By Catholic News Agency
Matt Hadro
Matt Hadro
As some Christian genocide victims rebuild their homes in Northern Iraq, a tenuous security situation still threatens their future in the region.
“Every week we have two, three families leaving,” Father Salar Kajo, a
priest of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Teleskov, Iraq and member of
the Nineveh Reconstruction Committee, told CNA last week at an
international religious freedom gathering in Washington, D.C.
However, he added, “we will not lose our hope and our faith.”
Fr. Salar spoke with CNA at the Second Annual Ministerial to Advance
Religious Freedom, held at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C.
from July 15-19. The ministerial was attended by religious and civic
leaders from all over the world, including representatives of 106
countries; it was held to draw attention to religious persecution and to
promote freedom of religion.
A major discussion topic at the ministerial was the role of U.S.
assistance in Northern Iraq to help Christian and Yazidi survivors of
the ISIS genocide rebuild for the future.
ISIS was driven from Mosul in 2017, and the last remaining town of
the original caliphate in Syria fell earlier this year. Yet many
Christians who fled the ISIS onslaught in 2014 have not returned to
their homes in Mosul and the Nineveh region, and an estimated 360,000
Yazidis are still displaced in Kurdistan and have not returned to
Sinjar.
The primary obstacle to their safe return is a lack of security, said
Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, in an
interview with CNA at the ministerial.
Although the territorial ISIS caliphate is gone, the security threats
to Christians and Yazidis in the region are two-fold: ISIS splinter
cells that continue to operate, and Iran-backed militias that commit
abuses with impunity.
There are up to 15,000 ISIS fighters estimated to have remained in
Iraq, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom (USCIRF).
Meanwhile, militias that are part of the Popular Mobilization Forces
(PMF) have committed abuses against Christians, Yazidis and other
minorities, and Iran’s influence in the PMF has grown. Militias are
harassing Christians, extorting them and stealing plumbing and wiring
materials from their homes as part of Iran’s “colonization” effort in
the area, Anderson wrote in an April op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
Despite the abuses, the Iraqi central government has failed to hold
the militias accountable, allowing them to operate with “impunity,”
panel members at last week’s ministerial said in agreement.
The security situation in Teleskov is “okay,” Fr. Salar told CNA, but
other towns are far less secure; residents of Batnaya and Tall Kayf,
for instance, will not return until the militias there are gone, he
said. The tension in the area has only been exacerbated by the threat of
a U.S.-Iran regional conflict.
The U.S. had a direct hand in sparing the town of Teleskov from a
conflict between militias and the Peshmerga around the time of the
Kurdish referendum in 2017, Fr. Salar said. Most families had fled the
town, but Fr. Salar remained with around a dozen young people despite
orders to leave from the militias. He contacted the U.S. Embassy in
Baghdad for help. “They supported us, and they stopped everything,” he
said.
One long-term solution to the security problem is “more community
policing,” Anderson told CNA. Officers in the police forces need to come
from the communities they serve, so that local religious and ethnic
minorities can have “confidence” in law enforcement and enjoy more
security, he said.
Aid to genocide survivors requires a level of security to be
effective, yet it also cannot simply be short-term food, clothing, and
shelter. To build for the future, families need the goods to live a
normal life—education, infrastructure, and jobs—made possible through
economic investment and international assistance.
Countries like Hungary and Poland have already been helping with
resettlement efforts; the Hungarian government donated $2 million in
2017 to help rebuild the town Teleskov in Nineveh. The Knights of
Columbus delivered $2 million for the town of Karamles in just over 12
months in 2017-18, and Aid to the Church in Need has also been
instrumental in helping Christians in the area recover and resettle.
However, leaders on the ground have insisted for years that
substantial U.S. assistance is necessary for the long-term stabilization
of the region; charitable groups can only bring so many resources to
the table. For years, displaced Christian families reportedly were
almost entirely dependent upon groups like the Knights of Columbus and
the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil for humanitarian assistance.
They claimed that little to no assistance reached them from the U.S. and
the United Nations.
Then, at the annual In Defense of Christians Solidarity Dinner in
October of 2017 in Washington, D.C., Vice President Mike Pence promised
that the U.S. would begin directly funding aid groups working on the
ground in the region, rather than sending assistance through the United
Nations.
Members in Congress also worked to establish a policy change like
this one. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) introduced the Iraq and Syria Genocide
Relief and Accountability Act to authorize and direct the U.S. to fund
aid groups working with persecuted religious and ethnic minorities. The
legislation passed the U.S. Congress in November of 2018 and was signed
into law in December of 2018.
Pence’s announcement represented a sea-change in U.S. policy;
persecuted communities would have a hand in determining the assistance
they would receive, explained Mark Green, the Administrator of the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID), to CNA at last week’s
ministerial.
Pence “gave us the mandate, basically, and the space to,
community-by-community, reach out to local faith leaders and say, ‘Look,
we want to work with you. What are your needs?’ Not us telling them
what their needs are, but instead them telling us what their needs are,”
Green told CNA.
And now the U.S. has someone in Iraq dedicated to working with the
local minority communities—USAID’s Special Representative for Minority
Assistance Programs in Iraq, Max Primorac. He “spends his time every day
going to communities,” Green said. “I’ve met with Archbishop [Bashar]
Warda a number of times, and our team does all the time.”
Yet in the months after Pence’s announcement, Iraq’s Christians said
the promised assistance was slow in arriving. Multiple proposals to
USAID by local aid groups were rejected, prompting Archbishop Bashar
Warda of the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil to tell the National Catholic Register in June of 2018 that Pence’s announcement had backfired in a sense—it
had encouraged some donors to move on to other charitable causes with
the assumption that Iraq’s Christians now had a secure backing from the
U.S., which they apparently did not.
Green promised that help was on the way. On Wednesday, a USAID
official told CNA that the U.S. has provided approximately $367 million
for the Vice President’s initiative to support persecuted ethnic and
religious minorities in Northern Iraq; USAID contributed $308 million,
and the State Department has contributed $57 million, the official said.
Green told CNA that the overall process of providing the needed
assistance is encouraging but much work remains to be done. “In some
ways, it’s turning an aircraft carrier around in a canal,” he said.
Anderson agreed that the agency “is working very hard” but is dealing
with a regulatory process that will slow the delivery of aid.
There has been “an incredible change in the bureaucratic orientation”
in the past year, Primorac said last week at a ministerial side event
on the Holy Sites in the Middle East. The Chaldean Catholic Church,
Syriac Orthodox Church, and Syriac Catholic Church are now seeing “equal
treatment” by the U.S. with other non-religious civic organizations in
how assistance is distributed.
The U.S. has funded efforts to restore or rehabilitate holy sites in
the area, such as projects at St. Matthew’s monastery, or Mar Mattai, of
the Syriac Orthodox Church and damage assessments at St. George’s
Monastery in Mosul, Primorac said; the U.S. is also the largest donor
for demining operations in Iraq.
Local priests also attested to the U.S. help in the region. Fr.
Thabet Habib Youssef, a priest from Karamles, told attendees at the
ministerial that the U.S. has provided useful construction equipment and
trucks to help clear out rubble, and helped bring water and electricity
back to the town.
He begged the U.S. not to create a “culture of dependency” with aid,
but to honor the “dignity of work” through public-private projects that
create “honest economic growth.”
Creating local jobs will be critical to keeping the youth from
leaving and securing the future, Fr. Salar said, “because without youth
in these places, in 10 or 15 years we will lose everything.”
Fr. Salar still keeps contact with families who have left Iraq for
nearby countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Some are “ready to
return back,” he said, but “we can’t give them a sign of hope” at the
moment. Their return may be dependent on whether the Iraqi government in
Baghdad is “working with us,” he said.
The rebuilding of churches is also critical to the future of the
Iraqi Christians, as they join their very identity to the local churches
and monasteries. In the rebuilding of Karamles, Anderson said, it was
“very important to have a church, very important to have cultural
centers restored.”
However, in addition to security and international assistance,
Christians in Iraq need to have the law on their side. Specifically,
they need legal accountability for the perpetrators of genocide, and
equality under the law in Iraq so that they are not treated as
second-class citizens.
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime of
Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 as a “Never
Again” response to the horrors of the Holocaust.
“If that is to mean anything,” said Lord David Alton of Liverpool, a
member of the UK House of Lords, in an interview with CNA at a
ministerial side event, “we have a duty according to the Convention to
prevent genocides from happening, to protect those who are going to be
subject to genocide, and then to punish those who are responsible. And
we have been failing on all three counts.”
If the ISIS perpetrators of genocide are not held accountable for
their atrocities, “it’s like giving a green light” to despots and
military leaders around the world to commit abuses with “impunity,” Lord
Alton said.
While the International Criminal Court is not recognized by many
countries, “we should be creating an ad hoc tribunal” to try the ISIS
perpetrators of atrocities, he said, “not unlike the one that operated
at Nuremburg after the Second World War.”
Changes to the Iraqi constitution are also needed to recognize the
rights of Christians, Fr. Salar said, because they are currently treated
as second-class citizens. Christians have acted as peacemakers between
Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Arabs and Kurds, and other minorities, he
said.
“Believe me, we are working hard with them because we consider
ourselves the life in these places, and the salt, also. Without the
salt, there is no taste,” Fr. Salar said.