Michael Swan

Iraqi refugees prisoners in their Christian locales

April 20, 2010

Anwer Salem [images/stories/features/iraqExodus/Aytiryya.jpg]The 10,000-plus Iraqis in Lebanon have no legal status. Lebanon never signed the United Nations Convention on Refugees. The country has no legal or administrative mechanism to deal with a person seeking asylum of any kind. While it does recognize Palestinian refugees, they are an exception. The police are not actively trying to round up refugees and put them in jail or send them out of the country. As long as they don’t wander out of the Christian neighbourhoods of Beirut or otherwise draw attention, authorities are willing to pretend they’re not there.

Deborah Amos no longer recognizes Middle East she has known since 1983

April 20, 2010

Deborah Amos [images/stories/features/iraqExodus/amosDebcShannonTaggart.jpg]The biggest and best story of Deborah Amos’s 28-year career as a Middle East correspondent comes in the form of an eminently readable, fast-paced book about the Iraqi refugee crisis — Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile and Upheaval in the Middle East. Amos spent five years among Iraq’s two million exiles, sipping tea with them in tiny, crumbling, empty apartments in the poor Geramana neighbourhood of Damascus, retracing their journeys from Baghdad by taxi, tracking them down after they resettled in the United States. Out of the whirlwind of “shock and awe” attacks on Baghdad in 2003, and the confusing rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and regime change and democratizing the Middle East, Amos discovered that the key to understanding what was happening in Iraq was in the people streaming out of Iraq.

Family caught in Lebanese limbo

April 20, 2010

David and Eliot Kakos [images/stories/features/iraqExodus/deathThreat.jpg]The Army of the Murabi Islamic Iraq State doesn’t like what Fuad Benan Kakos did for a living, and if they ever catch him they’re going to kill him. They gave him and his family a three-day head start. Fuad, Jacqueline and their sons David and Eliot have been in Beirut just over a year. The family had lived in the Christian neighbourhood of Zafaraniyya in Baghdad. Fuad made a modest living running a shop that had a dangerous sideline: under-the-counter liquor sales — legal for Christians under Iraqi law, but dangerous if the mujahedeen find out.

Dream is not shattered

April 20, 2010

Menirva Manhal Khoshaba [images/stories/features/iraqExodus/menirva2.jpg]Menirva is hanging onto her dreams. She’s 18. She’s lived as a refugee and a sweatshop seamstress since she was 14. Dreams are all she has. “I don’t want to drop my dream. I always want to keep our hope alive, that someone will help us, will accept us. I cannot imagine that I will accept life here,” she said, and the tears begin. “I am tired. I cannot take it any more. I want to continue to dream.”

For Christian refugees, 'There is no future in Iraq'

April 20, 2010

Diana Khodr and daughter Reena [images/stories/features/iraqExodus/dianaReena.jpg]The death threat was no surprise to Ihab Ephraim Khodr. He had seen it happen to other Christians. There had been plenty of other vague and general threats, year after year, before he received a personal threat just before Iraq’s March 7 elections. He had been waiting for it. His expectation is inked into his right wrist. In his student days in the first half of the decade, Ihab had begun to get a tattoo that would have portrayed a crown of thorns wrapped around his wrist. It was to be a sign of his devotion to Christ. It also would have made him recognizable on the street as a Christian.

Past the point of no return

April 20, 2010

Manhal Khoshaba Mikhail and Madeline Boutrous Oraha Matti [images/stories/features/iraqExodus/manhalMadeline.jpg]An election victory for Iraq’s more secular, less sectarian parties backing Prime Minister-elect Ayad Allawi isn’t tempting Iraqi Christian refugees to return home, even as members of the Chaldean Church hierarchy continue to express confidence that Christians can live in peace in Iraq. “It’s very, very difficult to turn back to Iraq, impossible to turn back,” Toma Georgees told The Catholic Register in his apartment in the Geremana neighbourhood of Damascus, Syria. “Our problem is not with the Iraqi government. Our problem is with Iraqi people, ignorant people who want to kill us, who want to kill all the Christians... Those people are ignorant, and they just want to drink our blood as Christians.”

ANALYSIS : Christians are essential to Middle East's future

April 20, 2010

Iraqi Christian Mass [images/stories/features/iraqExodus/iraqiCommunion.jpg]You don’t need to know a word of old Syriac or Aramaean, not a word of Arabic. You don’t need to know the stories of kidnappings, death threats or the desperate flight to the border. You don’t need to know how these people have lived for years in exile on borrowed money, tea, sugar and bread. From the moment you walk into a church filled with Iraqi refugees in Syria or Lebanon their faith, their devotion, their steadfast love of God is as real, as concrete, visible and tangible as the walls of the church.

Exodus Iraq: A flight to safety, a cry for help

April 19, 2010

Zuhaila and David Mikha [images/stories/features/iraqExodus/davidZuhaila.jpg]Beirut / Damascus - In 2006 there was an explosion at the church where Zuhaila Mikha’s husband used to help out. Ramzi was killed. Then in July, 2007 Mikha’s 19-year-old daughter was kidnapped. After two months of asking police and hospitals for information about her daughter she got word from her neighbour: “Let your neighbour know she should not go to the police or we will kill her.” She moved from Mosul to the nearby Christian village of Tel Eskoff. But after nine months trapped in the village — running out of money, afraid to go to the city, afraid to let her children out of her sight — it was time to get out of Iraq.

For Iraqi refugees, the healing begins with pain

April 1, 2010

DAMASCUS, Syria - On Passion Sunday, no matter where we are, we witness a struggle between the human and what we would like to call the inhuman. In Damascus among the Iraqi Christians, it’s hard to think of that drama as far away in time or geography. The refugees — afraid and often wounded in body and mind by their experience — are painfully and obviously human. The violence they have fled and their lives of waiting and hoping as they grow poorer in Damascus are exactly what we mean when we call anything inhuman. Jesus is fully and completely human — human as God intended humanity to be. The forces lined up to hang Him on the cross are the ones that rob us of our humanity in every age.

Regis College's new homes welcomes its first art show

March 19, 2010

TORONTO - Artist Catherine Crowe stood quietly, contemplating three of fellow painter Galina Oussatcheva's icons hanging in the lobby of Regis College, and then pronounced, "These are spectacular." In front of another stretch of wall Jesuit scholastic Trevor Scott was inspecting sculptor Farhad Nargol-O'Neill's 14 compressed and complex stations of the cross, and was very pleased.