Chaput: Iraq Christians persecuted

Jean Torkelson, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 27, 2006 at midnight

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Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput says the United Nations is ignoring millions of Iraqi Christians who have been persecuted by Islamic extremists.

"Members of non-Muslim religious minorities continue to suffer a disproportionate burden of violent attacks and other human rights abuses," Chaput wrote Friday in a Washington Times editorial he wrote with a fellow member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Chaput and the commissioners went to Turkey last month to meet with delegations from Iraqi's war-ravaged ethnic churches. They represent a huge part of the 1.5 million Iraqis who have left the country since 2003, and are among the "tens of thousands" who continue to flee every month "in a slow, silent exodus."

Without military protection, and so far ignored by the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, the Christian groups "have been forced to fend for themselves," Chaput wrote.

He said refugees "spoke despairingly" of churches being burned, religious leaders threatened with death, and jobs and stores traditionally staffed by Christians shut down by "extremists who say these activities are against Islam."

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