ASSYRIANS FACE ESCALATING ABUSES IN ‘NEW IRAQ’
By Lisa Soderlindh

Assyrian International News Agency
May 4 2006

UNITED NATIONS (IPS) — The longstanding persecution of ethnic
minorities in Iraq is quietly writing the end chapter to Iraqi Assyrian
history: if the world doesn’t wake up to the plight of this people,
they will soon be shoved through the door of extinction, warn patrons
and human rights defenders.

The Assyrian Christian population of Iraq, historically traceable
to the Mesopotamian cradle of civilisation, has increasingly become
the target of both ethnic and religious attacks since the U.S.-led
invasion and the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003.

“Today, the situation is the worst we have ever lived in Iraq,” Andy
Darmoo, head of the “Save the Assyrians” campaign, told a recent news
conference at U.N. headquarters in New York.

The non-political human rights campaign, aimed at saving the Assyrian
people of Iraq from oblivion and helping them reclaim their rights,
was launched in January 2005 by the former British Archbishop of
Canterbury, Lord Carey.

Fellow campaigner Glyn Ford, a Labour member of the
European Parliament, said that torture, kidnapping, extortion,
harassment, church bombings, forced religious conversion, political
disenfranchisement and property destruction are some of the deliberate
human rights violations that are wreaking havoc in the lives of the
hundreds of thousands of remaining Assyrians in Iraq.

The atrocities are rapidly spreading and escalating in the
Assyrian-concentrated northern region, and in cities such as Kirkuk,
Mosul and Baghdad, said Darmoo.

“The dangers we are facing are even greater now than a few hundred
years ago,” he continued, recalling the 13th century when Mongolian
forces led by the warrior Prince Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis Kahn,
swept across ancient Mesopotamia — now Iraq — and killed an estimated
800,000 people.

According to various sources, eight to 12 percent of the Iraqi
population of 26 million belongs to a Christian denomination, mostly
Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians and Catholics.

Iraqi’s Assyrians speak a classical Syricac, an offshoot of Aramaic
— the language of Jesus Christ — and most belong to one of the four
churches: the Chaldean Uniate, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Syrian
Catholic and the Assyrian Church of the East. They were estimated
at around one million before the recent exodus of Assyrians seeking
refuge outside Iraq.

With over half of the Assyrian Iraqi community residing in the north,
primarily in the Nineveh Plains and its surrounding areas, the illegal
confiscation of Assyrian lands in northern Iraq under the Kurdish
Regional Government (KRG) remains a challenging issue confronting
the ethnic-religious minorities, Shamiran Mako, an analyst with the
Council for Assyrian Research and Development (CARD), a Canadian-based
think-tank, told IPS.

She said that since the “liberation” of Iraq, oppression has become
more prevalent.

“Recently, there have been systematic measures taken by the Kurdish
Democratic Party (KDP) officials, under the Kurdish-controlled areas
to marginalise and suppress Assyrians through the dictatorial policies
of the KRG.”

There, the recent vast exodus of Assyrians has been two-fold,
Mako continued: it has been due to the rise of insurgency against
those residing in the targeted cities; and in the north it has been
directly as a result of the discriminatory measures of the KRG,
under the auspices of the KDP and the second main Kurdish party,
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Though the number of refugees in the world has been declining in recent
years, the international system for dealing with human displacement
has reached a critical juncture, including the challenge of a tougher
climate awaiting refugees fleeing their homeland, according to a
recent U.N. report on the worldwide refugee situation.

Statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) in October 2005 show that out of the about 700,000 Iraqis who
took refuge in Syria between October 2003 and March 2005, 36 percent
were Iraqi Christians.

Despite the vast number of Iraqi Assyrian refugees living under
terrible conditions, Darmoo was astonished “that there is yet no help
whatsoever from any quarter.”

“But we are not going to stop this time until we get our human rights,”
he told IPS.

Save the Assyrians has taken their case to the British and European
Parliaments. In a session devoted to human rights at the beginning of
April, a resolution was passed on Iraqi Assyrians recognising their
plight and calling on the Iraqi authorities, the European Commission,
the Council of the European Union, and the international community
to take action.

In the months preceding the new federal Iraq, the campaign sought
to influence the drafting of the country’s new constitution, which
was adopted in October 2005, with respect to Assyrians and other
minorities. But despite some minor revisions, Darmoo said it did not
really change anything.

“The constitution means nothing unless our rights are guaranteed by the
U.N. and by the superpowers,” he told IPS. “The Iraqi government will
not give us our rights — so international pressure must be enforced,”
he added.

But Mako, who represented the Assyrians at the 11th session of the
U.N. Working Group on Minorities in May-June 2005, said that the
world body, which has a limited presence inside Iraq, “has not doing
anything tangible”.

“The representatives on the ground are not attentive to the plight
of Assyrians following the fall of Saddam’s regime,” she told IPS.

“Instead, they focus on the oppression inflicted upon the Shiites
and Sunni Arabs, and the Kurds.”

However, the U.N. could play a key role by offering Assyrian refugees
residing in neighbouring countries the right of return, “as it has
for Kurdish settlers arriving from neighbouring Iran and Turkey,”
reasoned Mako.

Since 2005, the Council for Assyrian Research and Development has
sought to record the abuses endured by Assyrians living in the
heartland of northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, western Iran and
eastern Syria, and those in the diaspora, by way of its Assyrian
Human Rights Documentation Project.

“At the current rates of ethnic cleansing, forced assimilation and
migration, the indigenous Assyrian Christians will be fully eradicated
from the new ‘democratic Iraq’ in less than 10 years,” warns the
first outcome paper, arguing that “the Kurdification, Arabisation,
and Islamification of Iraq have left an ancient people at the doors
of extinction”.

The paper argues for a special territory for Iraq’s Assyrian population
and calls on the world to help secure the return of all Assyrians
refugees to their ancestral homeland in northern Iraq.

“We and all other ethnic and religious parts of Iraqi society are
entitled to basic human rights, same as the larger ethnic religious
groups in Iraq,” Edison A. Ishaya, president of the Assyrian Academic
Society, a U.S.-based group with members worldwide, told IPS.

“We plead to the world, and especially to all brothers and sisters
from all sectors of Iraqi society, for protection and basic human
rights,” he said. “All we pray for is to live in peace and continue
to be a productive and contributing part of Iraqi society — as we
have always been.”