Kanna: Not at all. There is no backing for the Ninevah Plains governorate from any European, non-European country or the Vatican even. The establishment of the governorate is purely administrative in nature and was brought about for demographic and not sectarian reasons.
We would like to affirm here that we do not draft racist discriminatory proposals founded on religious, sectarian or factional bases. Whomever outside Iraq works on adopting such measures is ignorant of our country’s geography and demographic makeup.
Al-Monitor: How many Christians remain in Iraq today? Do you expect higher rates of emigration by Iraqi Christians during the coming years?
Kanna: There are those who endeavor and plan to empty Iraq of its Christian constituency. But we assert our attachment to our land and identity and we shall never give anyone the chance to remove us from our motherland. When Saddam’s regime fell in 2003, Christians numbered approximately 1 million people, down from the 1.4 million figure recorded in the last census of 1987.
But following the waves of killing, forced displacement and threats throughout the past 12 years — particularly subsequent to the incident at Our Lady of Deliverance Church — emigration from Iraq increased and the number of Christians dwindled to half a million.
This number may be further reduced in the coming years because the successive Iraqi governments that ran the country after 2003 monopolized power and adopted discriminatory, religious and sectarian-based agendas, prompting Christians who lacked any form of protection to leave the country for fear of being persecuted.
Al-Monitor: What is the number of Christian homes seized in Baghdad? Did you try to recover them? And who stands behind those appropriations?
Kanna: The factions that espouse chauvinist extremist ideologies — which tried in past years to empty Iraq of its Christians — are the same ones that today through new figureheads and symbols are trying to seize the homes of Christians in Baghdad.
They are gangs and militias that exploit the backing of certain political parties to break into the homes of absent Christians, and if the home is occupied, paperwork is forged in land registries through people of influence there. During the past two years, my own tedious personal research has revealed that 50 Christian homes were seized in Baghdad.
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