The
numbers are stark. Almost 1.5 million Christians lived in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Between the U.S.-led invasion
that toppled his regime in 2003 and the rise of Islamic State, three-fourths of
the country’s Christians are believed to have fled Iraq or died in sectarian
conflict. The carnage continues. Of the 300,000 Christians remaining in 2014,
some 125,000 have been driven from their homes within the past year, according to a March report on “60 Minutes.”
Almost
a third of Syrians were Christian as recently as the 1920s, but only about 10%
of the country’s 22 million inhabitants at the onset of the current civil war
were members of Christian communities. That long and slow relative decline has
accelerated as hundreds of thousands of desperate Christians, along with
millions of their Muslim fellow citizens, flee the fanaticism of Islamist
rebels and the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Violent
oppression is nothing new for the Christians of these countries. The Ottoman
Empire’s well-known genocidal violence against the Armenians during World War I
was accompanied by similarly brutal and widespread mass murders of Assyrian
Christians. And in the 1930s, in the ethnic and nationalist turmoil following
the fall of the Ottomans, tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians were murdered
in riots and massacres.
Where
will it end?
The process
of murder and “religious cleansing” may well continue until, for all practical
purposes, the Christians of these countries simply disappear. Other Christian
populations in the Middle East have been almost entirely wiped out or
displaced. In 1900, most of Constantinople’s residents were Christian; today,
of Istanbul’s population of some 14.4 million people, fewer than 150,000
identify with any faith other than Islam.
The
years ahead may bring a similar fate to other Christian communities, consumed by
the fires of fanaticism. But the risk is not just regional: The loss of a
meaningful Christian presence in the Middle East could further polarize
relations between Christians and Muslims around the world—and bring us a step
closer to the kind of “clash of civilizations” that no sensible person wishes
to see.
The
violence of 2015 has deep roots in more than a century of brutal religious and
ethnic wars not just in the Middle East but across Central and Eastern Europe
as well. For all their obvious differences, the Ottoman, Russian, German and
Austro-Hungarian empires were alike in being multiethnic and multiconfessional
states. The collapse of these empires after World War I left vast territories
to be divided among competing groups.
The
process was neither smooth nor, in most cases, fair. Bitter conflicts—between
Serbs and Kosovars, Germans and Poles, Jews and Palestinians, Greeks and Turks,
Turks and Armenians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, to name just a few—led to
repeated episodes of war and ethnic cleansing, leaving legacies of hatred and
fear throughout the region.
Where
the four pre-World War I empires once stood, there are now more than 40 states.
The transformation satisfied the longing of many groups for national
independence and opened the door to democracy in many countries, but for tens
of millions of people, it led to unprecedented violence and displacement.
Today’s strife in the region—with multi-confessional, multiethnic Syria and
Iraq threatening to dissolve into smaller, more homogeneous units—is the latest
act in a long, bloody tragedy.
During
the many centuries of imperial rule, the peoples of the region became scattered
and mixed. But the region was a salad bowl, not a melting pot; groups retained
their distinctive customs and beliefs wherever they went, and different ones
served different economic roles. Merchants and skilled workers might be German,
Jewish, Armenian or any of a half-dozen other ethnic groups. Eastern Orthodox
peasants might be ruled by Catholic or Muslim aristocrats. Rabbinical courts
heard cases involving only Jews; the various groups of Christian clergy handled
such matters among their flocks.
But the
old arrangements could not withstand the rise of nationalism and calls for
self-determination. When the Balkan peoples struggled to throw off Ottoman rule
in the 19th and 20th centuries, they wanted ethnic nation states like the ones
they saw in the West, such as Sweden, Denmark and France.
Wars of
independence became wars of peoples and wars of religion. Turks massacred
Christians, whom they suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, and Christians
massacred and drove out Turkish civilians and Muslims on the side of the
empire. And of course, from time to time, everyone took a turn persecuting the
Jews. From the war for Greek independence that began in 1821 up through the
chaotic collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1923, such wars swept through the
region, and atrocities became almost routine. Peoples who had lived cheek by
jowl from time immemorial participated in unspeakable brutalities against their
neighbors.
Wars of
identity break out when order breaks down—which is what happened across the
region as the Ottoman and Russian empires collapsed. More recently, we have
seen the return of such conflicts in Yugoslavia after Tito’s death and in the
Caucasus and now Ukraine following the fall of the Soviet Union. In Syria and
Iraq, a series of colonial masters and locally grown despots maintained a
brutal order from the 1920s through the last decade. But neither the colonizers
nor the despots could provide permanent security.
The
role of Islamist fanaticism among Sunnis and Shiites in the latest round of
violence should not be minimized, but Christians are not now and never have
been the only victims of these wars. From vicious massacres in the Balkan wars
of independence to the destruction of the Circassians (a predominantly Muslim
people of the Caucasus), the mass deaths of Crimean Tatars and the more recent
slaughters in Bosnia and Chechnya, Muslim communities have often fallen victim
as well. In the spreading sectarian conflict between Shiites and Sunnis, the
murdered innocents and penniless refugees fleeing for their lives are usually
Muslim.
Still,
in the wars of identity raging across the post-Ottoman Middle East, Muslims
have more often been the perpetrators and Christians the victims. That is
certainly true today in Iraq and Syria, where Christians are for the most part
unarmed and much of the killing is being done in the name of radical Islam.
Over
the centuries, Middle Eastern Christians have developed many survival
strategies. One is to stay invisible. Christians have often survived best in
remote areas, and those in more densely populated areas often do their best to
avoid antagonizing their neighbors. Many Assyrian Christians fled into the
mountainous regions of Syria and Iraq to escape Ottoman persecution during
World War I, and the Armenians in the isolated, mountainous hinterlands fared
better than their more visible compatriots in Istanbul.
Another
survival strategy for Christians has been to find foreign protectors. In the
19th century, the Christian powers in Europe and the U.S. took an increasing
interest in the situation of Christian and other minorities in the Ottoman
lands. The Orthodox looked to Russia; Catholics in the region looked to France;
Britain and the U.S. asserted a right to protect Ottoman Jews as early as the
1840s; and Armenians often looked to the U.S., among others, for help.
This
strategy had its successes, but it proved costly. Turks justified the Armenian
genocide as a necessary measure against a pro-Russian Armenian rebellion in
World War I. Assyrian Christians provided troops for the British against Arab
and Kurdish rebellions against British authority in the 1920s; they paid a
heavy price when the British withdrew and the retaliations began.
As
Christians in the Middle East have learned at great cost, the Western powers
and so-called “international community” are weak reeds. They have been (and
still are) slow to intervene, and their interventions have usually been
halfhearted, short-term and subject to the vagaries of great-power rivalries.
Yet
another Christian survival strategy was to support the development of a secular
Arab identity in which Christians and Muslims could meet as equal citizens—just
as Catholics and Protestants can be German or American citizens. Many of the
most influential Arab nationalists (including many radical Palestinians) were
of Christian origin.
People
such as Michel Aflaq and Antun Sa’adeh of Syria and George Habash of Palestine made significant
contributions to Arab nationalist thought, and the era of secular Arab
nationalism allowed many Christians to play more prominent roles in the region.
Anti-Zionism also became one of the ways that the Christians of the Middle East
could demonstrate their Arab bona fides. To this day, intense support for the
Palestinian cause is common in Arab Christian communities.
Unfortunately
for Christian hopes, secular Arab nationalism lost its allure. The titans of
the nationalist era too often became ineffective despots presiding over failed
states. As the intellectual pendulum of the Arab world has swung back toward
Islamist ideas about politics, Christians have found themselves ever more
marginalized.
For
Christians, a final survival strategy was to cling to strong rulers. In Syria,
Iraq and Egypt, they attached themselves to rulers such as Hafez al-Assad,
Saddam and Hosni Mubarak (and now Abdel
Fattah Al Sisi). Such alliances had their uses for both parties. Christians
achieved a measure of protection and stability; they were repressed no worse
than anybody else, and a handful achieved wealth and political power.
For the
despots, Christian allies served many of the purposes that Jews once did for
kings in the Middle Ages. They were seen as loyal because they had no other
place to turn—and as useful both for their services and because you could blame
them when things went wrong (and, if necessary, throw them to the wolves). They
could also be counted on as intermediaries who could present the regime’s case
to outside powers. It was not for nothing that Saddam Hussein named Tariq Aziz (a Chaldean Catholic baptized as
Mikhail Yuhanna) as his foreign minister.
The
deal between Middle Eastern despots and their Christian communities also served
to conceal other divisions. In Iraq and Syria, the nominally secular Baathist
regimes of Saddam and Assad were, in fact, governments that allowed a religious
minority (Sunnis in Iraq, Alawites in Syria) to dominate the country’s
majority. However much Christians may have disliked the cruelty of these rulers,
they themselves were minorities, and they often preferred minority dictators
over the risks of potentially hostile majority-run regimes.
The
problem with this strategy is that dictators fall, and when they do, their
supporters often face retaliation. The overthrow of Saddam and the raging
challenge to Bashar al-Assad have left Iraqi and Syrian Christians without the
protection they hoped for, exposing them to the vengeance of populations that
blame them for supporting a hated oppressor.
Moreover,
the continuing association in many Muslims’ minds between local Christians and
the hated imperialists of the West makes local Christians attractive targets:
You can always find one to kick if you can’t strike out directly at Israel or
the U.S. “When America does a drone strike,” a 25-year-old Pakistani Christian
student told Fox News, “they [Muslim mobs] come and blame us. They think we
belong to America. It’s a simple mentality.”
The
failure of traditional Christian survival strategies has occurred just as the
regional order is beginning to collapse. Iran’s challenge to the balance of
power has exacerbated sectarian tensions throughout the Middle East, sparking
factional conflict and polarization in Syria and Iraq. While the Obama
administration tries to withdraw from the region and tilt toward Iran, the kind
of insecurity that has historically inflamed communal tensions in the Middle
East— and led to genocidal violence—extends its reach every day.
Traditional
strategies of accommodation will no longer serve. Christians face stark
choices. They can “fort up,” creating defensible and well-armed enclaves that
their enemies cannot conquer. They can flee, as millions have already done. Or
they can wait to be massacred.
In the
modern Middle East, the minorities that have survived, and in some cases
thrived, have acquired a military capacity. The Jews, the Kurds, the Armenians,
the Maronites and the Druse have not all created states, but they have all
built redoubts. The Maronites (Lebanese Christians in communion with the Roman
Catholic Church) and the Druse (a monotheistic religion distinct from both
Christianity and Islam) both entrenched themselves in the mountains of Lebanon
and built militias that have allowed them to survive recurring bouts of civil
war.
Other
communities have chosen the path of flight. Almost all the Jews of the Arab
world now live in Israel. More Armenians and Circassians live outside their
ancestral homelands than in them. Many Assyrian and Chaldean Christians already
live in the West, and Copts and other Christians have been escaping in a steady
flow.
The
conscience of the West has been slow to wake to the peril of the dwindling
minorities of the Middle East (including non-Christians such as the Yazidis, as
well as the persecuted Baha’i of Iran and the Ahmadis of Pakistan), but Islamic
State is changing that. In the wake of its atrocities, Pope Francis and, in the
U.S., church leaders like New York’s Cardinal
Timothy Dolan are speaking up.
This is
a very good thing, but advocates for the Christians and other endangered Middle
East minorities must think hard about the available options. We must choose
from among three courses of action.
We can
help the region’s minorities “fort up,” as the Israelis, Kurds and Maronites
have done. We can help them to escape and work with friends and allies around
the world to help them find new homes and start new lives. Or we can do what
history suggests, alas, as our most probable course: We can wring our hands and
weep piously as the ancient Christian communities in Syria and Iraq are
murdered, raped and starved into oblivion, one by one.
