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Iraqi Christians Debate Self-Autonomy
within Iraq's Kurdish region
23.12.2006
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December 23, 2006
A new plan for Christian self-autonomy within Iraq’s
Kurdish region has sparked debate among Iraqi
Christian leaders desperate to halt the mass exit of
Christians from Iraq.
With church-bombing and priest-kidnapping on the
rise in Mosul and Baghdad, Iraq’s Christian
population is estimated to have dropped below
450,000, half the size it was in 1991.
“A year ago, the plight of the Christian community
was not very well known,” Michel Gabaudan of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
told The Associated Press in a December 15 article.
“But that has changed, because we now have very
clear evidence that they have been persecuted.”
Iraq’s half-a-dozen or more historical churches,
many of them dating back to the first three
centuries after Christ, agree that something must be
done to preserve their existence. But consensus on a
solution has proven elusive.
Disagreement exists over whether to cooperate with
Kurdish leadership to form an autonomous area within
Iraq’s Kurdish federal state, or to go it alone and
create a new federal state solely for minorities.
One Chaldean archbishop has said that either plan
would only make things worse by creating a Christian
“ghetto.”
Sarkis Aghajan is one man who may have the biggest
say in the future of the Christian community. As
Iraqi Kurdistan’s Minister of Finance and Economy
and a Christian member of the governing Kurdistan
Democratic Party, Aghajan has financially supported
thousands of Christian refugees from the south while
calling for a Christian region attached to Iraqi
Kurdistan.
“I demanded the right of autonomy for our
[Christian] people – Chaldean, Syriac, Assyrian – to
be fixed in the Kurdistan Region Constitution,”
Aghajan told Compass by e-mail.
Aghajan publicly backed a statement last month by
five Christian political parties calling on drafters
of Kurdistan’s Regional Constitution to guarantee an
autonomous Christian area in the Nineveh plain,
Iraqi Christianity’s ancestral homeland north of
Mosul.
“Since the Nineveh plain falls within the expanded
boundaries [of the Kurdish region], we propose to
include in the constitution a clear text of our
people’s right to autonomy within the said plain,”
the November 10 document stated.
Divided Opinions
Kurdish leaders’ initial response was positive.
“It is their right to have their rights recognized
and fixed in the Kurdistan Regional Constitution,
including their right to autonomy in Nineveh plain,”
Iraqi Kurdistan Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani
said in a December 6 press conference. “This is our
permanent policy.”
But some Christian leaders have opposed any plan to
cede the area to Iraqi Kurdistan, saying that
Christians and other minorities need a completely
separate federal state.
Most vocal on the international scene has been
Pascale Warda, former Iraqi Minister of Displacement
and Migration.
Warda visited the United States in October to drum
up support for a separate federal state for
non-Muslim minorities in the Nineveh plain, a plan
supported by the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM).
The ADM’s campaign has been fueled by reports from
the Assyrian International News Agency that Kurdish
police and militia have been terrorizing Christians.
According to a December 18 Religion News Service
article, Kurds have also seized land owned by
Assyrian Christians.
Compass sources in the area were unable to confirm
these reports. In a November interview with Zinda
Magazine, Iraqi Kurdistan’s Christian Tourism
Minister Nimrud Baito denied outright allegations
that Kurds were taking Christian lands.
Despite negative reports, Kurdish leaders appear to
have made a sincere bid to attract Christians to
their northern region.
“We welcome any Christian brothers who choose to
come and live in Kurdistan, whether temporarily or
more permanently,” Iraqi Kurdistan President Massoud
Barzani said in December 2005. “You are free to
accept this fraternal co-inhabitance and to help in
the building of your country.”
Christian finance minister Aghajan has made good on
that promise, constructing more than 100 new
villages and churches for Christian refugees.
“Over 5,000 houses have been constructed for
Christians, in addition to schools, health centers,
Internet centers and occasion halls,” Aghajan told
Compass.
Even Kurdish Muslim converts to Christianity enjoy a
wide range of freedoms traditionally limited to the
historic churches, building churches and openly
identifying themselves as Christians.
“I’d rather see a Muslim become a Christian than see
him become a radical Muslim,” Kurdistan’s regional
prime minister told Radio Sawa in May.
‘Violently’ Backfiring
But incorporating a Christian Nineveh plain into
Iraqi Kurdistan is more complicated than squeezing a
guarantee into the new Kurdish constitution, up for
vote in April 2007.
The real test for any form of autonomy would be
winning the required approval in Iraq’s national
parliament in Baghdad, where minority Christian
ministers would need to bargain for the backing of
Kurdish or Shia groups.
Three districts that constitute the Nineveh plain
would also need to hold separate referendums to
obtain self-government, within Iraqi Kurdistan or
otherwise.
Kurdish forces currently occupy the districts and
provide security, though the area belongs to the
Mosul governorate under Baghdad’s central
government.
Many of the villages surrounding Mosul, the biblical
city of Nineveh, are majority Christian. But the
plain remains diverse, holding Yezidi, Shebek, and
Sunni Arab groups. Observers told Compass that any
referendum for autonomy would likely need at least a
coalition of Christians and Yezidis to succeed.
It is highly unlikely that Iraq’s Sunnis, who
currently control the Mosul government that
administers the three districts, would support a
plan for any form of minority autonomy.
And that is where problems may begin, Chaldean
Archbishop of Kirkuk Luis Sako told Compass.
One of the few Iraqi clergymen to raise his voice on
the issue, Sako said he expected that any
announcement that Christians were pursuing their own
region would violently backfire.
“We have 300,000 [Christians] in Baghdad, Kirkuk and
Basra, and in most cases they will have problems,
maybe even be persecuted for that,” the archbishop
said. “Others will say, ‘Get out of here, go to your
own area.’”
The archbishop said that he doubted the Nineveh
plain could be made secure, sandwiched as it is
between the Arab and Kurdish regions.
“Christians cannot live in isolation – we are in the
north, we are in the middle of Iraq and we are in
the south,” Sako said. “Wherever we are living, we
should cooperate with citizens. We don’t have to
create a ghetto.”
‘Last Chance’
But some leaders pointed out that attacks on
Christians were already on the rise before any plan
for Christian self-autonomy was publicized.
“We’ve been seeing attacks against our people in the
Mosul area anyway,” commented Tourism Minister Baito,
a strong supporter of Christian autonomy within the
Kurdish region and head of the Assyrian Patriotic
Party.
“The Kurds want to work with us to show the United
States and Europe that they are democratic and look
after minorities,” said Paul Koshaba, the leader of
a Christian tribe that in 1964 split from one of
Iraq’s largest Christian communities, the Assyrian
Church of the East. Koshaba has been working to heal
the rift, believing that only a united church can
survive in Iraq.
“This is our last chance,” Koshaba told Compass in a
new village constructed by Aghajan outside of Dohuk
last month. “We have to grab it now or it will slip
away from us.”
SIDEBAR
Personal Struggles of Iraqi Refugees
Bundled against the cold, a handful of Iraqi
Christians served their guests hot sweet coffee in a
blown-out concrete school building, all that
remained of their village in northern Iraq last
month.
Three months ago, the village of Havrez lay
completely deserted, empty since Saddam Hussein’s
forces destroyed it in 1978. Until recently, anyone
willing to follow a faint set of tire tracks through
farm fields to find Havrez could be forgiven for
assuming that the lone concrete structure was still
vacant.
But two weeks ago, Iraqi Kurdistan’s Christian
finance minister, Sarkis Aghajan, began funding the
construction of new homes for 25 Armenians from
Baghdad who returned to the village outside Dohuk
city as part of an increasing flow of Christians
forced northward and abroad by escalating violence
in Iraq’s south.
“Some 40 houses will be built urgently as a first
stage before the snowfall in order to house those
miserable families,” a member of Aghajan’s staff
told Compass.
For the villagers, day-to-day survival supersedes
debate over a safe haven.
“The UNHCR gave us warm tents, but they collapsed
under the heavy rains last week,” one villager told
Compass. Now all the women and men sleep in two
large concrete rooms, the windows covered with tarp
to retain some heat while they await their new
homes.
Like many members of the refugee village, Adis
Yohannes Markar was a former car electrician in
Baghdad. He does not know how to raise crops and has
no source of income at his new home in the middle of
farming country.
“This is my father’s village and my grandfather’s,
it is my home” he replied, when asked why he didn’t
move to the cities of Zakho or Dohuk, where he might
have practiced his trade.
“These are the poor people of Iraq who have nowhere
else to go,” explained one visitor to the village.
Most Christians with the means to do so have already
left the country, and a second wave of refugees –
the poorest of the poor – have been moving steadily
to the Kurdish controlled region in the north.
The influx of refugees has fed unemployment and
dramatically increased the cost of living.
“The biggest problem here in the north is
economical, not religious,” the Christian deputy
governor of Dohuk, George Shlimon, told Compass last
month. “People fleeing north have no experience
farming ; they need jobs.”
But most refugees prefer unemployment in the north
to sectarian violence in the south.
Islamic gangs have begun implementing a tax on
Christians in the city of Mosul, Christian sources
still in the city told Compass. Those who refuse to
pay are often kidnapped and killed.
“The sheikh at the mosque next to our house told
Muslims over the mosque loudspeaker not to buy
houses from the Christians because the land was
already theirs,” a Christian from Mosul told Compass
in Dohuk last month. The former bank manager had
fled north with his family after his home had been
bombed for refusing to pay 3 million Dinars
(US$2,276) to a local gang.
Last week, three Armenian Orthodox brothers were
killed at their car repair shop in Mosul while
physically resisting a terrorist group that had
attempted to take them hostage, sources in the city
told Compass.
In a separate incident last week, a Christian man
identified only as “Khayri” was killed and his young
child held for ransom. The captors initially
demanded US$50,000 for the child’s return but
eventually accepted US$35,000 from a relative,
sources in Mosul said. The Christian’s widow and two
children have now moved to the predominantly Syrian
Orthodox village of Bartalla, 25 kilometers (15
miles) east of Mosul.
spcm org
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