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"Freedom House's" Nina Shea
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Nina Shea Testifies on Monitoring Respect for
Human Rights Around the World, on Iraq

Committee on International Relations
U.S. House of Representatives
16 March 2006

On March 16, 2006, Ms. Nina Shea, the Director of the Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom testified on State Department Country Human Rights Reports before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations of the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee.

Shea's testimony addressed 12 country reports: China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Vietnam.

The hearing was held at 2:00 p.m. at 2172 Rayburn House Office Building. Others present included
the Honorable Christopher H. Smith, the Honorable Barry Lowenkron, the Most Reverend Thomas Wenski, Ms. Elisa Massimino, Mr. Ali al-Ahmed, and Ms. Sharon Hom

The following is the complete text of Nina Shea’s testimony on Iraq:

In Iraq, religious strife has been defined in recent months by the very visible escalation of violence between the Shiite and Sunni Arab populations. The bombing in February of the golden-domed Shiite shrine in Samarra and retaliatory attacks against a number of Sunni mosques captured headlines worldwide. Less noticed is the mounting persecution of the Christian, Sabean Mandean and Yizidi religious minorities, along with the Shabaks and Turkomen. Christians, constituting the overwhelming majority of these groups, are represented chiefly by Aramaic-speaking (the language of Jesus) ChaldoAssyrians and a smaller number of Armenians.

About a million of these minorities remain in Iraq, with their numbers rapidly dwindling. Reportedly hundreds of thousands of Christians have fled the country over the last two years since the first of now more than a dozen churches were bombed or attacked. Since then other Christian property has been destroyed or confiscated, and many Christian people have been targeted because of their faith for death, kidnapping for ransom, or
both.

As the UNHCR recently found: “Acts of violence reported by Christians and/or which appear to target Christians include bombings and other attacks on churches … the serious or fatal attacks on shop owners and/or business persons involved in trading and selling
alcohol, harassment, extortion, kidnapping, and even torture of persons perceived as not respecting Islam (e.g. women who appear in public without a hijab, persons accused of not respecting the teachings of the Koran and persons refusing to convert to Islam)…Others have been targeted for kidnapping against ransom based on the perception that Christians are generally more wealthy than others.” It states further:

“While much of the hardship and harassment they report that they face is symptomatic of the situation of general insecurity faced by all Iraqis in present day Iraq, members of the Christian minority nevertheless appear to be particularly targeted.” (emphasis added).
Some neutral observers are estimating that as much as fifty per cent of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees being processed in Syria are Christians. We could very well be witnessing the extinction of the ancient Christian community in Iraq as their numbers threaten to shrink to statistical insignificance. Though many incidents against them and the other smaller religious minorities are recounted in the report, their overall devastating significance for these communities is neither noted nor commented upon.

An Iraqi Muslim acquaintance recently visited my office to encourage the Center to speak out about the plight of the Christian and the other smaller minorities. He told me they are perceived as “weak” because they do not have their own militias and are few in number, and thus “easy targets for brutalization by the extremists of all groups – Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish.” In his view, the United States has “abandoned” them. By this he meant that the U.S. government should more effectively use its leverage with the Kurds and Shiites to better ensure the protection of the small minorities, and should ascertain that a fair share of U.S. aid goes to develop their areas so they can find a modicum of security within Iran.

Observers, myself included, have compared Iraq’s Christian community to a “canary in a coal mine.” That is, the terror visited upon the Iraqi Christians, because they are weak, will eventually become the pathologies and trends of the extremists directed against the society at large, and, possibly, against other vulnerable minorities in neighboring countries.

Christians, the original targets of kidnappings and assassinations carried out by thugs disguised as police, continue to be victimized by this form of violence. The first incidence reported of a person killed by militants disguised as uniformed police officers occurred in Basra on November 18, 2003, when Sargon Nano, a Christian, was dragged from his vehicle and shot. This method of uniformed thuggery was then spread to target members of the Mandean religious community, and, today, it victimizes many Iraqi sectors.

Islamist extremists have begun violently enforcing sharia rules on Christians. Ninety five per cent of liquor stores, mostly owned by Christians, have now been destroyed or shut, as the State Department reports. Christian women are being forced to wear Islamic head coverings, some who do not suffer acid being thrown in their faces. A source at the Assyrian Star magazine, the publication of the Assyrian American National Federation, provided some other examples: On March 15, 2005 in Basra, as noted in the State Department report, university students listening to music and not in hijab were attacked by members of the Mahdi militias while picnicking. The Mahdi militants objected to the music, the western attire, and the mixed male/female gathering. The report fails to note that there was one student killed in the attack -- a 20-year-old Assyrian girl, Zohra Ashor,
who had her western-style clothes torn off before being clubbed to death. (In August when the local office of al-Hurra tried to report on the event, it was threatened. The office has since closed and the employees are in hiding.) Likewise, in Mosul, the only women killed in targeted violence this past year were members of the ChaldoAssyrian community. One of them, twenty-year old Anita Theodoros Harjo, a student in Nineveh Art Academy, disappeared last August 8 as she ran errands between an Internet Café and her home. Her beaten and bludgeoned body, still clad in her American jeans, was found
dumped in 'Akkab cemetery.

If such treatment of the Christians continues its pattern of broadening, what could follow is the complete Talibanization of behavior of that part of Iraqi society that is within reach of the Mahdi militias.

Christians and the other smallest religious minorities continue to be vulnerable throughout Iraq, even in the Kurdish area, particularly the KDP-controlled parts, as the report points out. The Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project (ISDP) reports that Kurds linked to the KDP have confiscated millions of dollars of ChaldoAssyrian Christian property in such towns as Derey, Coumaney and Maristak. At the same time, the political disenfranchisement of many Christians that is acknowledged in the report regarding the January 2005 elections, as well as the October 2005 referendum (which is not so acknowledged), has exacerbated the Christians’ disadvantage in claiming an equitable share of reconstruction funds. To give one example, in the town of Bakhdeda, home to 30,000 ChaldoAssyrian Christians, houses are collapsing and children are regularly exposed to septic water as they play, but the churches appear to be in mint condition – reportedly the result of a cynical allocation of reconstruction funds by Kurdish officials there. KDP-controlled areas in northern Iraq could soon see parishes without parishioners. In other places, such as the city of Mosul, there are increasing demands posted to Christians, both particular and generic, to leave the city or risk death, reports the ISDP.

Violations of the human rights of these non-Muslim groups are often hidden within the report’s descriptions of the larger situation of insecurity and terror. Greater focus needs to be given to the Christians and the smaller minorities for two essential policy reasons: First, the proportional effect of even small numbers killed on the diminishing Christian population and the other non-Muslim minorities has enormous implications for the continuation of religious diversity in the country, an important moderating effect on that society, as well as for the survival of a unique and ancient Church.

Second, the tendency to concentrate on bigger groups and numbers masks the signs of new trends and methods in the violence – methods that are practiced first on the“weakest” sector, the Christians and other small religious minorities.

Finally, as the tragic drama plays out concerning the abduction of Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll, let us remember her translator, Allen Enwiya, a ChaldoAssyrian who was shot immediately when they were captured. He had taken the job to support his wife and small children after his music shop had been bombed. The invisibility of his persecution and death, even in such a high-profile case, is a familiar plight for Iraq’s smallest minorities.

The United States government should more closely monitor and report on these very vulnerable religious minorities who are being preyed upon by all sides; ensure their protection through effective diplomacy and through economic/reconstruction aid that they themselves can administer for their villages and areas, engage in a consultation process with their civic leaders to create for them safe havens within Iraq; and develop opportunities to allow the safe return of the hundreds of thousands who have fled the country and are now stranded in Syria and Jordan. In Iraq, the United States has the political and economic leverage that could possibly determine the fate of Iraq’s ChaldoAssyrian Christians and other small minorities.

The testimony of the Center and the other witnesses are available (click here).



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