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Hopefully the region heeds Pope Francis’ message of peace
God knows, Iraq could receive some good news. Coronavirus disease infection rates exceed 4,000 per day. Protesters are again killed and injured in Nasiriyah and elsewhere in the south. The government has pledged to bring the former activist assassins to justice: they are still at large. The Biden administration has just launched airstrikes against the positions of Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada on the Syrian border: they and other Shiite militias continue to attack and threaten American targets (and not just Americans, Irbil airport was recently blown up.) with impunity and, like a cheap mob gang, oppresses and kills the very Iraqis they claim to protect. Turkey feels free to intimidate the Kurds (what’s up?). Meanwhile, Iran is doing what it usually does – undermining other states, enriching uranium, openly attacking ships in international waters, and arrogantly telling the Iraqi government how to run its own affairs.
I am convinced that most Iraqis want to live in peace with their neighbors in a country they call their own. They are proud of the extraordinary community, denominational, social and ethnic mosaic that this great Iraqi scholar, the late Ali Al-Wardi, considered to be Iraq’s most distinctive feature.
So, the next visit of Pope Francis – the first of any pontiff – will be a ray of light, if it continues (which I fervently pray that it does). This will certainly give hope and comfort to Iraqi Christians, but possibly millions of other faiths of all faiths in the region as well. It will tell them that they are not forgotten. Above all, after so much suffering, the visit will bring a message of peace and reconciliation. I would have liked to still be there to see it: as a Catholic myself, I see it as a blessing for the future, but also a call to memory.
On a melancholy November day 11 years ago, I stood with my head bowed in the Syriac Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad as a crowded congregation mourned those – faithful, priests, police officers and passers-by – murdered from coolness by Daesh on Sunday. Mass on October 31, 2010. The total death toll was perhaps 60, with about 80 others injured, many seriously. Seven coffins represented them all. Among the congregation were two or three other ambassadors and – notably and courageously – Sayyid Ammar Al-Hakim, then head of the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq, one of the two main Shiite political movements established in the country, and the bearer of ‘a proud and resonant name. All around the church there was a strong security presence: snipers on the rooftops, armored vehicles blocking the streets, police and mukhabarat strolling around. I thought of Christ’s warning to Simon Peter: “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” It is not an injunction that Christian churches or Christian leaders have always observed: it is difficult to turn the other cheek, and the deadly sin of pride is alluring. But it is at the heart of the Christian gospel.
Christianity originated in the Middle East and for centuries remained the most widely practiced religion, even after the demise of political power. In 1918, Christians still made up about a quarter of the region’s population. Now they’re down to about a 20th. The Ottomans, in their confident heyday, were generally tolerant but still hung a patriarch or two when they thought the Greeks were causing trouble. During their long decline in the 19th century, with increasing pressure from Russia and the unrest of submissive populations in the Balkans, they became more militant repressive. The targeted murder of Ottoman Christians did not begin in 1915. As prominent Turkish historian Taner Akcam has documented extensively, its roots run much deeper. Mount Lebanon experienced a first civil war in 1860, with mainly Druze forces carrying out Christian pogroms. The Bulgarian massacres of 1876 became a famous cause in Europe.
This visit will certainly give hope and comfort to Iraqi Christians, but perhaps millions more of all faiths as well.
Sir John Jenkins
Other communities have also suffered, of course. The Yazidis, Shabaks, Druze, Alawites, Amazighs, Tuareg and others suffered in often horrific ways. In 1918, the Jewish community in Baghdad made up perhaps 40 percent of the total population. There were large populations of Jews, Parsis and Armenians in Basra. Cairo, Alexandria, Mosul and Aleppo were four of the world’s great cosmopolitan cities. Unfortunately, neither.
But the Jews have a state now. The Shiites thrived even under the brutal authoritarianism of the Khomeinist regime in Iran and are now a privileged class in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Christians have not been so lucky. In Egypt, where the Copts still represent perhaps a tenth of the total population, there has long been a steady stream of emigration, but it became a deluge when the Muslim Brotherhood took power in 2012. When the Muslim Brotherhood were overthrown, their supporters attacked Christian. targets of revenge: Christians, lacking tribal support networks, are defenseless. In the Palestinian territories, where Christ once walked, Christians previously represented perhaps a third of the total population. They are now less than a 20th. The same goes for Iraq, the land of the patriarchs. It is a sad and disturbing story.
And that matters in complex ways. The late Yasser Arafat told me that the continued presence of Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land was of fundamental importance to him. They were the leaven – “khamira” – in Palestinian society. Without them, he risked becoming flat, monocultural and extreme. You could apply the same principle to minority communities in Iraq. It is wonderful that the Muslims of Mosul are keen to encourage – and the UAE to fund – the reconstruction of not only their mosques, but also churches destroyed by Daesh, as the Assyrians return to the plains of Nineveh and the Yazidis slowly return to Sinjar. But it was Kurdish irregulars who harassed the miserable Armenians with their trail of tears in 1915. It was Bakr Sidqi who carried out the first massacre of Assyrians in modern Iraq in 1933. Shabak’s neighbors sought to take their land when Daesh appeared. And the Shiite militias are now setting up their own supporters where Yazidi and Christian villages once stood. Many Iraqi Christians – like the Copts – emigrated in despair. There is a long way to go.
The very name of Francis, taken by the Pope on his election, recalls the simplicity of Saint Francis of Assisi, who was authorized to preach before the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil, the nephew of the great Salahuddin, and to return unscathed to his co-religionists during the Bloody Fifth Crusade 800 years ago. A similar desire to cross confessional and sectarian borders is characteristic of this pope. And it is more than ever necessary in a world where often violent identity policies risk destroying the sense of our common humanity.
Pope Francis will visit not only Baghdad but also Najaf, where he will appeal to Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani (in itself a message to all of us), Irbil, Mosul and Qaraqosh. He will meet with the President, the Prime Minister and other senior officials working for the future of Iraq. He will see the appalling destruction caused by Daesh and hear the testimony of those he has persecuted. He will celebrate Mass for the Catholic faithful. He will see Nasiriyah, the city of Abraham, for himself – and hold an interfaith meeting in the Plain of Ur. Not everyone will accept his visit. He will have to guard against those who wish to use his presence for their own ends. It will have to bear witness to the suffering of all communities in Iraq and in the region at large. He will have to be frank with Iraqi politicians about the need for justice. He will, of course, be a diplomat and a statesman as it was not Saint Francis. But his message will be similar: we are human beings, children of God, and we must know and love each other better. I hope this message will be heard not only in Baghdad but around the world.
• Sir John Jenkins is Senior Research Fellow at Policy Exchange. Until December 2017, he was Corresponding Director (Middle East) at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), based in Manama, Bahrain, and was Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at the University of Yale. He was the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia until January 2015.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the editors in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Arab News
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