For Christian refugees, 'There is no future in Iraq'
By Michael Swan, The Catholic Register
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.
But he indefinitely suspended his appointments at the tattoo parlour.
Ihab and his wife Diana are graduates of the University of Mosul, founded by the Dominicans, but since their graduations in 2006 and 2007 neither had been able to find a job. Ihab had turned to running the family business, a small shop in the city. But he had to move the family to a village outside of Mosul for safety.
When the final death threat came Ihab had to close the shop. Without the shop or any prospect for a job, it made no sense to sit in the village waiting for the money to run out, or to venture back into the city and risk running into the mujahedeen. He and Diana packed up their baby daughter Reena and with Ihab’s sister Israu headed for the Syrian border, then through Syria to Beirut.
Like many Iraqi refugees they believe the resettlement process will go faster from Beirut. Caritas workers roll their eyes when they hear this. Fueled by rumour, there’s no evidence of a faster or surer route to the West out of Beirut.
The young family found a roomy apartment in a better neighbourhood a few blocks away from the crowded and crumbling apartment blocks where the main concentration of Iraqi Christians live. It’s pricey at $500 a month, plus $100 a month for utilities.
Diana stays home with the baby and her sister has a 12-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week sweatshop job sewing in a factory. It pays $250 a month. Ihab had landed a job in a juice factory carrying containers around the factory floor for $350 a month, half of what a Lebanese worker would earn for the same job. Working illegally in what the Lebanese call the marché noir was a tough adjustment for a university educated, middle class Iraqi. He quit in disgust over the wages, the back-breaking labour and the 12-hour days.
“I would work from seven to seven. But pay me a salary for this hard work,” Ihab said.
The danger in staying in Iraq is twofold. If Ihab runs into the wrong people or re-opens the family shop, he will be killed. The second threat is that the young family might live their whole lives waiting in vain for a free and democratic Iraq where they can hold jobs that match their education and their daughter can have a proper education.
“There is no future in Iraq,” said Diana.
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