16th February, 2005

GORDON LAKE

While Iraqi and Coalition officials continue to label Iraq’s 30th January elections as an extraordinary success, hundreds of Christians protesting outside Iraq’s Green Zone on Sunday a week later beg to differ.

While both the ChaldoAssyrian and Turkomen communities pointed to specific voting issues that prevented what one spokesman estimated to be 200,000 people from voting, some election officials have already made statements minimizing the claims even before their own investigations have been completed.

After Iraq’s Independent Electoral Commission formed a team of lawyers to investigate voter complaints, one election official, Adel al-Lami, was quoted as saying ‘’There are political parties that have contested the legitimacy of the election process even before the voting started,'’ - ‘’It’s because they know they won’t get many votes.'’

But it was election monitors that first raised red flags on voting irregularities. The Election Information Network, an organization set up with help from the United Nations and the European Union, had 8,000 monitors at polling stations on election day and backed up the claims that thousands were unable to vote in the Mosul area.

Iraq’s President Ghazi al-Yawer stated that tens of thousands of people in Mosul were unable to vote because of insufficient ballots.

The electoral commission does not deny this but cites security reasons for not getting enough ballots to the region. They have positioned themselves to stand by the assertion that voting irregularities occurred all over Iraq, which was to be expected in this ‘imperfect but historic election’.

For ChaldoAssyrian Christians, Turkomen and Yazidis, as far as the voting is concerned, it’s over. The Shia are about to take power in a big way and they will not tolerate more voting. The Kurds are happy with the turnout and do not want to risk putting Kirkuk back on the table. The Sunni wrote off the vote before the election and will be given more power than they could have gained if 100 per cent had participated in the election. And the United States is so happy that the elections even took place, they’ll accept a new term, “Themocracy” (50 per cent Theocracy mixed with 50 per cent Democracy).

And with the United Nations and other countries getting beat over the head with the Oil-For-Food scandal, there’s no one left with the appetite to help right whatever wrongs were done to Iraqi Christians and other minority groups in the election process.

There is one group that has the influence, manpower, resources and political expertise to rally to the ChaldoAssyrian cause. It’s the evangelical Christians. This is the group that keeps President Bush, and the Republican House and Senate in power. They are the largest and most active group of Christians in the United States.

This is not an attempt to take anything away from the Catholic Church or pit Christianity against Islam. It’s simply an observation that one of the greatest influences on the Kurdish leadership is the US Administration, and one of the greatest influences on the US administration is the evangelical Christians.

The problem is most Christians in the West probably don’t know that Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syriacs are the indigenous people of Iraq, or what population makes up the ChaldoAssyrian people. It’s an awareness issue. A simple matter of getting the message out to the groups that are open to hearing the message and are in a position to do something about it.

The Iraqi Constitution, self governance in the Nineveh Plains, security and freedom to practice one's religion without fear of persecution, is a one shot deal. It happens in the next ten months or it doesn’t happen at all. The Constitution will be drafted this year and that’s it. The ChaldoAssyrian community needs to reach out and reach out now.

That reaching out could take the form of starting more Paltalk rooms, web blogs and websites in English so that the West could understand the issues and proposed solutions. Or making ChaldoAssyrian experts available as guests on mainstream radio and TV talk shows. Offering story ideas to newspapers and magazines is also good. And contacting every Christian church in the west and just asking for help. It is hard for me to believe that any church that understood what was at stake would turn its back.

It was too late to do anything about the elections. But it’s not too late to save the ChaldoAssyrian community in Iraq if we stop complaining long enough to actively do something.

This article was first published on www.christianiraq.com.

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