Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 12:54 am Post subject: Neocons endanger Middle-eastern Christians |
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Interesting article on the effects of American military misadventures in the Middle East on ancient Christian communities:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1863335,00.html
Here's part of it:
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Talk to the refugees in Damascus, however, and you soon find that one group predominates: the Iraqi Christians. Although they made up only about 3% of the population of prewar Iraq - 700,000 people - under Saddam they were a prosperous minority, symbolised by the high profile of Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Christian foreign minister. Highly educated and overwhelmingly middle class, the Christians were heavily concentrated in Mosul, Basra and especially Baghdad, which before the war had the largest Christian population of any Middle Eastern town or city.
Now at least half of these Christians - around 350,000 people - have fled Bush's new Iraq and its violence, mass abductions and economic meltdown. Wherever I went in Syria I kept running into them - bank managers and engineers, pharmacists and scientists, garage owners and businessmen - all living with their extended families in one-room flats on what remained of their savings, and assisted by the charity of the different churches.
"Before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslim," I was told by Shamun Daawd, a former liquor-store owner who fled after he received Islamist death threats. "Under Saddam no one asked you your religion, and we used to attend each other's religious services and weddings. After the invasion we hoped democracy would come; but instead all that came was bombs, kidnapping and killing. Now at least 75% of my Christian friends have fled. There is no future for us in Iraq." |
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