Aid to the Church in Need: Iraq – Constitution crisis for Christians

Iraq – Constitution crisis for Christians

Posted by Press release on 24/8/2005, 10:18 am
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Iraq – Constitution crisis for Christians
“Where is the democracy we all longed for?” asks bishop
By John Pontifex

CHRISTIANITY in Iraq teeters on the brink of extinction amid new fears that the proposed constitution could deny religious minorities their rights.
Speaking today (Tues, 23 Aug), the Archbishop of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, said that if the country’s draft permanent constitution failed to protect civil liberties for religious minorities, it could spark a mass exodus of Christians.
The remarks, made by the Most Rev Louis Sako, came after fierce debate over whether the constitution should acknowledge Sharia as the ‘sole source’ of law in Iraq.
In his interview with Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic charity for persecuted Christians, Archbishop Sako said that if the constitution embraced Islamic Sharia law, his faithful risked losing their freedom.
He said: “We are very worried. If there is nothing that assures Christians of their rights, they will leave for other countries.”
“We are asking people to stay in this country but the problem is that we cannot give them a vision for the future. None of us knows what the future will hold.”
The archbishop’s comments came as Iraqi leaders yet again postponed a vote on the constitution, the key step before the document is submitted to parliament.
As tensions mount amid continued wrangling over the constitution, Archbishop Sako said Christians were finding it very difficult to make their voices heard.
The problem is made virtually intractable as Christians represent well below one million in a country with a total population of 24 million – more than 90 percent of whom are Muslim.
“What will our rights be?” asked Archbishop Sako. “The Christians were here long before the coming of Islam and the Arabs. We are an indigenous population – we are not foreign or strange. Where is the democracy that we all longed for?”
A constitution acknowledging the primacy of Sharia would, he said, make it very difficult to be a Christian.
They would, he said, suffer everything from pressure for Christian women to wear the hijab veil through to severe restrictions on building or repairing churches. Christians would have little protection in law, with prejudice weighted firmly in favour of Muslims.
The archbishop – a member of Iraq’s largest Christian denomination, the Chaldeans – went on to underline his concerns about the proposed federalisation of Iraq, especially the plans for Shiite Muslims to take control of the south, including the capital, Baghdad, which has the largest number of Iraqi Christians.
Highlighting the Shiites’ hard-line approach to minorities, he added: “Many Christians are leaving Baghdad for the north or to other countries. We just do not know what the future will be for Iraqi Christians there. All we can do is hope and pray that things will improve.”
Archbishop Sako’s remarks come more than a month after Bishop Andreas Abouna, the Chaldean auxiliary bishop of Baghdad, and the leaders of ten other Christian denominations, signed a joint letter calling for the constitution to recognise the rights of religious minorities.
The letter, which was presented to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, called on Iraqi leaders to scrap the proposed reference to Sharia as key to the constitution.
Meantime, Archbishop Sako urged the West to pray for Iraq in the next critical months and weeks.
Once the constitution is agreed by negotiators representing the country’s major religious groups, the draft will go before parliament.
Either Iraq’s leaders will approve the document and put it forward to a referendum or they will revise parts of the text and set a new deadline for deciding on it.
Editor’s Notes:
Directly under the Holy See, Aid to the Church in Need is a registered charity dedicated to the support of persecuted and poverty-stricken Christians.
Founded in 1947 by Fr Werenfried van Straaten, whom Pope John Paul II named “An Outstanding Apostle of Charity”, the organisation is now at work in about 130 countries throughout the world, especially Eastern Europe.
The charity undertakes thousands of projects every year including providing transport for clergy and lay Church workers, construction of church buildings, funding for priests and nuns and help to train seminarians. Since the initiative’s launch in 1979, more than 42million Aid to the Church in Need Child’s Bibles have been distributed worldwide.
For more information about Aid to the Church in Need, contact the Sydney office of ACN on (02) 9679-1929. e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org or write to Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148. Web: www.aidtochurch.org

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