Christians in the Middle East

Lord Patten Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, I am a bit gloomier than the most reverend Primate about things to come in the Middle East, which will be reflected in the three points that I have to make.

First, I stress my belief that we are facing religious cleansing in parts of the Middle East and may be entering what might be thought of as an Arab winter for Christians, Jews and other minority groups alike on a scale that we have not hitherto seen. We have heard about what is going on in Iraq, and I reflect that if some of the movements that are already happening were addressed not at faith groups but at ethnic groups, or those of this or that personal preference, the whole bang-shooting match of outrage in the United Nations—with Secretary of State Clinton flying in to try to deal with the issue—would have been released. Yet we do not seem to see that with religious freedoms. Secondly, in our religious comfort zone in the West we have to recognise that we have much to learn from those who are threatened in the Middle East. Thirdly, we must persuade our rulers to treat religious freedoms as being just as basic as other, much vaunted human rights. Religious freedoms belong in the premier league of human rights; in that context, I entirely agree with what the right reverend prelate the Bishop of Exeter has just said.

On my first point, to exemplify the Arab winter, it seems clear that all non-Islamic faith groups in the Middle East are in it together. It means facing up openly to the fact that some Islamic groups, however many good and moderate adherents there may be, are self-professed militants against Christians and Jews alike. We evidence this in their own words and actions. One sad manifestation of this in the western world today is not just to brush this issue under the carpet but to feel that it is not possible or polite even to talk about it in decent society. Yet the fate of Christians in the Middle East is indivisible from the fate of Jews there, for example, and indeed from other minority Muslim groups such as the Alevi adherents of Shia Islam who are so discriminated against, even in Turkey today with its increasingly authoritarian Government.

There can be no walking on the other side of the faith road in the Middle East in the face of a self-declared agenda by some of religious cleansing in some parts of the region. We must not do that any more than we can, even in the Palace of Westminster, ignore the manifestly Newspeak anti-Zionism, which concentrates as a surrogate on the Jew as a nation—I borrow from the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, on this—rather than on the Jew as a person, as it was in the old-style and now wholly non-PC anti-Semitism. At least in the Middle East, people are honest about it; we should be honest about it here.

However threatening this may be perceived to be in this country it is nothing like the threats facing the last Jews in Baghdad, nor the last few Jews in Iran. But then, it cannot be very nice for the last remaining 13,000 of my co-religionists left in Iran either. The pace of religious cleansing is gathering. Only this week, the organisation Minority Rights Group International introduced figures to show that while in 2003 there were between 800,000 and 1 million Christians of different brands and classifications in Iraq, the few years since have seen the numbers leach away to fewer than half a million. In his own words, not my suppositions, we heard it again earlier this week when Archbishop Sako, the leader of the highly threatened Chaldean Catholics in Kirkuk and the surrounding regions, despairingly said:

“It is a haemorrhage. Iraq could be emptied of Christians”.

They are caught in the middle of a terrible three-way squeeze between the majority Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds.

Secondly, we have very much to learn from those threatened in the Middle East in their reaction to secular unease. We must not fall foul of any patronising assumptions that we can give help from some position of spiritual strength in the West for, in much of the Middle East, religious leaderships have taken a hold on secular government in exact reverse step with the tendency in the West that sees many secularist leaderships encouraging the view that the state rather should take on the role of faith groups, by back-filling a void that they see as having been left vacant by faith groups—leaving the arbitration of moral matters to others. This is a view held by many, not necessarily always by me; none the less, those leading the threatened churches in, say, Egypt sometimes have an approach that is different from this spiritual/secular balance.

Take the leader of the majority Coptic Orthodox Church, his Holiness Pope Shenouda III. If he remains not an actual hermit while holding his high office, he is at least a part-time monk in his lifestyle, returning for some days each week to his monastery from the cares of running his church and dealing with state authorities, there to meditate and think. Meditating and thinking are not luxuries in this matter. This gives him strength at home which he will need for his people, as will be needed for the far fewer Coptic Catholics—only about 150,000 now remain in Egypt—in the face of a clear Islamist movement.

It seems certain that the Muslim Brotherhood, via its Freedom and Justice party, and the even tougher Salafis via their al-Nour party, will form a majority in the Egyptian Government after the general election results are fully declared. We have very much to learn from the deeply meditative Christianity of the Middle East, which gives them such clarity. Sadly, I think it highly likely that Pope Shenouda will one day wish that he was back in what will, bizarrely, seem a golden age of religious tolerance under the very unsatisfactory Mubarak regime, compared with things to come in his country in the next few years.

This will be rather like the views of the remaining Christians of contemporary Syria—I think they are about 5 per cent of the population as a whole—who were subject to a proper public opinion survey in the summer of this year. Much to my surprise, the survey revealed that they feared the success of the apparent Arab spring-like anti-Assad regime demonstrators, paradoxically, much more than they feared their present rulers, however dreadful and unpalatable they are, bizarre though that seems to us, for those rulers have at least allowed some freedoms to the Syrian Orthodox—the Syro-Malabar Catholics and others—in albeit registered churches in that country.

Thirdly and lastly I hope that, here in the UK, our secular rulers as a coalition—I see my coalition partners present—will clearly restate that it regards religious freedom as being as important as any other human right, then act when it can in difficult areas of diplomatic intervention. I would exemplify this by a worked example from Turkey, whose law on foundations of 2008 may have produced the occasional high-profile permission for a mass to be held at a Catholic shrine once a year, or kick-started back into life some Greek Orthodox seminary on an island, but it certainly has not spread religious freedoms across that country.

Slightly to my surprise, I was approached out of the blue about this, via a letter, by a bunch of Anglicans on the Anatolian peninsula. They wrote about the issues facing them, where they find it difficult or impossible to worship in churches or church-like meeting places on that peninsula. It is not allowed by the local state rulers. I asked a series of Written Questions about this, starting in my characteristically fair-minded way by asking the Government what the rights of Turks were in this country to worship. Could they worship in an unfettered and untrammelled way? Back came the helpful answer: yes, Turks can worship any which way they want in this country. I then put down some Questions about whether my right honourable and honourable friends in the Government would help these Anglicans by intervening with the Turkish Government, to try and see whether they could get a bit more freedom.

I did this in the traditional way by tabling Questions for Written Answer from the middle of 2010 until about the middle of 2011. Then, exhausted, I gave up because I got an Answer that there was nothing that Her Majesty's Government would do—this is quite specific; you see it on the record in Hansard—to help those who minister to the considerable number of Anglican residents and holidaymakers in the Anatolian peninsula, who want to keep their heads below the religious parapet. Incidentally, they are residents who vote. At the moment, they are forced to rotate worship among different houses, rather like Christians in the old days. Would the Government do anything to help them? The answer was no; they would not approach the Turkish Government to ask, “Please can you ease up a bit? Please can they just worship in this hall and then go on quietly to worship in some other place?”.

Then, however—and I end on this point—a bombshell. My Anglican correspondent, a clergyman in orders who spends half the year helping this necessarily furtive community, said that the German Roman Catholic community had suffered the same problems but then a much more muscular German Government had intervened directly with the Turks to promote a full-on, properly recognised German RC priest to worship and to celebrate in at least semi-public places. Maybe having a German Pope has put a bit of vigour into German diplomats.

I was struck, by the way, a few weekends ago in the car park of our West Country church by seeing a silver people carrier with one of those animal-loving advertisements across the back window with the strapline, “I love my German shepherd”. I looked down at the illustration but rather than an Alsatian I saw instead His Holiness Pope Benedict represented in its place.

I hope that our Government can act with similar vigour to that of the Germans to help the Anglican community on the Anatolian peninsula, for I fear that conditions may get worse for non-Muslim faith groups in Turkey. Dialogue, whether secular or spiritual, is of course vital, but so is action. The simple act of toleration of these little injustices to this or that religious community in any part of supposedly civilised Turkey will only encourage the religious cleansing that is gathering pace in other parts of the region as a whole.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Patten]

I thank the noble Baroness for giving way. She has just mentioned Saudi Arabia, and the lack of reciprocity between our practices and theirs. The same is the case with Turkey, which was mentioned earlier in the speech of the noble Baroness. Does she feel that we could or should do more to encourage the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to use the argument of reciprocity as a starting point and not brush it under the carpet?

[Baroness Cox]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for highlighting the point that I was intending to make, and for making it absolutely explicit. I thank him.

I ask the Minister whether religious freedom features as a priority in discussions on human rights with other countries and whether in cases of gross violations, consideration might be given to the use of appropriate pressure with regard to religious freedoms. My last question is what consideration is given to the provision of aid to victims of oppression and persecution, such as the desperately needed humanitarian aid for Christians under attack in Iraq.

In conclusion, religious freedom is one of the most fundamental freedoms enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights, to which the UK is a signatory. The threats to this freedom are growing in ways highlighted by today’s debate, which is why we owe a debt of gratitude to the most reverend Primate for initiating it. I sincerely hope that the Minister’s reply will demonstrate the Government’s deep commitment to the protection and promotion of religious freedom to bring reassurance to Christians and members of other faiths who are currently suffering persecution and oppression, and to assure faith communities that we are taking their situation seriously. We who enjoy our freedoms must surely use those freedoms to speak and to act for those who are denied theirs.