Missionary involvement with the Simele massacre in 1933: the end of American sympathy for the Assyrians

ABSTRACT

The Simele massacre of 1933 in Iraq, in which over 600 Assyrian Christians lost their lives, is an important part of Assyrian national history and is one of the few well-known events in twentieth-century Iraqi history where Christians are involved. While there was a general outcry in Western Europe and the United States against the Iraqi government following the massacre, the American missionaries present locally of the United Mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq did not support the Assyrians following the massacre despite the generally humanitarian approach of their mission and their support for the Assyrian cause in the early years after the First World War. In this article, I argue that apparent apathy from the side of the missionaries was largely the result of a radical change in thinking about missionary involvement in political debates concerning the future of non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East.

Introduction

The Simele massacre of 1933 was the mass murder of the Assyrian population of the northern Iraqi town of Simele (Summayl in Arabic), in which at least 600 Assyrians lost their lives very soon after Iraq gained its independence from Britain in 1932. The massacre is still of a great importance in the national narrative of the Assyrians.¹ The events at Simele entered Western political discourse almost immediately. Many contemporary European and American newspapers carried reports about the events, which caused much uproar among the general public. This was especially the case in Britain. While there had been earlier harsh reactions to revolts by other ethnic and religious groups—the Kurds and the Shi’is—many now held their government responsible for this massacre against Christians, seeing it as a result of leaving Iraq to its own devices.²

The massacre was also an important issue for the United Mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq, a mission founded by American Protestant groups in 1924. The response of these American missionaries is striking and hard to understand: having given full support to the Assyrian cause until the end of the 1920s, they eventually blamed the fact that the massacre happened for an important part on their own behaviour. Despite the strong focus of the mission on humanitarian endeavours more generally, especially education, there were almost no attempts from the side of the missionaries to help the Assyrians after the events. While providing actual relief, such as medical care or provisions for refugees, would have been very difficult given the anti-Assyrian sentiments in Iraqi society right after the massacre, the general sympathy of the missionaries of the United Mission had suddenly almost diminished after the events.

The Assyrians were unpopular with the Iraqi government and among large sections of the Iraqi population during the interwar years. This unpopularity was at its peak in the years immediately before the massacre. A major reason for this was the Assyrians’ participation in the Iraq Levies, the British ground troops in Iraq who had been recruited among the local population to bolster the forces of the resented British authorities.³ Another explanation of the Assyrians’ bad reputation was their resistance to integration into the state of Iraq.⁴ While it is correct that many Assyrians—and certainly an important part of the community’s elite—were opposed to integration, this has to be seen in a context where the future of the Assyrians as Iraqi citizens had only gradually materialized, and (crucially) in a country where integration was understood as equal to complete cultural and linguistic (but not religious) assimilation to the Arab majority.

In this article,⁵ I place the endeavours of the American missionaries of the United Mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq concerning the Assyrians in Iraq into the wider context of Christianity in the country, arguing that the lack of empathy from the missionaries’ side can be explained by looking at the wider landscape of Christianity in Iraq, as well as developments in Western humanitarian policies in the region. The Assyrians formed only one group within the totality of Christianity in Iraq, but politically they were by far the most active. The missionaries within Iraq were aware of this, and while they were of course generally supportive of the Christians, their missionary archives sometimes show disappointment at a lack of realism on the side of the Assyrians, while the other Christian groups were generally more inclined to work together with the Iraqi government. After setting out the context, I first show how the American missionaries of the United Mission were tightly connected to the Assyrians of Iraq before the massacre. Then, after giving an overview of the events of the massacre, I explain how the actions of the Iraqi army targeted at this specific Christian group can be explained from an Arab nationalist perspective. Finally, I discuss how the attitude of the missionaries after the events had changed dramatically from full support a decade before to irritation and inaction after the events, and how this can be explained by examining political developments in Iraq and changes in missionary and humanitarian thinking. My most important source here is the archive of the United Mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq, which is located in the building of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia.⁶ The archive mainly contains formal reports and letters from the missionaries to the office of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in New York.

The Assyrians and their relation to the missionaries

The Assyrians who were affected during the Simele massacre were a specific group of Christians in Iraq. More than other groups of Iraqi Christians, the Assyrians were often victims of discrimination and violence from the Iraqi population and state in the course of the early twentieth century. This had to do with their arrival at the end of the First World War as refugees from the Hakkari mountains and Urmia plains, north of the current Iraqi border, with help from the British. This refugee status, combined with the tribal formation that they retained in its form from before their arrival in Iraq, made them different from the settled Christians.⁷ Their most important leader was the patriarch of the Church of the East, who took responsibility for both religious and worldly affairs. From 1920, this office was assumed by Patriarch Mār Shimʿūn XXI,⁸ who was only twelve years old at the time, but who was going to play an important political role in the decades that followed. The causes of the Simele massacre can for a large part be traced back to the Assyrians’ history as non-Arab refugees. This is in constrast to the other Christian groups, who during the first half of the twentieth century often identified as Arab and with a few exceptions not as Assyrian.⁹ Today, the situation is different and identification as Assyrian occurs across all Syriac Christian denominations in Iraq.

With the exception of the Armenian Christians of Iraq, by the twentieth century almost all Christians in the country belonged to one of the four Syriac churches.¹⁰ The most important thing that these churches have in common is their use of the Classical Syriac language, but they have been divided into different churches with their own liturgies, ecclesiastical hierarchies and beliefs.¹¹ However, Arabic has been an important language as well since at least the ninth century C.E. for most of the Syriac Christians, and by the time of the creation of Iraq as a state many Syriac Christians either spoke Arabic or used it in formal situations, and were therefore able to identify as Arabs. This was important, because Arab nationalism was the official state ideology of the Iraqi state even before independence. While state actors, among whom most notably King Faisal, officially appreciated Christianity and Judaism, being accepted as a Christian or Jewish Iraqi citizen was contingent on being and identifying as an Arab.¹²

The Assyrian refugees from the Hakkari and Urmia regions were also Syriac Christians. Most of them belonged to the Church of the East (nowadays called the Assyrian Church of the East, in older literature often the Nestorian Church), some were Chaldean Catholic and some others had converted to Protestantism but had a Syriac Christian background. However, for them, identification as Arabs was out of the question. They referred to themselves as Assyrians and not Arabs and their elite propagated the use of their own language, a dialect of Neo-Aramaic called Swadaya.¹³ Several factors are at play here. In their region of origin they already identified as part of the Assyrian nation and this idea was brought to Iraq by the refugees.¹⁴ Another, equally important factor, was that they came from a region where Arabic was not used. This is in contrast to the Syriac Christians who were already in Iraq at the time of the establishment of the state: many of them spoke Arabic as their native language, especially the elites in the cities of Mosul and Baghdad. Third, having arrived as refugees, the future of the Assyrians in Iraq was unclear for a very long time: until 1937 there were attempts to resituate the community as a whole outside Iraq.¹⁵ Therefore, while the road towards becoming members of the nation was open to them in theory—by full assimilation and self-identification as Arabs—in practice this was impossible because of the uncertainty of their future as Iraqi citizens. In other words, the Assyrians were so different from the other Syriac Christian groups in terms of origin, language, and political status that their common history and shared heritage as Syriac Christians could not overcome this, with long-lasting consequences.

Another issue was the fact that they were seen as allies of the British because of the participation of Assyrians in the Iraq Levies, providing the disliked foreign rulers in Iraq with ground troops. It was partly because of their different situation without long-lasting ties to Iraq that the British were able to recruit them for this task.¹⁶ Their participation in the Levies had especially caused enmity among the Kurds, since the British used the Levies from time to time against Kurdish rebellions.¹⁷ The situation was further complicated because part of the Assyrians actively resisted integration as citizens in Iraq. Their goal was to go back to their region of origin, or otherwise at least receive autonomy within Iraq. While the Iraqi government had proposed their permanent settlement in the north of the country, including Iraqi citizenship and the same rights as the other non-Muslim groups, this was rejected by many leading figures, including the patriarch, because that would be the end of any hope for autonomy.¹⁸ One solution proposed during this period by the patriarch’s party was the Assyrians’ mass emigration to Syria, which was still under French control without imminent prospects of independence. They presented this wish to the League of Nation’s Permanent Mandates Commission in 1931.¹⁹ This wish was rejected by the League, but the idea of migrating to Syria remained as Iraqi independence drew nearer.

The issues mentioned above explain why the Assyrians from Hakkari and Urmia were unpopular with both the state and the Iraqi population, and it is important to keep in mind that these issues did not apply to the other Syriac Christians. That does not mean that they did not face discrimination for being Christian, but being able to identify as Arab made that they at least were officially given a chance to be considered loyal Iraqi citizens. It was especially the elite of the Chaldean Catholic Church that took this opportunity.²⁰ Stronger than that, the Syriac Orthodox journalist and politician Rafāʾīl Buṭṭī did not only embrace the Arab identity of the state,²¹ but even explicitly distanced himself from the Assyrians, as I will show below. It appears that some of the missionaries followed a similar pattern of thought in their developing relationship with the Assyrians.

The American missionaries connected to the United Mission in Mesopotamia (from 1935 United Mission in Iraq),²² which I focus on in this article, had very close ties to the Assyrians in Iraq. The United Mission was a Protestant mission and was founded in 1924 by three American Protestant churches working together and was coordinated by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions.²³ The mission was based in Mosul and was mainly active in the north of Iraq and Baghdad. It came to an end when its schools were seized by the Iraqi government in 1970.²⁴ In Basra, in the south of the country, there was also a station of the related ‘Arabian Mission’ of the Reformed Church in America.²⁵ While the missionaries of the Arabian Mission, which had already been established in the nineteenth century, were related to those of the United Mission, their activities were located outside the area where most Assyrians lived. For that reason I will not discuss them further in this article. Furthermore, there was the Catholic mission of the French Dominicans, which had been largely responsible for conversions to Catholicism from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.²⁶ Finally, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury was in contact with the Assyrians and occasionally intervened by diplomacy in support of the Assyrians, especially after the Simele massacre.²⁷

The united mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq and the Assyrians

The United Mission was closely connected to the Assyrians, despite the fact that they formed a very small minority in Iraq. We know this from the mission’s archive in Philadelphia, which contains a wealth of personal letters from the individual missionaries to the office of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in the person of Robert E. Speer (1867–1947), the secretary of the American Presbyterian Mission until 1937. The letters give deep insight into the thoughts and experiences of the individual missionaries. Most missionaries were assigned to a particular group of people and specialized in the language of that group. Most letters I refer to below were from Roger C. Cumberland (1894–1938), a young missionary who mainly worked among the Kurds and spoke Kurdish, but who also became deeply involved with the Assyrians around the time of the Simele massacre,²⁸ and from Dr. R.W. McDowell, an older missionary who was part of the mission together with his wife, knew Syriac and mainly worked with the Assyrians and supported their patriarch even after others started to criticize him.²⁹ In this section, I show how the United Mission connected itself to the fate of the Assyrians in Iraq from the start of the mission in 1924.

First of all, the Assyrians formed all of the mission’s local staff throughout the 1920s. This can probably be best explained by the fact that part of the Assyrians were already Protestant before their arrival in Iraq. This situation continued at least until the second half of the 1930s.³⁰ In 1932, Cumberland recognized that this had proven to be a problem in a letter to the office in New York, because of their politically difficult position in Iraq, as he writes that ‘so far as I have been able to see in these nearly ten years, the total impact of the Assyrians on the Muslims of this country forms one of the greatest obstacles to the progress of the gospel’.³¹

Also more in general, the mission’s archive is full of references to the Assyrians, concerning both the political aspects and the missionaries’ religious work among them. The other groups of (Syriac) Christians are seldom mentioned. In the beginning, the Assyrians were described in the most favourable terms. Cumberland gave the following description in 1924 in a letter to New York in which he described the different ethnic and religious groups present in Iraq, in which he did not hide his love for the Assyrians:

The fact that in an Arab country, the 4,000 Assyrian soldiers, under British officers, are the acknowledged protection, speaks well and truthfully for their manly qualities. Compared with the other peoples of the country, they are unquestionably the best. Their services are sought as railroad and postal officials, and in private enterprise, because they are the most capable and dependable.³²

He was less happy with their religious lives of the Assyrians, questioning whether they could really be called ‘Christians’; not only because they were not Protestant but also because their faith was considered weak and supposedly too much focused on appearances, which is a recurring theme among American Protestant missionaries more in general.³³ However, he regarded the Assyrians more favourably than the other Christians in Iraq, whose ‘passive attitude towards Islam has brought them to a level with it, or lower’, as he put it in the same letter.³⁴

R.W. McDowell was very much involved with the Assyrians in a political way. He had been in contact with the British authorities since the First World War and who had witnessed the genocide of 1915, and during the course of the 1920s, he actively campaigned for the Assyrian cause. At this point it was by no means decided that the Assyrians were to integrate in Iraq as citizens. A proposal, drawn by McDowell in 1924, shows his views of their future. He was very concerned about the prospect of Britain leaving Iraq, seeing foreign protection of the Christians as an absolute necessity. His plan therefore concerned placing the Assyrians under the direct protection of the League of Nations. In the plan the Assyrians would get their own administrative body, not territorially defined but with jurisdiction over Christians only.³⁵ The New York office received the plan favourably, but considered it difficult to implement because of the Arab nationalist tendencies in Iraq.³⁶ Indeed, the plan was probably not very realistic, but it shows that the United Mission was at this point actively supporting a lobby for Assyrian autonomy within Iraq.

To understand why the missionaries were so preoccupied with the protection of the Assyrians, we need to consider their deep and essentialist distrust of the Arabs. In 1924 McDowell mentions in a letter to Speer in New York that [t]he Arab is as bitter an enemy of the Assyrians as the Turk and just as dangerous but he is depending upon these Assyrians to save him from the Turk. That once done, the Arab will turn on the Assyrian and rend him.³⁷ His distrust of the Arabs was shared by Cumberland, who wrote about the ‘city Arabs’ in 1924 that ‘it is impossible to find a good word’.³⁸ On the other hand, like Cumberland, McDowell was highly impressed by the Assyrians, which, according to him, are ‘eager to work and when employed are industrious and give better satisfaction than other classes of labour’, as he wrote in a personal report to the New York office a year later.³⁹

The goal of the mission, however, was not to help the Assyrians and other Christians, but to convert Muslims.⁴⁰ They were working with the other parts of the population of Iraq, mainly in the north of the country, having established several Arabic- and Kurdish-speaking congregations and successfully running a number of schools. However, in practice, an important and disproportionately large part of their attention was devoted to serving the (Christian) Assyrians. The fact that the mission predominantly worked with people who were already Christian, despite their official goal to convert Muslims and other non-Christians, was shared with other missions in the Middle East. Initial attempts to convert Muslims mostly failed, and missionaries moved their attention to the local Christians.⁴¹ American Protestant missionaries were often concerned with a perceived lack of faith and making ‘real Christians’ of the believers they encountered.⁴² For the missionaries of the United Mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq, there is no reason to assume that they actually managed to convert a large number of people. In practice the conversion of Muslims remained an indirect goal.⁴³ For a large part, this was pursued by the establishment of a number of general educational institutions, which were in the 1920s and early 1930s most notably a number of village schools, a girls’ school in Mosul and a boys’ school in Baghdad, of which the curriculum included general subjects as well as Bible study.⁴⁴ Most of these schools were open to Muslims, although most students were Christian.⁴⁵ Educational endeavours were explicitly set up in order to assist evangelization, but to what extent it was ‘evangelistically profitable to carry education’ was open to debate.⁴⁶ However, as with other American Protestant missions, missionary educational endeavours can also be interpreted as fully-fledged humanitarian projects.⁴⁷ In fact, Heather Sharkey argues that from the 1930s onwards education became the primary goal in American missions in the Middle East as evangelization became almost impossible for political reasons.⁴⁸

Since the Assyrians who had come from Hakkari and Urmia were partly Protestant, there was an Assyrian Protestant congregation in Mosul, which the United Mission supported from its start in 1924. However, in a letter of the same year to the New York office, McDowell expressed his concern that the Assyrians be weakened if they support the Protestant Assyrians too much:

The unsettled political conditions and our desire to minister to the people of the Old Church without weakening it have been the reasons why we have refrained from organizing this Assyrian congregation into an Evangelical body.⁴⁹

The reason why McDowell was so cautious is that by creating an ‘evangelical body’ for the Protestant Assyrians, this might weaken the Old Church, which was the name they used for the Church of the East, to which the majority of the Assyrians belonged, and of which the earlier-mentioned Patriarch Mār Shimʿūn XXI was the head. The line of thinking here appears to be that a weaker Church of the East could result in a weaker negotiation position for political aims such as autonomy in Iraq.

The more time passed, the less realistic special provisions for the Assyrians however became: no emigration and no special treatments, certainly no separate administrative body. Though the patriarch and the people around him did not change their demands, the missionaries began to redirect their attention to supporting the settlement of the Assyrians in Iraq, and decided to start a formal Assyrian Evangelical congregation in 1926, according to an anonymous report.⁵⁰ The same document shows that they still supported the (non-Protestant) Church of the East as well, hoping that the future would bring about a ‘renewal of Christian activities’.⁵¹ The document shows optimism about the settlement of the Assyrians in Iraq, in contrast to the concerns uttered by McDowell in 1924 about what would happen if Iraq became independent, as cited above.⁵² However, while the missionaries kept supporting the Church of the East, they began to disagree with the church’s continued policy of demanding autonomy in Iraq. This is most visible in the missionaries’ changing views on the patriarch, who vocally expressed this policy. The first expression of concern from the side of the missionaries that I found comes from 1927, when an anonymous ‘Report on work for Assyrians’ spoke about the fact that part of the Assyrian leaders insisted that ‘they will not settle permanently in Iraq to become politically subject to the Moslem Arab rulers’, to be either protected by the British or taken out of the country. At the same time, however, the report acknowledges that these leaders ‘do not speak altogether without reason’, and also the patriarch, who was still only 19 years old and had recently returned from Britain where he had completed his education, was praised for being ‘intelligent, modest, but with a quiet dignity’.⁵³ As the patriarch became older, however, he became more involved in politics and multiple missionaries show that they were not happy with his continued agitation in favour of autonomy. Especially Cumberland became very explicitly annoyed with the behaviour of the patriarch. In 1931, he wrote in this context in a letter to New York that ‘[i]n my eight years of acquaintance with the house of Mar Shimon, its most prominent characteristic has been ambition for personal aggrandizement, with not the slightest care for the people except as they may serve that end’.⁵⁴ In 1932, he accused the patriarch again in a letter to Speer and made clear that he saw cooperation by the Assyrians with their neighbours as the way forward:

As for the situation of the Assyrian group as a whole, it is bad, due almost altogether to the bad leadership of Mar Shimon. His political aspirations have won for his people the distrust if not the hatred of both Arabs and Kurds, and the outlook for the future is very dark. So long as they are in Iraq and they maintain their present attitude of opposition to all their neighbors, there will be trouble.⁵⁵

McDowell, on the other hand, did not drop his support of the patriarch. In 1932, when asked to give information to Speer in the New York office about the Assyrians and their relationship to the patriarch, he who wrote much favourably about him and that he was ‘spiritually alive, of high moral character, fair mental equipment and concerned with the spiritual welfare of his people’.⁵⁶ In this letter, McDowell did not write about the position of the patriarch in relation to the political settlement at all, although he repeated his view that the Assyrians and other minorities would be in need of international protection after the departure of the British.⁵⁷

It is not clear from the mission’s archive if the mission had an official opinion about the patriarch at this point. But what is clear is that the mission still actively supported the Assyrians in general. In addition, the members of the mission’s local staff were still all Assyrian, but these staff did not support the political policies of the patriarch.⁵⁸ The special support to the Assyrians however came to an end when the United Mission decided to refocus on the general population of Iraq, which happened gradually after the Simele massacre of 1933.

The Simele massacre of 1933

The fact that the Simele massacre took place shortly after Iraq gained its independence in 1932 is not a coincidence. In 1930, the year of independence was fixed by a new treaty between Britain and Iraq.⁵⁹ Many Assyrians were afraid that independence would mean the end of their protection by the British, making their life in Iraq impossible because of their reputation and the role of the Assyrian Levies as an army for the British.

A key narrative of the Simele massacre was written down by Lieutenant-Colonel R.S. Stafford, the British administrative inspector for Mosul, who witnessed the events at close hand. His book is a detailed account of what he saw, did, and thought, but it is not an academic work. Major research has been provided by Khaldun Husry, in defence of the Iraqi government, Sami Zubaida, mainly based on British Foreign Office documents, and more recently by Sargon Donabed, who added more Assyrian sources, including oral testimony.

When the Assyrian Levies were disbanded in 1933 because of their relationship to the British, the former soldiers were allowed to retain and carry weapons in order to be able to defend themselves against the Kurds among whom they lived.⁶⁰ In early 1933, an Assyrian tribal leader and formal soldier in the Levies called Mālik Yāqū started a campaign to oppose the integration of Assyrians into Iraq as citizens with the same rights as other minorities.⁶¹ He did so in cooperation with the patriarch and by touring with armed men around the villages in the north.⁶² This led to a hostile response of the Iraqi government and a deterioration of public opinion with respect to the Assyrians.⁶³ The Iraqi army then dispatched troops to the area.⁶⁴ When a negotiation between Yāqū and the army did not succeed, Yāqū with a group of armed men decided to leave the country and cross the border into French-controlled Syria, in line with the above-mentioned proposal by the patriarch’s party to emigrate there. They were reportedly joined by 800 other Assyrians from various tribes. Syria sent them back and Iraq accepted their return on the condition of first being disarmed by the authorities in Syria; however, this disarmament did not occur.⁶⁵ When the Assyrians crossed the border back to Iraq in the beginning of August, fierce fighting broke out between the Assyrians and the Iraqi army,⁶⁶ which lasted almost a full day, in which the Iraqi army eventually got the upper hand.⁶⁷ Afterwards, most Assyrians fled back to Syria, while others tried to go back to their villages. The army then started a campaign to capture the fleeing Assyrians because they were still armed. Many villagers fled to the Assyrian town of Simele on 8 August. After three days, the army massacred all men in Simele, while they tried to prevent the women and children from being killed.⁶⁸

After the events in July and August 1933, the Iraqi army received a warm welcome in Baghdad at the end of August upon their return from the north.⁶⁹ It should be noted that at this point the massacre in Simele was not acknowledged, and that the people were cheering for the defeat of the Assyrians who had fought the army.⁷⁰ In August, in various places in Iraq, especially Mosul, anti-Assyrian attacks, as well as attacks against the British and French residents, took place.⁷¹ Immediate relief, including some medical help and transfer to new temporary camps, had come only days after the massacre and was provided for by the Iraqi government.⁷²

In the period between 1933 and 1937, a collective movement of the Assyrians out of Iraq was back on the table, which was reportedly supported by around 90% of the Assyrians at the time.⁷³ With support by the League of Nations, preparations for resettlement in British Guiana were made, but this could not be realized. The option for settlement in Syria failed, too, although a few thousand Assyrians were allowed to settle there and received Syrian citizenship.⁷⁴ In 1937 this idea was eventually abandoned when the Iraqi government declared to the League of Nations that the Assyrians who remained in the country would remain there as citizens but without any special rights.⁷⁵ The Assyrians had no choice other than accepting that, because the patriarch and main proponent of resisting integration had left the country and the former Levies were not armed anymore.

The position of the Assyrians in Iraq had changed. It was the end of their years in a tribal, partly armed formation with the hope for autonomy. The government forced the patriarch to leave the country out of fear of armed resistance and moved him with his family to Cyprus, from where, in 1940, he moved to Chicago. The official policy of the Assyrian Church of the East to aim for far-reaching autonomy or independence finally changed in 1948, when Patriarch Mar Eshai Shimʿūn wrote that the Assyrians in the Middle East should be loyal citizens in the various countries. This was an about-turn in policy in comparison to the patriarch’s earlier insistence on autonomy.⁷⁶

The massacre: purely political or anti-Christian?

Although the massacre was initially officially denied by the Iraqi government,⁷⁷ there is no doubt among historians about the atrocities that happened in Simele, but the extent to which the Iraqi government is to blame is still debated. These controversies concern two issues.⁷⁸ First, while a response by the Iraqi army to the armed campaign by the party of Yāqū was inevitable, a major question among historians is whether the Iraqi government intended to commit a massacre on Assyrian civilians, or that the army only intended to punish Yāqū and his party for his revolt but that a massacre was a more or less spontaneous act of individuals within the army.⁷⁹ The second issue is whether the Assyrian leadership could justify its refusal to accept the government’s settlement and integration proposal. Husry is extremely severe on this point, maintaining that the Assyrians had a comfortable life in Iraq and no cause for complaint.⁸⁰ Stafford, in his eyewitness-testimony, shows more sympathy for the Assyrians, but concentrates on the unrealistic expectations of the patriarch and the sincere efforts of the Iraqi government. Donabed rightly stresses anti-Assyrian sentiments in Iraq, as well as unrealistic housing plans, justifying the anti-integration campaign and the emigration attempt.⁸¹ An important part of Stafford’s argument is that, while it should have never ended in a massacre, the way in which the government treated the Assyrians in general was fair to say the least.⁸² This is in line with the fact that in general, the British supported the Iraqi government in their treatment of the Assyrians and their refusal to grant the Assyrians special rights or autonomy,⁸³ despite the suspicions in Iraq that the British were aiding the Assyrians against Iraq in order to delay independence.⁸⁴ Laura Robson criticizes the British government and argues that the Assyrians were used in order to secure the continued British control over Mosul, among other things, and then let down.⁸⁵

Both the Iraqi and British governments saw the massacre as a result of a political issue and denied that it had anything to do with the fact that the Assyrians were Christian. That is also the position of Stafford. This makes sense in the light of their special position in Iraqi society that I discussed above, although it seems probable that anti-Christian sentiments also played a role. Many Europeans, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, saw the events as an anti-Christian attack.⁸⁶ There are indeed some indications suggesting that the anti-Assyrian sentiments during the aftermath of the Simele massacre were also directed at the Christian population in general, although there is not enough evidence to proof this.⁸⁷ If the sentiments were indeed anti-Christian in general, this might explain why the Chaldean Catholic Church, in the issue of its official journal al-Najm appearing a month after the events, did not mention the massacre but opted to remain silent and instead praise the newly crowned King Ghazi, even though he is known to have had a major role in the massacre while he was still Crown Prince.⁸⁸ According to this explanation, the Chaldeans distanced themselves from the Assyrians and expressed their loyalty to the King and the Iraqi state even more forcefully to prevent trouble for themselves. On the other hand, it is not unthinkable that some Syriac Christians genuinely accepted the government’s interpretation. This was the position of Rafāʾīl Buṭṭī, a staunch Arab nationalist with a Syriac Orthodox background, who used the words ‘the Assyrian campaign’ (al-ḥamla al-Ashūrī) when he spoke about the events in his memoirs, without even mentioning the overreaction of the army and blaming the Assyrians for everything that happened.⁸⁹

A change in attitude of the United mission missionaries

The mission’s archive in Philadelphia does not feature any material written during the summer in which the massacre happened. However, from a body personal letters by Roger Cumberland—not part of the archive but published by Charles A. Dana and Joe P. Dunn in 2015 – we know that he personally spoke out against the Iraqi army and that he ‘allowed widows and orphans of the massacre to take refuge in his yard in Duhok’.⁹⁰ Because of this, the government targeted the United Mission as ‘anti-Iraqi’ and foreign, and sent Cumberland even out of Duhok for allegations of political activity under the guise of his work as a missionary.⁹¹ Despite Cumberland’s actions, which were courageous and had put himself and the mission in danger, the missionaries clearly held the Assyrian leadership to a large extent responsible for what happened. Remarkably, in an anonymous ‘Evangelistic Report’ of 1933 to the office in New York, the mission expressed the support of the government’s position here and did not explicitly blame it for the atrocities:

On the other hand, we see the patience of Government eventually exhausted (I think no other government in the world would have been patient so long) and the forces of fanaticism in control, culminating in the massacre at Semeil. We see the patriarchal program promoted without regard for truth: baseless rumors were spread as to the prospects of Assyrian emigration or the establishment of their autonomy in this country, and the basest slanders of the Government were circulated, all for the purpose of preventing settlement and so to appeal to the League and the ‘Christian’ nations of the West to rescue them.⁹²

In other words, according to this rapport the massacre was not the government’s fault, but caused by a combination of fanaticism from the side of the Iraqi population and a failing and dangerous strategy of the Assyrian leadership to resist integration in order to be ‘rescued’ by western countries.

The actions of Cumberland following the massacre caused allegations against the mission from the side of the government, but according to the mission this allegation could not be justified because even before the massacre Cumberland had been highly critical of the Assyrian leadership, which, as we saw, is correct.⁹³ A good relationship was however quickly restored. In 1933 John S. Bodeau wrote in a ‘mission narrative’ to the office in New York: ‘the Government recognizes our integrity as religious workers, and our genuine concern for the national aspiration of the country’, and went on to lament the death of King Faisal, ‘a ruler who stood above religious, political and racial parties, whose influence was ever for tolerance and progress’.⁹⁴ This statement shows not only that the mission was again accepted by the Iraqi government, but also that the mission started to fully support the government and its policies towards the minorities of the country. These warm words about an Arab government are in sharp contrast to the harsh words about Arabs that were uttered less than ten years earlier by missionaries in the beginning phase of the mission, as I pointed out above.

At the same time, it appears that the United Mission even started to distance itself from efforts by many Assyrian leaders to preserve their Assyrian identity as a separate ethnic group in Iraq. Shortly before the Simele massacre, the missionaries already started to drop their support of the aspirations of Assyrian autonomy or independence, but after the massacre the missionaries started to see their identification as a national minority as undesirable in their new situation as Iraqi citizens. This becomes clear in the context of the reduction of subsidy to the Evangelical Assyrian school in Baghdad. This school had been established by McDowell and his wife in 1921, before the start of the United Mission, in order to help them as refugees.⁹⁵ At that time, the residence of the Assyrians in Iraq was still widely regarded as temporary, so the establishment of a school especially for the Assyrians was not controversial. The school became an official part of the United Mission, and the mission decided to reduce their subsidy in 1930, this was in an effort to make it self-sustainable and not because it was not considered a worthwhile institution.⁹⁶ In 1936, the mission decided to cancel the subsidy entirely. The reasons for that are given in a report about statements by James W. Willoughby, a missionary who had been part of the mission since the start in 1924:

[The mission] did not consider that it should subsidize a foreign language group in Iraq. The Assyrians have never adapted themselves to the life in Iraq but have continued their school and their church in their original language. The Government is desirous of having them absorbed into the Iraqi nation. The Mission feels that its primary purpose is to evangelize the Arabs. Consequently it felt that it could not continue paying out money to a non-Arab community.⁹⁷

The subsidy was now cancelled because it served a ‘foreign language group in Iraq’, which the mission was not meant for. Formally, it is indeed correct that the mission’s goal had always been the conversion of Muslims, but in practice this is a sharp break with the past. In addition, the statement also includes a reproach that the Assyrians did not integrate into Iraq. Khendo H. Yonan, the Assyrian pastor who was responsible for the school, complained against this decision, and defended the loyalty of the Protestant Assyrians to Iraq in a letter in 1936: ‘Of course we are not an Arabic speaking community, but we are by far more Iraqis in spirit and in every way than the other sects among the Assyrians here in Baghdad’.⁹⁸ By ‘other sects among the Assyrians’, he means non-Protestant Assyrians, especially the Assyrians of the Church of the East, which was the majority. However, in a letter from B.D. Hakken, the secretary of the mission since 1937, to Khendo Yonan, this line of argumentation was rejected:

The Mission has never felt that it was responsible for the school and especially at this time it seems to be a needless expense since there are good Government schools and your children would not lose out educationally if you dropped the idea of conducting a school. You possibly feel that you must teach the Syriac tongue to your children, but is this the wisest course? The language of the country is Arabic and we feel that you should put emphasis on your children learning this language. This would be one way of identifying yourselves with the people of this country if you intend to remain citizens of Iraq.⁹⁹

In other words, not only did the mission want to withdraw their responsibility from the school, the secretary here even says that their school could better be closed down altogether. The letter shows a very sharp rejection of teaching the Neo-Aramaic language and an urgent call on the Assyrians to assimilate to the Arab majority culture: loyal citizenship was not enough. More than that, the Arab government of independent Iraq was now portrayed positively and the quality of state education praised.

Missionary apathy in relation to interwar humanitarianism

With the exception from the intervention by Cumberland that I mentioned above, there was no serious effort from the side of the United Mission to help the Assyrians after the massacre. On the contrary, despite their substantial involvement among the Iraqi Assyrians, in the years after the massacre they started to focus on other, non-Christian communities whom the missionaries deemed to be more in need of their attention. How could it be that this community could not count on more compassion from the missionaries who had supported them from the beginning?

The change coincides with rapid political changes in Iraq. In the early 1920s, Britain was still in charge in Iraq and maintained a close connection to the Assyrians. At that point in time, the Assyrians were still refugees and their future was undecided. From the 1930s the country was on its way to independence and now the government expected from the Assyrians that they integrate into Iraq as citizens. This change of government and change of policy concerning the Assyrians was apparently followed by the missionaries of the United Mission, who were forced to deal with a new political reality. A parallel can be made here with the history of Near East Relief (NER), which was also founded by Presbyterians and served Armenian refugees from the Anatolian genocide in Syria and Lebanon—an example that Keith Watenpaugh uses to trace the development of modern humanitarianism in the Middle East. Watenpaugh writes that after the genocide, the efforts of this organization first focussed on the Armenians’ relocation to southern Anatolia, and when this region fell out of French hands and had to be evacuated, their permanent establishment in Syria and Lebanon. In the first period, much of their work consisted of the establishment of schools, where the students did not learn Arabic, because their policy was to preserve the community’s Armenian identity.¹⁰⁰ The NER genuinely believed in this policy, but it went hand in hand with the French mandatory policy of keeping the Armenian population separate from the Arab population as a force against rising Arab nationalism. In the second period, at the end of the 1920s, the focus clearly shifted to integration of the Armenians in Arab society, without going against the policies of the local governments.¹⁰¹ Thus, like NER, the United Mission followed the policies of the new government of Iraq as it took power of the country, perhaps because they were dependent on the government for their operations.

Following the policies of the Iraqi government must have been quite a step, considering the missionaries’ initial highly negative attitude towards the country’s local population and especially the Muslim Arabs as shown above. However, on a more global scale we see American Protestant missionaries change their attitudes towards Islam from the late 1920s and especially in the 1930s.¹⁰² This was partly the outcome of a rising influence of modernists (as opposed to fundamentalists) in American Protestantism, which had a serious impact on the practice of various missions in the Middle East. This is also the case for the American Protestant mission in Egypt, which evidently showed a growing appreciation of Islam from the 1920s, and a new emphasis on social service, such as education, without an explicit goal of conversion.¹⁰³ This appreciation came despite a concurrent wave of Egyptian anti-missionary sentiments in the period 1928–1933.¹⁰⁴ As for the United Mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq, the archival materials do not explicitly indicate Islam being held in higher esteem or a rethinking of evangelization, but since the missionaries in Iraq came from the same Presbyterian circles as in Egypt, it explains their trust in the Iraqi Arab (and largely Muslim) authorities from the 1930s. Even Roger Cumberland, who still spoke so harshly about Muslims and Arabs in the 1920s (see above), lamented in a letter to Speer in New York in 1932 the ‘distrust if not the hatred of both Arabs and Kurds’ on the part of many Assyrians, which shows that he himself had fundamentally changed his views on the Arabs by the 1930s.¹⁰⁵

A final factor worth exploring is the involvement in politics and diplomacy of the missionaries, who often had a ‘conspicuously political role’ in providing the State Department with information, as Annie Tracy Samuel writes in her article about American policy in Iraq in the interwar years.¹⁰⁶ The United States had not joined the League of Nations and had no immediate authority in Iraq, but expected the British-led mandate and later the independent Iraqi state to offer Americans the same opportunities in terms of business, religion and education as it did Europeans.¹⁰⁷ When the missionaries tried to support emigration programmes for the Assyrians in the 1920s, they therefore communicated with the League of Nations rather than with the American government. After the Simele massacre, however, American missionaries of the United Mission—including Cumberland—met with hostility from the side of the Iraqi government, and therefore American interests were compromised. Samuel notes in this respect that the American government did not reproach the Iraqis for the massacre in order to retain a good relationship and prevent hostility to Americans from escalating.¹⁰⁸ It could be argued that the similar response to the massacre by the missionaries was motivated by the same considerations of American foreign policy: a good relationship with the mission was essential for the continuation of their programme. That can only be part of the explanation, though: the internal documents cited above show that the lack of support was in line with a genuine change of thinking about the Assyrian leadership.

Notwithstanding the explanations above, it remains a fact that the United Mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq dropped their support for the cause of the ethnic and religious minority of Assyrians in less than a decade due to external factors. Put in bluntly cynical terms, the missionaries had lost interest in the Assyrians and there was no longer any reason to support this group. This idea is supported by Keith Watenpaugh’s conclusion in relation to the NER’s changing attitudes to the Armenians in Syria: [T]he interwar understanding … of why certain categories of people should or should not receive humanitarian assistance often had very little if anything to do with the protection of their human rights per se and instead usually had more to do with their ethnicity, religion, citizenship, and utility to states and ideologies.¹⁰⁹

Conclusion

Given the general support for the Assyrians in Europe and at the League of Nations, and the public outcry as the world got to know what happened in Simele, the American missionaries of the United Mission would intuitively be expected to have acted in their defence. This is especially hard to understand because of their tight ties to the Assyrians and the fact that their local staff consisted of Assyrians. And even though the political situation around the time of the Simele massacre may have forced them to drop support of the Assyrian patriarch, in the years after the massacre they went much further by no longer supporting the Assyrians and their efforts to preserve their own identity and language. While this change in policy was a gradual process, it is likely that it was accelerated because of the Simele massacre.

The ecclesial make-up of Iraqi Christianity shows that the country hosted other Christian communities that were far less affected by anti-Assyrian sentiments, despite the close historical connections between the groups. Apart from the fact that these Christians were not refugees, their choice not to identify as a separate national group certainly made a difference, of which the missionaries apparently became more and more aware. The missionaries furthermore realized over time that the Assyrians in Iraq would permanently stay in Iraq and that the Assyrians’ opposition against the government would be counterproductive. In this, they were supported by a change in modern humanitarian thought, which since the late 1920s stressed good relationships with local authorities by not resisting their policies and nationalist aspirations. It was also in line with new currents in American Protestantism that showed a growing appreciation of Islam, which might explain the greater degree of trust in the Iraqi government. The change in attitude of the missionaries of the United Mission was therefore consistent with the development of their policy in the region towards pragmatic accommodation. In addition, the fact that the missionaries were of the opinion that the Assyrians could have been in a better situation if their patriarch had supported integration in Iraq as loyal citizens instead of working against it has certainly influenced their attitude. The Assyrians they worked with may nonetheless have interpreted the sudden lack of support as an act of betrayal.

Funding Statement

The research for this contribution is part of the project ‘Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities in the Formative Years of the Modern Middle East (1920–1950)’, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.