EXACTLY a week after the London bombings of July 7, two Iraqi bishops met Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor over dinner at a Roman Catholic church in Chelsea. Archbishop Louis Sako, of Kirkuk, and Auxiliary Bishop Andreas Abouna, of Baghdad, were in the capital on business: they specifically wanted the cardinal to approach the British Government on behalf of Iraq’s Christians, who, they said, were fleeing their country at the rate of 30,000 people a month.
The two Chaldean Catholic leaders wanted Britain to intervene to try to stop Sharia being incorporated into the draft Iraqi constitution, fearing that they would become second-class citizens if Islamic religious law were imposed. Instead they wanted the constitution to be secular, guaranteeing equality under the law for all Iraqis.
Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor “listened to their concerns”. Under Sharia, non-Muslims are accorded “dhimmi” status under which they may have to pay special taxes. Since Saddam Hussein was removed in 2003, the experiences of Baghdad Christian alcohol vendors, for example, have included visits from the Hawza (Shia religious authorities), who have extorted cash penalties on the grounds that Sharia was being violated.
Sharia is being enforced with greater vigour in the Shia-dominated south of the country, where barbers have been attacked for shaving men of their beards. All women, including Christians — who under Saddam could wear the latest fashions and make-up, and go to work — are under pressure to wear the hijab.
Many have escaped for Baghdad and the cities of the north, but even in Mosul they are made to wear headscarves. Others have sought sanctuary abroad, principally in Syria and the United States.
The Church in Mesopotamia is one of the oldest in the world; the majority Christian group, the Chaldeans, still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, and the Assyrian Church of the East was founded in the region in AD33.
For centuries, such communities have not only coexisted harmoniously with their Muslim neighbours but have been respected for their contribution to the life of society. Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, nationalised their schools in 1971 but he tolerated them, appointing Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean Christian, as his deputy Prime Minister.
It was only after the first Gulf war that the Christians began to feel unwelcome in the land they have inhabited for 2,000 years. In 1990 they numbered more than a million. By the outbreak of the second war the number had shrunk to 800,000 but even then, relations with Muslims remained cordial.
With the growing insurgency and the radicalisation of the Islamic factions, Christians found themselves in an awkward position. They were identified with the Western occupiers by Islamist militants, and last year churches were targeted in a spate of bombings, yet at the same time they found themselves excluded from the political reconstruction of their country by their “Christian” occupiers.
Today, the biggest challenge to the Christian community is the postwar settlement. “There is a danger that we could have religious government,” Bishop Abouna said. “If we mix them both together — politics and religion — it will be chaos. It will destroy everything.”
Bishop Abouna was chaplain to the Chaldean community in London until his episcopal ordination by Pope John Paul II in 2003. He once defended the American presence in his country on the grounds that Iraq needed help in security and development. Soon afterwards he protested, along with other Christian leaders, when Paul Bremer, the American civil administrator of Iraq — and a Catholic — refused to allow a Christian representative on the interim governing council.
Nor were any Christians invited to take a seat in the interim Iraqi government after elections this year, although great efforts were made to include every other “ethnic” faction. When the constitution was drafted, there was no one at the table to press the case for the Christian minority.
The Christian leaders decided to make their voices heard. At the end of June, a group of ten Chaldean, Orthodox, Syriac, Armenian and Evangelical leaders sent a joint letter to the Iraqi interim President Jalal Talabani, the Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to say that they feared discrimination if Sharia was enshrined in the constitution. “If there is a move towards the confirmation of the role of the Islamic religion in Iraqi society, then it is only natural to confirm the role of other religions that have been historically established in Iraq,” they said.
They were ignored, even after Pope Benedict XVI received assurances from the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebar, during a meeting in Castelgandolfo, Italy, last month, that their rights would be guaranteed. The constitution had missed its August 15 deadline, partly because of wrangling over the role of Islam, but the final document asserted, in Article 29(a), that “no law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam”.
According to Neville Kyrke-Smith, the UK director of Aid to the Church in Need, a Catholic charity working to help persecuted Christians, Iraqi Church leaders are concerned that under such a settlement the remaining 650,000 Christians “will be wiped out”.
A fortnight ago, in a call from Baghdad, Bishop Abounaagain asked Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor to intercede. This time the cardinal responded by writing a letter to Jack Straw in which he warned the Foreign Secretary that the constitution posed a “real threat” to religious freedom, that it meant “devastating consequences for minority rights” and that there would be an “exodus of Christians” fleeing the rule of the mullahs.
“A stable and democratic Iraq, which I know the British Government seeks, can only be constructed on respect for the human rights of all citizens,” the cardinal told Mr Straw last week. “I would urge you, therefore, to use your office to influence the parties to the constitution to enshrine specific guarantees which establish the equality of non-Muslims.”
The Foreign Office, however, insists that “Iraq is a sovereign country and it is up to them how they vote and draft their constitution. It is not our prerogative to steer the course of decision-making.”
The cardinal, in any case, was overtaken by events. On Wednesday it was announced that the constitution had been finalised and sent to the printers: there will be no more changes before a referendum on October 15.
Iraq’s Christians have had a bad war of liberation. They constitute only 3 per cent of the population, perhaps their only hope for equal rights now lies with the Sunnis of Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and Samarra who are likely to reject the constitution for reasons of their own.
