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  • Nina Shea Testifies Before Congress on Behalf of Iraq's Assyrians an

    AINA, CA
    Assyrian Int'l News Agency
    Dec 23 2006

    Nina Shea Testifies Before Congress on Behalf of Iraq's Assyrians and
    Other Minorities

    (AINA) -- The following testimony of Nina Shea, Director Center For
    Religious Freedom, was delivered on December 21 Before The US
    Congressional Committee On International Relations, Subcommittee On
    Africa, Global Human Rights, And International Operations.

    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. Al-Mujahideen Battalions."

    "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~E 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:

    Appoint a Special Aid Coordinator for Iraq as recommended by the Iraq
    Study Group. This post could prove to be very helpful in sustaining
    Christian and small minority communities, particularly those in
    northern Iraq that are being now marginalized.

    Provide emergency relief for Internally Displaced Persons inside
    Iraq. Ensure that this aid reaches the needy Christians, and other
    small minorities now amassing in northern areas of Iraq.

    Ensure that US reconstruction aid and development assistance is
    equitably distributed to Christian, Yizidi, Mandean and other small
    minority communities, including the ethnic minorities, the Shabaks
    and Turkomen, particularly in northern Kurdish areas where many are
    now fleeing from other parts of Iraq and where the US carries much
    influence. Legitimate, independent, local leadership of these
    minority communities should be consulted about the reconstruction
    priorities of their communities. Kurdish authorities must not be
    allowed to use US aid to ethnically cleanse northern Iraq.

    Support the establishment of a new autonomous district that would be
    jointly governed by ChaldoAssyrian Christians, Shabaks (an ethnic
    minority with Shiite roots), Yizidis and other small minorities in
    the Nineveh Plains, an initiative provided for under article 125 of
    Iraq's Constitution.

    Support the formation of police forces drawn from the local minority
    populations for Christian and small minority areas in the Nineveh
    Plains, as consistent with a decision of the Iraqi National Assembly
    and implemented elsewhere in Iraq.

    Use more effective diplomacy with Iraqi leaders, particularly Kurdish
    leaders, to insist on the protection and equitable treatment of small
    religious minorities.

    Resettle in the United States the most vulnerable members of the
    Christian and other smallest minorities. This group includes those
    orphaned, widowed, and maimed by targeted violence. There are over
    thousands of such refugees who seek to join relatives already in the
    US. Last year the US admitted a mere 198 refugees from Iraq, and is
    already authorized to admit up to 20,000. The US must provide funding
    to the UNHCR for the processing of such people and admit greater
    numbers.

    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.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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