Cold-hearted and ruthless: Schünemann is playing with the lives and health of 8,000 persecuted Iraqi Christians

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) accused the Lower Saxon Minister of the Interior, Uwe Schünemann, on Friday of cold-heartedly and ruthlessly playing with the lives and health of 8,000 persecuted Iraqi Christians. "Schünemann has torpedoed with his objection the initiative of the Federal German Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, to grant a contingent of Assyro-Chaldaic Christians refugee status and pushed these desperate people back into their miserable state for weeks, if not months", criticised the GfbV General Secretary. The Minister of the Interior for the province of Lower Saxony had last weekend spoken out against the reception of refugees from Iraq , saying that he was concerned for security and suggesting that the road into Germany could thus be opened for terrorists. Schäuble took back his plans for the European conference of ministers of the interior on Thursday.

The international press, the GfbV and other human rights organisations, leading western intellectuals and parliamentary committees of the western democratic states had reported comprehensively on the fact that the Christians speaking modern Aramaic, who in Iraq for the most part call themselves Assyro-Chaldaeans, are being systematically persecuted there. Christians are being murdered, crucified, beheaded, raped, forcibly converted to Islam, kidnapped or they have disappeared for ever. More than 40 of their churches have been destroyed and their schools, businesses and institutions have been bombed.

Hundreds of thousands of Assyro-Chaldaeans have fled to the neighbouring countries of Jordan and Syria . "There they must eke out a miserable life, often having to sell up all their belongings because they can find no work", reported Zülch. " Some of the poorest among them have had to sell themselves in order to be able at least to feed their children." Most of these refugees do not want to do this and do not want to return to Iraq . They have sought refuge in the west.

What has become of the Assyro-Chaldaeans from the Near-East, who number about a million, who have gone to the countries of the west and overseas? They have become, said Zülch, model, integrated, successful and loyal citizens. Their integration has been as much a success story as that of the Huguenots 200 years ago. "I have heard of not one single case of disloyalty, let alone terrorism, on the part of these former refugees in any western country."