Rakel Chukri is an employee at the culture editorial office.
“Huh? Are there Christians in Turkey?” This is how a Swedish-Palestinian taxi driver reacted the other week when I told him that my Assyrian parents were born in Turkey.
His reaction was not unique. I have met many with roots in the Middle East who know painfully little about the region’s Christian minorities. Every time I feel like a ghost, like my origins have been erased. In the Middle East, the corner of the world where Christianity was created, its practitioners have largely been scared away, murdered, oppressed.
My family’s fate was sealed in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of its Christian population, where roughly 1.5 million people are estimated to have been murdered. Most affected were Armenians, but Assyrians/Syrians, Chaldeans and Pontic Greeks were also slaughtered.
I choose the word slaughter with care. Because not even the children were spared. The Minister of the Interior, Talaat Pascha, justified it by saying that the children could grow up and become enemies of the state. It led to babies being poisoned and children being burned alive.
Open image in full screen mode Protests in Los Angeles in 2019 against Turkey’s denial of genocide in its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. Image: Damian Dovarganes/AP
There are plenty of testimonies from this cursed year. Foreign diplomats, journalists and missionaries saw how corpses lay everywhere. Desperate Christians sometimes survived by hiding among the corpses. I have often wondered if my mother’s grandfather Gabriel managed that way. If that was why he later cared about wearing nice clothes and smelling good.
The genocide was not an isolated event. As early as 1895, the New York Times wrote on its front page: “Another Armenian Holocaust”. Around the beginning of the 20th century, Christians were estimated to make up 20–25 percent in the area that is today Turkey. In 1924, the percentage of Christians had shrunk to two percent.
When the lawyer Raphaël Lemkin launched the concept of genocide during the Second World War, he based it on, among other things, the fate of Christians in the Ottoman Empire.
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Open image in full screen mode Photograph from 1915 shows the massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. The part of the genocide that targeted Assyrians/Syrians and Chaldeans is called Seyfo. Picture: AP
Today, April 24, has it has been exactly 109 years since the genocide began in 1915. And this year, just like in previous years, it is illegal to talk about the genocide in Turkey, Sweden’s new NATO friend.
But there are many of us who continue to fight so that one day we will be able to go there and honor our slain relatives. We – the rubble that remains – keep them alive within us. Others may have repressed that our ancestors once lived here, but we never forget.
READ RAKEL CHUKRI’S PREVIOUS ARTICLES ABOUT THE 1915 GENOCIDE:
Stop whining about Turkey, Billström! (2023)
What is Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde up to? (2021)
Children’s Gehenna in the Ottoman Empire (2020)
The Murders We Inherited (2015)
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