TINY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY STAYS PUT IN IRAQ

AFP
Mar 18, 2009
Baghdad

Armenians have long been one of its smallest communities with little
political influence, even with the wealthiest woman in Iraq and
associates of "Mr Five Percent" of Iraqi oil once among its ranks.

The low profile has allowed the tiny Christian community in
predominantly Muslim Iraq to thrive ever since the first traders
ventured to Mesopotamia — the land between the rivers — and settled
in the 17th century.

Unlike the Chaldeans, who account for the bulk of the war-battered
country’s Christians and have emigrated in droves, the remaining
Armenians at least plan to stay put, Archpriest Nareg Ishkhanian said.

"This is our land too. We are here to stay" despite having "problems
sometimes with the (Islamist) fanatics," said 63-year-old Ishkhanian.

The community now numbers around 12,000, including 7,000-8,000 in
Baghdad, out of an Iraqi population of about 29 million.

The number peaked at 35,000-40,000 during the 1950s, made up mostly of
survivors and descendants of what the Armenians term the 1915 genocide
in Ottoman Turkey. Ankara to this day denies any charge of genocide.

But the Armenian presence in Iraq dates back to the 1600s when traders
resettled in an arc that stretched through Iran and India down to
the Gulf port of Basra in present-day southern Iraq and back north
up to Baghdad.

Their main church in central Baghdad’s Tehran Square holds documents
as old as 1636.

At least 45 Armenians have been killed in the post-Saddam years of
rampant insurgency, sectarian warfare and often unbridled crime,
while another 32 people have been kidnapped for ransom, two of whom
are still missing.

On December 7, 2004, night-time assailants firebombed a new church
in the northern city of Mosul, an Al-Qaeda bastion, just days before
it was to be inaugurated.

Like all Iraqis, Armenians have also been caught up in car bombings,
killed during robberies or in cases of mistaken shootings by the US
military and private security firm Blackwater.

Historically, Armenians in Iraq have never challenged the ruling
regime. They were close to the pashas during Ottoman rule and to the
British during their subsequent colonial regime.

Dictator Saddam Hussein saw no threat from the Armenians, who accounted
for most of his domestic staff from nannies and personal tailor or
carpenter to official photographer.

Ishkhanian insisted on paying tribute to the host homeland despite
its turbulent history which has led to waves of emigration, during
which the better-off in particular have launched new lives in the West.

"We are indebted to the Arabs," he said. "They did everything to
welcome us. They allowed us to live and to rise in society, after
Armenian survivors, many of them orphans, had arrived bare-footed
from death marches across the desert."

At the other end of the spectrum, the Iskenderian family —
long-established in Iraq — claims part of the Green Zone in downtown
Baghdad that houses one of Saddam’s palaces and is now home to Iraq’s
government and a massive US embassy.

The Kouyoumdjians, another prominent family, trace their roots
in Iraq from even before their business and family connections to
Calouste Gulbenkian, the famed Mr Five Percent of Iraqi oil rights
a century ago.

Vast tracts of land in Fallujah, once epicentre of the anti-US revolt,
still belong to the family. Iraq’s first king, Faisal, used to stop
over for tea in their now destroyed "kasr" (castle) on the Euphrates.

Meanwhile, Dikran Ekmekjian, who was awarded an MBE for his service
to the British Empire, helped form and held posts in Iraq’s first
governing administration after independence from Britain in 1932.

And Iraqi satellite television has run a series on the riches-to-rags
tale of Sara al-Zangina (Wealthy Sarah), an Armenian heiress and
benefactor of the massacre survivors whose riches were frittered away
by an unscrupulous executor.

Stories abound of her beauty as a girl, of how she was smuggled away
in a Persian carpet to escape the attentions of a much older pasha,
of how she threw the most glamorous parties in the Orient after he
was recalled to Istanbul.

Today, the main church in Baghdad is part of a compound which includes
an elementary school, an archbishopric and cemetery. The cemetery
alone covers 5,000 square metres (54,000 sq feet) of prime real estate.

Headmaster Karnik Avakian said the school reopened in 2004, after
remaining closed through most of the period of Saddam’s Baath party
rule under which all Iraqis had to go to state school.

But even in Saddam’s Iraq, special classes were allowed in Armenian
language and religious studies, said Avakian, whose elementary school
has 150 pupils from 70 families.

The church’s stained glass windows were blown out on one side by the
many bomb blasts in nearby Tehran Square. But its crystal chandeliers
still bear witness to the former wealth of the Armenian community.

In a show of faith in the new Iraq, the church itself stands
freshly-repainted.

At the end of another day of minor renovations, Ishkhanian reflected
on the community’s history as the curtains on the altar were being
closed for the pre-Easter Lent fasting period.

"The rich have all gone. Now, we are the rich because we serve the
church and the community," he said.

The US-led invasion of March 2003 sent thousands of Armenians fleeing
to Armenia, Syria and Lebanon. Others have resettled in the United
States, Sweden and Holland.

"Many of them are coming back now, thanks to the improved security in
the country," says Ishkhanian, while Avakian said families are planning
to return from their refuge in safe Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.