Assyrians win campaign! Nineveh Plains province to be established! SYRIAC made an official language of Iraq!

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Sorry for the long title and caps and exclamation points, but seriously everybody…this is huge news. As reported by the Assyrian International News Agency, who picked it up from the Australian press:
The Assyrian community has plenty to celebrate after the Iraqi Council of Ministers’ agreed to establish a province in the Nineveh Plain – the ancestral homeland of the Assyrian people.
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The Parliament of Iraq also agreed to make Syriac, the language spoken by Assyrians, an official language in the country.
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I remember years ago when the petitions circulated online to create an Assyrian province in the Nineveh Plains (as well as a university for the area’s remaining Assyrians), and I am thrilled to see it come to fruition! Can you imagine – not only federal recognition of Assyrian self-determination and Assyrian culture (and religion!) as an integral part of the country’s past and future, but also SYRIAC and an official language of Iraq! How long has it been since Syriac was an official language anywhere? 244 AD in the Kingdom of Osroene, maybe?

Truly this is a historic moment in the long and often devastatingly sad history of the indigenous Syriac people of the Middle East. It just goes to show that God is with Christians wherever they are, and also that those who have long fought for the preservation and recognition of their indigenous cultures, languages, and religions in the see of Islamism and pan-Arabism are not fighting in vain.

My congratulations on this historic victory to all the Syriac Christians here, whether you call yourself an Assyrian, Chaldean, Maronite…whatever. This is a victory for all indigenous Christians of the Middle East.
 
Yeah…I meant an official language at a federal level, but yeah. Still!

I would give my right arm to get a copy of that <bilingual?> Syriac textbook…is the Saddam portrait really part of it? 🙂 Maybe I got my years mixed up, but I seem to remember from my language research done for a paper I presented in Oregon circa 2008 that the Saddam regime’s official position on the Assyrian/Syriac people, at least up until the 1980s or so, was to (attempt to) Arabize them…but then I also remember reading that during Saddam’s trial the attorneys attempted to present an Assyrian witness (or translator?) as a Kurd and Saddam got mad and yelled at them for it. Wish I could find that article…it might’ve been on AINA’s website, even.
 
That’s really cool.

When I first read this thread I thought this meant a whole new nation called Assyria had been reborn 😛
 
dzheremi said:
Sorry for the long title and caps and exclamation points, but seriously everybody…this is huge news. As reported by the Assyrian International News Agency, who picked it up from the Australian press:

I remember years ago when the petitions circulated online to create an Assyrian province in the Nineveh Plains (as well as a university for the area’s remaining Assyrians), and I am thrilled to see it come to fruition! Can you imagine – not only federal recognition of Assyrian self-determination and Assyrian culture (and religion!) as an integral part of the country’s past and future, but also SYRIAC and an official language of Iraq! How long has it been since Syriac was an official language anywhere? 244 AD in the Kingdom of Osroene, maybe?

Truly this is a historic moment in the long and often devastatingly sad history of the indigenous Syriac people of the Middle East. It just goes to show that God is with Christians wherever they are, and also that those who have long fought for the preservation and recognition of their indigenous cultures, languages, and religions in the see of Islamism and pan-Arabism are not fighting in vain.

My congratulations on this historic victory to all the Syriac Christians here, whether you call yourself an Assyrian, Chaldean, Maronite…whatever. This is a victory for all indigenous Christians of the Middle East.
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I’m sorry to say that I am woefully ignorant of this issue. Would someone be able to explain what this means a little more? Will it give the Syriac people in Iraq more autonomy/representation?
 
McCall1981 said:
I’m sorry to say that I am woefully ignorant of this issue. Would someone be able to explain what this means a little more? Will it give the Syriac people in Iraq more autonomy/representation?
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If I’m understanding Wikipedia’s article on the Iraqi government (my Arabic’s not good enough to tackle the parliament’s website) , it seems that they, or rather their province, will be represented in the federation council (as that is a collection of all provinces), but they won’t necessarily get more in the representative council, since that’s fixed at 325 members and fluctuates in its confessional makeup according to whichever parties happen to win (so without more Christians to vote for these parties, it’s unlikely that they’ll have more representatives). Christians head two political parties that I am aware of in Iraq, Zowaa (a.k.a. Assyrian Democratic Movement) and the Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian Popular Council. Together they have about half a dozen seats in the Representatives Council as well as in the Kurdistan Parliament.

What is important about this is more about cultural and language rights. While our friend Shlomo3amrooh is certainly correct that the teaching of Syriac has been permitted since 2003 (it was not always so), there is a difference between no longer being legally barred from teaching your language and having it recognized as an official language of your country. Where I live in the USA, it is possible to teach the Navajo language at all levels (there are multiple levels at the local university, for instance), but that doesn’t make Navajo an official language of the USA. Realistically, it is in the recognition of the Assyrian/Syriac people of Iraq as a distinct constituent people of the nation that this probably means the most, in the face of previous attempts at repressing and exterminating them going back to the very early days of modern Iraq (as in the Simele massacre of 1933). This gets a lot into the history of that country, but suffice it to say that the Assyrian/Syriac people have never had it easy in the British gift to the Arabs that is modern Iraq, and that this new resolution helps them to regain a little bit of what was taken from them in previous eras, and possibly even paves the way for some who have left to return, now that they will hopefully have a modicum more protection of their people and their cultural/political rights than they currently do under the thumb of various Kurdish, Turkish, and Arab local administrations in “Iraqi Kurdistan” and elsewhere in the country.
 
dzheremi said:
What is important about this is more about cultural and language rights.
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Indeed so. 👍 And, at least in a sense, Christian identity as well.
dzheremi said:
While our friend Shlomo3amrooh is certainly correct that the teaching of Syriac has been permitted since 2003 (it was not always so), there is a difference between no longer being legally barred from teaching your language and having it recognized as an official language of your country.
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From the looks of the book Shlomo3amrooh referred to, it seems to date back quite some years prior to the misguided invasion of Iraq. Notice the portrait of Saddam. Looks to me like something from the 1980s. And that wouldn’t be too surprising when one considers the presence and position of Mikhael Youhannan (aka Tariq Aziz) in the Iraqi government at the time. 😉
 
dzheremi said:
If I’m understanding Wikipedia’s article on the Iraqi government (my Arabic’s not good enough to tackle the parliament’s website) , it seems that they, or rather their province, will be represented in the federation council (as that is a collection of all provinces), but they won’t necessarily get more in the representative council, since that’s fixed at 325 members and fluctuates in its confessional makeup according to whichever parties happen to win (so without more Christians to vote for these parties, it’s unlikely that they’ll have more representatives). Christians head two political parties that I am aware of in Iraq, Zowaa (a.k.a. Assyrian Democratic Movement) and the Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian Popular Council. Together they have about half a dozen seats in the Representatives Council as well as in the Kurdistan Parliament.

What is important about this is more about cultural and language rights. While our friend Shlomo3amrooh is certainly correct that the teaching of Syriac has been permitted since 2003 (it was not always so), there is a difference between no longer being legally barred from teaching your language and having it recognized as an official language of your country. Where I live in the USA, it is possible to teach the Navajo language at all levels (there are multiple levels at the local university, for instance), but that doesn’t make Navajo an official language of the USA. Realistically, it is in the recognition of the Assyrian/Syriac people of Iraq as a distinct constituent people of the nation that this probably means the most, in the face of previous attempts at repressing and exterminating them going back to the very early days of modern Iraq (as in the Simele massacre of 1933). This gets a lot into the history of that country, but suffice it to say that the Assyrian/Syriac people have never had it easy in the British gift to the Arabs that is modern Iraq, and that this new resolution helps them to regain a little bit of what was taken from them in previous eras, and possibly even paves the way for some who have left to return, now that they will hopefully have a modicum more protection of their people and their cultural/political rights than they currently do under the thumb of various Kurdish, Turkish, and Arab local administrations in “Iraqi Kurdistan” and elsewhere in the country.
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Thanks, that helps a lot. This sounds like really good news 🙂
 
malphono said:
From the looks of the book Shlomo3amrooh referred to, it seems to date back quite some years prior to the misguided invasion of Iraq. Notice the portrait of Saddam. Looks to me like something from the 1980s. And that wouldn’t be too surprising when one considers the presence and position of Mikhael Youhannan (aka Tariq Aziz) in the Iraqi government at the time. 😉
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Well, yes…and I have to wonder: if it was produced in the wake of the invasion and toppling of Saddam’s regime, why would it have the portrait of Saddam at all? It’s not as though Saddam was particularly friendly toward Syriacs, or at least not toward those who would’ve supported any degree of political and cultural autonomy (so “Tariq Aziz”, the Arabized lapdog, aside). Just ask Yunadam Kanna, who survived several attempts on his life by the regime back in the 1980s (since you can’t ask any of the many people who were successfully murdered).

Not to mention that the Baathists frequently co-opted pre-Arab Mesopotamian history, which I’m sure did not endear them to the Assyrian/Syriac people. I remember reading in preparation for the earlier referenced talk in Oregon about how it was common to have traveling exhibitions of antiquities in the 1970s, where the Baathists would extol the glories of “Iraq” while showing off stolen bits of archeological evidence gathered from the North, which frequently included Syriac/Aramaic stone inscriptions. I can’t remember the article (from some art history journal, probably), but one quoted an old Arab woman who had seen one such Syriac inscription on some excavated rock and exclaimed that it was such mysterious writing that “only God could understand it” (yes, that quote was so ridiculous and sad it’s stuck with me for six years now). And their supposed recognition of Assyrian language rights never really happened (what the article section doesn’t tell you is that also in the 1970s the regime sought to “mainstream” Assyrians into Iraqi society via Arabic language classes; this, combined with the fact that nobody was actually allowed to teach their language, led to further suppression of Assyrian identity in favor of pan-Arabist nonsense).

It would seem that the Assyrians have had bad luck with secular regimes all over due to their nationalist aspirations, which is why I have reacted to this news as I have. Even completely outside of the Arab-Muslim world, we have things like the hanging of Assyrian nationalist poet Dr. Fraidoon Atouraya in Tbilisi of all places, who was sentenced to death on account of his nationalist activities. So for all the times they’ve failed and been crushed by both world powers and local forces, it’s really something to see them succeed.
 
The book was printed in 1981. Although I believe that Syriac was taught all the way up to the invasion. I may be wrong, I will ask around.

The point I was making is that the media portrays that the post-2003 Iraq is better for Christians. But the reality is the opposite.

The British took away our identity by dividing us (Chaldeans, Assyrians and Syriacs).

Saddam took away our identity by his systematic pan-Arab campaign.

On the other hand, Americans take away our identity by globalisation.

Can we solely blame the above? No. Our leadership is/was week at the time. Just like Latinisations, a lot of the time it is our Bishops that are willing to take it on.
 
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