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.”“If it continues like this, there will be no Christians in Iraq,” she told The Catholic Register.
Mikha is one of the 1.9 million Iraqis who have crossed the border with Syria. She made it as far as Beirut in Lebanon, but getting any further will depend on interviews she’s going through with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
She would like to join her sister in Canada, or perhaps her other sister in Australia.
This was never her life plan. She wanted to raise a happy family in Mosul.
“My origin is Iraqi and a good person would never deny their origin,” Mikha said in her spare, tiny apartment in Beirut. “I remember the good time in Iraq, our childhood. My country Iraq where everything is beautiful.”
Refugees began streaming out of Iraq shortly after the bombing began as the shock-and-awe prelude to the American invasion of 2003. At first it was just people of all kinds taking temporary refuge from the war. The war at one time had created as many as two million internally displaced Iraqis — refugees inside their own country.
Once Saddam Hussein and the Baath party were gone, jihadist fighters flooded into the country, fueling a sectarian civil war. While the main struggle for power was between the Shia majority and the Sunnis minority that once held sway in Saddam’s government, non-Muslim minorities were seen as an impediment to the creation of a more pure Muslim republic.
Then Christians started receiving death threats from the armed strangers in their neighbourhoods.
Mixed neighbourhoods in Baghdad were effectively taken over by armed groups who ordered the Christians, the Yazidis, the Sabian Mandaeans out. Sunni militias protected Sunni neighbourhoods. Shia militias protected Shia neighbourhoods.
Iraq timeline
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About 10 per cent of the 1.9 million Iraqis who have crossed the Iraq-Syria border register with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. More than 10 per cent of those are Christian. Though it monitors conditions in Iraq carefully, the UNHCR does not believe there is any immediate prospect for a safe or dignified return to Iraq for the vast majority of both registered and unregistered refugees.
Zuhaila Mikha and her two boys are one drop in this ocean of refugees. They get by on a thin stream of money. Her 17-year-old son Landy works, bringing in about $200 a month. Twice a week Zuhaila gets work sitting in the audience for Beirut television talk shows. Eleven hours stuck in a chair while TV crews film local personalities chatting about fashion and diets earns her 10,000 Lebanese pounds — $6.70.
“If Iraq is stable, I will be the first to return. There is nothing better than the country where one was born,” she said. But she dismisses the notion as wishful thinking. “If there was stability, no killings, no kidnappings, people would go back. People are not returning. They will not.”
It isn’t so much that Mikha and her fellow refugees abandoned their country. Rather, their country abandoned them. Baghdad was once a diverse city, and Iraqi Muslims took pride and delight in their minorities. They were part of the flavour and colour of being Iraqi, and many Iraqis cannot imagine their country stripped of its minorities.
The Christians were part of Iraq long before the Arabs, before the Muslims, even before they were Christians. They still speak ancient languages — old Syriac, Chaldean and Aramaean, the Semitic language spoken by Jesus and His disciples. They dominated the region when the Apostle Thomas established the first Christian communities in Iraq.
Za Aytiryya, the heart of the Iraqi Christian neighbourhood in Beirut, is not the worst place in the world. It’s full of close-knit
families who struggle and support one another as best they can. The cheap apartments are little more than three-room concrete caves with peeling paint, plastic chairs, crumbling steps and the expected smells of too many people living in too close quarters. But every guest is greeted with at least a glass of water, and usually with coffee and juice. Guests are steered into the best chair and children are urged to shake hands and try their English on the stranger.
The street is filled with middle aged men who wander in and out of a little cafe where they play cards, smoke and drink coffee.
Nobody wants to employ these men in the underground economy. There are plenty of younger refugees with stronger backs who will accept the low wages. While their sons and daughters take sweatshop jobs to pay the rent, the men wait for word from the UNHCR or one of the Western embassies. Will their case be forwarded for resettlement? Some of them have tried two or three times.
European Institute for Co-operation and Development social worker Souhayla Tawk notes how strong families and a sense of community have helped the Iraqis get through their refugee experience.
“There is a great deal of solidarity, not just in the families but in the Iraqi community in general,” she said.
Caritas social worker Rania Chehab sees the toll the situation is taking on children. Fathers are stuck in the coffee shop all day while 12-year-olds bear the pressure of making sure their families have money to buy food and pay the rent.
The biggest challenge the European Institute for Co-operation and Development faces running an after-school program for refugee children is a collective sense of uncertainty, doom and absence of hope.
“After living in a crisis together, you find this collective depression,” said project manager Benedicte de Truchis. “Nobody is able to handle anything anymore. So they live in this atmosphere where there is no one who can support you anymore... It’s like life stopped for this period of transit in Lebanon.”
Working for a Slovakian, church-based NGO in the poor neighbourhoods of Beirut, Algerian Dr. Irad Beldjebel sees the pathology of the refugee crisis – high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, post traumatic stress disorder. At the Shamoon household he finds grandmother Masko Hawil’s blood pressure at 220 over 100 despite the medication he gave her a couple of weeks ago.
“I’m surprised she’s still alive with this blood pressure,” said the doctor.
He’s sent her for an EKG, a series of blood tests and an ultrasound but still can’t find the cause of her alarming blood pressure. Ultimately his diagnoses is that she suffers from being a refugee, from having lost her home and everything else she was once sure about in her life.
“If you don’t change the environment and the situation you will get no result (from treatment),” said the doctor. “I cannot do miracles. I try to at least be close to the people and let them feel that someone is taking care of them, that they are not alone.”
Assyrian Church of the East Archbishop Meelis Zaia said his priests have told him 900 new Christian families showed up in Damascus in March, fleeing election violence.
The Mattis family isn’t one of them. They’ve been in Damascus waiting over a year for a chance to go to the West, but Yalda’s sister Ameera just joined them – one more Mattis in an apartment overflowing with them. It was a bomb that hit her car, killing the person sitting beside her but leaving her miraculously unhurt, which finally prompted Ameera to get out of Iraq. She had been threatened before, but had avoided the threats by moving to a Christian village outside of Mosul and going into the city only for her clerical job with the local traffic authority.
She’s lost any hope that things will get better.
“After March 7 (elections) nothing changed. After the elections many, many Christians were killed,” she said.
Her brother Yalda is sick of hearing how Christians have to maintain their historic presence in the Middle East.
“I know they want to keep people in these countries. They don’t want these countries empty of Christians,” he said. “OK, give us some protection. Do something for us. Don’t leave us to be killed. This is the problem.”
Through the first 11 months of 2009 the UNHCR in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan was registering an average of 3,845 new refugees per month. That’s down from the 7,739 per month in 2008 and the 12,642 per month at the height of the U.S. troop surge in 2007. But only about 10 per cent of the Iraqis who cross the border register with UNHCR. The numbers are still huge.
This year Western countries have agreed to resettle more than 30,000 Iraqi refugees. The U.S. will take more than 20,000. Canada’s target is 3,700. But that doesn’t mean 30,000 will pack up and get on a plane.
“We look at departure rather than resettlement. Last year we submitted 18,000 cases (for resettlement). The departure was 9,000, said UNHCR Damascus representative Renata Dubini. “For us it would be a really great success if we were able this year to have 12,000 person’s departing.
In Syria alone the UNHCR is keeping tabs of 12,800 cases it considers urgent. Even in Dubini’s best-case scenario some of the urgent cases won’t be resettled this year.
Canada’s resettlement goal depends entirely on private sponsors – mainly churches. The embassy in Damascus has cleared its backlog and is waiting for completed sponsorship forms. If they don’t get them they won’t meet their private sponsorship target of 2,500 refugees.
When the deacon from St. Terezia’s Chaldean Church comes visiting the children say its the only time they see their mother smile. The deacon, Shabisheer Jean, plays the jolly uncle but outside the apartment worries about the possibility of suicide.
“I just ask the Lord to give me a chance to find another country,” said Hanah Abdel Rahel Salumi.