Return of the Christian Assyrians to Turkey permanently threatened!

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) learned today that a bomb attack was carried out against the house of Gebro Seven, for many years the Chairperson of the "Augsburg Society of Assyrian Mesopotamia”, at 10 p.m. on 30th August 2006. Since the Assyrian human rights worker was at the time of the attack with his wife in the nearby Christian monastery of Mar Gabriel he remained unhurt. The Turkish police stated that otherwise the attack would have had fatal consequences.

The ethnic group of the Assyrians in Tur Abdin numbered until the middle of the sixties 130,000 people. Today there are living there less than 3,000 members of this nationality, which speaks Aramaic as its mother tongue and is of the Christian faith. The overwhelming majority of the Assyrians fled to Central or Northern Europe as a result of the persecution by the surrounding Kurdish population and the support or indifference of the Turkish authorities.

Since 2003 and the reforms announced by the government of Recep Tayip Erdogan Christian Assyrians began rebuilding in the abandoned Assyrian villages of Tur Abdin. This new attempted murder is another threat to the cautious return movement of the ethnic group which has been persecuted for so long. Since then there has been a large number of attacks on the houses and villages of the Assyrians. Only four weeks ago a bomb exploded in the Christian village of Charabale. In June last year three Christians who had returned barely escaped such an attack with their lives.

We join the appeals of the "Augsburg Society of Assyrian Mesopotamia” and of the "Central League of Assyrian Associations in Germany and their European Sections” (ZAVD) to the Turkish government to give those returning adequate protection, said the General Secretary of the GfbV, Tilman Zülch. The Erdogan government must disarm the Kurdish so-called village guardians who were armed by the Turkish army and must stop supporting the Kurdish Agas (big landowners), who have also taken over and continue to take over land belonging to the Assyrian community. If the government of Turkey does not take action the Assyrians have no choice but to take it that their presence is no longer welcome in the land in which they have lived for thousands of years.