Society for Threatened Peoples calls for a concrete aid programme from the German government for Christian Iraqi refugees

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) appealed on Tuesday to the members of the Human Rights Commission of the German Parliament to speak up for concrete aid measures for Christian refugees inside and from Iraq. The Committee will be talking on Wednesday with the Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, about a contingent solution for Iraqi Christians. „But even if the government fulfils the demand we have been making for many years of taking up 30,000 Assyro-Chaldaeans we must not forget the plight of those left behind”, said the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch.

The GfbV calls on the German government to finance, together with other European governments a development programme for Christian refugees in the autonomous Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan and in the neighbouring Nineveh plain, which is protected by Kurdish and Christian security forces. Peace has been brought by and large to both regions, but they have been overstretched with taking up some 120 Christian refugees.

„No one who sets store by Christian and western traditions can stand by inactive while the last 600,000 Christians are being forced to leave Iraq en masse while their 2000-year old tradition and culture are being destroyed”, wrote Zülch. The GfbV has been warning since November 2004 of a mass exodus of the Assyro-Chaldaean religious community and the destruction of their 2000-year old culture and tradition in Iraq. (Wiederholung!) In press releases, documentations and appeals to German and European politicians, to churches and Christian institutions, with vigils and human rights campaigns in many German cities or at church congresses the GfbV has constantly pointed to the plight of this forgotten minority and called for help.

In a „Chronicle of violence” the GfbV has constantly documented crimes against Christians. 37 Christian churches have been completely or partially destroyed. Many attacks have been carried out against nuns, priests and bishops, and many of these have not survived. In many places in central and southern Iraq only the old, the sick and the poor have remained in the Christian communities. Members of the Christian ethnic group have been abducted, raped, tortured to death, crucified, beheaded or shot. Hundreds of thousands of Christians have meanwhile taken to flight to escape from death threats and mishandling.