Mark Field is the Member of Parliament for the Cities of London
and Westminster. Follow Mark on Twitter.
The global media circus has moved on from Cairo,
Alexandria and the Egyptian seaboard. Soon the current rapt
attention to the terrible bloodshed in Damascus, Houla, Aleppo
and Homs will similarly pass.
Yet for the nine million Egyptian Coptic
Christians and the two million Syrian followers of Christ, whose
lineage goes back to St Paul’s proselytising in the first
century AD, these are desperate times. Religious minorities
often find their most assured protection under dictatorships.
Forget all the talk about liberators fighting against the
existing regime in Syria, or of democrats and progressives
triumphantly taking the reins in Egypt. The unspeakable truth is
that the sizeable Christian communities in these trouble-torn
states are at greater threat of ethnic cleansing from their
ancestral homes than has been the case for generations – often
at the hands of the self-styled freedom fighters so feted by the
Western press.
Events
in Iraq provide us with a timely example. During this year’s
Easter celebrations, St Joseph's Chaldean Church in central
Baghdad was surrounded by concrete barriers and army
checkpoints. Amidst savage bloodletting between Sunnis and
Shiites in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003,
the story of Iraq’s Christian population is one that is rarely
told. But since the invasion it is estimated that half their
number has desperately been driven to exile outside the country.
Some 330,000 Iraqi Christians have fled in the past decade to
Syria alone (where Christians have been largely protected by the
Assad regime). Others have found safe haven in Jordan and
naturally some have come to these shores. Under Saddam Hussein,
some Christians had risen to the top of politics, most notably
Tariq Aziz, Hussein’s Deputy Prime Minister. Yet since the
dictator’s fall, violence against the Christian minority, who
were often associated with the ‘crusading invaders’, has
included kidnappings, the beheading of a priest, the bombing of
ancient churches and forced conversion to Islam.
Similarly, I am now regularly contacted by
constituents dismayed by the upsurge in violence against Egypt’s
Coptic Christians. Attacks against this minority – who account
for over ten per cent of Egypt's 82 million population - are not
a new phenomenon. Copts have long complained about alleged state
discrimination in holding top posts as well as attacks from the
Muslim majority.
Yet
the erstwhile President Mubarak was broadly sympathetic to the
Coptic community, freeing up rules on new church building and
sending some important signals of tolerance, such as making
Christmas a national holiday. Indeed the Copts’ spiritual
leader, the recently deceased Pope Shenoudah, resolutely
supported the President until his fall. Since his death, Egypt’s
Coptic Christians are now more fearful than ever since they lack
a leader to guide and represent them as their nation comes to a
new constitutional settlement.
Governments in the West have given the impression
of naivety in heralding at face value the chain of events that
commenced some eighteen months ago in Tunisia. Indeed where we
(rightly in my view) intervened militarily – in Libya – we have
also added to a legacy of distrust and cynicism that will be
difficult to overcome. In the minds of many in the Middle East
the lesson of Colonel Gadaffi’s demise is that in future Arab
leaders should never trust Western leaders. Their reading of
this episode is chilling. Having given up his stocks of weapons
of mass destruction at the end of 2003, the former Libyan leader
was initially embraced by Western leaders who, within nine
years, had ousted, hunted down and executed their new ally. It
will not prove easy in future to negotiate with leaders in this
region and we should not be surprised that many will see the
speedy acquisition of nuclear capability as an essential
insurance policy against Western interference in their internal
affairs.
The West’s
failure (and its complicity) over recent decades to encourage
even rudimentary democratic institutions to take hold in much of
this region may be something we assuredly will regret in the
years ahead. History teaches us that democratic freedoms need to
be developed carefully and tend to flower only over a prolonged
period. To the political class in these countries democracy
still means no more than the holding of elections – and
thereafter reaping the benefits of exercising power and
patronage. Yet elections can only ever be a starting point. To
the general population in this region democracy needs to be
underpinned by the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free
press and a political culture that enables the individual to
hold government and state institutions to account once the
voting is over.
Modern
democracy also means enshrining citizens’ right to religious
freedom - never more important than in a region torn for
millennia by religious tension. In Tunisia’s Ennahda and Egypt’s
Muslim Brotherhood, we now have political parties holding power
which define themselves primarily in narrow ethno-religious
terms and base their policies around the tenets of sharia law.
Indeed Tunisia’s constitution now explicitly prevents Christian
candidates from standing as president.
This is the backdrop to the fate that I fear will
within a decade or so befall the long established Christian
population in this region. My own mother as a pre-school age
young girl, in common with millions of other ethnic Germans, was
forced to flee westwards from Breslau in January 1945 as the Red
Army advanced. My own forefathers had lived in this region of
Silesia (German since 1242) for at least nine generations that I
know of. The forced repatriation (in a process that might now be
called ethnic cleansing) of my mother’s family and millions of
other civilians from groups whose nationality would in future be
inextricably linked to their ethnicity, was largely overlooked
in the euphoria that swept the world as formal hostilities
ceased at the end of World War II.
If we wish to avoid a similar scale of civilian
displacement, we must ensure that the banishment from their
homelands of Middle Eastern Christians over the years ahead is
not a dark derivative of this surge in Arabian people power.
