German conservative interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has come out with a bold initiative to provide asylum for thousands of Iraqi Christians forced to leave their homeland in recent years because of religious persecution at the hands of Muslim extremist groups. According to the Schaeuble plan, which is backed by the interior ministers of the 16 German states, Iraqi Christians would be allowed to stay in Germany until conditions on the ground in Iraq have improved to the point where they can return home. While the Interior Ministry has not officially come out with any concrete refugees quotas, Berlin insiders believe that Germany could end up accepting anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 Iraqi Christians per year.
For far too long, European governments have ignored the terrible fate suffered by Iraq's most vulnerable minority; Christians, after all, are viewed by both Sunni and Shia terrorists as supporters of the American-led "Crusader Coalition." Scandinavian countries like Sweden have already granted asylum to tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees, many of them Christians. In Germany, in contrast, the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees scattered around neighboring countries like Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, has only recently garnered attention. Catholic and Protestant church organizations in Germany have been particularly vocal. At the moment, Iraq is already the number one country of origin of asylum seekers in Germany. In 2007, 4,327 Iraqis applied for asylum, more than twice the number compared to the year before.
So far, politicians from Germany's governing conservative CDU/CSU parties have taken the lead in calling for new asylum programs specifically targeted at Iraqi Christians. In contrast, their left-wing SPD coalition partners and the opposition Green party have voiced skepticism about the Schaeuble initiative. For example, Brigitte Zypries, Germany's SPD justice minister, argued that "It's a difficult path when you start saying that we're accepting somebody because of their religious conviction."
The Greens, a party with a long track record of calling on Germany to open the floodgates to refugees and asylum seekers from virtually around the world, voiced reservations, too. "We have to help everybody who is persecuted and cannot say there are our Christian brothers and sisters, and for others with a different identity we don't care," says Volker Beck, a senior Green MP. Finally, Wolfgang Schaeuble's other 26 EU partners yesterday rejected his call for a similar EU-wide refugee plan at a ministerial-level meeting in Luxembourg. Countries such as Slovenia (which currently holds the rotating EU presidency) and Luxembourg were particularly opposed to the German initiative, arguing again that one must not single out Iraqi Christians for preferential asylum treatment.
In this context, one must not forget that the "we-treat-all-religious-refugees-the-same" mantra has had very perverse effects in the recent past. For example, Muslim terrorists from Algeria and other Maghreb countries trying to brutally overthrow their own governments were granted asylum in Western Europe by successfully claiming that they were suffering religious and political persecution in their homelands. That is certainly not the kind of "equal opportunity" refugee policy that anyone should wish for.
Of course, in an ideal world, all those truly suffering religious persecution in Iraq and elsewhere around the world would be granted asylum in safe countries. But that's not the way things work. Political realities dictate that one cannot help all those who are in legitimate need of shelter and protection. Therefore, Western governments in Berlin and elsewhere should rightly focus on aiding the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees--in this case, Iraq's dwindling Christian minority.
