HAPPY HEW YEAR, IN HELL, HUSSEIN:

Iraq's Christians (JONATHAN ERIC LEWIS, December 19, 2002, Wall Street Journal)

As a showdown looms with the U.S., no group within Iraq has been more negatively affected than the Assyrians, Iraq's indigenous Christians, who are likely to be pivotal in any long-term U.S. plan for the region. Indeed they might make the difference between stability and simmering civil war in northern areas which are too broadly (and
ignorantly) considered exclusively Kurdish.

The Assyrian Christians, a non-Arab, Semitic people with a 5,000-year presence in northern Iraq, constitute some 5% to 10% of the Iraqi population. Despite constant threats from Muslim neighbors, they have kept their ethnic and linguistic identity alive and maintain a flourishing diaspora in Australia, Europe and North America. During the British Mandate that lasted from 1920 to 1932, the British employed the Assyrians as protectors of the Crown's interests in Iraq, only to abandon them shamefully when a newly independent Iraq entered the League of Nations in 1932. A year later, using the Assyrians' prior alliance with the British as a pretext for violence, the new Iraqi government launched an anti-Christian jihad in which scores of Assyrian civilians were murdered and their villages set on fire. Arab nationalists have continued to draw upon this Assyrian-British connection as evidence that Assyrians are agents of the Christian West.

Saddam's Baath Party, which came to power in 1968 as an Arab nationalist movement with ideological roots in European fascism, officially denies the existence of the Assyrians as a separate ethnic group and has implemented numerous policies in order to both ethnically cleanse the Assyrians from Iraq and to erase their identity as a distinct people. Iraqi officials, seeking to physically obliterate Assyrian civilization, have been involved in the looting and smuggling of priceless Assyrian artifacts. Speaking Assyrian in public carries great risks. The recent savage murder and beheading of a nun in Baghdad indicates the lengths to which the regime will go in order to terrify its Assyrian population.

Among the best things to happen in 2003 will be the removal of Saddam Hussein from power (and hopefully from this mortal vale). Posted by Orrin Judd at December 31, 2002 7:27 PM