By East County Magazine
Paul Kruze
Some 300 members of El Cajon's large Chaldean community gathered at Prescott Promenade in downtown El Cajon on Thursday afternoon to vent their frustrations that the U.S. government is not doing enough to protect ethnic Chaldean Christians who still live in war-torn Iraq and face new persecutions now, even after ISIS has been routed from their homeland.
Paul Kruze
Some 300 members of El Cajon's large Chaldean community gathered at Prescott Promenade in downtown El Cajon on Thursday afternoon to vent their frustrations that the U.S. government is not doing enough to protect ethnic Chaldean Christians who still live in war-torn Iraq and face new persecutions now, even after ISIS has been routed from their homeland.
The rally was sponsored by the Chaldean League of
California, local Chaldean associations, and the Chaldean Catholic
Diocese of St. Peter. Several speakers called for the Iraqi constitution
to be amended to assure equality for Muslim and Christian Iraqis and
asked for there to be a separation of church and state in Iraq.
According
to a flyer distributed by the Chaldean League, since the defeat of
ISIS, Iraqi Christians have started to return to their overrun towns and
villages, yet are once again being forced to flee again when Iraqi and
Kurdish forces clash.
"Look at the suffering of those people. They
have no one to defend them," said Bishop Emanuail Shaleeta of the St.
Peter Chaldean Catholic Church in El Cajon. "We are here to support
them. We are here to back them. We are here to pray for them. And we are
here to talk on their behalf. That's why we are asking the government
of Iraq -- the politicians of Iraq and the U.S. government which is
present there and in the Kurdistan area. We would ask them to please do
not forget about those people. Do not forget their suffering," he said
to the crowd of concerned Iraqi immigrants.
Bishop Shaleeta said
that the present Iraqi government has done little to address this
fermenting issue facing the citizens of Iraq. "The Iraqi government and
Kurdistan area is making the simple and poor people victim[s] of their
politics," he said.
Besma Coda, an Iraqi born in the oil-rich area
of Basra and educated at Baghdad University, is the co-founder and
Chief Operations Officer of Chaldean Middle Eastern Social Services, one
of the first non-profit social services for Chaldeans and Arab
communities in the United States. The social service agency serves
recently arrived Chaldeans in El Cajon.
Coda described the plight
of the Chaldeans in Iraq. She said that Iraqi Christians are been
treated poorly and are being brutalized by Iraqi Muslims and Kurds, who
aim to take advantage of their plight.
"The Chaldeans are being
kidnapped; women and children are terrified to walk the streets at night
or even during the day. They are without water, electricity, gas,
education and other environmental basic needs," she said. "When people
want to take action into their hands and try to hold their towns [from
the armies], they are stalked. Hard punishments are taken against them.
Iraqi Christians and other minorities need to be become part of the
solution to help rebuild their country," she told the crowd.
According
to organizers of the rally, Iraq is considered by some to be the
birthplace of Christianity with the Chaldean, Assyrian, and Syriac
communities that are the original architects of Mespotamia, what is
thought to be the cradle of modern civilization. In 2017, estimates
indicate that due to decades of war, the Christian population of Iraq is
now about 200,000 people, down from 1.5 million in 2003. While Arabic
and Kurdish are the official languages of Iraq, Turkmen (a Turkish
dialect), Syriac (Neo-Aramaic), and Armenian are official in areas where
native speakers of these languages constitute a majority of the
population, according the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook.
Today, 99 percent of the country is Muslim, followed by Christian, Yazidi
and other communities that together amount to less than one percent.
Many
Christian families have fled to northern Iraq, Recent reports, the
protestors say, indicate that the overall Christian population may have
dropped by as much as 50 percent since the fall of the Saddam Hussein
regime in 2003, with many fleeing to the Middle East Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon, and the United States.
Among the other speakers at the
rally, El Cajon City Council member Steve Goble shared his sentiments
about the current situation in Iraq, but also credited El Cajon's large
Chaldean community for bringing renewed vibrancy to the city.
"The
Chaldean community has added a lot of value to the El Cajon community.
Their arrival have kicked out a lot of the bad elements in El Cajon and
chased them away. It is important to support people who contribute to
your community. And one of the things that is important to them is peace
in their homeland," Goble said.
'Ahmed', a local El Cajon
businessman, who didn't want his name revealed (like many others at the
rally) said to ECM, "We are here today because many of our people are in
pain because of the pressure being put on them on the Iraq and
Kurdistan government and we don't need them to be in the middle of this
war. We are trying to give voices to people who have no voice."
While
many of the rally participants in their hearts yearn to return to their
country and are concerned about current conditions, albeit sympathetic
to the situation, Ahmed is decidedly concentrating on providing a good
life for his family in El Cajon since they arrived here in 2003.
"I
had only $500 dollars in my pocket," he recalled. "I come and am
working hard because Chaldean people are hard workers. They work for
their families. They work for their kids to help build their future. But
there is no future for me back in my country," he concluded.