Feature – Fear strikes Iraq’s Christians over Pope words

An Iraqi burns an effigy of Pope Benedict and a Germany flag during a demonstration in Basra city, south of Iraq September 18, 2006. Chanting slogans and burning a white effigy of Pope Benedict, some 150 demonstrators in the Iraqi Shi’ite city of Basra demanded a papal apology on Monday for comments that have offended many Muslims worldwide.

FEATURE-Fear strikes Iraq’s Christians over Pope words
18 Sep 2006 22:44:06 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Peter Graff

BAGHDAD, Sept 19 (Reuters) – A poster of the Virgin Mary hangs on the wall in the back of Iskandar’s Baghdad grocery shop. The 35-year-old Christian sips his soft drink and talks about why he is worried about Pope Benedict’s comments on Islam.

“We’re not afraid of our neighbourhoods turning against us, because we’ve lived with them for generations. But our fear is that the al Qaeda types will start targeting churches again, like they have with Shi’ite mosques.”

For months, most of Iraq’s million or so Christians have managed to avoid being sucked into the spiralling sectarian violence that kills 100 Iraqis a day.

But after comments by Pope Benedict last week angered Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims alike, members of a small Christian minority that survived for centuries in part by seeking a low profile now fear they could be targets.

The Pontiff said on Sunday he was deeply sorry Muslims had been offended by his use of a medieval quotation on Islam and holy war. But he stopped short of retracting a speech seen as portraying Islam as a religion tainted by violence.

Several Christians who spoke to Reuters this week blamed the Pope for making their lives less safe, and sided with their Muslim neighbours in describing his remarks as offensive.

“We, Christians and Muslims, have lived together for thousands of years in this city,” said Qais abu Saimon, a Christian in Mosul, an ethnically and religiously mixed northern city with one of the country’s largest Christian communities.

“Anything that offends them offends us also.”

Uttor, a nun in the same city said: “If I were sitting there when the Pope was delivering his speech, I would ask him not to talk about this subject because it is very sensitive.”

CALL FOR CALM

Iraq’s government issued a swift plea for Muslims not to take out their anger on their Christian neighbours.

“We call on all those who love God’s prophets not to carry out actions that will harm our Christian brothers here,” government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told state television on Saturday.

“There were kings that carried the cross and committed crimes under the cross. But we do not hold Christianity or its followers responsible for these actions, for they are acts of individuals.”

So far the call for calm seems to have been heeded: throughout Iraq’s violence of the past week, in which hundreds have died in bombings and sectarian slayings, there do not appear to have been large-scale attacks on Christian targets.

But the country’s main Shi’ite and Sunni Muslim parties have all denounced the Pope’s remarks and described them as an attack on Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, phrases likely to stir passions.

Anger seems to be growing. About 150 demonstrators in mainly Shi’ite Basra burned a white effigy of the Pope on Monday. A church door there was vandalised last week.

Radical Islamist Sunni insurgents issued predictable threats.

“We tell the worshipper of the cross that you and the West will be defeated,” the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq’s al Qaeda branch, said in an Internet statement on Monday.

“(May) God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen.”

MINORITY SHRINKING

Iraq’s Christian community has been shrinking for a generation as Christians left, fearing persecution both under Saddam Hussein and the Shi’ite and Sunni religious parties that have risen since his secular nationalist dictatorship fell.

A U.S. State Department report on religious freedom in Iraq released last week estimated that the country now has about 1 million Christians, down from 1.4 million in 1987. Most are Catholics, known as Chaldeans, the most famous of whom is Saddam’s ex-foreign minister Tariq Aziz, now a U.S. prisoner.

Although they have not taken sides in the main sectarian battles fueling the country’s violence, Christians have been targeted as the country takes on a more overtly Islamic hue.

The law allows Christians, unlike Muslims, to sell alcohol. But it can be deadly to do so. More than 50 Baghdad liquor shops operated by Assyrian Christians were attacked in the past year.

A wave of car bombs struck Christian churches in Baghdad and Mosul on January 29. Attacks on the Catholic Church of the Virgin Mary and the Orthodox Church in Kirkuk, and on Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church and the Vatican’s embassy in Baghdad killed at least three people and wounded nine.

Yonadam Kanna, a Christian member of parliament, criticised both the Pope for making his comments and Muslim leaders for responding with words that could enflame passions. Yet he said Christians had nothing to fear from ordinary Iraqis, only from Islamic extremists, who hardly need a new reason to attack.

“The extremists are always looking for an excuse to kill people anyway, so the Christian community doesn’t expect the violence against it to get any worse.”

(Additional reporting by Mussab al-Khairalla in Baghdad and Reuters staff in Mosul)