On Sunday October 31 a group of militants seized a church in Baghdad, killing and wounding scores of Iraqi Christians and signalling yet another episode of unimaginable horror in the country since the US invasion of March 2003. Every group of Iraqis has faced terrible devastation as a result of this war, the magnitude of which is only now beginning to be discovered.
Having visited the country in 1999 I can testify that the situation in Iraq was difficult prior to the war. But the hardship suffered by many Iraqis, especially political dissidents, was in some way typicall of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes.Iraq could at that time be easily contrasted with other countries living under similar hardships, but what has happened since the war can barely be compared to any other country or any other wars since World War II.
Even putting aside the devastating death toll, the sheer scale of internal displacement and forced emigration is terrifying.This is a nation that had more or less maintained a consistent level of demographic cohesion for many generations and it was this cohesion that made Iraq what it was.
Christian Iraqi communities had co-existed alongside their Muslim neighbours for hundreds of years - the churches of the two main Christian groups, the Assyrians and Chaldeans, are dated back to the years AD 33 and 34 respectively.A recent editorial in an Arab newspaper was entitled "Arab Christians should feel at home." As moving as the article was, the fact remains that Arab Christians should not have to feel at home - they already are at home.
I recall a group of Iraqi children from a Chaldeans school performing the morning nashids, songs, before going to class. I dread to imagine how many of these innocent children were killed, wounded or forcefully displaced with their families, like millions of other Iraqis from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.
The 1987 census listed 1.4 million Christians living in Iraq. Now the figure is closer to half of that and it is rapidly dwindling. The plight of Iraqi Christians seems very similar to that of Palestinian Christians whose numbers plummeted and continue to fall following the 1967 Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Christian diaspora was a direct outcome of the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine in 1948 and the Israeli government sees no difference between a Palestinian Christian and a Muslim.
But none of these points are deemed worthy of discussion in much of the Western media, perhaps because it risks hurting the sensibility of the Israeli occupier. The troubling news coming from Iraq can now be manipulated by presenting the suffering of Christians as an offshoot of a larger conflict between Islamic militants and Christians communities in Iraq.
Iraqi society has long been known for its tolerance and acceptance of minorities. There were days when no-one used labels such as Shia, Sunni and Christians - there was one Iraq and one Iraqi people.This has changed completely because part of the strategy following the invasion was to emphasise and manipulate the ethnic and religious demarcation of the country to create insurmountable divides.
Without a centralised power to guide and channel the collective responses of the Iraqi people all hell broke loose. Masked men with convenient militant names but no identities disappeared as quickly as they popped up to wreak havoc in the country.Any communal trust that had held together the fabric of society dissolved.
There is no question regarding the brutality and sheer wickedness of those who murdered 52 Iraqi Christians, including a priest, in Baghdad's main Roman Catholic church. But to represent the issue as one of Muslim and Christian hostility - as one report misleadingly put it, "Iraq's Christians caught between majority Shi'ite and minority Sunni Muslims" - is a both a major injustice and a dangerous act of provocation.
When such notions become acceptable, foreign powers are enabled to justify their continued presence in Iraq on the premise that they are there to protect those caught in the middle. For hundreds of years every colonial power in the Middle East has used such logic to rationalise their violence and exploitation.
This arrogant, self-serving mentality compelled Republican strategist Jack Burkman to describe the people of the Middle East as "a bunch of barbarians in the desert" in an English Al-Jazeera programme.Such hubris is further strengthened by killings like the Roman Catholic church massacre. A US solider in Iraq, quoted on a recent Democracy Now programme, referred to Iraqi culture as a "culture of violence," boasting that his country was trying to do something about this.
What will it take to see the "bunch of barbarians" as human beings who are trying to survive, fend for their families and maintain an element of normality and dignity in their lives?As for "Iraq's Christians" I must disagree with that depiction which is used widely in the media. They are not Iraq's Christians but Iraqi Christians.No matter how far their numbers may dwindle they will remain Iraqis.
Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally syndicated columnist and editor of www.PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story is available now on Pluto Press. This article was first published by the Morning Star.
Having visited the country in 1999 I can testify that the situation in Iraq was difficult prior to the war. But the hardship suffered by many Iraqis, especially political dissidents, was in some way typicall of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes.Iraq could at that time be easily contrasted with other countries living under similar hardships, but what has happened since the war can barely be compared to any other country or any other wars since World War II.
Even putting aside the devastating death toll, the sheer scale of internal displacement and forced emigration is terrifying.This is a nation that had more or less maintained a consistent level of demographic cohesion for many generations and it was this cohesion that made Iraq what it was.
Christian Iraqi communities had co-existed alongside their Muslim neighbours for hundreds of years - the churches of the two main Christian groups, the Assyrians and Chaldeans, are dated back to the years AD 33 and 34 respectively.A recent editorial in an Arab newspaper was entitled "Arab Christians should feel at home." As moving as the article was, the fact remains that Arab Christians should not have to feel at home - they already are at home.
I recall a group of Iraqi children from a Chaldeans school performing the morning nashids, songs, before going to class. I dread to imagine how many of these innocent children were killed, wounded or forcefully displaced with their families, like millions of other Iraqis from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.
The 1987 census listed 1.4 million Christians living in Iraq. Now the figure is closer to half of that and it is rapidly dwindling. The plight of Iraqi Christians seems very similar to that of Palestinian Christians whose numbers plummeted and continue to fall following the 1967 Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Christian diaspora was a direct outcome of the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine in 1948 and the Israeli government sees no difference between a Palestinian Christian and a Muslim.
But none of these points are deemed worthy of discussion in much of the Western media, perhaps because it risks hurting the sensibility of the Israeli occupier. The troubling news coming from Iraq can now be manipulated by presenting the suffering of Christians as an offshoot of a larger conflict between Islamic militants and Christians communities in Iraq.
Iraqi society has long been known for its tolerance and acceptance of minorities. There were days when no-one used labels such as Shia, Sunni and Christians - there was one Iraq and one Iraqi people.This has changed completely because part of the strategy following the invasion was to emphasise and manipulate the ethnic and religious demarcation of the country to create insurmountable divides.
Without a centralised power to guide and channel the collective responses of the Iraqi people all hell broke loose. Masked men with convenient militant names but no identities disappeared as quickly as they popped up to wreak havoc in the country.Any communal trust that had held together the fabric of society dissolved.
There is no question regarding the brutality and sheer wickedness of those who murdered 52 Iraqi Christians, including a priest, in Baghdad's main Roman Catholic church. But to represent the issue as one of Muslim and Christian hostility - as one report misleadingly put it, "Iraq's Christians caught between majority Shi'ite and minority Sunni Muslims" - is a both a major injustice and a dangerous act of provocation.
When such notions become acceptable, foreign powers are enabled to justify their continued presence in Iraq on the premise that they are there to protect those caught in the middle. For hundreds of years every colonial power in the Middle East has used such logic to rationalise their violence and exploitation.
This arrogant, self-serving mentality compelled Republican strategist Jack Burkman to describe the people of the Middle East as "a bunch of barbarians in the desert" in an English Al-Jazeera programme.Such hubris is further strengthened by killings like the Roman Catholic church massacre. A US solider in Iraq, quoted on a recent Democracy Now programme, referred to Iraqi culture as a "culture of violence," boasting that his country was trying to do something about this.
What will it take to see the "bunch of barbarians" as human beings who are trying to survive, fend for their families and maintain an element of normality and dignity in their lives?As for "Iraq's Christians" I must disagree with that depiction which is used widely in the media. They are not Iraq's Christians but Iraqi Christians.No matter how far their numbers may dwindle they will remain Iraqis.
Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally syndicated columnist and editor of www.PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story is available now on Pluto Press. This article was first published by the Morning Star.
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