ishtartv.com - economist.com
Mar
30th 2017
IN
THEORY, this year should have been a time when the fortunes of Iraq’s Christian
community, one of world’s most beleaguered religious minorities, at last
changed for the better. Instead, say members of the community and people
supporting them, it is proving to be a time of agonising dilemmas.
The
number of Christians in Iraq has plunged from perhaps 1.3m before the 2003 war
to barely 250,000 now, and the great majority of those who remain are living in
the relative safety of the country’s Kurdish-controlled north. At least 100,000
had to flee their homes and seek Kurdish protection in 2014 after Islamic State
(IS) swept through their ancestral lands. But last year quite a lot of that
territory, including some historically Christian towns, was wrested from IS
control. A protracted, bloody struggle for control of Mosul, the regional
capital, is grinding on (see article),
but hard-pressed religious minorities hope and assume that IS will eventually
be driven out. All that creates the possibility at least of a collective
return.
But
to put it mildly, that won’t be easy or cheap. At least 12,000 displaced
Christian families are being supported in temporary accommodation by religious
charities, mostly in Ainkawa, a Christian district in the city of Erbil. A survey published this week by Aid to the Church
in Need, a Catholic charity, found that nearly 90% of these displaced people
were interested in going back and 40% were keen to return as soon as possible.
But the same study, which looked at 12 mainly Christian towns and villages,
found that nearly 12,000 homes had been damaged and 700 destroyed completely.
The cost of repairing the damage could exceed $200m. Recent images of the
once-flourishing Christian town of Qaraqosh, recaptured six months ago, show
scenes resembling an uninhabitable ruin.
Stephen
Rasche, an adviser to the Catholic archdiocese of Erbil, said in London last
week that another problem was looming: a real risk of humanitarian assistance
to the temporary residents of Erbil running out. If that happens, a long and
costly effort to keep some Christians in their ancestral lands, and give them
hope of living sustainably, may collapse, triggering a fresh and perhaps final
surge of emigration.
But
Iraqi Christians and their international supporters, including an upwardly
mobile and industrious diaspora, are persisting. Bashar Warda, the Catholic
archbishop of Erbil, told a visiting journalist earlier this month that among
his people there was a strong determination to return and make a viable living
in their traditional homelands. The first priority, he said, was ensuring
adequate material conditions; fixing places of worship, however culturally
important, could come later:
The
vision we have is this: first houses, proper shelter, public services, and then
we will think of churches. If you have nice churches without people, what will
you do with those churches? First I think we should have…faithful people, then
they will take care of the churches. We don’t have to worry about that [now]….
As
an example of a modest success story, the archbishop cited the village of
Telskuf were 120 families had returned and were busy renovating their homes
with help from the church and other agencies.
Anecdotal
evidence suggests that prospects for Christians returning look somewhat
brighter in localities that were recaptured from IS by Kurdish forces and much
less good in settlements where IS was driven out by the Iraqi army in
co-operation with often-chaotic mixtures of militias.
And
that in turn raises an awkward question. Iraq’s Christians, in the north and
elsewhere, used to be connected to their Arab Muslim neighbours through a dense
and well-established network of relationships. But since the advances of IS in
2014, those relationships of trust have disintegrated, and won’t be easy to
reconstitute. By contrast, ties between Christians and their Kurdish protectors
have grown closer. Some may conclude that if there is any future at all for
Christians in Iraq, it is exclusively under Kurdish administration in the far
north.
But
Martin Manna, director of the Michigan-based Chaldean American Chamber of
Commerce and an influential figure in Iraq’s Christian diaspora, says his
members won’t give up on Iraq proper. They will continue to lobby for better
treatment by Iraq’s central government, even though once-strong Christian
communities in Baghdad and Basra have dwindled to near-extinction. In
co-operation with Christian groups inside Iraq, the diaspora would support the
idea of the Nineveh Plain, the area adjacent to Mosul, becoming a separate
province, safe for religious minorities. They would also criticise moves by
Baghdad which hurt Christians, such as a law demanding that the children of
interfaith marriages be Muslim.
But
the immediate task, Mr Manna acknowledges, is reconstruction in the north:
working with the local churches and humanitarian agencies to fund and rebuild
the areas trashed by IS. Given that he speaks for nearly 4,000 Iraqi-American
entrepreneurs, from supermarket-owners to real-estate brokers, that doesn’t
seem completely unrealistic. Whether they live in Detroit or Erbil, religious
communities that have survived for nearly 2,000 years can draw on some powerful
reserves of tenacity and energy, and they will need every drop.
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