Louis Sako, Bishop of Kirkuk: „I know Who Doesn´t Want Iraq To Be Free”
„They are Arab fighters who have entered Iraq, financed by fundamentalist movements in nearby countries, or maybe even by the governments.” An interview with the rising star of the Chaldean Church
by Sandro Magister
ROMA – In Iraq, the Chaldean Catholic Church has not yet chosen its new patriarch, who will succeed the deceased Raphael I Bidawid (see photo). John Paul II has summoned the Chaldean bishops to Rome December 2-3, to come to an agreement. But in the meantime, important things have been happening at the top levels of some dioceses.
Bidawid was hotly contested within his own Church. He was accused of governing it in an authoritarian way, and of carrying on an excessively fawning relationship with the Baathist regime and Saddam Hussein.
After the fall of Saddam, the Chaldean Church was afraid of paying dearly for its link with the defunct regime. But events belied these fears. Now the danger looming over Iraqi Christians is the same that threatens the whole country: terrorism, which strikes without distinction not only the American occupation, but the U.N., the Red Cross, foreign embassies, police forces, local authorities, religious leaders, and the Iraqi population itself, in its various components.
The Chaldean Church is one of the participants in the laborious process of democratization now underway. The Vatican is apprehensively following this process, and the steady stream of terrorist attacks, while abstaining from any public comments.
But one of the newly appointed Chaldean bishops has spoken openly: Louis Sako, nominated as bishop of Kirkuk on September 28. He has spoken, among other places, in an interview – reproduced below – with the magazine of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, published in Milan, „Mondo e Missione.”
Sako, 55, an outstanding figure in the Chaldean community, was until recently a parish priest in Mosul, and before that the rector of the seminary in Baghdad. He knows twelve languages, has studied in Rome and Paris, is an expert in ancient Christian literature, and has a master´s degree in Islamic history. His is a consultant for the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and has often been the guest of „Pax Christi” in Italy.
Mosul, his home town, which was the ancient city of Nineveh, was the first in Iraq to be provided with a provisory provincial council, shortly after the end of the war. And Sako was elected its vice-president. The Mosul model was later reproduced in Kirkuk and other provinces.
Sako told the Italian newspaper „Il Foglio” on October 21 that „Iraq as an engine of democracy does not sit well with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Egypt, and other neighbors,” because „civil rights for non-Arab minorities, religious liberty, and legal reform would bring into question the power upon which atavistic tyrannies and proven systems of repression are based.”
He raised the alarm over certain Muslim imams „who are not as moderate as they would like to be believed. They are ´Radio Islam,´ more capillary than Al Jazeera.”
But he has said he trusts that „the Iraqi New Deal can become reality.” And thanks to whom? „To the Americans. The pope was opposed to it, and he had his reasons, but for all Iraqis the destruction of the dictatorship was a liberation. We could never have done it by ourselves.”