Iraq’s shrinking Christian minority struggles to survive
Agence France Presse — English
October 16, 2004 Saturday 4:44 PM GMT
BAGHDAD Oct 16 — The coordinated attacks on five Baghdad churches
Saturday sent tremors through Iraq’s small Christian community, which
finds itself being set adrift amid a tide of rising Islamic extremism.
The dawn attacks across Baghdad caused no casualties but were the
latest assault on Iraq’s ethnic mosaic as insurgents seek to sow
dissension among Iraq’s Muslim majority and dwindling Christian
community.
Five explosions in the span of an hour was one more blow to an
embattled minority that was shrinking even before the recent spate
of attacks.
The community stood at 1.4 million people according to a 1987 census
but has since shrivelled to 700,000 during a turbulent period of war
and years of crippling sanctions.
“The attackers have one goal: sowing strife in the heart of Iraqi
society. But they will not destroy our unity,” said Yunadam Kanna,
a Christian representative in Iraq’s interim parliament.
“Churches are easy targets because they are places of worship open
to all.””
Iraq’s Christian community, numbering just three percent of Iraq’s
25 million population, has been heavily targeted in the unrest that
has swept Iraq following last year’s US-led invasion and some have
picked up and left.
At the start of August, four attacks against Christian targets in
Baghdad and two others in Mosul left 10 people dead and 50 injured in
what the government said was the work of suspected al-Qaeda operative
Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
Liquor stores, owned by Christians, have been blown up by Islamic
militants. And Christian families, many considered wealthy by Iraqi
standards, have been targeted by kidnappers for huge ransoms.
Following the August bombings, Iraq’s Displacement and Migration
Minister Pascale Icho Warda, herself a Christian, said 40,000
Christians had left Iraq.
Shocked by the latest outbreak of violence, the patriarch of the
Chaldean Church, Monsignor Emmanuel Delly, said: “If the government
is powerless, what can we do.
“We call on them (attackers) not to touch the holy sites.”
Iraq’s provisional constitution, signed in March, guarantees freedom
for all religions, but it has not assuaged the anxieties of the
small community amid the torrent of violence and identity politics
sweeping Iraq.
The 1970 constitution adopted under the old regime also guaranteed
freedom of religion and prohibited any religious discrimination.
It also acknowledged that the people of Iraq consisted of “two
principal nationalities,” Arab and Kurd, and “other nationalities”
whose rights were considered legitimate.
In December 1972, the head of the ruling Baath Party identified these
by decree as the Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syriacs.
The Chaldeans, whose 600,000 people represent the majority of
Christians in Iraq, are an oriental rite Catholic community.
Their church emerged from the Nestorian doctrine, which it renounced
in the 16th century while preserving its rites. Former deputy prime
minister Tareq Aziz, currently in US custody, is the best known of
the Chaldeans.
The Assyrians, believed to number about 50,000, are Christians who
remained faithful to the Nestorian doctrine.
The Nestorian church became a dissident movement in 431 AD after
the Council of Ephesus. They affirm that Christ has two separate
personalities — namely human and divine — and not a single
personality possessing both human and divine nature as Roman
Catholicism and Orthodoxy believe.
In Iraq, there are also Catholic and Orthodox Syriacs, Catholic and
Orthodox Armenians, and since the time of the British mandate after
World War I, Protestants, Anglicans and Roman Catholics.
Many Iraqi Christians still speak Aramaic-Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic,
the language of Christ. During the 1970s, bilingual cultural magazines
in Arabic and Syriac were published and radio and television programmes
were transmitted in Aramaic.
In the northern region of Kurdistan, Christians number about 150,000,
mostly Chaldeans.
Since the fall of former president Saddam Hussein’s secular regime,
many of Iraq’s Christians have kept a lower profile for fear of being
equated with the largely Christian US-led forces in the country.