Iraq’s ancient Christian community has run out of time and will disappear soon, a senior Iraqi churchman has warned.
Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil made his alarming predictions at a press conference for the launch of the Aid to the Church in Need report on oppressed Christians abroad, Persecuted and Forgotten?
Speaking
in Westminster St Patricks Day, alongside Archbishop Vincent Nichols,
Archbishop Warda warned that there were fewer than 200,000 Christians
left in Iraq and “the time for waiting” was running out.
Declaring
that figure to be “optimistic”, he said: “From what we have seen so far
our people have lost patience. The past is terrifying, the present is
not promising. All is left is the very limited choice of emigration, to
Jordan and Turkey.”
He cited Mosul, one of the most dangerous
cities in the world to be a Christian, and where hundreds were driven
out in a pogrom in October 2009, saying: “In 2003 there were 4000
Chaldean families, 1000 Christians from other churches, and 11 active
Chaldean churches. Now six churches have been closed, and if it goes
this way, it wont be this long before certain areas of Iraq are
evacuated.
“We have freedom of worship, but not freedom of religion, that is not allowed, in any Islamic
state.”
The
41-year-old archbishop was previously rector of St Peter’s Chaldean
Catholic Seminary in Dora, a Christian neighbourhood of Baghdad before
the 2003 invasion, but which had to move to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan,
last year due to violence.
Islamists have cleansed Dora almost entirely
of Christians.
The Archbishop plans to build a Catholic University and
Church-run hospital in Erbil, which will be open to all.
He
described how many Christians in Baghdad and Mosul had received warnings
through text messages or bullets, sometimes delivered by policemen.
Some clerics received three bullets, one representing murdered priest Fr Ragheed Ganni, another for the murdered Archbishop Rahho, and another for the intended victim.
He
warned that, though Christians were safer in the Kurdish-controlled
regions of northern Iraq, they still lacked economic security and were
so impoverished some had resorted to prostitution.
Some 5000 Christian
families had fled to the Kurdish-controlled region and yet, he said, the
Iraqi Government cared so little for them that they had demanded
European governments paid for their resettlement.
“It was a
strange statement,” he said of the Government’s demand: “They are not
some group who have emigrated from Europe. They do not come from
Europe!”
Aid to the Church in Need’s report found that persecution
was intensifying in two-thirds of the worst countries, and that many
Christian communities in the Middle East faced extinction within a
generation.
Archbishop Warda thanked the charity and asked Christians in
the west to raise awareness and making politicians aware of what was
going on.
“We need to bear the cross,” the Archbishop said, “but it is getting heavy.”