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STATEMENT OF NINA
SHEA, DIRECTOR
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, for allowing me to
testify today on behalf of the Center for Religious Freedom.
Chairman Chris Smith has been a dedicated and passionate
leader on human rights for many years, and I wish to commend him for all the
important hearings held under his chairmanship in this subcommittee. They
have held governments around the world accountable, including our own, and
given hope and relief to millions of the world’s oppressed. This hearing
today is no exception.
Egregious religious persecution occurs in North Korea,
Saudi Arabia, China, Vietnam, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and several other
countries officially designated by the State Department as “Countries of
Particular Concern,” and is being addressed by the other witnesses today.
There is an additional country where religious groups of various faiths face
some of the bloodiest persecution in the world today, a country that is not
listed among the CPC’s. It is Iraq, and it is on this country, and
particularly on the persecution faced by Iraq’s smallest, most vulnerable
minorities, that I will direct my testimony. We should view Iraq’s smallest religious minorities – the
Christians, Yizidis, Mandeans, Baha’is, Kaka’i and Jews – as we once did
Soviet Jews. The persecution these small minorities face stands out against
even the horrific violence now wracking the rest of the population. This is
demonstrated by the stark statistic that an estimated half of the members of
the small minorities have been driven from their homes in the past two or
three years, either to other parts of the country or abroad. Their very
survival as communities within Iraq is now threatened by what amounts to
ethnic, or rather cultural, cleansing. The State Department’s Religious
Freedom Reports accurately depicts a defenseless non-Muslim population that
is being pounded by all other factions. Al Qaeda terrorists, Sunni
insurgents, Shiite militias, Kurdish militants, and criminal gangs all
persecute and prey on these small religious minorities. Their situation is unique: Their religion and culture
identifies them with the “infidel occupiers” in the minds of the extremists,
and lacking the militias, tribal structures and foreign champions of Iraq’s
other groups, they are singularly defenseless against the mayhem that has
followed the occupation. Because they do not govern any department, they are
at the tender mercies of those dominant groups who aim to take their
property, businesses and villages. The United States has a great moral
responsibility to address their plight, and specific policy actions are
required to help them. These policies will differ from the efforts we once
took on behalf of Soviet Jews. Most of these small minority people do not
wish to leave Iraq. We must expeditiously take actions that will maximize
their security within Iraq, and will draw back some of those who have taken
temporary shelter in other surrounding countries. For the most desperate
among them, we must begin to resettle them here, where many, if not most,
already have relatives who are well established.
While Shiites and Sunnis, who comprise Iraq’s religious majority, also face
appalling levels of extremist violence, sectarian strife, and official
discrimination on account of their religions, it is the plight of Iraq’s
small religious minorities on which I will focus today both because the
situation confronting these peoples threatens their very survival, and
because their situation is not being sufficiently addressed by U.S. policy
and was all but ignored in the recent Iraq Study Group Report.
The very fact of their defenselessness – they
are persecuted and killed, but do not themselves persecute and kill --
contributes to the inverse relationship between their suffering and the
world apathy at their situation.
Iraq’s small religious groups -- Christians (Chaldean, who are Eastern rite
Catholics Assyrian, including the Church of the East, Syriac, who are
Eastern Orthodox, Armenians, both Roman Catholic and Orthodox, and
Protestants, who are Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, evangelical and
others), Mandeans (followers of John the Baptist), Yizidis (an ancient angel
religion), Bahais, Kaka’i (a syncretic group around Kirkuk) and Jews,
together number an estimated one million of Iraq’s population of 26 million
at the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The largest group of these is Christian, the
next largest is the Yizidis with about 70,000-500,000 and the Mandeans with
about 6,000-10,000, and the smallest, the Jewish community, whose numbers
had dwindled to the double-digits by 2003. Under escalating persecution and
violence, these groups are fleeing their homeland
en masse.
Though they constitute some 3 or 4 per cent of Iraq’s population, according
to the UNHCR, they represent about 40 per cent of the refugee population.
This disproportionate exodus attests to the intolerable treatment and
conditions they face inside Iraq. We have also received reports that an
estimated half of the Christians who remain in Iraq are internally
displaced, with those from the south moving to the north of the country for
relative security. The UNHCR has determined that they are being targeted for
their religion by militants determined to establish an extreme sharia ruled
state. Because they speak Western languages and have cultural ties to the
West, they have also been targeted for perceived or real cooperation with
the US embassy and the Coalition. In 2004 a dozen churches were attacked in coordinated
bombings and other similar incidents have followed. Since July 2006 alone,
seven clergymen have been kidnapped and two of them, both from Mosul,
murdered. As the State Department notes, these religious groups can no
longer gather in safety and many have stopped holding worship services
altogether. My friend, the Chaldean Archbishop of Basra, who says his
prayers in the language of Jesus, Aramaic, as is the Chaldean tradition, has
been transferred apparently for security reasons to the diocese of Australia
and New Zealand, and his Basra diocese now has only a couple of hundred
families remaining. These churches are not just lying low, they are being
eradicated.
Christian, Mandean and other women in some areas are being violently
pressured to conform to supposed Islamic conduct and dress, with some killed
or maimed, while men who operate liquor stores and cinemas have also been
violently attacked by extremists. Flyers were posted at Mosul University
this month declaring: “in
cases where non-Muslims do not conform to wearing the Hijab (woman’s head
cover) and are not conservative with their attire in accordance with the
Islamic way, the violators will have the Sharia and the Islamic law applied
to them.”
It was in Mosul that some female students were
murdered for wearing Western clothes and having a picnic with men in 2005
and where Orthodox priest Fr. Paulis Iskander was beheaded and dismembered
on October 11.
Some of the death threats against non-Muslim minorities
have been personal and some of these have been collected and translated,
such as the samples that follow that were provided to the Center for
Religious Freedom by the Chaldean Federation of America.:
“To the traitor,
apostate Amir XX, after we warned you more than once to quit working with
the American occupiers, but you did not learn from what happened to others,
and you continued, you and your infidel wife XXX by opening a women hair
cutting place and this is among the forbidden things for us, and therefore
we are telling you and your wife to quit these deeds and to pay the amount
of (20,000) thousand dollars in protective tax for your violation and within
only one week or we will kill you and your family, member by member, and
those who have warned are excused.
“You
traitor, Amjad,
We can behead the traitor
and we are ready for that.
We can chase the infidels
and renegades and everybody who deals with them and with the occupiers and
punish them according to Islam law, ‘The unjust have no supporters’ Allah is
the most honest,
The Islamic Army in Iraq.”
“This is the last warning…
to the American nasty crusader agent (James). Our battalion will execute you
by cutting your head and blowing up your house. Allah willing. Our
battalions will pursue the snakehead your brother (Talia). We will arrest
him wherever he is – God willing.
Copy to the battalion
Commander the Mudjahed
Abu Sayyaf and the
Commander Abu Therr”
There are many other such examples -- and many cases of targeted killings
backing them up. Grisly reports of kidnapped Christian children being
crucified and mutilated after ransoms were not paid have emerged this fall
from the ChaldoAssyrian community. Numerous cases are also reported by the
Assyrian International News Agency on its website,
www.aina.org.
This week, I received a letter from the Sabean Mandean
Association in Australia that detailed the cases of Mandeans kidnapped and
assassinated for their religion this past year. Some of the
kidnap-for-ransom victims were reportedly circumcised before being released,
a detail that indicates religion played a role in the crime.
Listed among the cases was the murder on December 2 of the Rev. Taleb Salman
Araby, the deacon who assisted His Holiness Ganzevra Sattar Jabbar Hilo al-Zahrony,
the worldwide head of the Mandean Community. He was easily recognizable
because he wore the white
rasta robes of the
Mandean clergy. His family was prevented from holding a funeral service for
him by extremists who threatened to blow up their house and the bereaved
family was forced to bury him without any religious ceremony. Furthermore, such violence against Christians and members
of the smallest minorities is conducted with impunity. In northern Iraq and
in the Nineveh Plains region where up to a third of the small minorities
live, there have been no local police forces established unlike other areas
in Iraq, and the few forces that are provided to Christian and minority
areas from elsewhere have been known to harass and prey on these small
minorities. There are reports that the judiciary discriminates against
Christians and other small minorities. The Washington-based Iraq Sustainable
Democracy Project, for example, reports that courts in the Kurdish area
discriminate against Assyrians who contest land and property confiscated by
Kurdish militants.
The Project also reports that in the Kurdish areas, Christian and other
small minority towns have not benefited equally from U.S. reconstruction and
development aid; their villages have been excluded by provincial-level
officials from benefiting from water and electrical systems and denied their
fair share of other utilities and services, such as schools and medical
facilities, provided by U.S. aid.
Apparently the US has no safeguards or checks in
place to prevent this. As an Assyrian mayor of one of these towns, Telhaif,
told me in November, such discrimination and marginalization is making
minority towns and neighborhoods uninhabitable and forcing their residents
out. According to detailed reports, once abandoned, Christian, Yizidi and
Mandean properties have been seized by Kurdish authorities. Such treatment
has given rise to charges that Kurdish authorities are carrying out ethnic
cleansing against Christians and smaller minorities, including other ethnic
minorities, such as the Shabaks and Turkomen.
Government leaders in Iraq have been largely indifferent to the
victimization of the small minorities. The Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament,
Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, was quoted earlier this year urging kidnappers to
target Christian women instead of Muslims. After addressing the kidnapping
of his own sister, Thayseer, the Speaker of the Iraqi National Assembly was
broadcast by al-Iraqiya Satellite Television as stating: “Why kidnap this
Muslim woman; instead of Thayseer, why not kidnap Margaret or Jean?”
The latter are Christian names, thus implying
that it would have been better for a Christian woman to have been kidnapped,
raped and killed.
The United States Government urgently needs to take effective measures to
help the most vulnerable of Iraq’s religious groups. The US owes a special
obligation to these peoples because their non-Muslim status associates them
with the American occupation in the minds of Islamist extremists.
Furthermore, they alone are defenseless, lacking militias,
social structures and governing authority. Such
measures should include actions that would help these peoples, who have
maintained a presence in Iraq for thousands of years, to survive inside
Iraq, as well as actions that would help the most desperate among them find
sanctuary abroad.
All such measures should be expeditiously
implemented. They are:
Many other steps could be taken as well. While no group is
spared suffering in Iraq, the smallest minorities are defenseless and the
most vulnerable. In addition, they are viewed as collaborators of American
occupiers by extremists. Today these Iraqi Christian ChaldoAssyrians,
Yizidis, Mandeans, and others are comparable to yesteryear’s Soviet Jews.
They need our help to survive egregious and pervasive religious persecution
and discrimination. The State Department’s Religious Freedom Reports
describes much of their suffering, but U.S. policy in their regard has been
lacking.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This concludes my testimony.
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