But now, “fear reigns in my country,” he said, and “the common person on the street shares the opinion that it became very clear very soon that the U.S. has no vision for order and democracy in Iraq.”
Shiba, 40, is pastor of the Assyrian Evangelical Presbyterian Church, located in the center of the city in what was once considered an upscale area but is now dangerous. His congregation, with about 120 families, was founded by missionaries from Iran and the U.S. in the 1920s, and it recently started another small congregation in the suburbs. He spoke Wednesday at a news conference at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Richmond, using a translator, Victor Makari of PC(USA)’s Worldwide Ministries Division.
. Shiba spoke both of hope — he described Iraq as “a beautiful garden that has a diversity of God’s colors’ — and of the difficulties people face there today.
At the beginning, he said, the churches in Iraq spoke out to try to prevent the war, “but our voices must have been too weak.” When Saddaam Hussein’s regime collapsed, “at the beginning there was a sense of ecstasy about what might come as a result.” But now there is “a sense of depression” as confusion has spread about who will be in charge of the country now.
When the war ended, all social institutions in the country dissolved. Police protection disappeared and “we felt naked and vulnerable,” Shiba said.
He is married, with two daughters, and since the end of the war “there has not been a day when I could leave my family for a full day … They would feel very frightened at home,” Shiba said. Women and children feel especially vulnerable, too frightened of kidnapping and rape to shop for necessities or go to work. Many educated people — doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers — have become targets and have left the country if they could. Recently, he said, a woman who was a department chair at a university was confronted by attackers and beheaded, as was her husband.
Shiba said about 3 percent of Iraqis are Christian and there are six Presbyterian congregations in Iraq. Iraqi Christians have a long history of living alongside Muslims in the country, and under Saddaam Hussein’s regime “it was extremely difficult for one religious group to fight another religious group,” so there was “no visible conflict,” Shiba said. Even after the war, “we have held on to the good relationships that have existed for a long time … Those relationships remain strong and close,” and some Muslims have protected their Christian neighbors from extremists.
Asked what he’d challenge U.S. congregations to do politically to assist the Iraqi churches, Shiba said he does believe American congregations have influence and should press for an agenda of peacemaking and for rebuilding of the country.
Bishop Thomas L. Hoyt Jr., a leader in the Christian Methodist Episcopal church who’s president of the National Council of Churches in Christ, asked what the Iraqi people think about the theory some have advanced that the United States may have intervened in Iraq because of a desire to have access to oil. Shiba smiled a “why are you doing this to me” sort of smile, and then answered that whether the reason given for the war was to secure supplies of oil or to change the regime or to combat terrorism, the Iraqi people recognize that the American government is planning for its own future and they can “read between the lines” to make their own assessments of the motives involved.
Also present at the news conference was Bernice Powell Jackson, a leader with the United Church of Christ in the USA who is the North American president of the World Council of Churches. Jackson said in an interview that there are differences in views between churches in North America and those in the Southern Hemisphere. But “human sexuality is not high on the list,” she said. “What’s high on the list is the growing economic disparity in the world.”
In parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, churches deal with the reality that “people are struggling just to eat,” Jackson said. “The problem is how to wake up us folks (in North America) to understand there are 6,000 people dying of AIDS every day in southern Africa … That’s like two World Trade Centers every day, and we’re oblivious to it.”
