How Hussein Keeps Control of Iraq's Religious Rivalries

Wall Street Journal | 12 November 2002 | Hugh Pope

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How Hussein Keeps Control
Of Iraq's Religious Rivalries

Myriad Ethnic and Religious Tensions
Could Boil Over in a Post-Hussein Iraq

By HUGH POPE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MOSUL, Iraq -- Iraq's Christians have a nightmare scenario that unfolds from a U.S. attack aimed at overthrowing President Saddam Hussein. They recently got a taste of it.

As a group of nuns arrived for their initiation vows at a church in this northern Iraqi town two months ago, Muslim boys taunted the congregation, says Jshleymon Warduni, a leading Christian bishop in Baghdad. Christian youths responded in kind. More Muslims arrived, armed with knives and bottles. The Christians picked up chairs, and soon a pitched battle was in progress. By the time Iraqi security forces waded in, about 15 people were injured.

"The government does protect us in such cases," says Bishop Warduni, who speaks for Iraq's main Christian sect, the Chaldeans. "But if the Americans want to save Iraq, let them come with dialogue. If they don't, the danger will be greater for Christians. [American talk of war] has unified the idea that being Christian is being with America and Europe."

While the longstanding rift between Iraq's two largest populations, Sunni and Shia Muslims, has gotten much attention, Iraqi society is actually a complex patchwork of ethnic and tribal rivalries that Mr. Hussein's regime alternately inflames and restrains to preserve his government's domination. There are not only Kurds but also pro-Saddam and anti-Saddam Kurds. There are Shia Arab Muslims and Sunni Arab Muslims. Bitterness can also fester between Assyrian and Chaldean Christians.

Each group has its own grudges, feuds and vulnerabilities, likely to bubble to the surface if the iron hand of Mr. Hussein is suddenly lifted, much as grievances flared after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. For the country's Christians, some 2% of the population, the mounting U.S. pressure has already roiled the sectarian waters. One recent morning here in Mosul, 220 miles north of Baghdad, the nation's capital, a nunnery woke to find its statue of the Virgin Mary shrouded in Muslim veils. In a Christian township nearby, a group of Muslim men knocked out the watchman of a Christian cemetery and raped his wife. On Aug. 15 in Baghdad, a group of intruders broke into a nunnery and found a lone, 71-year-old nun, Cecilia Hanna. They knifed her to death in her cell and cut off her head.

Christian exiles suggest Mr. Hussein's regime may even be exploiting the tensions to blackmail the U.S. "We all know what decapitation means," says Peter Pnuel BetBasoo, of the Assyrian International News Agency, in Chicago. "It's a message saying, 'You Christians are in jeopardy.' "

The governor of Mosul, Abdulwahed Shennan, denies there was even a mishap at the church. "I would have been the first to hear about it," he says. "Nothing like that happened. There is no difference between mosque and church in Iraq."

In fact, Bishop Warduni and foreign diplomats in Baghdad say Mr. Hussein's government usually steps in to contain explosions of ethnic and religious strife. Christians say the nun's murderers were arrested and paraded on TV. The cemetery rapists are in jail. Two days after the Mosul confrontation, the regime forced the Muslims' tribal leader to apologize to Christian elders. And attacks on Christians have long been more frequent in the Kurdish north, under U.S. protection since Mr. Hussein's government was driven out in 1991.

On the whole, Christians say, Mr. Hussein's regime doesn't treat them worse than other citizens. Some have risen high in the government. Iraq's veteran deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, is a Chaldean. "The president's tailor and barber are Christians, too," says Nareg Ishkhanian, pastor of the main Armenian Orthodox church in Baghdad. Like many in his 22,000-strong community, his parents were refugees from Ottoman-era massacres in present-day Turkey and remember with gratitude a history of protection by Iraqi Arabs. "But if there are problems in Iraq," he adds, "we share them, too."

The problem is that Mr. Hussein wants to have it both ways. He poses as an indispensable peacekeeper between Christians and Muslims, just as he does between Shia and Sunni Muslims. But as the U.S. puts his regime on the defensive, he is rallying Iraq's Muslim majority around Islam. In February, Mr. Hussein put Christian church property under tighter control by Muslim state bureaucrats. His son Uday's newspaper, Babil, has repeatedly attacked Christian dogma this year.

These pressures are pushing Christians out of Iraq, where St. Thomas brought Christianity in the first century A.D. The community, which once numbered a million, is now down to around 600,000, according to Bishop Warduni, or to 300,000, according to a Christian intellectual who asked not to be identified.

Write to Hugh Pope at hugh.pope@wsj.com