Αmericans
of all political stripes have embraced the promotion of democracy as a
centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. But this American democracy crusade
has caused huge, and largely overlooked, collateral damage since the
9/11 Al Qaeda attacks against the United States in 2001. The fall of
authoritarian regimes throughout the greater Middle East has fueled
growing persecution of minority Christian communities. The Pew Research
Center has charted extensive government restrictions on non-Muslim
religions in numerous countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Afghanistan, Iran, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. Pew also has
gauged very high social hostilities in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, the
Palestinian territories, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
These government
restrictions and social hostilities directed against Christians are
causing many to flee the region. In the early twentieth century,
Christians accounted for about 20 percent of the Middle East population,
but now that figure is down to only 5 percent. In the aftermath of 9/11
and the “Arab Spring,” Christian communities throughout the greater
Middle East find themselves increasingly besieged. While the United
States seems to notice bits and pieces of this picture, the full
magnitude of the horrific Christian plight is largely ignored.
Sieges against Christians in Lands “Liberated” by the American Military
A
democracy enthusiast would anticipate that the Christian community
would be thriving now that a “democratic” Afghan government was
installed by American military power after the ouster in 2001 of the
Taliban regime. After all, Afghanistan’s constitution, adopted in 2004,
guarantees freedom of religion. But Afghan Christians today are
compelled to worship in secret lest they be accused of apostasy for
converting to Christianity from Islam, a charge punishable by death.
Such persecution no doubt will grow after 2014, when American soldiers
are largely gone and Washington is less able to influence the government
in Kabul.
Across a troublesome border, Pakistan’s blasphemy laws
are wielded more and more aggressively against Christians by a weak
civilian government propped up by Pakistan’s Islamized military and
society. Christians, who make up only about 2 percent of Pakistan’s 180
million people, are living under growing fear of persecution and
economic discrimination. The assassination in March 2011 of the only
Christian minister in Pakistan, who bravely criticized harsh blasphemy
laws that impose the death penalty for insulting Islam, has chilled the
willingness of secular and liberal Pakistanis to speak out.
Iraq’s
open warfare against its Christian community has led to a mass exodus
of Christians from that country since the 2003 American and British
military invasion ousted Saddam Hussein, whose repugnant regime was
nevertheless relatively hospitable to Christians. Iraqi Christians are
severely embattled by Sunni extremists linked to Al Qaeda and are
discriminated against by Iraq’s Shia majority, largely in control of the
government. Incidents such as the 2010 suicide bombing of Our Lady of
Salvation Church in Baghdad, which killed fifty Christians and two
priests, have terrified Iraq’s Christian population, which has dwindled
to less than 500,000 from between 800,000 and 1.4 million in the time of
Saddam.
Sieges against Christians in Lands Coping with the Arab Spring
The
current Egyptian regime, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, poses a
far greater threat to Egypt’s sizable Coptic Christian community than
its authoritarian predecessor under Hosni Mubarak. A Coptic church in
Cairo was set ablaze by Islamists in 2011 and many Copts—an estimated 10
percent of Egypt’s 85 million people—live in fear that Egypt is on the
path to being governed by Islamic law, or Sharia. In early April 2013,
Egypt’s police sided with an angry crowd of young Muslims throwing rocks
and firebombs in a siege of Egypt’s major Coptic Cathedral. Nor have
Egyptian Copts, who have sought work in neighboring Libya, fared well in
the chaos that has reined in that country since the fall of Muammar
Gaddafi. Christians were shocked in December 2012 by the bombing of a
church in Misrata, Libya. That attack has stoked fears that Libyan
Islamists are growing in power and more such attacks against Christians
are in store.
Islamists also are emerging as a powerful force in
Syria, generating fears that, should they gain power, they would
persecute Syria’s Christian community. About three hundred thousand
Christian Syrians have already fled the country and are refugees. A
Christian patriarch in April 2013 warned, “The future of Christians in
Syria is threatened not by Muslims but by…chaos…and the infiltration of
uncontrollable fanatical fundamentalist groups.”
Now Syria’s
violence is spilling over into neighboring Lebanon. The Shia Islamist
group Hezbollah is flexing its military muscles and lending support to
embattled Syrian forces. Many Lebanese Christians have fled over the
years due to civil war and, more recently, in fear that Hezbollah
eventually will control the country and turn it into an Islamic state.
Christians made up about fifty percent of the country in 1932, during
the last national census, but now by some estimates are only 34 percent
of the population. A similar trend has long been under way in the
Christian Palestinian community, caught in the middle of the conflict
between the Israelis on one side and secular and Islamist Palestinians
on the other. The Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem has lamented that the
Holy Land is fast becoming a “spiritual Disneyland,” with holy sites as
theme park attractions bereft of worshipping Christians.
In the
small, rich Arab Gulf states, Christian communities, formed primarily by
Asian immigrate workers, quietly practice their faith, but that isn’t
happening in the region’s powerhouse Saudi Arabia. Qatar, for example,
has allowed the construction of a Catholic church in Doha for one
hundred and fifty thousand Catholics. Churches in Kuwait, Bahrain and
the United Arab Emirates are seen as a way to lure expatriate labor to
those countries. These Gulf States have survived the political torrents
of the Arab spring, but should they fall to street protests, successor
regimes likely would resemble Saudi Arabia today, which forbids
Christian worship by the estimated eight hundred thousand Catholics in
the kingdom. The Saudi government publicly lauds interfaith dialogue,
but Saudi-sponsored conferences take place outside the kingdom to avoid
domestic religious-political backlashes from Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi
religious establishment.
Sieges against Christians in Non-Arab Middle East Lands
The
tightening sieges of Christian communities in the Arab Middle East is
running parallel to sieges laid against Christian communities by
non-Arab Muslims elsewhere in the region. The Assyrian Christian
population in Iran has plummeted from about one hundred thousand in the
mid-1970s to about fifteen thousand today. More than three hundred
Christians have been arrested by Iran’s Islamic regime since mid-2010.
Churches operate in fear. And Christian converts face persecution.
Meanwhile, Turkey is praised in the West as a democratic success story
in the Muslim world, and the government in Ankara often is characterized
in the media as “mildly Islamic.” But the steady erosion of free-speech
rights in Turkey, as evidenced by the increasing imprisonment of
journalists and the government’s aggressive purging of the secular
Turkish military, raises doubts about the future prospects for Turkish
political and religious tolerance. Attacks against Christian leaders in
Turkey have raised concerns about the security of roughly one hundred
thousand Christians living in a country of 71 million Muslims. A
Catholic bishop was stabbed to death in southern Turkey in 2010, and
several years earlier a Catholic priest was murdered in a Turkish town
along the Black Sea.
Demand for Blunt American Talk and Diplomacy
Democracies
consist of more than just elections. They must also have divided powers
among executive, legislative and judicial branches, as well as
protected practices of freedom of expression and religious belief. The
mistreatment of Christian communities throughout the Muslim Middle East
powerfully undermines any assertion that Islamic societies are tolerant
of other faiths, and will continue to rebuke such assertions so long as
the regimes and societies writ large fail to protect Christian
minorities with words and deeds.
The United States cannot be the
world’s policeman in behalf of democracy and religious tolerance. The
horrendous loss of our national treasure, both in fallen soldiers and
enormous costs, vividly and painfully reminds Americans that we lack the
power, means and interests to militarily intervene wherever there is
human tragedy. Nevertheless, Americans ought to recognize that the “soft
power” of rhetoric and diplomacy can influence world events at the
margins. Regimes in the greater Middle East, like nation-states
everywhere, want power and prestige in international relations, and they
can be “shamed” in the eyes of world opinion. Washington should seek to
embarrass governments and pressure them to lift the sieges of
Christians that are now so prevalent throughout the Middle East. Then we
would see whether they truly aspire to be called, and treated as,
genuine democracies.
Richard L. Russell is Professor of
National Security Affairs at the Near East and South Asia Center for
Strategic Studies. He is the author of Sharpening Strategic Intelligence , Weapons Proliferation and War in the Greater Middle East , and George F. Kennan’s Strategic Thought . The views expressed are those of the author alone.
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