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By Nina Shea , 08, 2016
Pres.
Trump must act fast to save Iraq’s Christian genocide victims; Obama policies
have been epic fail
By
Nina Shea, Director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. This
piece is adapted from remarks given at the Anglosphere conference at the NY
Catholic Archdiocese’ Sheen Center, on December 5.
Iraq’s
Christian genocide survivors are hanging on with hope and the help of a fraying
thread of private aid. The US government acknowledged the ISIS genocide
suffered by these Christians, Yizidis and other minorities, last March. Since
then, the Obama administration’s humanitarian response toward them has been
epic fail.
As
Iraq’s post-ISIS reconstruction phase now comes into focus, the Christians
stand to lose out again. Unless President Trump acts fast to
reverse the current practices and policies, Iraq’s ancient Christian
communities, with direct ties to the earliest Church and who speak Aramaic, the
same tongue as Jesus of Nazareth, will disappear completely.
Most
of these Christians have been effectively shut out of the $1.1 billion American humanitarian aid program for Iraq
since ISIS seized their hometowns in Iraq’s northern Nineveh province, in 2014.
The Chaldean Catholic Church leaders who assumed responsibility for them
after they fled to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, testified to Congress in September that American aid has
systematically and completely by-passed them: Stephen Rasche, a lawyer for the
Erbil Chaldean Archdiocese, attested that apart from some “tents and tarps” in
August 2014, “the Christian community in Iraq has received nothing in aid
from any US aid agencies or the UN.”
Iraq’s
churches have scoured the West for private donations to feed and shelter some
one hundred thousand indigent refugees from ISIS. In its third year, this
private effort is foundering from donor fatigue.
Nor
have the persecuted Christians been able to find shelter in the refugee camps
of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, an agency heavily supported by the
US, anywhere in the region. Monsignor John Kozar of the pontifical
Catholic Near East Welfare Association, run by the NY Archdiocese, told a New
York conference on Dec. 5 that Christians don’t dare enter UNHCR camps for
they would be targeted by Islamic gangs within them. John Pontifex, a
director of the papal agency Aid to the Church in Need, emailed me that he
visited a UNHCR registered camp in Lebanon, from where, he discovered, all the
Christian refugees had fled in fear, opting instead for the cramped but
safer quarters of a nearby Christian home.
Now,
as the UN Development Program plans for the distribution of US and other
funding to rebuild Iraqi towns devastated by ISIS, that agency, expected to
receive billions of dollars in US aid, has released a plan that fails to list a single funding distribution
center in the Christian areas of Nineveh among the some 20 facilities
approved for the distribution of reconstruction aid in Iraq. ISIS has left
Nineveh in ruins, notwithstanding recent headlines of church bells ringing
there again. Careful reporting by CBN’s Chris Mitchell reveals widespread
destruction of civilian homes and businesses in the largest of the Christian
towns, Qaraqosh. Iraqi Catholic nun Diana Momeka wrote to me last
month that troop reports from three predominantly-Christian towns estimate
damage affecting up to 80 per cent of the buildings and historical
site.
Sinjar,
the Yizidi’s center, stands as a warning for other Nineveh towns. It was
recaptured from ISIS last year but its residents have yet to return from camps
in Kurdistan because it lies in rubble. Sinjar’s Yizidis now have reason
for hope, since one of the UNDP facilities for funding reconstruction is to be
located there. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the Christians.
American
reconstruction funds largely failed to reach Iraqi Christians
during the Bush years, as a July 2012 US Government Accountability Office
report verified. Continued US indifference all but
ensures this will occur again.
To
say in this context of religious genocide and sectarianism, as the Obama
administration sometimes does in trying to explain why Iraqi Christians are
being excluded from US assistance programs -- that there should be no religious
test for US assistance -- is unconscionable. In fact, the administration has
not been able to offer any coherent explanation as to why the Christians are
being systematically left out of these key US funded aid programs in Iraq.
Each
month, more Christians leave Iraq to resettle in the West. In four years,
they could all be gone, warns the Knights of Columbus, a prominent private
donor to the displaced Nineveh Christians.
As
president, Donald Trump should immediately issue instructions to every relevant
US department to end the marginalization of the genocide minorities in all U.S.
aid programs; and a demarche along the same lines to the United
Nations and the Iraqi government – both of which receive generous American
support.
Otherwise,
these communities are soon likely to become extinct, and the term “genocide,”
itself, morally meaningless.
Nina
Shea has worked as a lawyer specifically focusing on religious freedom in
American foreign policy, for thirty years. Joining the Hudson Institute as a
Senior Fellow in 2006, she has led the Center for Religious Freedom, which she
founded in 1986, in its effort to defend religious freedom internationally. Ms.
Shea served as a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom, an independent federal agency, for thirteen years until 2012, and has
been appointed to represent the United States on U.N. human rights bodies by
both Republican and Democratic administrations. She has co-authored two books
on religious persecution ("Persecuted: The Global Assault on
Christians" (Thomas Nelson 2013) and "Silenced," Oxford
University Press, 2011), and authored four studies on violent teachings in
official Saudi education materials, making her an authority on the subject. She
currently is a leader of a campaign for Christians threatened with genocide by
ISIS.
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