CHRISTIANS SEEK POLITICAL UNITY IN ADVANCE OF

C O N F I D E N T I A L BAGHDAD 001785 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 07/01/2019 TAGS: IZ KDEM KIRF PGOV SOCI SUBJECT: CHRISTIANS SEEK POLITICAL UNITY IN ADVANCE OF NATIONAL ELECTIONS REF: A. BAGHDAD 1702 ¶B. BAGHDAD 1486 ¶C. BAGHDAD 1288 ¶D. BAGHDAD 1426 Classified By: Deputy Political Counselor Steve Walker for Reason 1.4 ( d). -------------- Summary -------------- ¶1. (C) Several key Christian politicians and religious leaders have begun to lay the groundwork for the unification of Iraq's Christian political parties into a single electoral coalition in anticipation of the January 2010 national elections. Although Iraq's Christian community suffers from numerous divisions (e.g.; how the different communities should be described, as seen in the recent amendments to the Kurdistan Constitution),Christian leaders argue that a unified list could win as many as eight seats in the national Parliament, even in the absence of electoral quotas. They believe that the key to the formation of a united electoral coalition will be the Council of Bishops, which could use the promise of its endorsement as an incentive to encourage unification. Already, the three largest Chaldean political parties have united to compete as a unified coalition in the KRG parliamentary elections. However, negotiations between the Chaldean and the Assyrian political parties to form a unified list for the national elections will be fraught with difficulty due to ongoing disputes and could break down as they did in 2005. The results of the KRG elections may determine who has the upper hand in the negotiations. End summary. -------------- Divided We Fall -------------- ¶2. (C) On June 18, Poloff met with Georges Bakoos, the Prime Minister's advisor for Christian Affairs, who predicted that Iraq's Christian community could win five to eight seats in the next Parliament given their population size (estimated at 300,000 to 500,000) if Christian political parties formed one unified coalition. Since 2005, Iraq's Christian community has had only two Parliamentary representatives: Ablahad Sawa of the Chaldean National Party and Younadan Kanna, who heads the Assyrian Democratic Movement. Bakoos attributed the Christians' poor showing in the 2005 Parliamentary elections to the fact that Christian political parties ran on five separate party lists. He argued that the lack of unity not only divided the community's votes, but also demoralized Christian voters, leading many to either stay home or vote for secular national parties (Bakoos said that he himself had chosen the latter). ¶3. (C) Part of the explanation of the political divisions within Iraq's Christian community lies in its denominational fault lines and the intercommunity debate as to whether Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Assyrians are in fact distinct groups. On the one hand, the Chaldeans, who are Catholics and make up perhaps as many as 70% of Iraq's Christians, view themselves as a group that is distinct from the self-described Assyrian community. The same is true of the Syriacs, who are a mixture of both Catholics and Eastern Orthodox subscribers and compose perhaps 10% of Iraq's Christians. On the other hand, there are the Assyrians who are part of the Church of the East, which is independent Catholic (i.e., it accepts the authority of Pope Benedict in Rome, but maintains its own Patriarch). The Assyrians make up perhaps 18% of Iraq's Christians (the remaining 2% of Christians being Armenians and Protestants) and view themselves along with the Chaldeans and Syriacs as part of one Chaldo-Assryian-Syriac group. (Note: Estimates of the denominational breakdown of Iraq's Christian population vary greatly, especially in relation to the size of the Assyrian Qgreatly, especially in relation to the size of the Assyrian community, although there is general acceptance that the Chaldean population constitutes the vast majority. End note.). -------------- Christians Debate the KRG Constitution -------------- ¶4. (C) Over the past few weeks the debate over how to officially define Iraq's Christian community has raged, albeit out of the public eye, in the drafting of the new Constitution for the Kurdistan region, which was approved by the Kurdistan Parliament on June 24, but will not go in effect until it is ratified by a region-wide referendum (ref A). On June 28, MP Kanna told Poloff that the Chaldeans and Syriacs were pushing the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to list Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs as distinct groups in articles 5 and 35 of the Constitution. Kanna stated that he and others had successfully lobbied KRG President Massoud Barzani to modify the Constitution's language to list the three groups as one. On June 29, Archbishop Matti Matouka, the head of the Iraqi Syriac Church, told Poloff that he had received lots of emails complaining about the "Chaldo-Assyrian-Syriac" language of the KRG Constitution, confirmation that the insertion of the language labeling the Christian community as one group was contentious. -------------- There Can Be Only One -------------- ¶5. (C) On a practical level, these differences in self-identification have translated into near constant squabbles between Iraq's Christian political parties since 2003 as each has sought to claim the mantle of the community's leadership. This has been particularly true of the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM),headed by MP Kanna, which is recognized by many as the Iraqi Christian community's most organized political entity (and one that is supported by a vocal American diaspora). The party's superior organization translated into immediate benefits during the CPA era, when MP Kanna was the sole Christian representative on the Iraqi Governing Council. Since that time, the ADM's attempts to portray itself as speaking for the entire Christian community have irritated many within the larger Chaldean and Syriac bodies politic, which view themselves as not only numerically superior, but also distinct from the Assyrians. ¶6. (C) One Iraqi Christian leader, former Minister of Displacement and Migration Pascale Warda, herself a current ADM member, described Kanna as singularly obsessed with being the sole voice of Iraq's Christian community and the ADM as being a one-man show, with him at the helm. PM Advisor Bakoos described how in the run up to the Iraqi Constitutional Convention in 2005, the Christian community was asked to put forward a list of five persons to represent them. According to Bakoos, Kanna insisted on providing his own list to the Convention which was heavy on representatives from the ADM to the exclusion of other Christian political parties. On June 23, Chaldean MP Sawa told Poloff that in October 2005 he had initiated discussions between the various Christian political parties on the formation of a unified electoral list, but that negotiations had broken down when the ADM insisted on having the first three slots on the list. ¶7. (C) For his part, Kanna described himself to Poloff as a uniter and pointed to his efforts to ensure that Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syrians are listed as one community in the KRG Constitution. He also stated that despite its name, the ADM has numerous Chaldeans and Syriacs in its leadership structure and described the party as being far more popular than its Chaldean rivals and even the Christian community's religious figures. When asked if he would be willing to form an electoral coalition with other Christian parties, Kanna responded that MP Sawa (head of the Chaldean coalition) was welcome to combine forces with the ADM and that he would be looking to arrange a meeting soon to see what might be possible. -------------- Enter the Bishops -------------- ¶8. (C) Given the political rivalries, Christian leaders note that attempts to unify Christian political parties in a single electoral coalition for the 2010 national elections will remain contentious despite the lack of representation that resulted from their divisions during the 2005 parliamentary elections. This time, however, the Christian Qparliamentary elections. This time, however, the Christian community's religious leaders may attempt to play a more active role in facilitating the unification of a Christian electoral list. Bakoos relayed to Poloff that he had been in contact with Cardinal Emmanuel Delly, Patriarch of the Chaldean Church (Iraq's largest Christian community),who agreed that a unified electoral coalition was important. According to Bakoos, the two have discussed the possibility that Iraq's Council of Bishops, which includes representatives from the 14 officially sanctioned Christian churches in Iraq, would offer its endorsement as an incentive for Iraq's Christian political parties to form one electoral list. In a separate meeting, Archbishop Matouka, Patriarch of the Syriac Church and Vice-Chairman of the Council of Bishops, confirmed to Poloff that the Council is working hard to push for unification and telling the various political parties that they must come together in order to receive the Council's "blessing." ¶9. (C) In explaining the benefits of the Council's involvement, Bakoos argued that not only might the possibility of a Council endorsement lead to successful negotiations to form a united Christian coalition, but that it would also have the effect of driving up the Christian community's turnout on election day in the same way that the endorsement for the United Shia Alliance by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani helped increase Shia turnout in the 2006 elections. However, not all of the actors are covetous of the Council's endorsement. When asked about the idea, Kanna was dismissive of the influence of the religious leaders saying that the people viewed them as corrupt and out of touch. -------------- KRG Elections: The First Test -------------- ¶10. (C) Even in the absence of a major religious endorsement, a number of Christian religious parties have already begun to come together. MP Sawa described to Poloff how the three largest Chaldean political parties, including his own Chaldean Democratic Union Party along with the Chaldean National Council and the Chaldean Democratic Podium had come together to form a new coalition called the Chaldeans Consolidated List. Sawa indicated that the first test of the Chaldean Consolidated List would be the KRG parliamentary elections planned for July 25 (ref B). In that election, five seats have been set aside for the Christians (ref C). Sawa was confident that the united Chaldean list would be able to win at least three of the five reserved seats, which would reflect the Chaldean's demographic weight in the KRG. (Note: Based on previous conversations with minority religious leaders, the Chaldean population in Kurdistan may be as high as 150,000, compared to 15,000 Assyrians (ref D). End note.) ¶11. (C) For its part, the ADM also believes that it will win two-to-three seats in the KRG elections, but according to Kanna it views its primary competition coming not from the Chaldean Consolidated List, but from the "Ishtar" list, which is also known as the Chaldean Syriac Assyrian People's Council. According to Kanna, the Ishtar list is not an independent party, but a Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) creation that promises to represent the Christian community but will ultimately align with the KDP. Indeed, the Ishtar list is supported by the current enigmatic KDP Finance Minister Sarkis Aghajan who is a Christian, but who has not been seen in the KRG for the past eight months. (Note: The Finance Ministry in the KRG is not a unified entity. Both the KDP and PUK continue to run their own Finance Ministries. End note.) Kanna accused Ishtar of engaging in electoral fraud to win the seat reserved for Christians on the Baghdad Provincial Council in January 2009 and claimed that they were already engaging in voter intimidation in the Kurdistan region in order to influence the July 25 elections. Kanna argued that Ishtar will probably win two-to-three seats if it is allowed to continue with its heavy-handed tactics. In a separate conversation, MP Sawa also expressed concerns about the Ishtar list and said that Finance Minister Aghajan was using his office to direct money to Christian communities, in particular to displaced communities, in order to buy their votes. (Note: The Embassy can not verify the veracity of Kanna and Sawa's harsh accusations against Ishtar. End note.) -------------- Comment -------------- ¶12. (C) While attempts to politically unify Iraq's Christians have been unsuccessful to date, the community's lack of political clout appears to have brought a new sense of urgency to attempts to expand its political representation Qurgency to attempts to expand its political representation within the national Parliament. While negotiations for a unified list remain fraught with difficulty, reports that Iraq's Christian leaders will step in to encourage unification is a welcome development. It appears that the painful lessons of the 2005 national parliamentary elections, which resulted in the election of only two Christians to the Parliament, appear to be catalyzing the Chaldean parties at least to put aside their differences. Whether the new Chaldean Consolidated List and the ADM can reach an agreement remains to be seen. However, the KRG elections will provide the first test of the relative strength of each party. If either party demonstrates its political clout in the KRG elections by winning the majority of the five seats allocated to Christians, this may put pressure on the other to seek a political alliance on its terms. Conversely, if the Ishtar party wins a majority of the Christian vote, this too may force the Chaldean List and ADM to join together for political survival. In the meantime, the Embassy will continue to encourage Christian political parties to establish common ground and articulate a shared political agenda as a means to more effectively address the concerns of Iraq's Christian community. End comment. HILL