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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2008, pages 59-60 Waging Peace The Necessity of Religious Reconciliation in Iraq
CANON ANDREW White, speaking April 29 at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, DC on religious reconciliation in Iraq, began his lecture by stating a fundamental bias. “I need to be perfectly honest with you,” he said. “I love Iraq more than any other place in the world.” The British-born, Anglican minister later qualified this statement when he earnestly asked Iraqi Ambassador to the U.S. Samir Sumaidaie, who was present for the lecture, for an Iraqi passport. Such documentation would ease the red tape for him, explained Canon White, who has spent over 10 years visiting or living in Iraq. In his continuing promotion of religious reconciliation, he recently helped organize the 2007 Iraqi Inter-Religious Congress, a first-of-its-kind meeting of national-level clerics and religious leaders and politicians. Canon White, current president of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, now lives in Baghdad’s Green Zone, after post-invasion violence pushed him out of his home overlooking the Tigris River. On Saturday and Sunday, he said, he “does God,” serving as pastor for St. George’s Church in Baghdad, with its 1,500 Iraqi parishioners, and conducting non-denominational services in the Green Zone. During the work week he addresses religion and sectarianism reconciliation initiatives, mostly with the U.S. Department of Defense, the Iraqi government and USIP. He recognizes how odd his presence is—as a Christian minister who supported the war, loves Iraq and works with the Pentagon. But that, he said, “is the reality of Iraq. It is not normality.” Although he felt the war was necessary, based on the horrific cruelty of Saddam’s regime, he recognizes the “major mistakes” made by the coalition in Iraq. Canon White recalled a conversation he had early in the occupation with then-Civilian Administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer in which he emphasized the need to work with religious leaders to prevent a religious insurgency. Bremer naively brushed off this advice, stating that Iraq is a “secular country, so there would be no need to worry about that.” “A few months later,” Canon White continued, “he came back to me and said, ‘You were right—religion seems to be raising its head.’” What followed was a violent insurgency, irrevocably exacerbated by the sectarian strife that followed the early 2006 bombing of the Shi’i holy site, the Askariya mosque. “The fact is, there is no secular country in the Middle East,” opined Canon White. “The issue we are facing now is how do we work with the religious leadership of the nation, which is in turmoil.” The present situation in Iraq seems to support Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, who said, “When religion goes wrong, it goes terribly wrong.” Although he recognized that religion has gone very wrong in many places in Iraq, Canon White refused to simply blame Islam: “I’ll have people sit with me and say, ‘It’s all about Islam going wrong, isn’t it?’ I openly reply that Christianity has killed more people than Islam has killed.” The question that remains, then, is how does the religious leadership work toward reconciliation? White said he has gotten together with the religious leaders from all communities: Sunni, Shi’i, Kurdish, Christian, Yizidi, Turkmen and Mandaean. Through this work, he said, he has come to believe that “if you are there in Iraq you, too, will find the Iraqis are the most amazing people in the world.” Canon White repeatedly stated that peace is not made by inviting only one’s allies to the table. Rather, the process of reconciliation requires just the opposite. “I’m not just about this being nice people sitting together, drinking cups of tea,” he said. “The people we often have to work with are very, very difficult people. I divide the world into bad guys and really bad guys. When I look around the [negotiating] table sometimes I see really, really bad guys. But if we want to stop violence, if we’re really serious about working for peace, we can’t just work with nice people.” Part of the reconciliation process, the cleric explained, is to bring all parties together and discover from them what their issues are. Beyond that, the idea is that once the sides are speaking with each other and hearing each other’s stories, they are no longer enemies. “It’s not easy to give answers or solutions or to perceive exactly what’s going to happen, even when you’ve been to Iraq,” he acknowledged. But Canon White is confident in the positives reconciliation can bring. He has been working with prominent Sunni and Shi’i leaders on a forthcoming fatwa, a religious ruling on Islamic law, that will speak out against all forms of suicide bombing, all forms of violence, and against the killing of the other. Although the process is slow, Canon White insisted that “we’ve got to believe in what we are doing, that a difference can come.” For more information see <www.frrme.org>. —Josh Walsh |
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