Iraq: Do not forget the tragedy of the Christians in Iraq and demand immediate aid

On the occasion of the coming of the Christian Easter celebrations the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has appealed to the Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and the Bundeskanzler, Angela Merkel, to take regard at last of the tragedy of the Iraqi Christians and to organise immediate aid for this forgotten minority. „It is disgraceful for people in Germany to be proud of Christian and western traditions and then just to sit by and watch the mass exodus of the last 600,000 Christians from Iraq and the destruction of their 2,000-year tradition and culture”, said the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch, on Thursday.

The GfbV reminds us again of the terrible crimes which preceded the mass flight and expulsion and which still continue. 37 Christian churches have been completely or partially destroyed. Many attacks have been perpetrated against nuns, priests and bishops, which many have not survived. Members of the Christian ethnic group have been abducted, raped, tortured to death, crucified, beheaded or shot. In many parts of central and southern Iraq only the elderly, the sick and the poor in the Christian communities have remained. Following the murder of the abducted archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, who was the leading dignitary among the Chaldean Catholics, and the murder of his three companions, the last Assyro-Chaldean Christians are now trying to leave the city.

„We appeal urgently to you to finance a development programme for the settlement of the Christian refugees in the autonomous federal state of Kurdistan and in the neighbouring Nineveh plain, which is guarded by Kurdish and Christian security forces”, says the letter of the GfbV to the Bundeskanzler and the Foreign Minister. Both regions have been largely pacified and are overstretched with taking up 120,000 Christian refugees. „The politics of peace and an especial responsibility for the protection of minorities, which have resulted from the sad German experience of two totalitarian regimes, should commit us to providing speedy aid to these minorities which are existentially threatened”, said Zülch. At the same time he called once again on the German government to give up its „crazy boycott” of the peaceful federal state of Kurdistan and to set up a consulate there like other democratic states.