No priority for Christian refugees

Reuters

The EU rebuffed German calls for specific measures to help Christian refugees from Iraq yesterday, insisting that decisions on asylum could not be based on religion.

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble urged European countries last week to provide shelter to Christians among the some two million refugees who have fled to Iraq's neighbours to avoid ethnic strife after the 2003 war.

Slovenia, which holds the rotating presidency of the 27-nation EU, insisted that religion could not be a precondition in asylum decisions.

"International standards are such that they do not permit differentiation on the basis of religions or race," Slovenian Interior Minister Dragutin Mate said after EU interior ministers discussed the issue at a meeting in Luxembourg.

"That is the basic reason why I am afraid it will be very hard to work in that way," he had said earlier in the day, when asked if Christian refugees should be given priority.

Mr Mate said ministers had agreed to discuss at their next meeting in June how to help all minorities in Iraq, with no discrimination on the basis of religion or race.

Writing in Bild am Sonntag newspaper last Sunday, Mr Schaeuble, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) party, raised specific concerns about the plight of Iraq's Christian refugees. "We must help here and offer them a home in European countries until they can return to their home," Mr Schaeuble wrote.

On Monday he said he would be happy to take in other religious minorities too, while stressing that most religious minorities in Iraq were Christians anyway.

"We all agree that regarding Iraq, religious minorities and Christians are 99 percent the same," he told reporters. "The situation of the religious minority (in Iraq) is dramatic."

German Integration Minister Maria Boehmer, also a CDU member, echoed his call, saying this week: "It is a human imperative that we quickly help the persecuted Christians (from Iraq) and take them in to Germany."

Iraq's small Christian minority has tried to keep out of the sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis since the 2003 US-led invasion. But Christian clergy and churches have been targeted repeatedly in the past few months and many Christians have left the country.

The Archbishop of Mosul of Iraq's largest Christian denomination, the Chaldean Catholics, was kidnapped in the northern city in February and found dead two weeks later.

Scores of grieving Christians packed a Baghdad church earlier this month for the funeral mass of a priest slain by gunmen.

Comments

Marwa Roomi (2 weeks, 1 day ago)

It is absolutely appalling that the EU has insisted that religion should not be taken into consideration in asylum decisions. The EU is turning a blind eye to the situation in Iraq by making such a decision. The reality is that minorities in Iraq, such as Christians, Mandaeans and Yazidis, ARE being targeted because of their ethnicity and religion. Surely the EU cannot overlook this fact? If one particular group is targeted, be it because of religion or hair colour, the EU has to respond to that fact. Just as the Jews were murdered because of their religion during the Nazi regime, so are the Iraqi minorities being killed because of their faith. The violence against the Mandaean in particular has clearly turned into Genocide. If the EU ignores this fact, history has clearly taught us nothing.