By America Magazine (The Jesuit review)
Kevin Clarke
Time is running out for the Christian communities of Iraq’s Nineveh
plains. Deeply shattered by years of dislocation and violence at the
hands of Daesh,
as ISIS militants are known in the region, thousands of Christian
families have begun the costly and difficult task of rebuilding their
homes, churches and civic and religious institutions—all had suffered
degrees of destruction, from the merely serious to absolute ruin, during
the three years Daesh rampaged through the province after its lightning
seizure of Mosul in June 2013.
Now with Daesh on the run in Iraq, those same Christian communities face a new threat as Kurdish Peshmerga
forces and Iraqi government troops backed by Shiite militias square off
across the province. In some instances, hostile brigades are just
kilometers apart on either side of the Christian communities that had
just begun reconstruction.
This stalemate between the Iraqi
central government and the independence-leaning Kurdish Regional
Government is the greatest obstacle to a successful reintegration of
Christians in the province, according to Stephen Rasche of the Nineveh
Reconstruction Committee. Speaking at the United Nations in an
information sharing conference sponsored by the Holy See Mission to the
UN on Nov. 30, he said the standoff “has carved Nineveh in half and made
towns in which we need to work inaccessible.
“Moreover, the
economic viability of the region and its ability to sustain recovery
efforts is being halted due to the inability of its inhabitants and
workers to travel between towns.” Because of the growing uncertainty
generated by the Kurd-Iraqi conflict, several communities “now lie open
to the real risk of inhabitation by others from outside, thereby
creating new sources of potential violence and conflict.”
The
stalemate between the Iraqi central government and the
independence-leaning Kurdish Regional Government is the greatest
obstacle to a successful reintegration of Christians in the province
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Archbishop
Bashar Matti Warda, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Erbil, agreed
that the current standoff in Nineveh represented yet another existential
threat to the province’s Christians. The Christians, he said, along
with Yazidis and other religious minorities, had become perhaps the
greatest victims of the political and sectarian conflict between the
region’s Sunni and Shia Muslims over the last three years. “Christians
paid a huge price for these disputes,” the archbishop said. “We cannot
bear another collateral damage. Time is not on our side.”
But in a
small indication of how difficult unraveling that confrontation may
prove to be, the Iraqi Ambassador to the United Nations bluntly rejected
the notion of a separate and independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq.
“Iraq should be one Iraq and Iraq should remain united,” Ambassador
Mohammed Hussein Bahr al-Uloom said. “And the Iraqi people proved this
in the struggle against Daesh.
“There can be no Iraq without
Kurds; there can be no Iraq without Christians; there can be no Iraq
without Arabs; there can be no Iraq—and here is a group you have
probably not heard of— without Mandaeans,” he added, referring to a tiny
community of the followers of John the Baptist who perdure in Iraq.
“This
is the beauty of Iraq; I don’t like my country to be separated and
fragmented,” he said. He preferred the nation to remain united “with my
brothers, the Kurds, the Christians” a multi-ethnic and multi-religious
state. “This is the life of the Iraqi people...there will be no
separation for the Kurds,” he said. “The Kurds will stay; the Christians
will stay; the Turkmen will stay; the Yazidi will stay. They are all
one people. “This is our message,” he said firmly, “and we need your
support.”
According to the ambassador, the struggle against Daesh
exhausted more than $100 billion and the conflict left behind $130
billion more in damage. This is a burden, he said, that the Iraqi state
cannot be expected to shoulder alone. Defeating Daesh—which he described
as transitioning from a military to an ideological struggle—is the
responsibility of the world community because it means the protection of
the entire international community.
But the threat of renewed
violence is just one of the challenges standing before the restoration
of the ancient Christian community in Iraq. Millions will be required
for the physical reconstruction of these devastated villages and
neighborhoods. Archbishop Warda pointed out that the Christians of the
region have so far had to rely on the support of Christian aid groups.
Aid to the Church in Need, the Knights of Columbus and Caritas
Internationalis have already directed millions to the effort to sustain
Nineveh’s Christians and other minority groups and to begin the
rebuilding.
The work is meant not only to restore Christians
communities but to revitalize the role of Christians in Iraqi society as
a mitigating and bridge-building force among the nation’s diverse
ethnic and religious communities. “Restoring and maintaining pluralism
and diversity in the Nineveh Region is essential to defeating ISIS
ideology that sought to eliminate religious and ethnic minorities from
their so-called Caliphate,” said Edward Clancy, director of outreach and
evangelization for Aid to the Church in Need-USA. His organization will
be among the international Christian and Catholic aid organizations
that will be directing significant resources to Nineveh over the coming
months and years.
“The Nineveh plains were home to more than 40
percent of the Christian population in all of Iraq,” Mr. Clancy told
this U.N. audience. “While East Mosul has seen 90 percent of its people
return, the Nineveh Plains has seen only 12 percent of the Christian
population return even though these territories were liberated earlier
than Mosul.
“If they are again to become a vital part of a diverse Iraqi society,
Christians will need help from the international community,” he said.
“They will need the economic and political support of institutions like
the United Nations and the major countries of the West.”
He added,
“We must keep leaders to their promises and their responsibilities.
Action is needed now or the Christian community which has been present
in Iraq for nearly two millennia will become a historical footnote.”
“One
positive outcome that has followed the genocide by ISIS,” said
Archbishop Warda, “has been the denouncing of their tactics by the
entire world community—Christians, Muslims and others. Now it is time
for action as well as words. Not only the West but Islamic countries as
well, who have been affected by the terror of ISIS’ ideology, must
commit resources to sustain pluralism in Iraq as a manifestation of
their opposition to this ideology of hatred and genocide.”
“Crucial
for preserving pluralism and diversity in the Nineveh Region that was
overrun by Daesh is that we seek to return to survivors, as much as
possible, what Daesh pillaged from them,” Archbishop Bernardito Auza,
the permanent observer of the Holy See Mission to the United Nations,
told the gathering. “This means ensuring the conditions for them to
return to their places of origin and live in dignity and safety, with
the basic social, economic and political frameworks necessary to ensure
community cohesion. It means doing more than the indispensable work of
helping them to rebuild homes, schools and houses of worship, but also
to rebuild society by laying the foundations for peaceful coexistence.”
Toward
that ambition of restoring Nineveh’s Christians and rebuilding
sustainable civic and economic institutions for them, the Vatican has
thrown its support to the “Return to the Roots”
project. That fundraising effort is being coordinated by the Nineveh
Reconstruction Committee with the help of Aid to the Church in Need and
the Knights of Columbus.