What’s to Become of Mideast’s Christians?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside. PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The Arab awaking has been, at best, a mixed blessing for the Middle East’s Christian Arab minorities. The uprisings in Libya and Tunisia have had little impact on the region’s Christians, as these two countries are almost entirely Sunni Muslim in religion.

But Egypt and Syria are a different story. The fall of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak earlier this year, and the ongoing rebellion against Bashar al-Assad, the authoritarian president of Syria, has exposed these minorities to violence and persecution by extremists.

The upheavals have prompted concerns that regimes that were seen as guarantors of Arab Christian survival, whatever their other faults, may be replaced by ideological Islamists.

In fact, Christian Arabs have been leaving the Middle East for decades, fearing the growth of fundamentalist Islamic groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is estimated that about half of Iraq’s 1.4-million Christians have fled the country since the American invasion in 2003, and even in Lebanon, which once had a Christian majority, the 1.7-million Christians are now only about one third of the country’s population.

They are now a negligible presence in the Palestinian territories – even in places such as Bethlehem. In Israel some two per cent of Arab citizens are Christian. And in Jordan Christians comprise about three per cent of the population.

Egypt has some 10-million Christians, the largest remaining non-Muslim population in the Middle East by far. The ancient Coptic Orthodox Church is the main Christian denomination in Egypt, led by Pope Shenouda III. They represent more than 10 per cent of the total population.

Mubarak allowed them religious freedoms and punished Islamists who persecuted them. That protection is now gone.

A car bomb exploded in front of a Coptic Church in Alexandria last New Year’s Eve, killing 23 people and injuring at least 79. There was further sectarian violence in the country between Christians and Muslims in March and April.

The destruction at a Coptic church in southern Egypt on Sept. 30 further heightened tensions. When liberal Muslims joined Coptic Christians as they marched through Cairo’s Maspero area on Oct. 9 in protest, they were attacked.

Egyptian security forces then rammed their armed vehicles into the crowd and fired live ammunition indiscriminately. At least 36 people were killed and 272 injured.

The first stage of staggered parliamentary elections will begin on Nov. 28 amidst continuing turmoil and many Copts fear a strong showing by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Given these conditions, large numbers are leaving the country. “If emigration of Christians continues at the present rate,” said Naguib Gabriel, director of the Cairo-based Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organizations, “it may reach 250,000 by the end of 2011.”

Syria’s Christian population, once more than 30 per cent of the country’s total, is now down to 10 per cent. The 2.5-million Christians in Syria belong to various eastern rite Orthodox, Catholic and Assyrian churches.

The Assad regime in Syria is dominated by the Alawite minority, itself just 10 percent of the population. They came to political power in the 1960s by dominating the army and the Ba’ath Party.

A Shi’a sect, they are viewed by many Sunni Arabs – who are the vast majority of Syrians -- as heretics.

Many Christians fear that Assad’s downfall would deprive them of the semblance of protection the Assad family has provided for four decades. (Bashar’s father Hafez ruled the country from 1970 until 2000.) They might be subjected to reprisals at the hands of a conservative Sunni leadership that has long been out of power.

The Damascus regime has claimed that it is being challenged by Islamic radicals. The demonstrators deny that, but many Christians appear to believe it.

Hence there have been interventions from bishops and priests, Orthodox and Catholic, on behalf of the government. As the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Mario Zenari recently stated, Syria has been a country that has been “exemplary in terms of harmony between different religious confessions, for mutual respect between the Muslim majority and Christian minority.”

But the Assad regime is probably living on borrowed time. Syria has already been suspended from the 22-member Arab League. Its only Middle Eastern ally is fellow Shi’a Iran, while most Sunnis in the region, including the Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, and non-Arab Turks, would shed few tears if it disappeared.

As Syria edges ever closer to civil war, Christians could well find themselves on the losing side. And should the regime fall, Syria might witness a bloodbath far worse than what we saw in Libya.

Reflections on the Demise of the So-Called "King of Kings"


Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

There has been no end of commentary about Moammar Gadhafi's bizarre reign of chaos and terror in Libya.

His grisly death at the hands of fighters from the city of Misrata, which had suffered so grievously during the long civil war that finally led to his ouster, was captured by video cameras and broadcast around the world.

The essence of his rule was one almost unique for a 20th-21st-century ruler. The so-called ‘King of Kings' was truly an absolute monarch, a modern-day Egyptian pharaoh or Roman emperor.

Monsters such as Hitler, Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Saddam Hussein, and Stalin were, after all, to some extent bound by their own ideological formulations and political parties.

Saudi kings, even when absolute rulers, must govern within the strictures of Wahabi Islam.

But Gadhafi was literally able to do whatever he felt like doing; he was, after all, his own creation, a deity, and not beholden to any ideologues, dead or alive.

His "Green Book," a treatise that spelled out his "third universal theory" that would supplant both capitalism and communism - could it have been just an elaborate cruel joke, mocking his own people? - allowed him, in effect, to crown himself a philosopher-king. No popes or ayatollahs or caliphs stood in his way.

His idiosyncrasies were legendary and his every whim carried out: at one point he had decided that camels on roads near Tripoli made the city look "backward." They were immediately shot by his compliant military.

For all his buffoonery and comic-opera outfits, Gadhafi was a brutal tyrant, ordering the deaths of people at home and abroad with absolutely no qualms. He was a sociopath without a conscience.

And his family used the country's oil wealth to live in untold luxury. Libyans visiting their various compounds since Gadhafi's downfall have come away astounded by the affluence. The humble Bedouin persona Gadhafi affected was nothing but a pose.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Lord Acton's warning remains as relevant today as it did when he expressed it in 1887.

Gadhafi left behind no institutions, not even the kind other dictatorships have allowed, such as tame parliaments, compliant political cabinets, or political parties that had been hollowed out. Libya is starting from scratch. It is a political as well as a physical desert.