Christians of Iraq
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Christians of Iraq
Contact Links Historical articles Historical pictures Photos of Bombed Churches Home Only this link has access to all News articles
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Ignoring Christians and Ethnic Minorities in Arab Muslim Countries April 6, 06
By Prof. Kamal Kolo
Belgium -- In the name of Arab Heads of states: The Iraqi Christians do not exist!
It was amazingly strange to listen to the closing speech of Mr. Amro Moussa, the general secretary of the Arab countries league, when he addressed the heads of states and delegations during the Arab summit on 29 March 2006. As a General Secretary of this league, Mr. Amro Moussa is representing the general accepted policies of the Arab countries. His closing speech reflects the consent and approval of all attending delegations in addition to their line of thoughts.
In his reference to Iraq, Mr. Moussa strongly condemned in the name of the Arab league the bomb attacks on the Shiite Muslims Jaafar al-alaskry and Ali al-Hadi shrines in Samarra, to the north of Baghdad, referring to them by mentioning their explicit name, yet shamelessly falling short of mentioning the systematic campaign of terrorist bomb attacks on Iraqi Christian churches in Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, where tens of innocent Iraqi Christians -- children, women and men -- were wounded or killed and great property damage was caused.
Mr Amro Moussa chose to use the vague and meaningless expression "and other places of worship" in a probable shy reference to "maybe" Christian churches. While the attacks on Shiite shrines are committed by rivaling factions of the same religion "Islam", the attacks on the peaceful Christian churches and population were committed by Muslim terrorists, which put the dangerous significance of these latter attacks against the Iraqi Christians to a much higher level. Yet the heads of state in the Arab league and their speaker chose to look blindly at the plight of Iraqi Christians, not even dignifying their existence by mentioning their name.
Why does such a leader at such an occasion, where Arab heads of states are convening, choose to ignore the indigenous religious-ethnic minority that has been living in Iraq for thousands of years and thus to deny their existence? Why do the heads of states attending that meeting and listening to a closing speech accept this deliberate ignorance and denial of existence? Does this not reflect a pattern of state of mind and a way of thinking?
According to Mr. Amro Moussa, the Arab governments and people are seeking peace, justice and democracy and demanding the world to support their just cause; they condemned the Western "attack" on their Islamic religion and demanded to respect Islam and other religions in general. Yet again, how was it possible for a panel of heads of states to swallow the paradox that their speaker, while demanding respect and recognition from non-Muslim foreign countries for their belief and religion, explicitly fails to respect and recognize the Christian citizens of Iraq by denying their existence?
This is, unfortunately, a recurring pattern in ancient and modern history of Arab Muslim countries. This time it was used on a pan-Arab panel. On a local level, in Iraq, and again amazingly and shamelessly, the Iraqi Muslim politicians, Shiites, Sunnites, Kurds and Turkmen, secular or religious and in spite of all their deep differences, they all agree about one certain phrase, when mentioning a certain Iraqi issue:
"The Iraqi people with all of their components, Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Shiites and Sunnites".
The phrase stops at this point and the politician or Muslim religious man continues commenting on his topic. The expressions "Chaldoassyrians" and "Christians" have a too bitter taste to be pronounced. At the beginning of the period of the deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, the Chaldoassyrian people were considered as non-existing, too. They were deprived of their national ethnic and historical role in favor of one marginal component: Arab Christians and even this small role became obliterated during the sudden religious zeal of the dictator in his "campaign of belief" in the late eighties-nineties of the last century which gradually created and installed Islamic fanaticism in Iraq. Before of the fall of the dictator and his institutions, the Iraqi opposition was very keen to talk about democracy and the rights of minorities -- whether Muslim, Christians, Sabaens, Chaldoassyrians, Turkmen or Shebecks -- and to portray a multicolor picture for the future of Iraq. Disappointment and fear replaced hope, when it proved that those minorities or ethnic groups that had been suffering from dictatorship and persecution, after having gained power, started playing the same game against the Chaldoassyrians and Christians as before.
It is the game of denial of existence, which is directed by a much worse strategy than before, because Islamic fanaticism, now well established in Iraq on governmental and institutional levels, calls for more radical types of denial of rights and existence for non-Muslim minorities that are considered by Islamic fanaticism to represent "citizens" not having equal rights to Muslims, and again starts the tale of "second degree citizens". Words from the Islamic law, like Ahl al-Kitab (the people of the book) or Ahl al-Dhimma (the people of the vow), are fashionable in today's Iraqi jargon as well as in religious speeches and literature. Under Islamic law, these minorities will never have the same rights as Muslims have, because that would be a breach of Islamic law.
The prelude was the new Iraqi constitution and the preceding general elections, where the deprivation of rights of and denial of existence of Iraqi Christians as an ethnic and religious minority has become a policy of the governing Muslim majority that also dangerously injects fanaticism into simple ordinary Muslims on the streets. The persecuted people of yesterday have become the new persecutors. History shows that Islam and equal rights of minorities are on opposite sides. If the leaders of the Arab Muslim world are shying from recognizing Christian communities by not even addressing these communities by their names, the promised democracy, equality and social justice are but dreams or rather time buying terms, till the ultimate face of neo-Islamic dictatorship is well rooted in Iraq.
By Prof. Kamal Kolo
www.tebayn.comProf. Kamal Kolo is a scientific researcher at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium