Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Pe ...

Nevertheless the British officials kept feeding the patriarch with hopes of returning to his homeland. Stevens reported to Canning that he had met with the patriarch and expressed to him the government’s wishes to see him and his people return to their country under the rule of the sultan. Once again, Stevens said he had done his best to impress upon the patriarch the benefits that he and his people would reap from his contacts with Kemali Effendi. The patriarch, however, had had nothing to say except to thank him and to assure him that he put his fate and his nation’s in the hands of the British government.²⁴

On his part, the patriarch submitted many appeals and messages to the British ambassador, all of which expressed his wish to put himself and his people under the protection of Great Britain, and stated that he was authorised to act on their behalf.²⁵ He said he was willing to submit to the sultan’s authority under the terms of any settlement that the ambassador deemed likely to resolve their crisis.²⁶

While the Assyrian patriarch put all his hope in the assistance of Great Britain, it seems that he could not comprehend that Britain had a different agenda from the one he was hoping to achieve. In a report to Canning, Lt. Col. Farrant stated that the patriarch must remain in Mosul for an unspecified period and that his stay would continue until his fate was decided.²⁷

When he first took refuge at the British vice-consulate, just a short time after Rassam and Ainsworth had visited him in Tiyari in June 1840, Mar Shimun had been well aware that he and his nation had no one else to depend upon for support. The massacre had left him alone, and he was anxiously looking for a power that would provide them protection without imposing its religious doctrine²⁸—that was why he had approached the British. However, during the frustrating years at Mosul, the patriarch was living in constant anguish and constantly giving voice to his complaints: ‘[M]y country and my people are gone! Nothing remains to me but God’.²⁹ He seems not to have appreciated that the issue of the Assyrian tribes represented a conflict of interest for Great Britain, since it was seeking to establish its influence over the Asiatic Ottoman Empire and among various ethnic and religious groups living there, and the Assyrians were only one element.