John F. Cullinan offers the sad report. Before posting the entire article, I wish to highlight a couple of sentences: (my bolding)
U.S. officials have deliberately refused to take any steps to safeguard Iraq’s persecuted Christians — or even to acknowledge their plight — for fear of being seen as aiding unpopular and unfashionable religious minorities. . . The U.S. government’s consistent policy of studied and shameful indifference forms rare common ground between the Bush and Obama administrations. It is an indelible stain on American honor that two administrations did nothing to assist, much less protect, a beleaguered religious minority. Such was not the case in the Balkans a decade ago, when the Clinton administration came to the aid of embattled Muslim minorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo with decisive military force in similar circumstances.
The entire article follows:
Spare a thought — and perhaps also a prayer — for Iraq’s beleaguered Christians, who yesterday observed the somber Feast of the Holy Innocents. Perhaps nowhere else does this particular occasion cut closer to the bone: In Iraq, Christians mourn their friends, the most recent martyrs for the faith, on the same day that
Christians around
the world are called to remember the Church’s very first martyrs, the
infants slaughtered en masse in Bethlehem on Herod’s orders after the
birth of Jesus.
Today is also an appropriate time for all
Americans, believer and unbelievers alike, to consider their moral
responsibilities toward an invisible minority caught up in a forgotten
war. After all, one of the unintended — and unacknowledged —
consequences of Iraq’s liberation in 2003 was the swift and ongoing
demise of Iraq’s ancient Christian communities. While this tragedy was
unforeseen, it was by no means unforeseeable, if only U.S. policymakers
had paid due attention to Iraq’s complex religious landscape and recent
history. Worse yet, U.S. officials have deliberately refused to take
any steps to safeguard Iraq’s persecuted Christians — or even to
acknowledge their plight — for fear of being seen as aiding unpopular
and unfashionable religious minorities.
This policy of malign
neglect helps explain why so few Americans are even aware that Iraq
still remains a rich ethnic and religious mosaic beyond the simple
tripartite division of all Iraqis into three warring tribes: Shiites,
Sunnis, and Kurds. Fewer still are aware that Christianity in
Mesopotamia dates from the mid-first century, when local tradition
holds that the Apostle Thomas (the same doubting Thomas who appears in
John’s Gospel) founded what became the Church of the East, the only
enduring Christian community formed outside the borders of the Roman
empire during apostolic times. Thomas’s mission predates
the arrival of Islam by six centuries and serves as a needed reminder
that early Christianity was an essentially Eastern phenomenon.
Today, the vast majority of Iraqi Christians share common roots in the
Church of the East, which split into two branches in the 16th century,
one Roman Catholic (Chaldean) and the other essentially Orthodox
(Assyrian). Both churches worship partly in Arabic and partly in
Aramaic, the same language that Jesus spoke. Smaller Christian
denominations include Syriac Christians (mainly Roman Catholic, but
also Orthodox), Latin Rite Roman Catholics and other historic Middle
Eastern churches (mainly Orthodox and Armenian), and some Protestants
(mostly Anglicans) and Evangelicals.
It was not so long ago
that Iraqi Christians belonging to all these churches played a unique
and vital role in the common life of modern Iraq. Their contributions,
both institutional and individual, once formed an irreplaceable part of
the fabric of Iraqi life. And their contributions in turn played a
wholly disproportionate role in relation to their actual numbers in an
overwhelmingly Muslim society.
On the one hand, there was a
web of church institutions — schools, hospitals, clinics, and
orphanages — that served all Iraqis regardless of faith. Of these, none
was more prominent than Baghdad College, a remarkable Jesuit
preparatory school for boys that turned out a disproportionate share of
Iraq’s political and cultural elite between 1931 and 1968. As with most
other church schools, fully half the student body were Muslim. Even
today, 40 years after the American priests and seminarians were
expelled and all private schools nationalized in the wake of the
Six-Day War, Baghdad College’s legacy endures. In the
December 2005 parliamentary elections, three of the four leading
candidates for prime minister (all Muslims, of course) were former
students. So too are many other distinguished Iraqis, such as Kanan
Makiya, whose 1989 classic Republic of Fear shattered the
wall of silence around the Baathist dictatorship. Yet this one school’s
splendid example is by no means a strictly Iraqi or purely historical
phenomenon, as Christian schools continue to educate an outsized share
of local Muslim elites in places as diverse as Egypt (Gamal Mubarak) or
Pakistan (the late Benazir Bhutto).
On the other hand, there
was and remains individual Christian witness to values that are in
notably short supply in Iraq nowadays, especially respect for one’s
neighbor regardless of faith and willingness to resolve disputes
without recourse to violence. These particular values are ones their
Muslim neighbors most often acknowledge and admire, as I learned while
living and working as a Catholic seminarian in Jordan a decade ago. And
they are precisely the same ideals Pope Benedict XVI cited in his
annual Christmas message on Saturday:
How can we forget the troubled situation in Iraq and the little flock of Christians which lives in the region? At times it is subject to violence and injustice, but it remains determined to make its own contribution to the building of a society opposed to the logic of conflict and the rejection of one's neighbor.
Yet these same values have made Iraqi Christians
easy targets for Sunni and Shiite extremists and common criminals in
the utter collapse of law and order that followed the U.S.-led invasion
in March 2003. Unlike their Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish neighbors, Iraqi
Christians have no private militias, no powerful foreign patrons — and
no fighting ideology like the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood
or its Shiite counterparts. They are thus the only group in Iraq
without blood on their hands, holy innocents caught up in an unholy war.
Last year, I wrote about how practically every Christian neighborhood, parish, or family was repeatedly forced to pay protection money (jizya)
to avoid exile, murder, or forced conversion to Islam. These evils were
universally justified by their perpetrators on the basis of the same
Koranic verses dealing with subject peoples, but they were seldom if
ever publicly denounced as a perversion of Muslim faith by Iraq’s
influential Muslim clergy.
This year, Iraq’s dwindling
Christian communities are still being targeted on the basis of their
faith. That is especially the case in Mosul, long the most lawless and
violent place in Iraq. By an unhappy coincidence, Mosul is also located
in the ancestral heartland of Iraqi Christianity, and is thus the last
refuge (short of exile) for Christians fleeing targeted violence in
Baghdad, Basra, and other places.
Mosul is therefore a
target-rich environment. In December alone, at least seven churches,
convents, and schools have been bombed, claiming dozens of lives,
including the latest holy innocent, an eight-day-old baby girl. Iraq’s
central government deserves credit for dispatching some 3,000
additional police after a similar spate of bombings and attacks in
October, but their presence has brought little improvement as
Christians continue to flee Mosul for overcrowded and underdeveloped
villages such as Qaraqosh in the adjacent Nineveh plain. Meanwhile, the
situation around Kirkuk, also in northern Iraq, remains nearly as dire
for Christians caught up in the Arab-Kurdish struggle for control of
the area’s oil fields.
While the Iraqi government has
belatedly taken some modest steps to ease the suffering of Iraqi
Christians, the U.S. government’s consistent policy of studied and
shameful indifference forms rare common ground between the Bush and
Obama administrations. It is an indelible stain on American honor that
two administrations did nothing to assist, much less protect, a
beleaguered religious minority. Such was not the case in the Balkans a
decade ago, when the Clinton administration came to the aid of
embattled Muslim minorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo with
decisive military force in similar circumstances. In Iraq, however,
America’s unmet moral obligations were and are the direct consequence
of the security vacuum arising from the American-led destruction of
Saddam’s Republic of Fear.
When pressed by religious-freedom
advocates, Bush-administration officials invariably ducked
responsibility by claiming that overall security improvements,
beginning with the 2007 surge, would trickle down to Iraq’s most
vulnerable and helpless minorities. The Obama administration takes the same hands-off approach in October’s annual State Department report on religious freedom: “The
‘surge’ by the Multinational Forces in Iraq, in coordination with Iraqi
Security Force operations, reduced the overall level of violence in the
country; however, significant effects were slow to trickle down to the
country’s minority communities.” But the real reason for inaction, as
several senior Bush-administration officials admitted to me off the
record, was that being seen to help Christians was simply too
controversial at home and in the Muslim world. It was a matter of
scarce political capital better spent elsewhere, I was told.
A couple of weeks ago, a Chaldean-American friend of mine raised
the issue of American responsibility for the plight of his brothers and
sisters at a public forum convened by a mid-level State Department
official. According to the Detroit Free Press, this official
“said he couldn’t comment on whether Iraqi Christians were hurt by the
U.S.-led war.” “I can’t answer that,” he said. “Let’s leave that to the
historians.”
On the same day that my friend was try to get a
straight answer from the State Department, more than 120 Christian
leaders met in Baghdad to issue yet another urgent plea for targeted
security assistance and development aid. Similar pleas for equally
modest measures have long fallen on deaf ears, not least in
Kurdish-controlled areas, where the treatment of Christians seeking
refuges leaves a lot to be desired.
Meanwhile, the plight of
Iraq’s surviving Christians worsens. In churches around the world
today, Christians will hear the passage from Matthew’s Gospel (2:13-18)
that recounts the slaughter of the holy innocents and ends with these
words of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah:
A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted because they were no more
The time is fast approaching when Iraqi Christians are no more.
— John F. Cullinan, a regular NRO contributor, has written frequently about Iraq’s religious dynamics since 2003.