Assyrian Nationalism Cannot Demand Equality While Excusing Prejudice

Opinion

An Assyrian activist who demands recognition for his own people while denying the dignity of another is not defending a consistent principle. He is asking for an exception. That is the contradiction exclusionary Assyrian nationalism needs to confront: opposing discrimination against Assyrians while excusing it when directed at Kurds, Arabs, Muslims, or people who understand their own identity differently.

A cause does not become just simply because the people advancing it have suffered. Its demands, methods and treatment of others still deserve scrutiny. Historical persecution cannot be used as a permanent exemption from criticism, and national survival cannot become an excuse for prejudice.

This is not an argument that Assyrians caused their own displacement, or that better manners would have prevented massacres. It is an argument about political responsibility now. Assyrian leaders and activists should be judged by what they advocate and achieve, not protected from examination by the history they invoke.

The history itself is serious. The Sayfo genocide is the subject of substantial historical scholarship, and ISIS’s persecution and expulsion of Christians from Mosul in 2014 were documented by human-rights investigators. These are not invented grievances. But recognising that history does not require accepting every political conclusion drawn from it. Historical scholarship on Sayfo, Human Rights Watch on Mosul.

The distinction matters because remembrance and collective blame are different things. Remembering the perpetrators of an atrocity is necessary. Treating their descendants—or everyone who shares their ethnicity or religion—as permanently suspect is not remembrance. It is prejudice wearing the authority of history.

An Assyrian child does not inherit responsibility for an Assyrian politician’s conduct. A Kurdish child does not inherit responsibility for a tribal leader’s crimes a century ago. A Muslim neighbour is not answerable for ISIS merely because ISIS claimed religious authority. Any nationalism that rejects this distinction abandons individual responsibility precisely where it should insist on it.

Sources: Berghahn Books — David Gaunt, Naures Atto and Soner O. Barthoma Human Rights Watch

Criticism needs a target, not an ethnicity

There are legitimate reasons to scrutinise Kurdish political parties, security institutions and regional authorities. Rejecting anti-Kurdish prejudice does not mean granting those institutions immunity.

Human Rights Watch’s 2009 investigation into Nineveh’s disputed territories documented intimidation and coercion by Kurdish authorities against minority communities. The same investigation also found no evidence linking Kurdish authorities to the particular campaign of killings against Christians in Mosul that it examined. Both findings matter. A serious advocate must be willing to cite evidence of wrongdoing and acknowledge where an accusation was not substantiated. Human Rights Watch’s investigation.

That is the difference between accountability and ethnic hostility. A party can be criticised for its policies. An official can be investigated for a decision. A land claim can be tested against records and judgments. None of these requires treating Kurdish identity itself as illegitimate.

The July 2026 land protest in Duhok illustrates why specificity matters. In their own account, Assyrian political organisers described demands for enforcement of court judgments and action against alleged encroachments. Those claims deserve examination on their merits. They do not establish that every Kurdish resident is a land thief, or that an entire people has no legitimate connection to the region. The organisers’ account.

When an activist replaces a documented complaint with racial abuse, he weakens his own argument. The question stops being whether an authority violated someone’s rights and becomes whether the speaker recognises anyone else’s rights at all.

That is not merely a public-relations problem. It is a failure of principle. Demanding recognition of Assyrian belonging while dismissing Kurdish belonging repeats the exclusionary logic being challenged. One community’s history does not have to be erased for another’s history to be recognised.

Nor should ancestry become a licence to rank living people. Historical continuity can inform claims concerning heritage, language and land. It does not establish that people with another ancestry deserve inferior citizenship, less security or fewer opportunities. A political movement that turns the past into a hierarchy of human worth is not escaping discrimination. It is proposing a different beneficiary.

Sources: Human Rights Watch Assyrian Democratic Movement — Zowaa

Religious persecution does not justify religious prejudice

The same standard applies to anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Criticism of religious doctrines, discriminatory laws, Islamist movements and armed organisations is legitimate. No religion should be beyond examination. But criticism becomes prejudice when it treats a Muslim’s identity as sufficient evidence of dangerousness, disloyalty or lesser worth.

There is no coherent version of equal citizenship in which Christians must never be judged collectively, but Muslims may be. There is no credible defence of religious freedom that protects churches while regarding another community’s freedom as an indulgence.

Assyrian advocacy should insist that nobody must convert, conceal their identity or accept inferior status to live safely. That principle becomes hollow if its defenders cannot apply it beyond their own community.

Discrimination against others is therefore not just “unhelpful” to Assyrians. It is wrong in itself. Its strategic cost follows from that moral failure: it makes cooperation harder, narrows the audience for legitimate grievances and gives opponents an opportunity to portray demands for equality as demands for communal privilege.

This does not mean Assyrians must trust every neighbour or reconcile with every institution. Trust must be earned. Accountability cannot be replaced by vague appeals to coexistence. But distrust of a particular authority is not permission to deny ordinary people their rights.

Sources: United Nations

Diaspora conviction needs accountability

Diaspora political engagement also deserves harder questions.

Living abroad does not disqualify someone from caring about the homeland. It does, however, make it possible to advocate confrontation without bearing its immediate consequences. An activist can publish an uncompromising demand from a secure home while a family elsewhere must live with the retaliation, lost employment or broken local relationships that may follow.

That distance should produce caution and accountability, not a competition over who can sound most militant.

The useful questions are practical. Who was consulted? What do people living in the affected communities want? What resources support the proposed strategy? Who carries the risk if it fails? What would count as success?

A statement can attract attention without protecting a family. A historical map can express attachment without resolving a property dispute. An online argument can humiliate an opponent without securing a single enforceable right. None should be confused with political achievement.

Assyrian organisations should face the same scrutiny they demand of larger parties. Fundraising should come with transparent accounts. Representatives should explain whom they represent and how those people can challenge them. Plans for return should address livelihoods, services, security and property—not simply invoke a duty to return.

Nor should displaced families be shamed for decisions made under pressure. National identity does not give an activist ownership over another person’s life. Someone choosing safety, employment or a future for their children is not obliged to satisfy a stranger’s preferred image of national sacrifice.

A movement becomes self-serving when loyalty to its slogans matters more than the welfare of the people it claims to defend.

Sources: United Nations

Equality must apply inside the community too

The demand for recognition must also survive disagreement within Assyrian political life.

People who identify as Chaldean, Syriac or Aramean should not automatically be treated as confused, manipulated or disloyal. Shared history can be argued for. Political cooperation can be encouraged. Neither requires coercing someone into a label.

If an Assyrian nationalist objects to outsiders deciding what Assyrians are allowed to call themselves, the same objection should apply when that nationalist tries to dictate another person’s identity.

The UN’s minority-rights framework places protection of identity alongside non-discrimination and effective participation. These principles belong together. Recognition is not convincing when it is demanded outwardly and withheld inwardly. United Nations overview of minority rights.

The political test is simple: would the proposed arrangement protect a dissenter, a person of another faith, or a neighbour of another ethnicity as reliably as it protects an Assyrian nationalist?

If the answer is no, the proposal offers a change in who enjoys privilege, not a rejection of privilege.

Assyrians’ rights do not disappear because an activist behaves badly. Equally, the rights of Kurds, Arabs or Muslims do not depend on whether Assyrian activists approve of their politics. Equality cannot be awarded only to the deserving or withdrawn from the disliked.

That should be the central challenge to exclusionary Assyrian nationalism. It must stop using historical injury to excuse present prejudice, stop confusing ethnic hostility with political seriousness, and stop treating criticism from within as betrayal.

A movement seeking a viable future needs enforceable rights, accountable institutions and a strategy that can withstand contact with the people who must live under it. Anger may explain why someone enters politics. It cannot substitute for those things.

Assyrian advocacy cannot demand an end to discrimination while reserving the right to discriminate. The principle it claims to defend either applies to others, or it is not equality at all.

Sources: United Nations