Plight of Iraqi Christians Provokes Calls for Special Protection
by Jim Lobe

Antiwar.com, United States
Oct 15 2004

While the successful penetration by suicide bombers, who killed
ten people, including four U.S. nationals, of the carefully guarded
“Green Zone” in downtown Baghdad grabbed headlines here this week,
another measure of the deteriorating security situation in Iraq came
from a more surprising source.

In an article published Thursday in the online edition of the
right-wing National Review, an influential neoconservative activist
appealed to the Bush administration to create a “safe haven”
within Iraq specifically for Iraq’s estimated 800,000 Christians,
or “Chaldo-Assyrians,” 40,000 of whom are believed to have left the
country since the U.S. invasion in the face of growing persecution.

The creation of such a zone, which is contemplated under the interim
constitution approved by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) earlier this year, could curb the growing exodus and might even
persuade some who left to return, according to the author, Nina Shea,
the director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom.

“The community needs U.S. help to create such a district which should
encompass the traditional community villages located near Mosul, in
the Nineveh Plains,” according to Shea. “They believe that thousands
of their members who have fled to other countries in the Middle East
over the decades but are not permanently resettled could be persuaded
to return to such a secure place.”

She also called on the State Department to begin providing
reconstruction aid directly to the Christian community in the region,
and not just to Arab and Kurdish groups living in the region.

Calling the Chaldo-Assyrians the “canaries in the coal mine for the
Great Middle East,” Shea, who enjoys good relations with the Bush
White House, noted that “the extent to which they are tolerated in
the new Iraq is being watched closely by Maronites of Lebanon, the
Copts of Egypt, and other non-Muslim populations in the region.” Like
the Chaldo-Assyrians, the Maronites and Copts are Christian.

Her appeal echoed those of a number of Iraqi-American Christian
groups which met here earlier this month in a concerted effort to draw
attention to their co-religionists’ communities which has deteriorated
sharply since the U.S. invasion.

“Widespread and systematic abuse of human rights and targeted
killings of Christians continue every day in Iraq, mainly in the
Kurdish-controlled areas in the North, Mosul, and Baghdad,” asserted a
letter to the U.S. Congress sent by the 70-year-old Assyrian American
National Federation (AANF) late last month. “As a result of such
atrocities, some 40,000 Assyrians have already fled Iraq since July
of this year.”

“Iraq, once the center of the earliest Christian churches in the
world, may soon be cleared of its Assyrian population, the only
indigenous people of that country – ancient Mesopotamia,” warned the
letter, which also called for Congress to earmark five percent of
total reconstruction aid for Iraq “for the safety of the Christian
population and the rebuilding of their villages.”

Communities of Christians have indeed inhabited modern-day Mesopotamia
virtually since the dawn of Christianity 2,000 years ago. Most are
Chaldeans, or Eastern-rite Catholics, whose native tongue is Aramaic,
the language of Jesus. Most of the other Christians are Assyrian,
who belong to different denominations, including the Ancient Church
of the East, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Chaldean Church,
and Protestant churches. The remainder consist primarily of Syrian,
Armenian, Greek Catholics; Armenian and Greek Orthodox; and, Mandaeans,
who are followers of John the Baptist.

Historically, the Chaldeans and Assyrians have been concentrated in
the Mosul area, although many left seeking economic opportunities
in other regions. During successive periods of “Arabization” in
the post-colonial era, and particularly under Ba’athist rule, some
Christian communities, like other non-Arab groups, particularly Kurds,
were displaced in order to make way for Arabs, especially from the
southern part of the country.

According to the last national census in 1987, Iraq had some 1.4
million Christians, but most sources estimate that 800,000 at
most remain in the country of some 23 million today. Most of the
emigration took place after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 when UN
sanctions brought intense economic hardship on middle-class families,
in particular, a disproportionate number of which are Christian.

As the sanctions continued to weaken the middle class during the 1990s,
tens of thousands of Christians emigrated to nearby Arab countries,
notably Syria and Lebanon, Europe and North America.

Under Saddam Hussein, Christians, particularly Assyrians who were
sometimes referred to as Christian Kurds, suffered from forced
relocations in the north, and, like Kurds and Shiites, were banned from
organizing political parties. At the same time, they were welcomed
into the Ba’ath Party (which was co-founded by a Christian) and were
permitted to rise, as did then prime minister Tariq Aziz, to senior
posts. The regime did not interfere with their religious practice,
and, in some cases, even provided subsidies to churches.

With the rise of Islamist sentiment, even before the U.S.-led invasion
last year, Christians grew increasingly concerned about their fate in
Iraq. Popular pressure induced the regime to adopt Islamic slogans,
build mosques and even introduce a ban on alcohol, which hit the
almost exclusively Christian liquor-store and restaurant owners
particularly hard.

On the eve of the war, Pope John Paul II, along with a number of
Iraqi Christian clerics, made private and personal appeals to the
Bush administration not to go to war, in major part because of their
fears that the aftermath could expose the community to much greater
risks and persecution.

“The concern is that Christians will disappear,” Bishop Pierre Whalon,
an Episcopal official working with the Chaldean church, told the
London-based Financial Times on the eve of the war. “The present
regime gives them some tolerance; who knows what the next one will do.”

Those fears, which were broadcast before the war by U.S. Christian
denominations but pooh-poohed by the neoconservatives and other hawks
before the war, now appear to have been well-grounded. Christian
liquor-store and restaurant owners and their families have been
attacked – sometimes fatally – in predominantly Muslim towns and
cities, while last August, five churches in Baghdad and Mosul were
blown up in a coordinated series of bombings. At the same time,
wealthier Christian families have been targeted for kidnapping by
criminal gangs.

Christians have also come under attack by Kurdish militias in the
north, including Mosul itself, where Kurds have clashed frequently with
Arabs and other minorities as they have tried to extend their control
to “Arabized” areas, which they consider to have been traditionally
Kurdish.

“They worry that this may be the beginning of either a jihad by
Muslim extremists or an ethnic-cleansing campaign by Kurds, with whom
they live in close proximity, or both,” wrote Shea, who said the
administration “cannot afford to be indifferent to the persecution
facing the Chaldo-Assyrian religious minority.”

The result has been an exodus of an estimated 40,000 Christians so far,
most of whom have emigrated to neighboring Syria. At the same time,
many others from Baghdad and the south have reportedly tried to move
back to their traditional homeland near Mosul, particularly around
Dahouk, Zakho, and Irbil.

It is this area that, according to Shea and the Christian
Iraqi-Americans, should be carved out and given special protection
as contemplated by section 53(D) of the CPA-approved Basic Law,
on which the interim government, however, has not yet taken a position.

(Inter Press Service)