from The Tablet

25 November 2006

Flight from fear
John Pontifex

The conflict in Iraq between Shia and Sunni Muslims continues to dominate headlines. Yet the Christian community there is threatened with wipeout and the media barely demur, in a crisis that is imbued with tragic irony.

I might have known that a phone call to Iraq would be full of the unexpected, but what happened next caught me totally by surprise. "Stop talking for a moment," said the bishop suddenly. "Can you hear what's going on outside my window?" The phone crackled obstinately for a moment before giving way to the sound of gunfire. The call soon ended but no matter: I had a clear enough picture of life today in Iraq.

As the beleaguered President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair search for a new policy in Iraq, they would do well to listen to Bishop Andreas Abouna of Baghdad on the devastation of this ancient cradle of civilisation.

But just who is bearing the brunt of the incessant fighting? The media have given very full reports of the internecine warfare that has broken out between Shia and Sunni Muslims. Nor indeed is the Kurdish question overlooked, particularly as the debate intensifies over the possible break-up of Iraq into three groups.

There is nonetheless a fourth group who appear to have been airbrushed from the media portrait of Iraq. They are a people who, it turns out, have most to lose from this apparently never-ending conflict. Christianity in Iraq is staring oblivion in the face. A population of 1.2 million, made up mostly of ancient-rite Catholic Chaldeans, enjoyed some measure of protection under Saddam Hussein's regime, which was secular by Middle East standards. It is now clear that they have been rendered virtually defenceless in the ebb and flow of conflict, which over time has become ever more deadly, ever more driven by politico-religious zeal.

It was not always like this, or at least not if the Iraqi bishops are to be believed. Especially in the early days after the overthrow of Saddam, reports to charities such as Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) were full of optimism that the turmoil was by its very nature transitory. Indeed, Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk saw the time of change as an historic opportunity for the Christian community. He suggested that ancient-rite Churches had much to offer their Muslim neighbours, not just in terms of their often highly developed educational and professional skills, but also through introducing fresh thinking on the relationship between religion and society.

Now, things could not be more different. That the total civilian dead could be as high as 150,000 - or 655,000 if The Lancet medical journal is to be believed - is sadly only one symptom of the crisis. A catalogue of disastrous events has unfolded, each one quicker in succession than the last. The fall of key parts of the country to militia control has gathered pace, each zone dominated by a "mini-Saddam", as one Baghdad priest put it to me.

If there was an all-important turning point for the Christians of Iraq, it took place last summer. The kidnapping and murder of three priests, Fr Saad Sirup Hanna, Fr Raad Washan and Fr Basil Yaldo, came as the militia stranglehold over Baghdad was reaching its zenith. The onset of ethnic cleansing under a religious banner, apparently so alien to the Iraqi way of life, had begun in earnest. According to priests close to ACN, the capture of the three men and the torture they suffered were seen by the faithful as the moment when the presence of Christianity in this, their most ancient home, was no longer tolerable. If there was no respect left for the priests, the people could expect no mercy either. As fellow Baghdad priest Fr Bashar Warda told me: "It was the sign that we had to leave the area altogether."

Nor was the "area" itself without significance. Most of the priests in question are from Al Dora, the so-called "Vatican of Iraq", home to almost a dozen churches, monasteries, the famous Babel College and St Peter's Seminary. With these religious buildings closed down or barely, if ever, used, it seems to mark a point of no return in Iraq's ancient Christian history.

Then, on Monday 9 October, the Syrian Orthodox priest Fr Paulos Eskandar was abducted in Mosul. Two days later, his mutilated body was found in an eastern district of the city. He had been beheaded and his body cut into five pieces. Thereafter a video showing the details of the assassination was distributed across Christian churches in Mosul, Baghdad and surrounding Christian villages. The message from the terrorists could hardly have been clearer.

For the faithful forced to leave for other parts of Iraq or for neighbouring countries, there really is no alternative. By the summer, Baghdad auxiliary Bishop Andreas Abouna was reporting that, in some parts of the country, up to half the Christian population had already left. Now comes news that there are up to 35,000 refugees in Syria. Of those, 20,000 are in the capital, Damascus, desperately looking for accommodation, food and medical care.

In an interview with ACN, Bishop Antoine Audo of Aleppo, in northern Syria, described how Christians had swarmed over the border from Iraq, reporting how the women had been forced to wear the veil and how yet more priests had received death threats.

Commenting on the many militia now controlling key swathes of Iraq, Bishop Audo said: "These fanatics want to get rid of the Christians completely." Fr Habib Al Nafali, a priest from Baghdad now working as chaplain to the exiled Iraqi Christian community in the UK, said of the reports he had received from his native country: "There are groups within the Iraqi police who try to burgle Christian homes and rape Christian girls. They know they are defenceless, that they don't have guns."

The only forces holding back those remaining Christians from fleeing Iraq would seem to be extreme poverty, illness or the very real fear of kidnap. The hope of better times to come has vanished - at least for the time being. For most, they can no longer put off the day of their departure.

All the signs are that these blows to Christianity may turn out to be fatal, and yet they have failed to show up on the media radar, despite journalists' constant struggle to find a new angle on an old story. That at last seems to be changing with widespread reports of a 14-year-old boy crucified in Basra. The claims came as Bishop Djibrail Kassab of Basra left his diocese to take up a new post ministering to Chaldean refugees in Sydney, Australia. With no sign of a replacement being found for him in Basra, sources close to ACN said that there are no more than about 200 Christian families spread across the entire region.

Reports of these events, slow to catch the eye of the media, have a significance that has not been lost to the US Catholic Bishops' Conference. Determined to play their part in raising awareness of the near annihilation of Christianity in Iraq, they have written to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, calling for the creation of a safe haven for Christians. The creation of what the bishops call "an administrative region", governed by Baghdad but controlled by the Kurds, has, according to Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, the advantage of offering the Christians "greater safety and more opportunity to control their affairs".

But before Ms Rice or indeed President Bush leap on the US bishops' plans in a bid to restore lost faith, especially among the disenchanted conservative Christian Right of America, they should hear out the objections raised by Archbishop Sako of Kirkuk. For a start, he dismisses as "difficult and risky" the idea of the safe zone for Christians, which is planned for the Nineveh plains outside the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Bishop Antoine Audo went further, saying: "The Sunnis in Mosul will take this [‘safe-zone' plan] as a pretext to attack the Christians. The Sunnis will say: ‘Look, the Christians are asking for independence from us. We must stop them.' The Christian has to live with everybody else. That is the way it should be."

The concerns of many bishops run deep. In a statement sent personally to ACN, Archbishop Sako is now calling on Christians to abandon the historic differences that have divided them along boundaries of rite and denomination, most notably Chaldeans, Syrians and Armenians. Blaming their "weakness" on these divisions, Archbishop Sako is calling on the Churches to come together to form one voice on matters ranging from the controversial Iraqi constitution, which ambiguously attempts to enshrine both sharia law and religious freedom, to the development of the few Christian villages remaining in the country.

But what can the US do to heal the differences and save the Church from the tragedy befalling it? Archbishop Sako, for one, is scathing. When I quizzed him on the safe-zone plan recently, his attitude towards the Americans could not have been clearer: "We are Iraqis; we belong to the Iraqi civilisation. We have lived beside the Muslims and in an Islamic culture for so long. We have not assimilated with the coalition forces. We have nothing to do with them."

The religion shared by the Iraqi Christians and the US forces has for so long been a delicate issue. Archbishop Sako and the faithful have fought a desperate public relations battle with the Muslim majority to show that they are no fifth column in league with so-called latter-day Crusaders. It is difficult to know which part of the safe-zone plan Archbishop Sako finds more abhorrent - the content of the scheme, or the fact that it would be masterminded by the Americans. It is a sign of just how bleak things have become. Given the semi-religious zeal with which President Bush pursued the war in Iraq, it is ironic that the biggest loser in the whole sorry affair is the country's ancient Christianity, which stands on the brink of extinction. In this time of desperation, it should come as no surprise to learn that the faithful in Iraq are clinging to the Gospel message and the belief that - as Bishop Abouna puts it - "faith is stronger than fear".

John Pontifex is head of press and information for Aid to the Church in Need (UK).