The genocide is addressed in Feniks -- Geschiedenis 3, a secondary-school history textbook, where Assyrian and Greeks are identified as victims of the mass violence carried out in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, according to Comité 1915, an organization that has campaigned in the Netherlands for recognition and education about the genocide.
Related: The Assyrian Genocide
The inclusion gives the history a place in mainstream secondary education rather than limiting discussion of the subject to commemorations, community organizations, or political debates.
"Education is essential to pass on the history of victims to future generations," Johan Kurt, chairman of Comité 1915, said. "That the genocide against Arameans is now explicitly mentioned in a Dutch history textbook is therefore a significant and valuable step."
The development comes after years of lobbying by Assyrian organizations in the Netherlands. According to Comité 1915, advocacy for recognition of the genocide dates to the 1980s. The campaign was further organized after the establishment of Comité 1915 in 2014, with the group focusing on recognition, commemoration, publications, exhibitions and political and social advocacy, as well as the inclusion of Assyrian history in Dutch education.
The move also follows a series of developments in the Dutch parliament concerning the genocide of Christian populations in the Ottoman Empire.
In 2018, the Dutch House of Representatives adopted a motion introduced by then-Christian Union lawmaker Joël Voordewind that explicitly said the recognition of the Armenian genocide concerned the Assyrian and Pontic Greeks, who were also victims. The motion passed by 142 votes to 3.
In 2021, lawmakers again called on the Dutch government to recognize the 1915 genocide, explicitly noting that the Assyrian and Pontic Greeks were among those who suffered during the violence.
The issue has remained politically contested. While the Dutch parliament has adopted motions recognizing the genocide, successive Dutch governments have stopped short of formally adopting that position themselves. In a 2021 response to parliamentary questions, the government said it did not make a determination on whether the events of 1915--16 constituted genocide.
Lawmakers have continued to raise the issue. In 2026, Don Ceder submitted another motion calling on the Dutch government to implement earlier parliamentary motions and recognize the Armenian genocide and Sayfo.
In 2025, a Dutch court rejected Comité 1915's lawsuit against the City of Enschede over plans for a Sayfo monument in Volkspark, ruling that the city's support for the 2022 proposal had been conditional on broad backing from local organizations and that this condition had not been met. The monument plans had been the subject of lengthy negotiations over its design and inscription before the mayor withdrew support, while Comité 1915 had argued that opposition from the local Turkish community and Turkish government had influenced the decision.
Ottoman Christian Genocides
The late Ottoman period saw a series of mass killings, deportations, and forced expulsions targeting the empire's Christian populations, particularly Armenians, Assyrian, and Greeks. The most extensively documented case was the Armenian Genocide of 1915--16, when Ottoman authorities under the Committee of Union and Progress arrested Armenian leaders, carried out mass killings and deported Armenian civilians under conditions of starvation, disease, and exposure.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 664,000 and 1.2 million Armenians died. Assyrian Christians were also subjected to mass killings and deportations during the same period, an episode widely known as the Sayfo. Greek Orthodox communities likewise experienced massacres, deportations, and forced displacement, beginning before World War I and continuing through the Greco-Turkish War and the early 1920s.
These campaigns unfolded amid World War I, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and increasingly nationalist efforts to reshape Anatolia demographically. Historians differ in how they define and group the violence against the different Christian populations, but substantial scholarship documents large-scale persecution, mass killing, deportation, and population removal affecting Armenians, Assyrian, and Greeks.
Recent historical research describes the period from the 1890s through the early 1920s as involving successive waves of anti-Christian violence and demographic transformation, while also distinguishing the responsibilities of the Ottoman government during World War I from those of the Turkish nationalist movement that emerged after the empire's defeat.
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