Iraq's shrinking Christian
minority struggles to survive
Sat Oct 16, 04
BAGHDAD (AFP) - The coordinated attacks
on five Baghdad churches sent tremors through Iraq (news - web
sites)'s small Christian community, which finds itself being
set adrift amid a tide of rising Islamic extremism.
The dawn attacks across Baghdad caused
no casualties but were the latest assault on Iraq's ethnic mosaic
as insurgents seek to sow dissension among Iraq's Muslim majority
and dwindling Christian community.
Five explosions in the span of an hour
was one more blow to an embattled minority that was shrinking
even before the recent spate of attacks.
The community stood at 1.4 million people
according to a 1987 census but has since shrivelled to 700,000
during a turbulent period of war and years of crippling sanctions.
"The attackers have one goal: sowing
strife in the heart of Iraqi society. But they will not destroy
our unity," said Yunadam Kanna, a Christian representative
in Iraq's interim parliament.
"Churches are easy targets because
they are places of worship open to all."" Iraq's Christian
community, numbering just three percent of Iraq's 25 million
population, has been heavily targeted in the unrest that has
swept Iraq following last year's US-led invasion and some have
picked up and left.
At the start of August, four attacks
against Christian targets in Baghdad and two others in Mosul
left 10 people dead and 50 injured in what the government said
was the work of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
Liquor stores, owned by Christians,
have been blown up by Islamic militants. And Christian families,
many considered wealthy by Iraqi standards, have been targeted
by kidnappers for huge ransoms.
Following the August bombings, Iraq's
Displacement and Migration Minister Pascale Icho Warda, herself
a Christian, said 40,000 Christians had left Iraq.
Shocked by the latest outbreak of violence,
the patriarch of the Chaldean Church, Monsignor Emmanuel Delly,
said: "If the government is powerless, what can we do.
"We call on them (attackers) not
to touch the holy sites."
Iraq's provisional constitution, signed
in March, guarantees freedom for all religions, but it has not
assuaged the anxieties of the small community amid the torrent
of violence and identity politics sweeping Iraq.
The 1970 constitution adopted under
the old regime also guaranteed freedom of religion and prohibited
any religious discrimination.
It also acknowledged that the people
of Iraq consisted of "two principal nationalities,"
Arab and Kurd, and "other nationalities" whose rights
were considered legitimate.
In December 1972, the head of the ruling
Baath Party identified these by decree as the Assyrians, Chaldeans
and Syriacs.
The Chaldeans, whose 600,000 people
represent the majority of Christians in Iraq, are an oriental
rite Catholic community.
Their church emerged from the Nestorian
doctrine, which it renounced in the 16th century while preserving
its rites. Former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz, currently
in US custody, is the best known of the Chaldeans.
The Nestorian church became a dissident
movement in 431 AD after the Council of Ephesus. They affirm
that Christ has two separate personalities -- namely human and
divine -- and not a single personality possessing both human
and divine nature as Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy believe.
In Iraq, there are also Catholic and
Orthodox Syriacs, Catholic and Orthodox Armenians, and since
the time of the British mandate after World War I, Protestants,
Anglicans and Roman Catholics.
Many Iraqi Christians still speak Aramaic-Syriac,
a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Christ. During the 1970s,
bilingual cultural magazines in Arabic and Syriac were published
and radio and television programmes were transmitted in Aramaic.
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