The ‘Fingernail Factory’ is not the name of the latest salon to hit town, but the place where this Middle East country’s feared Mukhabarat allegedly re-arrange your cuticles if they think it might improve the story you’re telling them.
The nickname given by Iraq is to the secret police [General Intelligence Directorate] may be apocryphal, but it is true that they might ask you at any time to pay them a visit, and they sometimes use more than questions to get answers.
One young Christian described how he was kept last year (2010) for two days in a windowless concrete hole in temperatures above 40 degrees, and nearly died of asphyxiation. His crime was to be born to a Lebanese Christian mother and a Muslim father from the A------ tribe.
An unexpected invitation also arrived two years ago for RL – she cannot be named here for security reasons - who runs Hope and Trust, a small charity which feeds, protects and helps speed up the lengthy process of re-settlement for Iraqi families, some of whom have been hounded since the mid-1980s.
‘They play with your mind’, she says as we drive past the building where her interrogation happened. 'They have very clever ways of making you give them what they think they want.’
The secret police are menacingly unpredictable, and it casts a shadow over life in this otherwise surprisingly accommodating country. Uncertainty is the name of the game for everyone, but most especially for refugees who comprise half the population.
The Archbishop of Canterbury drew attention in a recent speech on the Middle East’s Christians to the ‘rule by security agencies that are free to bully and torture’, and ‘the culture of impunity.’
This is at root what has provoked the Arab Spring and the refugees are the most vulnerable to it.
The secret police monitor the churches that have, not surprisingly, increased in number.
Of the total 132,3250 total refugees, internally displaced people and even more worryingly stateless Iraqis in the world, 13 per cent are thought to be Christian, according to the UN’s latest forecast.
There have been other waves of refugees before the Iraqis. A Palestinian shepherdess tends a small flock of goats, much like the Moabitess Ruth, having been born here after her parents fled Palestine in 1948. Abandoned by her husband for failing to produce children, she and her mother wander the stony hills with their sheepdog, reeking of wood smoke from the cooking fire, making a pretty picture for the huge tourism industry – but condemned by political circumstance to extreme poverty.
The tiny old woman sitting quietly in threadbare clothes with other ex-pats at her church’s Christmas dinner listening to the Bible quiz fled Sudan.
But the Archbishop of Canterbury drew particular attention in the same debate to the Assyrians – Iraq’s indigenous people. Even their treatment in Britain he described as ‘ludicrous and insulting’:
‘Syrian Orthodox children - this is a real instance - were told by teachers in a British school that they should not attend a Christian assembly because they must be Muslims if they are Syrians’ he told his fellow peers.
If it is bad for the indigenous believers who have existed in the region since the very beginning, it is worse for seekers and those who help them. The mukhabarat ‘discourages’ baptism which is viewed as especially provocative, on top of the country’s existing problems: power struggles among the local tribes; water scarcity and a massive black economy.
The Arab founder of a church and school for Iraqis was held for four days, accused of baptising new believers. They blindfolded him and held a gun to his head according to RL. It so shattered him that he left the country.
The church keeps going, and reaching out – despite mixed messages from the government. The school for 400 refugee children was closed by the government after a piece was published on it by a Saudi journalist.
RL suspects there is a mole in the UN, since the pastor’s detention happened after two Iraqis they knew who were of Muslim background requested religious asylum as newly baptised believers.
This kind of treatment is as arbitrary as the secret police occasionally sending out their trucks and rounding up from the shops the illegal workforce of refugees, who though registered with the UN have no official livelihood. This country is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not allow for minimum wage-earning by refugees.
‘They have recently been deporting secretly,’ says RL who is herself a mixed-race migrant originally from Malaysia. ‘Our families go missing, and we can’t locate where they are. The wife gets a call sometime later and discovers her husband is back in Iraq.’
RL is 54, and has been an IS partner for 17 years, supported by an Anglican church in Malaysia.
‘I am equipped to help build up these people in order for them one day to go back to Iraq and build up the suffering church there.
‘But it is still not safe for Christians and Sabaeans [followers of John the Baptist] there. And on top of it we are getting Iraqi families who are fleeing again from Syria.’
RL runs a variety of programmes for different age groups, and receives a small amount of funds from an English charity, the Hope Fund, set up by the former Anglican chaplain here, Malcolm White of the Church Mission Society. With the money, she has been able to help get 15 families out of the country to the US, Canada and Australia since 2008, by working with the embassies that offer emigration services.
It is a teaspoon in the ocean, and she wants to encourage more prayer, interest and volunteers to speed up the service. Her team of four includes another IS partner – a Dutch doctor – who not only offer a clinic attached to an Arab church, but also help with convoluted UN form filling.
These need translating and is charged per page. Couriering papers from country to country is another cost.
‘We had a family that had applied 13 times for re-settlement and were rejected. We were able to sit down and work through with them their forms and today they are in Australia’ says RL proudly.
GREETING us energetically in a pool of sunlight in the front yard of their tiny concrete home, Georgis [not his real name] has a horrendous story, but for the kindness of strangers.
Originally from Kirkuk in Northern Iraq, he tells of identity problems for Assyrians (the original name for the indigenous non-Arab people of Iraq, many of whom worship in the Syrian Orthodox Church) in Saddam’s Iraq; of being forced to sign documents in the mid-1980s saying they were ‘Kurdish’ – and unwanted aliens therefore; of being forced into the military for three years; of fleeing in lorries to Ankara, being turned back at the border – and of fleeing once again during the first Gulf War.
Once in this country they had to rent a roofless concrete shack covered with nylon. There was water for one cup of tea a day; and husband and wife shared their mattress with their small daughter for two years.
They fled Kirkuk in 1991 and managed to register with the UN in 1996, but the UN closed their file without reason Georgis says in 1999. They re-opened it again in 2007 after the second Gulf War: ‘The UN was more pro-active then’ says RL.
While the family waits for their case to be processed – seemingly for ever – Georgis who is now 50, volunteers as he has done for the past six years at RL’s church, networking the staple food distribution service to 200 families, and improving his English. A tall, vigorous former electrical engineer and welder, he surprises me by his energy and warmth.
He has created a garden with a makeshift swing hung from the olive tree in the concrete front yard. The house with its worn furniture, recycled from other resettled Iraqi families, is cheerful with a festooned Christmas tree and pictures painted by a gifted Iraqi friend.
‘I have accepted this is my life for now. I pray a lot and fast,’ he says in explanation.
Fazaneh his wife says, through RL’s translation, that it is difficult for her to see her husband without proper work. ‘The children have no rights here, no right even to friendships,’ she adds.
They describe their feelings for RL and the link she’s providing. ‘She is like big sister. She is very very good woman’, Georgis manages to say directly to me in very broken English, and gives me the thumbs up – a sign that needs no translation.
THIS COUNTRY is the gateway to the future for so many; the land that launched the most famous refugees in history. Moses passed through here, sensing God’s promise. Jesus, a refugee just after his birth, began his ministry here – and archaeologists now agree they’ve found the actual spot.
It is humbling. When I return to London I will seek out those whose story echoes that of those who founded our civilization who were also homeless, insecure wanderers, and try to be a more active part of God’s promise to them. You could too, by praying, giving – and going.
Jenny Taylor founded Lapido Media in 2005, a consultancy specializing in religious literacy in world affairs. She now works with journalists to improve the coverage of the social and political impact of religion and provides education and training for opinion formers in political religion.
