'Defying Deletion'
In Iraq, sharing the same religion as a country whose military occupies the homeland is dangerous. For many Iraqis, refusing to denounce Christianity has led to generations of intimidation and death. Last week, Iraq Archbishop Bashar Warda declared that Christians are living in "near-genocide conditions."
This is the story of many Iraqi Christians that Andre Anton, director and writer of the documentary "Defying Deletion: The Fight over Iraq's Nineveh Plains" wants to show.
Anton, who founded Lamassu Productions, graduated from Wayne State in 2007. He said most of the Christians make up a nation of many names that consist of Assyrian, Chaldean or Syriac.
He said the differences in these names depend on the Catholic identity of the Chaldeans versus the Orthodox Christianity of the other two and perhaps a few minor variations in Aramaic dialect, the language of the Iraqi Christians. Ethnically, however, they are all Assyrians, Anton said.
"The Assyrians are an ancient people," he said as he added that they are the indigenous people of Iraq and the instigators of civilization itself.
His film focuses specifically on the indigenous Assyrian population, he wrote in an email.
"I find it highly dangerous to group us all as Iraqi Christians, since it undermines our right to be in Iraq and because it neglects our indignity," he said. "Christianity can exist anywhere in the world, (but) the Assyrian identity can only continue to exist in their homelands. Elsewhere it will cease to exist because of unavoidable assimilation factors." Since roughly 600 A.D., according to the film, the Assyrians in the region endured one assault after another from agents of an extremist ethnic cleansing movement who often forced the Assyrians to choose between religious conversion and death.
In less difficult times, they were forced to culturally assimilate within dominant groups of their region. Despite this, they somehow maintained their distinct identity through the years.
Assyrians of today face these same problems and more, Anton said. "(Saddam Hussein) set up orders that newborn Christian babies should not be named Christian or Assyrian names, but Arab Muslim names," he said. "Our names are an important part of our identity."
The documentary outlines how the oppression of the Assyrians got worse after the fall of Hussein's regime.
Assyrians were often kidnapped for an average ransom of $40,000, according to the film. In one account, a woman's husband was kidnapped and, behind tears, she was barely coherent when she explained her husband was murdered in cold blood.
In another account, the father of a young priest at Babylon University told the story of his son who was forced "to leave the Church or die," which prompted the family to move to Jordan.
Hundreds of thousands of Assyrians have fled the region or have been murdered in the post-Saddam era, but it is often the case that the Christian refugees "lose everything" in this flee, only to gain "a little bit of security" while they "just wait for better times," according to several natives in the movie.
But even with the slight increase in security, one refugee in Jordan said he feels like a prisoner in his own home.
"We are not allowed to work, and I am afraid to go outside," he said in the movie. "We are stripped of our dignity."
His family shares a home with another family, in which at least eight people sleep inside one small room. Those who have moved to a different part of the country, instead of fleeing, face a different form of oppression that comes in the form of electoral fraud, political disenfranchisement, economic deprivation and unwarranted arrests, which Anton said has been documented by the U.S. State Department.
The culprits: Kurdish nationalists. The reason: Kurdistan.
In a period of severe political turmoil, the Kurdish population of Iraq seized this mess as an opportunity to fortify the interests of a Kurdish state within the Iraqi region, often at the expense of Assyrians. The boundary of Kurdistan, which is the name of the unofficial Kurdish State, extends to Iran, Syria and Turkey.
The problem with this claim is that Kurdish territory overlaps into the northern Iraqi region where Assyrians have historically been based. The region is oil-rich, which has been a factor in the reasons for Kurdish opposition to Assyrian interests.
With regards to the extremists within the region, however, the justification for Assyrian opposition is different, according to the movie. "In February, you had an archbishop kidnapped. In March, you had his body found. In April, another priest (was) killed," said Michael Youash of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project, before he went on to explain the significance of this pattern.
"This is a sequence that is a message to the community," he said in the movie. "Even if Iraq is moderately turning around, (Assyrians) will still be targeted."
"We were considered second-class citizens, simply because we were Christians and Assyrians," said Dr. Donny George Youkhanna in a different interview, who is widely seen as the savior of the Iraqi International Museum in Baghdad.
"Saddam went through large efforts to omit our identity as Christians and as Assyrians," he said.
At the end of the movie, Youkhanna marked the end of the screening with these last words: "That's my country. I was born there. My father was born there. My grandfather was born there. I am an Assyrian. That's my homeland. I hope the time will come, a good peaceful time that I can go and see my homeland." He passed away hours before the short film debuted March 11, one day before it won the award for Best Short Film Documentary at the Detroit Independent Film Festival.