would you
give to both Assyrian and non-Assyrian scholars interested in Assyrian
Genocide primary-source research?
My advice has several points. We must have more archive research
as there are many blank spaces. For instance, the archives in Iran
have not been used yet, but what has been published gives great
insight into what was happening in the Turkish-Iranian border strip
where the first Assyrian groups were massacred already in February
1915 and where a second wave of massacres occurred in 1918. Can we
see who ordered the assassination of Mar Shimun? Also the Turkish
military-history archive obviously has a vast material on the actions
of troops against Assyrian villages. We have just scraped the surface
with our work on the siege of Azakh and there were about 30 different
documents on this in that archive. There should be equally as much
documentation for the battle for Midyat and the siege of Aynwardo.
There sho uld be very much about the military campaign against the
Nestorian tribes in Hakkari. We have the feeling that there are lots
of generations’ old private papers that could give new perspectives
on events: there are manuscripts in people’s attics and storage rooms
that can give great detail about events. As we were working on the
siege of Azakh, many different families came forward with diaries,
poems, chronicles and so on that dealt with the Turkish siege of
that little town. Similar materials need to be recovered, restored
and in case they are very important, published in edited form. Many
central places of documentation are not yet open for research. For
some strange reason the family of General Agha Petros deny access
to his papers. And my assistants have not succeeded in accessing the
archive and libraries of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate in Damascus
or the Syrian Catholic monastery in Sharfe, Lebanon where one of the
most important early writers on Seyfo, Ishak Armale was a teacher. We
would very much like to read his manuscripts. Further, researchers
need to put the genocide into comparison with all of the other major
genocides. What happened to the Assyrians was different from what
happened to the Armenians — why? For instance the Armenians were
deported on long death marches, but the Assyrians with few exceptions
were killed in their home villages without deportation. There was
much political hate-speech against the Armenians, but very little of
this towards the Assyrians, even so both groups were eradicated. We
need more work with a gender perspective on the fates of women and
children. More attention should be placed on the righteous Muslim
neighbors who protected their Assyrian neighbors.
Although the Assyrian Genocide recognition movement has expanded and
gained greater attention during the last decade, do you consider the
frequency of scholarly publication on the issue to have slowed during
the same period?
No I don’t think scholarly publication has slowed down at all. Before
2000 almost nothing had been written on Seyfo that one could even
consider calling scholarly. The only exception that comes to mind
is Joseph Yacoub’s dissertation at the Catholic University in Lyon,
France. It deals mostly with how the League of Nations dealt with the
Assyrian question, but it touches on the genocide in its background
chapters and it is still a very useful piece of research. The
influential works written in the 1980s by the American professor John
Joseph gloss over Seyfo, and can therefore be used by those who stop
genocide recognition. Almost everything we now know about the details
has come in the last 10 years.
How important is the staging of frequent scholarly conferences on the
Assyrian Genocide? Do you feel that the frequency of such conferences
is insufficient or that too often it is Assyrian activists organising
these conferences rather than universities or scholars themselves?
Actually there haven’t been very many academic conferences on the
Assyrian genocide at all. But it does happen that when scholars working
with the Armenian genocide gather they invite someone to present
the Assyrian case. It would be very good to have meetings that were
exclusively dedicated to the Assyrian genocide issue. A first meeting
of this type will be held in Holland in June this year. It may prove
an embryo to something greater.
In 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars recognised
the Assyrian Genocide. Since then, do you think that IAGS has done
enough to support Assyrian Genocide scholarship or advocate for
Assyrian Genocide recognition?
Yes, the IAGS has recognized the Assyrian genocide along with that of
the Greeks. I am not a member so I don’t know the background very well
and I don’t know what kind of evidence they were presented with. This
is a mixed association of scholars and activists, but has as far
as I know it has no international political influence and does not
have a lot of money. The organization had a conference in Sarajevo
in 2007 and there took a vote on a petition presented by some of
the membership. I don’t see what they could do much more that make
their declaration and spread it. I have heard that the organization’s
president Israel Charny has recently put on the internet some articles
on the Assyrian and Greek genocides, but I have not read them. I think
if we are looking for more influence and funding it must in the fir
st hand come from inside the Assyrian community itself. As it is now
only a few –as we say in Swedish “souls on fire” in Sweden, Holland
and the USA have privately supported research and that has been mostly
in the form of paying for translations, printing costs or enabling
research trips. This money is a very welcome form of help, but there
is a need for more continuous support. Support for research on Seyfo
should be coming from a much larger part of the Assyrian community,
otherwise it will look as if the Assyrians themselves don’t think
this event was particularly important.
As you are aware, scholars focusing on the Assyrian Genocide are few.
Why do genocide scholars broadly speak so little about the fate of
co-victims of the Ottoman Empire’s genocide (the Assyrians and Greeks),
as opposed to that of the Armenians?
Genocide scholars are more and more aware of the Assyrian genocide.
What scholars need is the results of new research. More and more the
Assyrian case is mentioned in general genocide text-books and new
editions of older works have new sections covering Assyrians. But we
are starting from a very, very low level of knowledge and with very
little resources other than the few burning-soul activists, who are
not always given the credit that they deserve. The Armenians have a
much longer tradition of research and they have produced many more
books and articles. The Assyrian community cannot expect the same
amount of attention, until it too has produced its own research and
has presented its evidence. Most important: the Armenian community
has co-operated with universities for a very long time. There are
professorships sponsored by Armenia ns in many universities in USA and
there are many universities that have programs in Armenian studies
like UCLA, Michigan, Dearborn, Fresno etc. The Armenians have built
up a major international research library in Paris based on the
collection originally assembled by Nubar Pasha and there is a very
good research center and library in Watertown, Massachusetts. The
Assyrian community needs to build up similar intellectual resources.
By Joseph Haweil Assyrian Genocide Research Center
From: A. Papazian
http://www.aina.org/news/20110508172838.htm