Our debt is the international recognition of the genocide of the Christian peoples of the East, says Farantouris

A special event was organized on Friday by the Panhellenic Association of Assyrians under the auspices of MEP and University Professor Nikola Farantouri and the Municipality of Aigaleo to honor the 110th anniversary of the genocidal massacres of the Assyrians by the New Turks of Mustafa Kemal (1915-2025).

The event aired the documentary “Souls in Transit” on the genocide of all the Christian peoples of the East (Assyrians, Greek Pontic, Armenians) of the award -winning director Aida Schlaepfer, which is in Greece for the presentation of the film.

The documentary Souls in TransitProposed for Oscar in 2023, has been awarded the Cannes Festival and presented in the European Parliament.

Opening the event, MEP Nicolas Farantouris, who visited Syria, amidst the big slaughter last March, said:

“I welcome you, my compatriots of Greek Assyrians, from all parts of Greece and from all parts of the world, to speak loudly and to restore the historical truth about the genocide of the Christian peoples of the East, the Assyrians, the Greek Pontians. The Assyrians, a proud people, a carrier of culture for over 5,000 years, from Mesopotamia and around the world, have brought them so close to Hellenism that their fortunes have identified in difficult times, persecutions, ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide. We are here to restore historical truth. We are here to unite our strengths. I, from my place in the European Parliament and every corner of Europe and the whole world, both the West and the East, and all together, with the ally of historical truth. Because nothing can move forward unless we have arranged old accounts of the past. We are here only for the truth, without the disposition of hatred, intolerance and hostility. But the truth must be restored and it is the duty of our own generation to turn back and remember the suffering that our ancestors suffered. “

Nikolas Farantouris as a member of the Security and Defense Committee and the Coordinator of the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee has been in favor of recognizing the genocide of Pontian Hellenism and to the whole of the Christian peoples of the East.

The Assyrians Christians

The Assyrians come from Assyria, one of the oldest cultures in the world, as the existence of Assyrian culture dates back to 2500 BC. in Mesopotamia. The modern history of Assyrians is in the early years of Christianity. The ancient state of Assyrians was in present -day Iraq and had the capital of Nineveh, near present -day Mosul.

In the 19th and early 20th century, the Assyrians numbered close to 3.5 to 4 million and lived in the Ottoman provinces of Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, Iran and the Russian Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia). During World War I, Assyrians such as the Armenians and the Greek Pontians were victims of systematic national-religious clearances by the Ottoman regime in the context of Panturanian plans for the “Turks” of Anatolia and Caucasus.

The Treaty of Sevres in 1920 envisioned a relative autonomy for the Assyrian Caldians, whose delegations had participated in peace conferences demanding the establishment of an Assyrian state promised by London in December 1917. As well as the Armenians and the Kurds, all of them victims of geopolitical plans and sharing of the Middle East between Kemalist Turkey, France (command in Syros-Livano) and England (command in Iraq, Hyperordan and Palestine).

The genocide of the Assyrians

During World War I. The Assyrian population of the Upper Mesopotamia (Tour Abdin, Hakari, Van, Siirt, that is, areas of today’s Southeast Turkey and Urmy, region of northwestern Iran) was displaced by force and slaughtered by the 1920s and 1920s.

Estimates of the total number of dead Assyrians vary. Some reports estimate the number of victims at 250,000, although recent estimates raise the number of dead to 500 to 750,000. The genocide of the Assyrians took place at the same time as the Genocide of the Armenian and Greek Pontians. In 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars concluded that “the Ottoman operation against the Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted genocide against the Armenians, the Armenians and the Assyrians”.

The Assyrian Diaspora

Today, after many centuries of presence in the territories of today’s Turkey and Iraq, the remaining Assyrians are under the immediate threat of the Islamic State. Many have already migrated abroad, in France (Paris, Marseille), Germany, Sweden, USA.