By Crux
Inés San Martín
Inés San Martín
Speaking outside the program at an event in Rome on migration, the
newly arrived ambassador from Iraq to the Vatican said Wednesday that
the country’s Christian community is at risk after violence perpetrated
by ISIS, but people who fled now want to go back.
To do so, she said, they need help rebuilding the regions devastated by Islamic State’s reign of terror.
“Neither the government nor the Iraqi population at large want
Christians to leave, because we know they are an essential part of our
society,” said Amal Mussa Hussain Al-Rubaye, Ambassador to the Holy See.
“Thank you for caring for our migrants, but from this place, I want to
say to the world: if you want to help our migrants, do so by helping us
rebuild Iraq.”
Visibly emotional, Al-Rubaye said hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
who’ve been welcomed by Turkey, Kurdistan or Jordan are ready to go
back, particularly to the Nineveh Plains,
where an estimated 90 percent of the local Christian population lived
before the rise of ISIS in 2014. The terrorists, she said, “[tried to]
kill everyone who thought differently,” leaving people “no choice but to
flee.”
“Christians who’ve fled are now ready to come back, but the areas
where they live are completely destroyed,” she said. “And it takes time
to rebuild houses.”
Since late 2018, the region is being rebuilt, mostly with foreign
aid, provided either by the government of Hungary or private charitable
organizations, such as the papal charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN)
and the Knights of Columbus.
Al-Rubaye’s words came during a Q&A section of an event organized
by the Argentine embassy to the Holy See on Wednesday, on the eve of
the United Nations’ World Refugee Day, marked annually on June 20th.
Even though she wasn’t on schedule, her short remarks garnered applause
from the audience.
Also speaking at the event were Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Secretary
for Relations with States within the Holy See’s Secretariat of State;
Andrea Tornielli, the Vatican’s media operation editorial director;
Father Fabio Baggio, undersecretary of the Vatican’s Migrants and
Refugees section; Paola Alvarez, representative of the International
Migration Organization; and Andrea Pecoraro, representative of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Both Pecoraro and Alvarez focused their talks on the current
statistics on global migration, noting that today, there are close to 70
million people fleeing war and persecution, with 26 million living as
refugees, 41 million as internally displaced persons (IDP), and close to
3.5 million as asylum seekers.
This information, Pecoraro said, does not take into consideration
that in the past 12 months, an estimated four million people have fled
Venezuela, only 10 percent of whom have requested asylum and hence have
been included in the UN’s statistics.
As a comparison, he said that in 2009 there were some 40 million
refugees, and that back in 1945, at the end of WWII, there were 50
million people who’d been forced to leave their homes.
Syria today has the largest numbers of both refugees and IDPs, with
close to seven million, and Venezuela holds second place, way ahead of
other countries such as Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar or Somalia.
Something else both remarked on is that often times, it’s the
“developing countries” that are hosting the largest numbers of refugees,
with Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda and Sudan heading these statistics. The
only developed country to make the top ten he presented is Germany,
hosting close to a million refugees.
“Most stay in neighboring countries, either because they want to go
back once the conflict is over, or because they can’t afford to keep
going,” Pecoraro said.
The right to request asylum, he said, is a “human right,” adding that
when borders are closed to a person due to their “race, the color of
their skin or their faith,” countries are discriminating and this has a
negative impact both for the person seeking help and for the country
that refuses to be welcoming.
The ambassador didn’t mention that earlier this month, Argentine
President Mauricio Macri, generally pro-immigrant, announced he’s
running for reelection and that his running mate is Miguel Angel
Pichetto, once a close ally to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who’s on
the opposing ticket.
“I’m not xenophobic, nor do I speak about building a wall, but this
year, 400,000 poor Latin Americans entered Argentina,” Pichetto said in
Nov. 2018. “Is this sustainable over time?”
“We cannot be a country of stupid people, of fools, in such a complex
world,” he said. “We cannot be the State that serves as benefactor of
other countries.”
Gallagher, the papal representative, discussed short, mid and
long-term actions that international actors and policy makers need to
take to address the migrant question. On the first, he said that the
current crisis cannot be ignored and that governments have the
responsibility to help those fleeing their homes.
When it comes to mid-term solutions, he called for actions that avoid
future crises making immigration influxes more manageable. “These have
to be policies that make migration safer, recognizing it as an
unavoidable reality that carries both challenges and opportunities,” he
said.
About the long term solutions, Gallagher argued that immigration
should be “a choice, not a need,” and urged countries to work on
building policies that respect every person’s right to remain in their
own countries, leading a dignified life “in the place they call home.”