Helping an ancient community facing extinction

Aid to the Church in Need is one of the most important organisations working in the Church today because one of the needs it meets is particularly keen, namely saving the Christians of the Middle East from extinction.

This is a forgotten story. Most times it is one that is never even told, not by the mainstream media at any rate. It is one that barely appears, if at all, on the radar screens of our politicians. It is a story that the Church in Ireland has for the most part neglected as well, despite the facts that Christians living under conditions of persecution have a right to expect a strong feeling of solidarity from their fellow Christians living in this part of the world.

The Middle East is, of course, the home of Christianity. In the early centuries of the Church, Christians were the majority across the Middle East and North Africa. The Arab invasions of the Seventh Century and subsequently put paid to that. But even as recently as a century ago, Christians made up around 10% of the population in many Middle Eastern and North African countries. This has now dwindled to about 2% on average, with Egypt still being the exception. About 10% of Egyptians are Coptic Christians, although they are under growing pressure from Muslim extremists.

Extremism

In Iraq, prior to the American invasion of 2003, Christians numbered about 1.5million or around 4% of the population. Today, they number about half a million. They have been hit very hard by the rise of Muslim extremism.

Most recently they have been hit extremely hard by so-called Islamic State. In June 2014, ISIS swept into northern Iraq seizing Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and taking over the surrounding Nineveh Plains on which lived many of Iraq’s Christians, their presence there predating the Arab invasion by centuries. Christianity has been present in Iraq since the Second Century and Iraq’s Christians are the descendants of the Assyrians, who appear in the Old Testament. ‘Nineveh’ itself is a name that appears in the Old Testament.

Presence

Indeed, one of the speakers at a conference organised in Rome last week by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) was the Patriarch of Babylon, a title that signifies how ancient the Christian presence in Iraq is. I was there as a guest of ACN.

The conference in Rome was held to discuss what should happen now that ISIS has been driven from the Nineveh Plains and from Mosul. According to ACN, “there are still 12,000 registered Christian families (approximately 95,000 people)” who fled as ISIS advanced in 2014, “and are presently living as internally displaced persons (IDPs)” in the nearby Kurdish region of Iraq.

ACN wants to help these Christians return to their homes. Their bishops do not want them leaving Iraq altogether as so many Christians have done over the last decade and a half, settling in countries like America, Canada or Australian instead.

ACN estimates the number of damaged or destroyed homes in the nine Christian villages of the Nineveh Plains at 13,000. The estimated cost of rebuilding those homes is US$250 million, which sounds like an enormous sum until we realise that in any one year, welfare spending in Ireland comes to something like €10 billion.

Unfortunately, the sum of US$250 million is enormous when it has to be raised almost entirely from private donations. To date, governments have contributed very little towards helping the Christians of Iraq. One speaker at the conference ruefully noted that it was only when the Yazidis (who subscribe to a pre-Christian, pre-Muslim religion) were driven from their homes in Iraq that the world began to pay proper attention to what ISIS is doing to religious minorities.

The fact that Christianity is disappearing from its ancient heartlands does not mobilise Western governments the way other causes do, including extending abortion ‘rights’ to the Third World. This receives plenty of money.

Another speaker noted that the only government that has put serious money into rebuilding the Christians villages is that of Hungary, and it is frequently reviled by the EU as far-right.

One speaker was rather scathing of UN efforts in the region.

Human rights lawyer, Ewelina Ochab, emphasised that Christians have a legal right to return to their homes under international law, even if their homes have since been occupied by other people. This is reminiscent of the Palestinian right to return, something that attracts a great deal of international attention compared with the plight of the Iraqi Christians.

Mark Riedemann told the conference that the EU and the US have no clear strategy about how to help. He contrasted this with the Hungarian government.

Stephen Rasche, another lawyer, repeated that were it not for money privately raised by, among others, the many ordinary people who donate to Aid to the Church in Need in various countries each year, “there would already be no Christians” left in Iraq.

Conference

One thing that struck me about the conference was the very obvious and deep faith of the Iraqi Christians who addressed it either in person or on video.

One young Christian teenager spoke in a completely unaffected way about her faith. A priest told delegates: “some Iraqi Christians who were not very active in their faith have now discovered their faith thanks to their suffering. They have learnt to rely on their faith when there is nothing else to rely on”.

These Christians may be undergoing great physical hardship and danger, but it may be that is it easier, spiritually speaking, to be a Christian in Iraq than in Ireland.

Our government has said and done almost nothing to help the persecuted Christians of Iraq and elsewhere. It cannot even bring itself to condemn as genocide what ISIS has done to Iraqi and Syrian Christians even though it is essentially what Cromwell did to Catholics here in Ireland.

So, it seems our persecuted brethren will have to continue to rely on the help provided by ordinary Christians in this part of the world and on organisations like Aid to the Church in Need. We have to be their main hope of survival in their ancient homelands.