Dawronoye's
television team visits the guerrillas. Beside Jacob Mirza (front row,
third from left) sits Sargon Adam, holding a machine gun. (Photo
courtesy Sargon Adam, August 1999).
By
Carl Drott
May 25, 2015 --
Warscapes
, posted at
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
with permission --
This
article is primarily based on interviews conducted in Syria and Sweden
between August 2013 and January 2015. For the sake of simplicity, the
term "Syriac" is here employed to denote also those individuals or
communities identifying as Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Christian
Kurds or Christian Arabs.
* * *
In northeastern Syria,?“Christian
militias” (as they are often termed)?are now battling the Islamic State
[also known as ISIS] alongside Kurdish forces. However, these groups did not simply emerge
spontaneously as a response to a security threat:?they are the latest
incarnations of the Dawronoye movement, which first appeared on the
European and Middle Eastern political scenes 20 years ago.
While
they are indeed Christian, their fight is not primarily for their faith,
but for their nation ? which is neither Syria nor Kurdistan. In their
native tongue?a contemporary descendant of the Aramaic language spoken
by Jesus?they call their people
Suryoye
(Syriacs) and their homeland
Bethnahrin (Mesopotamia).
Remnants of a shattered community
Syriacs
were among the first to adopt the Christian faith, but their religion
and culture gradually became marginalised following the Islamic
conquest. Since they lived scattered across the Middle East, most
eventually adopted the Arabic language, while a few communities, mainly
residing in or near Kurdish-dominated areas, managed to retain their own
language. In areas that today form part of Turkey, Syriacs suffered
several bouts of persecution leading up to a horrifying climax during
the First World War. Although they traditionally obeyed their rulers and
kept a low political profile, Syriacs were accused of conspiring with
the Christian enemies of the Ottoman Empire. This “problem” found its
solution in a genocide that was planned by the Ottoman authorities and
carried out in collaboration with local Kurdish Muslims who could
benefit by taking over the land and belongings of their victims. Over a
quarter of a million Syriacs perished, along with Armenian and Greek
Christians and Kurdish Ezidis. Syriacs still refer to 1915 as the “year
of the sword”:?
Seyfo
.
C
emetary by the Syriac Orthodox St. George's Church in the village of Mherka, northeastern Syria. (Photo ⓒCarl Drott, Sept. 2013).
A
heavily decimated community managed to remain in the Turabdin area,
which after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire became part of the
Republic of Turkey. Others settled instead in the Jazira area?just south
of Turabdin?in what became northeastern Syria. This fertile region,
previously populated by Arabs, Kurds, and Syriacs, now came to be
dominated by the latter?at least for a few years. North of the border,
the Turkish government soon turned against the Kurds, who were viewed as
a threat to the desired unitary character of the new nation-state.
Following the suppression of Kurdish uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s,
large numbers of Kurds fled across the border and became the new
majority in the Jazira area.
For several decades, the Kurds in
Turkey offered little resistance to the state’s assimilation policies
and oppression. However, political mobilisation took off again in the
1970s, and in 1984 the secular, socialist and nationalist Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK) initiated an armed insurgency. The response was
brutal and indiscriminate: anyone living in a pro-PKK area could become a
target, and standard practices of Turkish security forces included
torture, extra-judicial executions, and the destruction of villages.
Tens of thousands of Kurds were also recruited to serve as armed
“village guards” and while some joined voluntarily, often for
opportunistic reasons, many others saw it as the only way to save
themselves from government reprisals. Meanwhile, the PKK systematically
targeted “local collaborators” and their families. Everyone in
southeastern Turkey now had to take sides?for or against the PKK.
During
this time, there was also an increase in attacks against the Syriacs in
Turabdin. Most notably, there was a wave of assassinations without any
clearly discernible motive, committed by “unknown perpetrators.” Many
suspected that the intention was to drive out the remaining Syriacs, and
that the government either was directly involved or had at least turned
a blind eye. Since Syriacs constitute both an ethnic and religious
minority, nationalist as well as religious extremists presumably desired
their exodus, while local opportunists might have sought to take over
their property, just like in 1915. Groups belonging to all these
categories were at the time operating with impunity in Turkey’s
southeast since they agreed to fight the PKK on the government’s behalf.
Regardless of who was behind the violence, the presumably desired
effect was reached: over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, nearly the
entire Syriac community in Turabdin migrated, mainly to European
countries like Germany and Sweden.
In the late 1980s, a small
group of Syriac youth gathered in Midyat, the main town of Turabdin. As
they discussed the seemingly hopeless future of their people, they also
noted that their predicament was similar to that of the Kurds: they had
no recognition as a distinct ethnic group with their own language, and
they suffered from discrimination and oppression. However, unlike the
Syriacs, who had always played the role of hapless victims, the Kurds
were now fighting back. The youth decided to join the PKK’s local
support network?but eventually got arrested. Although they were
released, they concluded that they could not continue like before?at
least not in Turabdin. Paradoxically, since their main goal was to
enable Syriacs to remain in their homeland, they chose to follow the
migration stream to Europe.
Instead of simply continuing to work
for the PKK, the group now established its own secret network, which by
1995 had grown into a disciplined organisation along revolutionary
socialist lines. Those who pledged to become party cadres would “leave
everything behind” and live only for the struggle. It was hoped that
this vanguard would awaken the people and turn into a mass movement.
They called themselves
Tukoso Dawronoyo Mothonoyo d’Bethnahrin
, commonly
translated as the Patriotic Revolutionary Organisation of Bethnahrin.
Its members referred to themselves simply as Dawronoye, which was first
thought to translate as “the revolutionaries”. In fact, the name turned
out to mean “the modern” and stuck through later reorganisations as a
general label for the movement and its members. As it turned out, many
had been waiting for them.
Jacob and Sargon
Jacob
Mirza was born in 1964 in a village near Midyat. After five years of
compulsory Turkish schooling, his father sent him to study at the Mor
Gabriel monastery, where he remained for another four years. Although he
did well in his studies, he did not feel the calling to pursue an
ecclesiastical career. Since childhood, Jacob explains, “I could not
accept injustice, regardless whether it was I who suffered it or someone
else, so I got involved in conflicts all the time.”
On one
occasion, when Jacob was in his mid-teens, he joined a game of football
against a neighbouring Muslim village. His Syriac team accused the
referee, who was from the Muslim village, of judging unfairly in its
favour, and when an argument descended into a brawl, Jacob proceeded to
punch him in the face. Two days later, the referee?now armed with a
metal bar?went looking for him in Midyat. “We fought again”, Jacob
recounts. “He cursed at Jesus and the Bible, and I replied with curses
at Mohammed and the Quran. After that, all I saw was chaos. All the
Muslims came when they heard that a Christian had cursed at their
prophet. Anything could have happened, I mean, I could have been
murdered right there.”
In the end, it was a Muslim who took Jacob
inside his shop and locked the door, thereby saving him from the mob.
Two years later, in 1983, Jacob immigrated to Sweden, where he started
working as a language teacher (all children with immigrant backgrounds
have the right to “mother tongue tuition” in Swedish schools). He became
involved with political work, but found that the diaspora nationalist
movement was deeply divided. Since there had been no standardised
myth-making process of the kind that united European nation states in
the 19th century, different groups had wildly different ideas
about the definition, history and character of their nation?or even
what it should call itself.
The so-called “name dispute” primarily
pitted those calling themselves Syriacs against those calling themselves
Assyrians, but Jacob never committed to any of these names. For several
years, he remained active in organisations on both sides, but
eventually lost faith in their ability to attain any tangible political
goals. Instead, he started meeting informally with a group of friends to
discuss what they could do. “During this time I was always looking for
something”, Jacob explains. One day, in a pizzeria owned by one of his
friends from the discussion group, his hopes were re-ignited.
“Jacob,
can I talk to you?”, his friend asked in a low tone of voice. “This is
secret. There is a group that thinks just like us.”
The year was
1994, and the secret group was Dawronoye. After meeting with one of
their representatives, who turned out to be an acquaintance from
Turabdin, Jacob was quickly drawn in, and the following year he attended
a political training camp where he took the pledge to become a party
cadre. By this time, he had left his job as a language teacher and set
up a series of restaurants and other businesses, which he now sold in
order to devote himself full time to the struggle. After a stint as a
grassroots political organiser in the Netherlands and Germany, Jacob
would move on to media work and travel extensively to Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, and Iran.
Sargon was born in 1972,
and moved from Turkey to Sweden with his family at the age of four. As
he grew up, he experienced friction between the lifestyle and values of
his traditional family home and the surrounding society. “We who were
brought up in the 1970s and 80s suffered more or less from an identity
crisis, and with that came an inferiority complex and everything, and
then you tried to show yourself off as someone you are not”, Sargon
explains.
In his mid-teens, he started drinking, using drugs and
acting out, and although he had a talent for studies, his absences
ultimately got him expelled from upper secondary school, and he started
working odd jobs. He also became involved in a local Assyrian youth
group?and spent a lot of time reading about the history of his people.
However, the rival historical narratives presented by different
political factions added further to his identity crisis.
“Are we Syriacs? Assyrians? Arameans? What the hell are we?”, he asked himself.
While
he remained active in the youth group, he slid further into a criminal
lifestyle. “There was a lot of money flowing, lots of drugs, lots of
girls around me”, Sargon recounts. “I was a real tough guy.”
However,
in the summer of 1996 he decided to make a change: “I attended a camp
with Dawronoye, where I took the step to become a party cadre and leave
everything behind. I told them that I just have a month of prison time
to serve first.”
Sargon now had to make the transition from a
local bad boy, commanding fear and respect from everyone, to observing
another hierarchy?one where he was no longer at the top. “They had these
difficulties with me in the beginning. It was not so easy to tame me
actually”, he says, adding with a smile, “but one did everything for the
fatherland.”
Sargon Adam (left) and his comrade Midyat in the mountains. (Photo courtesy: Sargon Adam, July 1999).
No more submission
Dawronoye’s goal was not only to attain national rights, but also to bring about wider social, political and cultural change.
“The
ideology was revolutionary socialist”, Sargon says. “This does not just
mean to wage an armed struggle and bring down governments and things
like that, but to create a revolutionary personality. Since we had lived
under Christian traditions for too long, where submission was a must,
we had to break that pattern. No more submission, you have to start
revolutionising yourself, develop yourself, and get educated.”
Many
of Dawronoye’s activities in Europe centred around the Seyfo issue.
The government in Turkey denied that any genocide had occurred in 1915,
and Syriacs there had always exercised self-censorship on the topic.
“All Suryoye knew about Seyfo, and you would talk about it at home, but
you did not dare say anything outwardly”, Jacob says. Even in Europe,
the genocide of the Syriacs?unlike that of the Armenians?was unknown to
most people and unrecognised by all governments. Dawronoye now tried to
raise their voice through street protests, hunger strikes, and house
occupations, where they demanded one simple thing: recognition of Seyfo.
There was another issue, however, in which?Dawronoye refused to take a stand.
“The
name dispute had torn us apart and emptied all of our strength”, Sargon
says. “Our goal was to enlighten the people that they are one and the
same people, with the same roots, homeland, everything.” In their
events, they held both Syriac and Assyrian flags, and tried to
circumvent the name dispute by rallying around the less contentious name
of their homeland: Bethnahrin.
As they set up their new movement,
Dawronoye were coached by the far more experienced revolutionaries of
the PKK?something that was bound to spark opposition within the Syriac
community where anti-Kurdish sentiments ran deep. These sentiments were
based on more than historical grievances; the same attitudes towards
Christians that had enabled Kurdish participation in Seyfo could still
be found among tribal and conservative Kurds. However, Dawronoye argued
that the PKK represented a clear break with the past, since they
supported the same rights for others as they wanted for themselves, and
actively worked to change norms and structures within their own
community.
“That party will cooperate regardless of what people
you belong to, because they are fighting against the oppression that
comes from the same direction against all the groups there”, Jacob
explains.
Many took it for granted that Dawronoye simply
constituted the Syriac wing of the PKK. “The truth is we have always
made our own decisions, but certainly we have learned from the PKK, and
they have helped us a good deal”, Sargon says.
One of the ways in
which Dawronoye asserted their independence was self-financing, enabled
through monthly membership fees and a yearly fundraising campaign.
Contributions from a few wealthy business owners were crucial, Sargon
explains, “We had one guy who helped the PKK before, and when he went
over to us we received one thousand German Marks every month as
membership fee, and twenty thousand German Marks every year in the
campaign.”
Dawronoye’s cadres systematically mapped Syriac pizzerias and
other businesses, and went door-to-door asking for donations. “Just
here in Sweden, we could collect one or one and a half million Swedish
Kronor,” Sargon says, referring to the yearly campaign. “People believed
in us, but unfortunately the church and the other organizations said we
extorted people. There was nothing like that.”
Mountain guerrillas
While
Europe became a stage for political activities, and Syriacs there
provided crucial funding, Dawronoye had from the start aimed to return
to Bethnahrin. To show the world that they were no longer willing to
submit, members?were going to establish an armed wing and fight the
Turkish state. However, southeastern Turkey had a far too high presence
of security forces and informants, so in 1995 the first group of cadres
instead travelled to Syria, and from there crossed over into Iraq.
“Since
Turkey was in conflict with the PKK in northern Iraq we could take the
conflict there”, Jacob explains. In the eyes of Dawronoye, this was not
foreign territory, since Turkey, Syria, and Iraq all form part of
Bethnahrin. Furthermore, Jacob explains, “We thought there would be
changes in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, and that we needed to
be prepared. The conditions were also far better. In Turabdin there were
maybe four-five thousand people, but we had about one point two million
Assyrians, Syriacs, and Chaldeans in Iraq.”
The conditions in
northern Iraq may have been favourable, but they were also very
complicated. The Kurds, who form the vast majority of the population
here, had risen up against Saddam Hussein’s oppressive government in the
wake of the 1990-91 Gulf War, expecting support from the United
States?and its allies. As the government moved in to crush the uprising,
US and allied forces finally intervened to establish the world’s first
“no-fly zone”? which effectively became a “no-go zone” for government
forces.
The Kurdistan region now gained
de facto
autonomy, and
when largely free and fair elections were held the following year, it
seemed like a promising sign. However, the results produced a draw
between Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Massoud
Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). A “fifty-fifty”
power-sharing arrangement failed to bring about a functional government,
and tensions between the two rivals finally came to a head in 1994,
when civil war broke out. During the conflict, the PUK allied itself
with the PKK and Iran, while the KDP developed a close cooperation with
Turkey?which also sent its own troops across the border to hunt down the
PKK. Although the PUK-KDP conflict ended in 1998, the war against the
PKK continued.
Dawronoye first established itself?in the Badinan
area, which lies on the Turkish border and has a sizeable Syriac
population. However, this is also KDP heartland, and despite Dawronoye’s
declaration of neutrality in the intra-Kurdish conflicts, the group
was?soon forced to leave for the Qandil mountains. Here, fighters?set up
a separate camp in the close vicinity of a major PKK base,?where they
could receive military training, and from 1996 onwards they fought
alongside their mentors. Dawronoye’s guerrillas were so few, and at
least initially so?inexperienced, that they never launched any
operations on their own, but instead rotated for duty in a small unit
that was integrated into the armed wing of the PKK.
“There was
fighting maybe every week or every other week, where the unit took part.
We had at least four or five comrades all the time in the fighting”,
says Sargon, who joined the guerrillas in May 1999?only a few months
before a unilateral PKK ceasefire brought an end to Dawronoye’s war.
Although
they tried to stay out of the intra-Kurdish conflicts, Dawronoye were
inevitably dragged into the fighting between the PKK and the KDP, and on
one occasion, an attack was even launched on Dawronoye’s own
initiative. A young Syriac woman named Helen Sawa had disappeared in May
1999, and when her body was found a month later, suspicions pointed to a
senior KDP leader that had employed her in his household. Local
authorities were accused of covering up the alleged rape and murder, and
a few weeks later the PKK and Dawronoye launched a retaliatory attack
against a KDP outpost. It was more than “an eye for an eye”? around
forty KDP peshmerga were reportedly killed in the fighting. “We felt
that something had to be done, since they had acted like they did,” says
Sargon. “We wanted the world to see that we are here, we exist, and we
can take revenge too.”
The imagined and the real Bethnahrin
In
2000, Dawronoye held its?first congress, and members?reorganised as the
Bethnahrin Freedom Party (
Gabo d’Hirutho d’Bethnahrin
, or GHB). Sargon
criticised the new party’s vague political vision and lack of concrete
goals, and when he refused to back down he was imprisoned in the
mountain camp. “I had to accept what the congress had decided, and
unconditionally follow the party,” says Sargon, who after several weeks
buckled and went back to his duties.
The congress also saw the
first cracks emerge in the relation between Dawronoye and the PKK, whose
representatives were not invited; although their cooperation continued,
the PKK henceforth viewed its Syriac allies with open suspicion.
A
meeting conducted shortly before Dawronoye's guerrillas engaged in
military operations alongside Kurdish forces. In the background hang
Assyrian, GHB and Syriac flags. (Photo courtesy Sargon Adam, March 2003).
After
Dawronoye were?forced out from the Badinan area, they had tried to
mobilise the small Syriac communities in the PUK zone, but with little
success. “The people in those areas had started calling themselves
'Christian Kurds'. They had no concept of an own identity”, Sargon
explains. Dawronoye instead turned their focus to the larger Syriac
communities residing in Mosul and on the Nineveh plains, outside of the
no-fly zone.
Since they shared common enemies, Saddam Hussein’s
government tolerated a limited presence of PKK cadres in the nearby
Makhmour refugee camp, and they would now provide cover for Dawronoye.
“I could move around in the Mosul area, but had to be very alert,
because the
Mukhabarat
[the intelligence service] was extremely
good at detecting people who behaved in an odd way”, says Sargon, who
arrived in Makhmour in the autumn of 2001 and remained for about a year.
He and his comrades successfully organised a network of local
intelligence operatives, but their attempts to awaken some kind of
political and national consciousness in the wider Syriac population
failed. “Those who called themselves Assyrians were nationalistic, but
the Chaldeans and Syriacs just saw themselves as Christians. They did
not know any better, they did not even know that they and the Assyrians
are the same people”, Sargon says, adding another explanation:?“They
thought Saddam would never fall, and you sensed the fear in the
population. The fear of the state was immense.”
Dawronoye
nevertheless managed to attract scores of new party cadres from various
locations, and over time its?armed wing grew to include around 150 guerrillas. While a core group of around 35
originated from Turkey and had lived in Europe, the rest were local
recruits. However,?they rarely developed the “revolutionary character”
that was expected.
“We did not succeed in making the guys from
Iraq believe in our cause, in a better future and all that. It was more
for their own gain that they came to us, it was not like ideological or
nationalistic or anything, but they wanted food for the day or thought
we could help them get to Europe”, Sargon says. “You know, when you talk
about nation and fatherland and all of that, you have to have common
emotions, and like, we lacked those common emotions. We had an illusion
about what Bethnahrin was, while they lived in a real Bethnahrin that
was only shit, that was only oppression, hunger, and fear.”
New politics for a new Middle East
When
the US invasion arrived in the spring of 2003, Dawronoye joined the
Kurdish offensive from the north, hoping to assert itself as a political
force in the newly liberated areas. “Together with the PUK, we went
into Kirkuk and took some offices belonging to the Baath party”, Sargon
recounts. The Iraqi army had fled before they even arrived, and soon
thereafter Dawronoye decided to demobilise their armed wing and end
their cooperation with the PKK.
“We thought new politics would
begin in the Middle East, and that we would be able to fight for our
rights in a political way. This is why we laid down our weapons”,
explains Jacob, who left the PKK-affiliated Medya TV to set up
Dawronoye’s own Suroyo TV.
While Dawronoye failed to establish any
real foothold in post-invasion Iraqi politics, another arena opened up
around the same time, as Turkey appeared to be edging closer to EU
membership. In order to lobby the EU and its member states in relation
to the accession talks, Dawronoye founded the European Syriac Union
(
Huyodo Suroyo d’Urifi
or ESU) in 2004?but the new organisation’s more
polished and diplomatic approach, along with the sudden adoption of the
term “Syriac”, proved controversial internally.
“They changed
strategy without any congress or anything. Why should we call ourselves
'Syriacs'?and who decided this?”, Sargon asked. He was promptly
imprisoned once again.
Although the reforms later stalled, there
were initially indications that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan
would set Turkey on a new path towards democracy and pluralism. In 2005,
the Syriac spring festival
Akitu
could, for the first time, be
organised openly in Midyat. Despite the fact that they had fought the
Turkish army only a few years earlier, and never officially concluded
any peace deal, Dawronoye was behind the well-attended celebrations. Not
only did the authorities tolerate the event, but it was even personally
attended by the governor of Mardin Province?while Prime Minister
Erdogan sent a congratulatory message. Jacob describes it as a game from
both sides:
“Turkey wanted to take us under its control, and we
wanted to test how Turkey reacts.” For Sargon, however, this was no
victory, but the final proof that Dawronoye had abandoned their ideals
and ended the struggle prematurely, without securing any meaningful
political concessions. “You can sit with your enemy or your oppressor,
but there should not just be peace for one side, while the other gets
nothing”, he argues. “Okay, maybe some in the Dawronoye movement can
travel to Turkey without getting arrested, but what have you gained on
that as a people? Nothing.” After nine years as a full-time party cadre,
six of which were spent in Iraq, Sargon finally cut all ties with
Dawronoye and returned to Sweden.
The changing game in Syria
Dawronoye
had maintained a presence in Syria from the very beginning, primarily
in the Jazira area, and although the regime's intelligence agencies
occasionally clamped down on the movement, they mostly stuck to
monitoring its activities through regular meetings. Open agitation
against the government was clearly a red line, but cultural activities
as well as political work relating to Turkey and Iraq would generally be
tolerated.
This arrangement came to an abrupt end in the spring of
2012, as Dawronoye’s Syrian affiliate, the Syriac Union Party (
Gabo
d’Huyodo Suryoyo
or SUP), used the Akitu celebrations as an opportunity
to declare its opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. A few days
later, several activists were arrested in early morning raids, and?more
were picked up when a demonstration organised in response was violently
disbanded. However, although several were tortured, they were ultimately
released. Apparently,?regime security forces exercised more restraint
here than in other parts of the country, so as not to jeopardise
existing local support,?but they would soon lose territorial control
anyway.
A few months later, the People’s Protection Units (YPG)
took control of a large part of the Jazira area?and the government
withdrew to a few isolated enclaves. While the YPG stood under the
control of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which cautiously tried to
forge a third way between the government and the rebels, activists from
the SUP pushed their way into the Syrian embassy in Stockholm, issuing a
press release condemning “the terrorist regime of Al-Assad” and hailing
”the martyrs of the Syrian Revolution.” Despite such defiant
declarations, Dawronoye could accomplish precious little on its?own, and
there were few “moderate rebels” in the area?only a growing threat from
jihadist and criminal groups. However, since the PYD is the Syrian
branch of the PKK movement, the solution appeared natural. Dawronoye
would get back together with its?former allies and take up arms again.
“We
did not really need to discuss or decide anything new”, says Jacob, who
at the time sat in the leadership of the Bethnahrin National Council
(
Mawtbo Umthoyo d’Bethnahrin
or MUB), the supreme body of the Dawronoye
movement that replaced GHB in late 2005. “We always said that we may
come back to Iraq again with weapons, or to Lebanon, to Syria.”
Some
guerrilla veterans from the 1990s were brought in from Iraq, Turkey
and Europe, while others were already present in Syria, where they began
training local recruits. The following year, in 2013, a police force
called
Sutoro
opened three stations in the Jazira area, and a military
force called the Syriac Military Council (
Mawtbo Fulhoyo Suryoyo
or MFS)
announced its existence in an online video. T
he MFS initially hinted at
future military action against the regime, but this never materialised.
Instead, a more immediate and existential threat appeared, as a
coalition of rebel and jihadist groups suddenly attacked. The MFS and
the YPG soon fought side-by-side in the frontlines to defend the area,
while Sutoro developed an increasingly close cooperation with its
Kurdish counterpart Asayish. Just like in the 1990s, Dawronoye
integrated into the security structures of their Kurdish allies, while
retaining their own organisations and financing themselves through
diaspora donations.
MFS fighters outside their base in Ghardukah, northeastern Syria. (Photo ⓒCarl Drott, January 2014).
Around
the same time as the attacks began, the PYD invited other parties and
civil society organisations to participate in a process to form local
governance structures. Most turned down the offer, fearing that the PYD
would continue to dominate, but the SUP participated actively from the
beginning until the end.
Among the chief declared goals was one to
ensure the peaceful coexistence of different ethnic and religious
communities. With unmistaken symbolism, one of the first meetings was
conducted across the border in Midyat, where Kurdish representatives
took the opportunity to apologise for their people’s role in Seyfo. When
the autonomous “Jazira canton” was declared in January 2014,
representatives of the SUP took up positions in the government and
legislative assembly, while Syriac, Arabic, and Kurdish were declared
official languages.
“We believe that this philosophy of [the PKK
leader] Ocalan can be a model not just for the Kurds but for other
peoples also”, says Nazira Goriye, the co-spokesperson of the
legislative assembly. “We want our rights not just as Christians, but as
a people, as a nation. This is why we are on the side of the Kurds, not
on Assad’s side. Assad tries to give our people a morphine injection.”
Nazira Goriye, co-spokesperson of the legislative assemply in the autonomous Jazira canton. (Photo ⓒCarl Drott, January 2014).
The future of Bethnahrin
Over
the years, Dawronoye?learned to adapt to a rapidly shifting political
environment, and several times changed its?strategy?to exploit
opportunities wherever they emerged. More often than not, the
group?has?seen its?ambitions frustrated?not surprisingly, considering
that it?has?always tried to punch above its?weight. Perhaps Dawronoye's
activists?have now finally found their chance.
Dawronoye’s core goal is
to ensure the future existence of its?people in their native lands, but
with the possible exception of the Nineveh plains in Iraq, there is no
place where they could realistically seek regional autonomy, let alone
their own state. In other words, they have to find a way to live with
the majority population without being dominated by it.
Meanwhile, the
PKK movement has come to embrace a vision of a multicultural mosaic
within a decentralised democratic system. While sharing some overarching
political structures, different communities should be encouraged to
organise their own grassroots-level structures, and manage their own
affairs to the greatest extent possible. In other words, the respective
projects of Dawronoye and the PKK coincide perfectly in Syria.
So,
what are the chances that Dawronoye can garner popular support for
its?project? After all, these secular, nationalist revolutionaries
represent a complete inversion of their community’s tendency to remain
politically passive and subservient while turning to religion for
consolation.
“The Kurds are one step ahead of us, but if you look
at what the Syriacs were like before and what they are like now, I think
we have made great progress”, Jacob says. “This struggle will continue,
because we have cultivated a thought among our people that we have to
fight to survive, we have to fight to be free, we have to fight for our
children’s future and not give up.”
Unlike the PKK, Dawronoye have
yet not succeeded in building a mass movement?but the necessary
infrastructure is in place, in the form of a network of affiliated civil
society organisations. Furthermore, the lawless situation in Syria
plays to their strengths. Like the PKK, Dawronoye are well organised and
good at getting things done, and their cadres are motivated by ideology
rather than material incentives. Perhaps most importantly, they are now
the ones holding arms to defend the area. In a situation where the
Islamic State is directly threatening the very survival of the Syriac
people, Dawronoye and their Kurdish allies are fighting and dying in the
frontlines to protect them, asking for nothing in return?except the
opportunity to shape tomorrow’s society.
[Carl Drott is
a Swedish freelance journalist who has covered the conflict in Syria
for
Le Monde diplomatique, Haaretz, Syria Comment
, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and the Stockholm Journal of
International Affairs, among others. For his previous piece for
Warscapes
-- "
Extremists" and "Moderates" in Koban
i -- was reported from the midst of the seige.]