Simele Massacre - Cultural Impact and Legacy

Cultural Impact and Legacy

7 August officially became known as Martyrs Day or National Day of Mourning by the Assyrian community in memory for the Simele massacre, as it was declared so by the Assyrian Universal Alliance in 1970.

In 2004, the Syrian government banned an Assyrian political organization from commemorating the event and threatened arrests if any were to break the ban.

Assyrian music artist Shlimon Bet Shmuel has written a song about the event. A number of poems and stories have been written about the incident, including one by the American William Saroyan, titled "Seventy Thousand Assyrians", written in 1934;

…We're washed up as a race, we're through, it's all over, why should I learn to read the (Assyrian) language? We have no writers, we have no news — well, there is a little news: once in a while the English encourage the Arabs to massacre us, that is all. It's an old story, we know all about it.

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The Simele massacre inspired Raphael Lemkin to create the concept of "Genocide". In 1933, Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, was based on the Simele massacre, the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust.

The massacres also had a deep impact on the newly established Kingdom of Iraq. Kanan Makiya argues that the killing of Assyrians transcended tribal, religious and ethnic barriers as Arabs, Kurds and Yazidis were united in their anti-Assyrian and anti-western sentiments. According to him, the pogrom was "the first genuine expression of national independence in a former Arab province of the Ottoman Empire" and that the killing of Assyrian Christians was seen as a national duty.

The British were standing firmly behind the leaders of their former colony during the crisis, despite the popular animosity towards them. General Headlam of the British military mission in Baghdad was quoted saying: "the government and people have good reasons to be thankful to Colonel Bakr Sidqi".