IRAQI CHRISTIANS: CAUGHT IN A REFUGEE WEB
Yigal Schleifer
EurasiaNet, NY
March 9 2006
The Khams family, Chaldean Christians from Northern Iraq, celebrated
this past Christmas in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Istanbul.
It was a far cry from the celebrations they used to have in their
large home in Iraq, but Nather Khams, who came to Istanbul with his
parents and two siblings 10 months ago, says it was still a much
happier Christmas.
“In Iraq we don’t feel the holiday. You can’t even put on a cross,”
says Khams, 37. Only a few months before their last Christmas in
Iraq, the church where his family prayed was the target of a bombing
attack, and his mother and sister narrowly escaped injury. In the
days leading up to the holiday, Khams’s mother, Samira, saw Islamic
militants chop off the head of a man on the sidewalk as she rode by
in a taxi. Afraid that their church might be attacked again, Khams’s
family spent that last Christmas in the safety of an all-Christian
village called Karakosh, located some 20 kilometers from Mosul, the
northern Iraqi city that has boiled over with insurgent violence and
ethnic tensions since the start of the United States occupation of
Iraq. “Before, all the family, relatives and friends were there, and
there was safety to make a party, to celebrate,” says the soft-spoken
Khams, who has a short-trimmed, graying mustache and a receding
hairline. “Now you are scared to even go to church.”
Khams and his family are among an estimated 2,000 Chaldean Christians
– members of one of the Middle East’s oldest Christian sects and who
belong to the Catholic Church – who have been quietly immigrating to
Istanbul over the last two years (even larger numbers of Chaldeans have
been seeking refuge in Syria and Jordan). Coming on tourist visas,
the Chaldeans arrive in Istanbul hoping to be quickly resettled in
the United States and Australia, where many already have relatives
living, or somewhere in Europe. Instead, many have found themselves
stuck in Turkey, living illegally on their expired tourist visas
while they wait to move onwards. Although no exact figures exist,
experts estimate that the Christian population of Iraq – made up
mostly of the Catholic Chaldeans and the independent Assyrian church –
is rapidly diminishing, with some 800,000 Christians currently living
in the country of 27 million, compared to 1.4 million a decade ago.
And while the violence that has gripped Iraq over the last few years
has affected all Iraqis, Christians say they have felt particularly
vulnerable since, unlike the country’s Kurds or Sunni and Sh’ia
Muslims, they don’t have a militia to protect their community’s
interests. Meanwhile, as the insurgency in Iraq began to take on a
more Islamist character, the country’s Christians increasingly found
themselves targeted by militants, the most notable example being
the coordinated bombing in August 2004 of five churches in Baghdad
and Mosul, which killed over a dozen. In late January this year,
car bombings outside Christian churches raised new concerns about
sectarian violence.
George Mushe, 51, who came to Istanbul from Baghdad with his wife
and three children, described a worsening spiral of violence that
finally forced his family to flee. His son, who was working in
a business that supplied spare parts to the American forces, had
his life threatened and ultimately had to quit his job, while his
two daughters luckily survived the bombing of the secondary school
they were attending. Mushe, meanwhile, was forced to close down his
business, a wedding hall that catered mostly to Christians, since
holding events there simply became too dangerous. “There’s no life
in Iraq now. If you leave your family to go to work or church, you
don’t know if you will see them again,” Mushe says, while sipping on
a tea in an Istanbul pastry shop. “Before the war they looked at us
as different, but we could go to church, to work.”
“Our patriarch and bishops don’t want us to leave Iraq. They say our
churches are now empty,” he added. “They say that Muslims are also
being killed. But what can we do? They are bombing churches.”
For Nather Khams’s family, the comfortable life they knew in Mosul,
an ethnically mixed city of Christians and Muslim Arabs and Kurds,
quickly deteriorated after the launch of the American offensive.
Sitting in the living room of the small, two-bedroom apartment the
family of five now shares in Istanbul, Khams’s mother, Samira, pulls
out a light blue headscarf as a way of demonstrating that change. “I
couldn’t go out unless I wrapped this around my head,” Samira says
as she covers her tousled jet-black hair with the headscarf.
Khams’s 30-year-old sister, Maysam, says she found herself under
increasing pressure to put on a headscarf and stop wearing slacks
at the Mosul vocational school where she was a teacher. After the
school started receiving anonymous telephoned threats against any
female teachers not wearing a headscarf, Maysam decided to quit her
job and stay at home. The family finally decided to leave Iraq after
Khams’s father, Harbi, who ran a business distributing a pro-government
newspaper, survived a shooting attack on his car. “It was a mixed
feeling,” Nather Khams, who ran a business in Mosul selling computer
hardware, said about leaving Iraq. “We wanted to get to a safe place,
but we were sad to leave our memories, our house, our friends.”
In Istanbul, the Chaldeans have traded a life of certain danger for
one of uncertain waiting. They have moved en masse to the city’s
Kurtulus neighborhood, one of the few districts in the city that
still has sizable Greek and Armenian communities. A steep walk down
one hill and then up another one leads to St. Anthony’s cathedral,
a massive brick church on Istanbul’s famous Istiklal boulevard, where
the Chaldeans have been given the basement chapel as their own. On
Sundays, Chaldeans can be seen leaving the church, as they wend
their way through the narrow streets that lead back to Kurtulus,
many stopping at a cut-rate outdoor bazaar to buy their fruits
and vegetables for the week. “The church is central in our life,”
says George Mushe, who serves as a deacon in the Chaldeans Istanbul
church. “Having a church here in Istanbul has been very good, to be
able to pray in our own language.”
Also not far from Kurtulus is the office of Caritas, the Vatican’s
international aid agency, which is the main organization working
with the Iraqi Christians in Istanbul. Located on the grounds of the
Vatican’s consulate building, Caritas provides the Iraqis with social
services and assistance in obtaining visas to third countries. Since
the Iraqi children can’t attend Turkish schools because of their
illegal status, Caritas also opened its own school, providing daily
classes for elementary school-aged children.
In a space built for 65 pupils, some 250 children now study in
classrooms that have been subdivided several times over. Even a chilly
shed in a courtyard has been turned into a classroom.
Tulin Turkcan, Caritas’s director of refugee services, says the
organization has been overwhelmed with work over the last two years.
“People are coming all the time with questions and needs. It’s not
easy,” she says. “They need basic assistance – schooling, medicine,
food. They need assistance from the government, but they know there
is not assistance, so the most important thing is for them to be
resettled in a third country.” Over the last year, though, the number
of Iraqi Christians being resettled has decreased significantly,
Turkcan says. The United States and Australia are granting fewer and
fewer families asylum. Turkcan and others working with refugees in the
Middle East believe that fewer Iraqis are being granted refugees status
because western countries and the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees, the main organization responsible for determining
asylum claims, fear that giving more Iraqis the opportunity to go to
the west would create a pull factor that would eventually lead to a
broader exodus from Iraq. Some suspect, meanwhile, that Washington
is holding back on granting Iraqi Christians asylum because doing so
would be an admission of its failure to create a post-Saddam Iraq that
is safe for all Iraqis. For people like Nather Khams, days are now
spent simply waiting for an answer to their asylum applications. With
many Turks struggling themselves to find work, most of the Iraqi men
are unemployed, although some of the women have been able to find
work as domestic helpers. Khams says he and the rest of his family
wake up at 11am most days, as if in some kind of collective stupor,
and mostly stay at home watching Arabic satellite television.
“We have no rights here. We don’t have a permit to live here,” he
says with a furrowed brow. “We don’t feel stable here. You can’t
find your future here.” Could he and his family imagine going back
to Iraq if the situation there improved? Samira Khams waves her hands
emphatically. “We can’t go back,” she says, her voice rising. “We have
sad memories there. We couldn’t go back, even if it became good there.”
Editor’s Note: Yigal Schleifer is a freelance journalist based in
Istanbul.