Federal panel decries Iraq’s religious-freedom record

Updated: 5/11/07

Federal panel decries Iraq’s
religious-freedom record

By Robert Marus

ABP Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (ABP)—For the first time since the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein four years ago, a non-partisan federal panel said May 2 that religious freedom in Iraq is gravely endangered.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, in its annual report to Congress and President Bush’s administration, said the conditions for religious freedom in Iraq are “alarming and deteriorating.”

The panel, also for the first time since the late dictator’s government fell, has placed Iraq on a list one tier below the world’s worst violators of religious freedom.

Without significant improvement in Iraq’s human-rights conditions over the next year, the report added, the commission will bump Iraq up to its most infamous list of human-rights violators. Such a move would place Iraq alongside nations like North Korea and Saudi Arabia, where the State Department says religious freedom is nonexistent.

“Despite ongoing efforts to stabilize the country, successive Iraqi governments have not adequately curbed the growing scope and severity of human-rights abuses,” the commission report said, noting the explosion of sectarian violence between Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the past year.

“Although nonstate actors, particularly the Sunni-dominated insurgency, are responsible for a substantial proportion of the sectarian violence and associated human-rights violations, the Iraqi government also bears responsibility.”

The report cited innumerable reports of “abductions, beatings, extrajudicial executions, torture and rape” perpetrated by para-governmental factions like Shiite militias. Such organizations frequently “operate with impunity and often … complicity” of the U.S.-backed government, the report said.

It continued: “Although many of these militia-related violations reveal the challenges evident in Iraq’s fragmented political system, they nonetheless reflect the Iraqi government’s tolerance—and in some instances commission—of egregious violations of religious freedom.”

The commission also noted other religious minorities in Iraq—including Christians— “continue to suffer pervasive and severe violence and discrimination at the hands of both government and nongovernment actors.”

Nina Shea, one of the panel’s three vice chairs, told reporters the commission was alarmed by the thousands of Iraqi religious minorities who have fled the country in the past few years because of such persecution. Their numbers in the country “are dwindling down to statistical insignificance,” said Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.

The 1998 law that created the commission requires it to report annually on the status of religious liberty worldwide and recommend the State Department name nations that commit or tolerate “severe and egregious” violations of religious freedom as “Countries of Particular Concern.” Administration officials retain ultimate authority to make those designations and impose sanctions they deem appropriate.

In addition, the commission has made a practice of producing a “watch list” of nations in danger of earning CPC status. This year, it added Iraq to the watch list.

Last year, the panel added Afghanistan—another nation struggling to recover from a U.S.-led invasion—to the watch list. It recommended keeping Afghanistan on the watch list.

A footnote in the report noted that at least three members of the nine-member commission considered the Iraqi situation so dire that they voted to recommend that Iraq be added to the CPC list this year. The three—including the panel’s current chair, Felice Gaer—were appointed to the bipartisan panel by Democrats. Republicans appointed most of the other six commissioners.

Asked if there was an ideological division over the Iraq war that precipitated the panel’s split vote on CPC designation, Gaer said, “The commissioners and the commission as a whole consider religious-freedom conditions in Iraq as truly alarming.”

Gaer is the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights.

Commissioner Richard Land, who is a close Bush ally and has been one of the most outspoken defenders of Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq, said the division simply reflects disagreement over the extent to which Iraq’s current government can be held accountable for the deteriorating conditions there.

“I think there’s a difference of opinion about how much we can know about how much the government is capable of doing and how much … these are non-state actors or state actors and to what extent the government has the capacity to control non-state actors,” he said. Land is the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Land also took exception to the characterization that religious freedom in Iraq has become a “disaster” since the U.S. invasion.

“Iraq was a CPC under Saddam Hussein,” he said. “Religious freedom, and every other freedom, was a disaster under Saddam Hussein.”

The commission had recommended CPC status for Iraq every year since 1999, when the panel began its work. The designation arose mainly from Hussein’s suppression of Shiite Muslims while favoring those of his own Sunni faith. However, according to many Middle East experts, Christians and some other religious minorities in Iraq enjoyed more governmental tolerance in Hussein’s Iraq than in many other Middle Eastern locales.

As for its CPC recommendations for 2007, the panel nominated the same 11 nations as last year—Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Although the commission has long recommended most of those nations for CPC status, the State Department has not followed that recommendation for Pakistan and Turkmenistan, has been slow to take action against Saudi Arabia and, last year, removed Vietnam from its CPC list.

The religious freedom commission’s report criticized those decisions, noting that religious-freedom violations are widespread in Pakistan and Turkmenistan. The commission also contended that Vietnam has not improved conditions enough to warrant its removal from the CPC list, which happened on the eve of a November 2006 trip that Bush took there.

In addition, the report criticized the Bush administration’s implementation of the CPC recommendations it had made. The law that created the commission and established CPC status requires the government to take sanctions against those countries designated as such. However, part of the law allows the government to cite sanctions already in effect against such nations rather than taking any additional sanctions.

The panel specifically faulted the State Department for continuing a waiver for sanctions against Saudi Arabia while U.S. officials monitor implementation of reforms promised by the kingdom.

State Department spokesperson Leslie Phillips, asked May 2 for the agency’s reaction to the report, said department officials would need more time to analyze it before commenting.

Joining Iraq and Afghanistan on this year’s watch list were Bangladesh, Belarus, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia and Nigeria.

The report also turned the panel’s attention to Turkey, which received its first official visit from USCIRF commissioners last year and is in the midst of political upheaval over the proper role of religion. The country also has experienced a series of violent attacks by religious radicals against Christians, Jews and other religious minorities in recent years.

Gaer noted that the nation is struggling with how to become a modern, democratic society that is welcoming to religious pluralism.

“For religious-minority communities in Turkey, there are state policies and actions that effectively stop them from sustaining themselves,” she noted. “This has led to the decline and, in some cases, the virtual disappearance of some of these religious minorities on lands that they have inhabited for millennia.”