Christian Divisions in Iraq

One should take into account that Younadem Kana, an Assyrian Christian member of the Iraqi Governing Council, is the contemporary Iraqi equivalent of a politician. Still, Meghan Clyne's summary of some of the talking points from his tour of the United States is worth a read. Since the piece covers a lot of varied ground, quoting from it representatively would be redundant. However, this part caught my attention in particular:

"During Saddam's time," Kana says, "we were disrespected guests in our own home." The Baathist regime destroyed close to 200 villages and over 125 churches and historical monasteries in the region; it tried to impose Koranic law on Christian children; it employed a policy of Arabization toward the Assyrian community; it assassinated the leader of the Assyrian Christian church; it exiled and killed many in the Chaldean community. "They destroyed us and deported our people, without even giving them a chance," Kana notes.

In 1991, following his defeat in the first Iraq war, Saddam Hussein used religion to try to endear himself to the Islamic world. During this "faith campaign," symbolized by the addition of "Allah Akbar" (God is Great) to the Iraqi flag, Saddam closed down Christian businesses and shut Christians out of politics and positions of power. Unable to make a living for themselves, and weary of the persecution, many hundreds of thousands of Assyrians were forced to leave Iraq, fleeing to Europe, Australia, and the United States.

"Under Saddam's sectarian, apartheid policies, we were fifth-degree citizens," Kana explains. "First came the Sunnis, then the Shiites, then the Kurds, then the Turkomen, and we were fifth — unwelcome, even though we are Iraq's native people. This oppression was for nothing more than our Christian faith and our Assyrian ethnicity; we were allowed only to be Baath-party members, and to be Arabized."

Those paragraphs probably won't surprise many folks in America, but what makes them interesting is the mild difference from an Iraqi Catholic priest's comments:

The Christians are pleased that Saddam is gone, yet they felt safer under Saddam. This is because Saddam did not bother Christians so long as they kept to themselves. While this meant that Christians could not openly proselytize, it nonetheless allowed them to maintain churches and hold services without fear of government reprisal. Since Saddam's fall, however, Father Hermiz lamented that one church in Baghdad has been bombed, and the Christians are scared. His parishioners are concerned about the Shias, who they fear will not adhere to Saddam's "don't bother us, and we won't bother you" policy.

Various factors must be noted. Kana is a political man and has been actively fighting the Ba'athists for thirty-some years, while Father George Hermiz appears to have led a quietly charitable church, doing good where good could be done. Both of these approaches are necessary, and both will fit into a given area's politics and culture in different ways. It may be that the theology and group identities of the groups lend themselves to the particular roles that they've filled.

We shouldn't just acknowledge life's and Christianity's tapestry of distinctions and move on. The dichotomy is worth considering both to increase in empathy with those who approach life differently and to assess one's own inclinations. More immediately, though, and of more relevance for current events, is a potential lack of empathy on the ground in Iraq, about which Rod Dreher wrote in March 2003:

Incidentally, a reader who knows something about the Church situation in Iraq says that non-Chaldean Catholic Christians there have long viewed the Chaldean Catholics as collaborators with Saddam. The reader predicts that there is going to be hell to pay for the Chaldean Catholics after the fall of the Saddam regime, as other Iraqi Christians hold them accountable for their relationship to the dictator. The Vatican's strong objection to this war has been duly noted by non-Catholic Iraqi Christians, the reader says, and the post-war fallout from that is not going to be pretty.

Both Kana and Hermiz mention other sects in ways that suggest a tendency toward mutual inclusion as Christians in a Muslim land. But I do hope there's some more direct communication being pursued at all levels.