"Stop the terror against Aramaic-speaking Christians and other minorities in Iraq!”

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) supports the appeal of the Young Aramaic Union and the Föderation der Aramäer (Suroye: Federation of Aramaeans) Deutschland e.V. to a vigil under the motto: "Stop the terror against Aramaic-speaking Christians and other minorities in Iraq!”

on Saturday, 3rd November 2007

at 1 p.m. (1300 hrs) in front of the Embassy of the United States of America, Clayallee 170 in 14195 Berlin.

The two Aramaic associations want to give evidence of their solidarity with the Christian Assyro-Chaldaic Aramaeans in Iraq and to protest against their persecution and expulsion.

At the same time the exile organisations want to demonstrate against the fundamentalist Islamist terror, which is turning against members of their religious community and those of others in Iraq.

Islamist Arab terror groups are determined to drive out of the country the Christians, who have been at home in Iraq for 2000 years. In southern and central Iraq more than 30 churches have been singled out for attack and every Christian minister of religion must be in constant fear for his life. Christians are attacked on their way to work or school, in their homes or shops. Hundreds have already been abducted and murdered, girls and women – even nuns – raped. The brutally mutilated corpses of abducted Christians are constantly being found, although their families already paid large sums of money in ransom to save the lives of their relatives.

The number of Christians in Iraq has sunk dramatically. In 1987 there were still 1.4 million Christians, at the beginning of the war in 2003 about 650,000. Of these three quarters have now been driven out of their homes. Tens of thousands are refugees and the wave of violence shows no signs of abating.

Many Christians from Iraq have fled to Syria or Jordan. But many are also seeking shelter in the peaceful Iraqi Kurdistan and in the Nineve plain in northern Iraq. Here the terrified people are protected from attack. But now the neighbouring country of Turkey is planning to bring war to North Iraq. Christian villages have already been subject to severe shelling by the artillery.

The GfbV demands:

* The right to remain must be granted to the Christian refugees who reach Germany or who sought refuge at the time of Saddam Hussein;

* Germany must develop aid programmes for the impoverished Christian refugees from Iraq in Syria and Jordan;

* No war against Iraqi Kurdistan! The NATO country Turkey must not destroy this peaceful multi-ethnic and multi-religious federal state in North Iraq.