Confounded by the weak

The chairman of Iraq’s High Religious Council is an English clergyman with multiple sclerosis.  As the US pulled out of the country this week, he may yet be the cornerstone of Iraq’s future.

The so-called Vicar of Baghdad, Canon Andrew White was named in commendatory references ten times in a debate in the UK’s House of Lords on Christians in the Middle East on 9 December.  Next month (January) he will be awarded the US’ True Freedom Prize, his 14^th award for peace-making.

His church is the only Anglican church in the Iraqi capital today – the most dangerous city on earth – and serves all regardless of faith or ethnicity, symbolising a potent germ of social cohesion.

Located on Haifa Street, Baghdad, St George’s offers a clinic in the compound providing dentistry, a pharmacy and a stem cell machine for cleaning blood.  It serves Christians, Muslims, women, children and soldiers: and can treat about five hundred people a day for free.

In a country that is officially Muslim, with 60 – 65per cent Shia and 32 – 37 per cent Sunni, White's preeminence among religious leaders suggests that social capacity in multifaith contexts may be rooted in powerlessness.

‘Canon White suffers from multiple sclerosis so he’s often very poorly and sometimes he can't walk properly or speak clearly’, says Andrew Dipper, CEO of Release International which supports the church’s work, after a visit last month.

‘But he loves Baghdad, and he's passionate in spending every bit of energy he's got on building a just and fair society.’

It may be a forlorn hope, but a live one.

Iraq was forged in 1916-18 from three different Ottoman provinces at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. A multiplicity of peoples and faiths were stitched together under Arab Sunni rule: these include indigenous Assyrians, Sabaeans (who worship John the Baptist), Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Yezidis, and Twelver Shias, as well as Kurds and Turkomen.  All have suffered persecution.

'Minorities in Iraq have distinct religions and cultures, but the existence of all of them has been threatened,’ says a Minority Rights Group report.

White took his first trip to Iraq in 1998. When the current war began, he adamantly warned the international diplomatic community to take religion into consideration when planning the postwar reconstruction.

Today he works with the results of their failure to do so.

The most recent figures from the UNHCR on Iraq, published in January 2011, show nearly 1.5 million people of Iraqi origin are refugees or still internally displaced within the country itself. Around 1.7 million are refugees or asylum seekers elsewhere in the region and abroad, particularly Jordan, out of a total population estimated in July last year by the Central Intelligence Agency at 30,399,572.

White has accused the international community of ignoring his warnings:  ‘Religion is a major part of the conflict; therefore it must also be part of the solution.

‘Just after the war I told the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that we must start working on religious dialogue immediately. I was told Iraq was a secular nation so religion should only be thought about after water and electricity were dealt with.’

Minority Rights Group’s Head of Conflict Resolution, Chris Chapman believes White is right.  ‘Their effective participation in public life could enhance the possibility of peaceful coexistence between different peoples in Iraq,' he said in November 2010, responding to an attack on a church in which 52 people were killed.

Canon White risks his life for such a goal, without which civil society will be impossible as the new President Nouri al-Maliki tightens his grip on power against competing oligarchs.

Religious and tribal strongmen like Muqtada al-Sadr and Ammar al-Hakkim guard their privileges ruthlessly, says Charles Tripp, Professor of Politics at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

‘Power does not lie with the new parliament’, he wrote in an article in the December edition of London Middle East Institute’s magazine The Middle East in London.

‘It is located instead in the networks of association and complicity that run behind and through the parliament, the ministries and all public institutions.

‘[al-Maliki] has managed to carve out for himself an increasingly powerful position, using personal connections, patronage and intimidation.’ 

Under these conditions, civil liberty is ‘precarious’ says Tripp.  White’s civil capacity building from a position of weakness could be the most hopeful bolster.

‘What he's passionate about is challenging them to speak out against fundamentalists in Islam, and to stop them taking the law into their own hands’ says Andy Dipper. 

‘The Muslims he works with respect him because he's not trying to build a name for himself.’