By Neil Fleming, University of Worcester
Iraq’s Assyrian minority were among those targeted by Daesh (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) during its reign of terror in the 2010s. Like earlier generations of Assyrians, many felt that they had little choice but to leave the country. As a result, Assyrians today are a global diasporic community, though a sizable number remain in Iraq. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Church of England was at the centre of efforts to secure for the Assyrians an autonomous enclave in Iraq, or failing that, an alternative homeland.
The Assyrians’ cause was promoted tenaciously by a remarkable group of Anglican clerics, including Francis Heazell, W.A. Wigram and J.A. Douglas. What is more, their endeavour enjoyed the active patronage of successive archbishops of Canterbury, most notably Randall Davidson and Cosmo Lang. There was collaboration too with the Anglican diocese of Jerusalem and the Episcopal Church in the United States. All harboured hopes of establishing full communion with the Assyrian Church of the East. But even as that prospect receded rapidly in the 1920s, their commitment to the Assyrians’ cause remained, evolving to become outwardly secular and humanitarian in practice.
Davidson, Heazell and Wigram had long been associated with the Archbishop’s Mission to the Assyrian Christians that was established by the Church of England in the late nineteenth century. The small Assyrian population then resided in an arc of territory that straddled southeastern Turkey, northern Mesopotamia and northwest Persia. The wartime disintegration of the Ottoman Empire led many of the Assyrians outside Mesopotamia to relocate there, in the territory that the occupying British were refashioning as the Kingdom of Iraq.
From that period a significant number of Assyrian men found employment in the armed Levies that were attached to the Royal Air Force (RAF). That association with the occupying power, alongside the Assyrians’ Christianity, did little to ease their relations with Iraq’s other religious and ethnic communities. Resentment could flare up into violence; most notoriously, the Iraqi army’s massacre of the Assyrian village of Simele in 1933, shortly after Britain formally surrendered its mandate to oversee Iraq’s government to the League of Nations.
The Assyrians’ service in the RAF’s Levies meant that in addition to veterans of the Church of England’s mission, their cause in the UK was taken up by arch-imperialists, such as the MPs Leo Amery and Lord Winterton, and the peers Lord Lloyd and Lord Lugard. Their biggest challenge, however, was the British policy of maintaining Iraq as a unitary and centralised state. This inevitably played down the anxieties of Iraq’s minority communities. The Assyrian lobby therefore emphasised the moral debt owed to the Assyrians by the British, as a beleaguered Christian minority, and as loyal soldiers in the service of its air force. They campaigned through the press and by asking questions in parliament, and also at Geneva where the League of Nations mulled fitfully over the Assyrians’ future.
Despite the adhesion of others, Anglican clerics remained the most conspicuous British element of the series of campaign vehicles that constituted the Assyrian lobby in the UK. These included the Assyrians and Iraq Christians Committee (1926–27), the Iraq Minorities Non-Moslem Committee (established 1930), the Friends of the Assyrians (established 1935), and the Assyrian Settlement National Appeal (1936–37). Anglican participation in these bodies arguably replaced the work of the Archbishop’s Mission to the Assyrian Christians that had for years overseen the Church of England’s mission to the Church of the East. Indeed, in 1930 the committee of the Archbishop’s Mission resolved that its funds should be directed to humanitarian relief.
The Assyrian Settlement National Appeal, for example, had for its president the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Lang. And although Leo Amery had the more active role as chairman, its secretary was Lang’s chaplain and secretary, the Rev. Alan Don. The pamphlet that launched its appeal, published in 1936, hoped to take advantage of a French offer to provide a home for the Assyrians in Syria by raising funds to enable their removal across the border. The ten page pamphlet was illustrated throughout with photographs of Assyrian civilians – men, women and children – that were clearly intended to humanise their plight.
In the pamphlet’s introduction, Lang wrote:
“This appeal is made on behalf of a people small in numbers but great in their traditions and their spirit. For long centuries and through many trials they have maintained a courageous loyalty to their own national life and to the Christian Faith … It is an appeal to the generosity, the chivalry, and the honour of the British nation.”
As expected, the pamphlet painted a picture that sought to appeal to British religious sensibilities.
“The Assyrians were among the first people in the world to adopt Christianity, helped, perhaps, by the fact that their language is closely akin to Aramaic, the language spoken by Our Lord and His disciples.”
It noted how the ancient Assyrian church was once “the greatest missionary church”, with outposts as far afield as China, India and Sumatra, before observing that its failure to convert the Mongols, and through them much of Asia, resulted in it becoming “a mere island of Christianity in the rising flood of Islam”. The Assyrian church, it asserted, “became for them the symbol of their independence as well as of their faith.”
The more secular turn in the pamphlet’s narrative that followed dwelt on the Assyrians’ military service since the First World War. It drove home the point that the Assyrian Levies were:
“the only organised military force upon which we could rely to support the Royal Air Force in defending the northern frontier, supressing continuous Kurdish revolts and sustaining our mandatory obligations for the peace and good government of Iraq. They were, in fact, a first-class fighting force whom their British officers were proud to command.”
The pamphlet acknowledged that the Levies were primarily in the service of the British, not the Iraqi state, and that “the British taxpayer saved several millions in the years between 1922 and 1932 by employing them in the place of far more expensive British troops.” Their loyalty to Britain “exposed them, inevitably, to much direct unpopularity.” The pamphlet gently chided the British authorities for giving false assurances to the League of Nations about Iraq’s internal cohesion before it addressed the “series of indefensible massacres” suffered by the Assyrians at the hands of the Iraqi army.
France’s withdrawal of support for the Syria plan meant that it went the way of other discarded possibilities for Assyrian resettlement. It also undermined the Assyrian Settlement National Appeal and the wider cause that it represented. Its Anglican members appear to have become further disenchanted by deteriorating relations with the Church of the East, and divisions within that denomination. The torch in any case was being passed to the Episcopalian Church in the United States, where the Church of the East afterwards relocated its patriarchate along with growing numbers of Assyrian migrants.
Decades of Anglican campaigning on behalf of the Assyrians are preserved in the archival holdings at Lambeth Palace Library. These contain a remarkable amount of detail on the various schemes proposed to address the Assyrians’ predicament. Admittedly, much of this material is written by British observers, and for the consumption of a British audience. But taking this into account, it is still possible to observe how the Assyrians’ expectations were raised and disappointed time and again. Also discernible are the corresponding frustrations and tensions that existed within the UK’s Assyrian lobby, such as Lang’s wariness of the less constrained approach of some of his clerics, and the complex ways in which religious-inspired humanitarianism became bound up with more secular concerns and arguments.
A Monument of Fame 