CRSV: Sayfo (1915)

This case note documents the occurrence of sexual violence in violent conflict. It contains explicit mentions of different forms of sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.

Background of the Conflict

The Sayfo, or the Assyrian Genocide, was the mass slaughter and deportation of Assyrian/Syriac Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan by Ottoman Forces and a few Kurdish tribes during World War I. The Assyrians were divided into different churches such as the Syriac Orthodox Church, Chaldean Catholic Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East, all of which were mutually antagonistic. Before World War I, these communities lived in the remote areas of the Ottoman Empire, and many were stateless. When the empire began to implement its policy of centralization, there was a heightened threat of violence and danger for the Assyrians.

Mass killings began during the Ottoman occupation of Azerbaijan between January and May 1915. The Sayfo, as this genocide came to be called, unfolded concurrently, and in close relation to the Armenian genocide, although the Sayfo was considered less systematic in comparison. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the Assyro-Chaldean delegation indicated that it had lost 250,000 of its community and had been reduced to half its pre-war population. In 1923, during the Lausanne Conference, 275,000 deaths were reported. To date, Turkey denies this was a genocide.    

Prevalence of Sexual Violence

During Sayfo, sexual violence and rape were very much part of the larger campaign of mass killings (Yacoub, 2016). Alongside the massacring of men, women, children, and the elderly were deported (Naby, 2017). When women were deported, they were either raped during deportation or sold to civilians as sex slaves. Some women were abducted and forced to convert to Islam (Yacoub, 2016; Gaunt et al., 2017). Girls as young as six and seven were abducted and subject to rape (Morris, 2019).

Basis of the Use of Sexual Violence

One of the major reasons behind the use of sexual violence and rape was to largely pursue a campaign of genocide (Naby, 2017; Yacoub, 2016). As it was targeted at the Assyrian community, the use of sexual violence and rape can be considered a specific act to perpetrate ethnic erasure. Further, it was also used as a means to intimidate and humiliate populations in a show of power, as well as a means to enable the displacement of large sections of the Assyrian society.  

References

Gaunt, D., Atto, N., & Barthoma, S. A. (2017). Let Them Not Return: Sayfo – The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Berghahn Books.

Morris, B., & Ze'evi, D. (2019). The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of its Christian Minorities. Harvard University Press.

Naby, E. (2017). "Abduction, Rape and Genocide: Urmia's Assyrian Girls and Women". The Assyrian Genocide: Cultural and Political Legacies. Routledge. pp. 158–177.

Yacoub, J. (2016). Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide : a History. Oxford University Press.