by Anthony O'Mahony
Many of Iraq's once thriving Christians have fled violent persecution by Muslim extremists. Some of those remaining see a Christian enclave as their only hope. Others resist being ‘locked in a ghetto'. But will either be enough to save one of the world's oldest Christian communities?
At the start of June, the leadership of Iraq's Chaldean Church opened its synod on national soil, a move that was taken deliberately to express the Church's oneness with the beleaguered country's people. Two years earlier the synod had been held in Rome, but this time, as Fr Philip Najim, procurator of the Chaldean Church to the Holy See, put it, "Despite security concerns, the Patriarch and bishops chose to hold the synod on national soil to send a strong signal of solidarity to the entire community, to let them know that we are present and that their lives are dear to us."
On the eve of the synod, on 31 May, the precariousness of the Church's position and the vulnerability of its ministers became all too clear. An armed group gunned down and killed Fr Ragheed Ganni and three deacons of the Chaldean Catholic Church. The murder took place right after Sunday Mass in front of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Mosul where Fr Ragheed was parish priest. He had been targeted several times in previous attacks and the church has also been repeatedly attacked and bombed in the last few years, the last time only a few months ago.
The three deacons had insisted on accompanying Fr Ragheed to protect him. Now, with "a heart full of bitterness and mourning", the Patriarch of the Chaldean Church, Emmanuel III Delly is lamenting its martyrs, recalled by friends as "... young men alive with faith, who accompanied their parish priest's every move, risking their lives for their belief in Christ", according to AsiaNews.
The killings made the issues to be discussed at the synod in the Chaldean monastery of al-Qosh near Mosul in northern Iraq all the more pertinent. Security and the state of the Chaldean community, halved by forced emigration, were uppermost in people's minds. The future for Christianity in Iraq has never looked so bleak.
Some two million Iraqis have been displaced within the country and some two million have become refugees in the region. This internal displacement is putting great pressure on Christian areas. Up to an estimated 300,000 have fled Iraq permanently, while others are refugees elsewhere in the Middle East region, including in Syria and Jordan. In Syria, 44 per cent of Iraqi asylum seekers have been recorded as Christian since the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees began registrations in December 2003. Tens of thousands are internally displaced within the country. A sense of deep crisis and foreboding pervades the community.
Christians in Iraq have been made deeply anxious by the rise of radical Islamic tendencies in both the majority Shia and the former ruling class, the Sunni minority. Bombings of churches, kidnappings, rapes, assassinations, numerous Christian families forced on to the streets after Islamic extremists expropriated all their possessions, and forced conversions to Islam have led to large numbers of Christians leaving.
In Baghdad some Islamist groups have issued fatwas forbidding the wearing of the cross or making any Christian religious gestures. Churches are under threat for displaying the cross. One Christian said: "Extremist Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq are at war over everything else, but united by a common denominator, the persecution of Christians."
On the 4 June a letter signed by the radical Shia group the "Mahdi Army" "imposed" the veil on all Christian women. Mimicking the fierce Sunni Islamist campaign of persecution against Christians, including the imposition of the jizya, a tax on Christians, in the capital, Shia militants occupied the Chaldean convent of the Angel Raphael in the Doura quarter of Baghdad on 5 June.
The Doura quarter was previously referred to as the "Vatican City of Baghdad" due to the high concentration of Christian churches and institutes located there. In December last year the Catholic seminary and the Babel College (a proto-Catholic university) relocated to Ankawa in the north of the country. No stranger to displacement, the Chaldean patriarchate moved to Baghdad in 1950 after large numbers of Christians moved from their heartlands in the north to the capital. Some have now even suggested it might be time for the Chaldean Church to reform and relocate in the safer autonomous region.
It is reported that today some bishops are pushing for a "Christian enclave" in the Nineveh Plain. Others argue that this would undermine Iraq's traditional multifaith fabric and could turn the Christian community into an ethnic "Assyrian" minority locked in its own ghetto. To date the plan does not have the support of all Christians, especially the majority of the Chaldean episcopate, but increasing insecurity means that the idea is gaining currency, although the debate over such a solution risks creating a division among Christians.
The current plan for the "Nineveh Plains Autonomous Unit" was formally proposed by Assyrian and other Christian activists at a conference held in Baghdad in October 2003. The autonomous region, which would be centred on one of the largest concentrations of Christians in the country, would also contain a larger number of other ethnic and religious groups within its area.
The idea for a Christian "enclave" has a long history; it was originally proposed for the Assyrians at the end of the First World War with the creation of the British mandate for Iraq. The Assyrians gathered in the north of the country with their Iraqi co-religionists after being displaced from the Hakkari region in the then new Turkish Republic. The Assyrian Christians were formed at the time into the "Iraqi Levies", one of Britain's most feared, effective and loyal fighting forces in the imperial army. Betrayed by colonial politics of the period, the Assyrian state never materialised. Christians were left unprotected and more than 3,000 were slaughtered in a massacre of 1933. This led to a further exodus across the Middle East and in the lands of exile in the West.
Today the issue of how the Christian presence in Iraq should be protected has become an important political issue that evokes deep passions. In January, the senior Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk expressed his fears about the idea: "The Nineveh Plain is largely surrounded by Arabs, and Christians would serve as a useful and undefended buffer zone between Arabs and Kurds." According to the archbishop, the best solution is religious freedom: "In my opinion it would be preferable to work at the constitutional level and each area to guarantee religious freedom and equal rights for believers of all faiths throughout the land, including Christians, who can be found everywhere."
The Vatican have not given any open support to the plan to create a Christian enclave, but the meeting between Pope Benedict XVI and President Bush on 8 June certainly had this as a discussion point in the context of the future of Christianity in Iraq; and most properly in Benedict XVI's valedictory meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The question of how best to configure Christianity in Iraq is one of great religious importance and religious significance and, with more than 80 per cent of Iraqi Christians being Catholic, the future of Christianity in Iraq and the wider Middle East is clearly of paramount concern for Rome.
What is astonishing is that despite a troubled history of conflict, war and displacement a fruitful ecumenical dialogue had developed between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, the two principal and ancient expressions of Christianity in modern Iraq (and historically far to the east in Tibet, central Asia and China).
On 21 June an historic meeting took place in Rome between Pope Benedict XVI and Catholicos Mar Dinkha IV of the "Assyrian Church of the East". After the meeting the Pope said he hoped that the ecumenical dialogue between the Holy See, the Assyrian Church and the Chaldean Church would be renewed and that the work of their Joint Theological Commission should be better known.
But other, far darker pressures face both the Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities. Should they disappear from Iraq, it would mean the end of their Syriac language (close to that spoken by Jesus) and their customs, rites and culture. A unique part of Christian patrimony would disappear along with this first-century Church. The United States and the United Kingdom would have presided over the destruction of one of the world's oldest Christian communities. Its reverberations would be keenly felt beyond Iraq's borders.
If the democratic project of Iraq ends in dismal failure for the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, the future will be bleak for all the historic Churches of the Middle East. No wonder then that the situation is being watched closely by the Maronites of Lebanon, the Copts of Egypt and other non-Muslim populations of the region. As the conservative North American National Review stated at the time of invasion, Iraqi Christians are "the canaries in the coal mines".
Reprinted with permissionpublished in The Tablet of June 30th 2007
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