When news of the Trump administration’s new Genocide Recovery and Persecution Response Program was announced in late July by Vice President Pence, it sounded good on its face. Pence spoke of the program during the State Department’s inaugural “Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom,” an event intended to “focus on concrete outcomes that reaffirm international commitments to promote religious freedom and produce real, positive change.” He said the new genocide program would focus primarily on post-genocide recovery efforts for the persecuted Christian and Yazidi populations, which were tied together, despite the fact that the Yazidi faith is a blend of Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam.
While the Christian minority has indeed suffered at the hands of the Islamic State (IS), no Christian community in recent years has faced genocidal extermination in the way the Yazidis have. Despite the fact that numerous countries, including the US, have named Christians and Shia Muslims as victims of genocide, the UN Commission of Inquiry, after an extensive analysis, identified only the Yazidis as true victims of genocide.
The plight of the Yazidis should not be conflated with that of other minority religious groups in Iraq, who unarguably suffered persecution and gross violations, but empirically not to the level of de jure genocide. IS fighters exterminated Yazidis, branding them “devil worshipers,” in mass killings when fighters based in Iraq and Syria attacked the Iraqi region of Sinjar in August 2014. The UN determined that IS “sought to erase the Yazidis through killings, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture, and inhuman and degrading treatment.” IS fighters violently raped their captives and also actively prevented births by separating women from men, and by sexually traumatizing females. The Islamic State also attacked and persecuted many other religious minorities in Iraq, but it had the requisite intent to annihilate the Yazidi population, just because they were Yazidis.
In addition to 10 discrete reconstruction projects under the Genocide Persecution Response Program, the administration, under Pence’s urging, is redirecting substantial amounts of UN-earmarked funds in Iraq towards rebuilding Christian and other religious communities in the Nineveh Plains. The administration has rejected the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) assessment that aid should be need-based, impartial, and focused on more populated areas around the war-ravaged city of Mosul. Of the $150 million USAID allocated to UNDP initially as a blank check to use as it saw fit for stabilizing Iraq, only $75 million was released, with $55 million earmarked exclusively for helping Christian and other religious minority groups and even directed to specific towns. The second disbursement of $75 million will be released to the stabilization fund only when the administration is satisfied that UNDP is efficiently implementing its very specific agenda.
The main implementers of the administration’s strategic religious minority mission in Iraq will primarily be faith-based groups. At the In Defense of Christians Solidarity Meeting held in D.C. last October, Pence said: “our fellow Christians and all who are persecuted in the Middle East should not have to rely on multinational institutions when America can help them directly…[F]rom this day forward, America will provide support directly to persecuted communities through USAID….The United States will work hand-in-hand from this day forward with faith-based groups and private organizations to help those who are persecuted for their faith.”
What is troubling here is not the intent to focus on persecuted religious groups; to be clear, Jewish World Watch (JWW) was founded in memory of the Holocaust, and represents a call for Jews and others to not stand idly by, and to help any population persecuted on the basis of race or religion. JWW partners regularly in both our advocacy and project work with other faith-based organizations representing myriad beliefs. What is troubling is the Trump administration’s focus on religious minority groups above all others, prioritizing humanitarian aid on faith affiliation above degree of need. There’s also a concern that the administration may be exploiting the term “genocide,” which should really be reserved for the Yazidi population, as a means of justifying such concerted effort on behalf of Iraqi Christians.
Bringing religion into humanitarian aid decision-making in such a prominent way runs the high risk of politicizing a system designed to base its interventions on meeting a country’s most pressing needs. Wendy Taeuber, Iraq Country Director for the International Rescue Committee, pointed out the risk in a recent op-ed in The Hill: “Deciding in advance who deserves aid and who doesn’t undermines the very principles of humanitarian action, including the basic tenet that assistance is provided solely on need and is not used as a tool to advance political, military or security objectives.” Operating “free from external influence” is a hallmark of aid agencies working in conflict settings around the world. They must cultivate a reputation of impartiality in order to best serve affected communities and gain access to them.
Moreover, by singling out Christians and Yazidis as recipients of special aid, the administration’s good intentions towards these religious minorities could hurt more than help them. Kori Schake, the deputy-general at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told IRIN contributor Samuel Oakford that this preferential treatment is “breeding resentment.” She noted that Christians are already disproportionately benefitting, with their homes and churches getting reconstructed faster and with more resources. “Targeting assistance and attention to Christian communities to the exclusion of their Muslim fellow citizens is ultimately bad for Christian communities and bad for American interests in the Middle East,” Schake said. A perception that America is favoring one religious community could antagonize the Iraqi government and damage U.S. credibility in the region. According to former CIA officer Kenneth Pollack, “Christians make up a tiny percentage of the population, and if they get a disproportionate percentage of aid, that’s going to look bad….It looks like the U.S. isn’t committed to the general rebuilding and stabilization of Iraq. It will look like it’s more committed to its own special interests.”
Beyond concerns over America’s reputation, experts worry about the security implications of such favoritism. “Explicitly supporting Christian communities in Iraq because they are Christian would accentuate [sectarian] divisions,” said John Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Iraq’s persistent conflict stems in part from the unequal distribution of power and resources along religious and sectarian lines; the increasingly direct and public emphasis on Christians and to a lesser extent Yazidis, could fuel sectarian divisions in the country and make these already at-risk communities targets for violence from other groups resentful of their advantage.
The US must maintain its tradition of evidence-based, flexible approaches to aid allocation, particularly in Iraq’s precarious environment. If the Trump administration really wants to help the Christian and Yazidi minorities, it should invest in programs that simultaneously rebuild all conflict-affected communities and create a bulwark against the resurgence of violence by implementing conflict prevention strategies.
This is the underlying philosophy of Jewish World Watch’s grantmaking to grassroots organizations in areas affected by mass atrocities. Our partners on the ground—some of which are faith-based, including Evangelical Christian groups—employ myriad preventive techniques in their work, including mass awareness-raising campaigns, civil society building, education, development and reinforcement of rule of law, increased security for vulnerable groups, reintegration programs, and sustainable livelihood solutions. Their need-based interventions not only help rebuild survivor communities but also target the structural causes of conflict, thereby protecting against the resurgence of violence and promoting recovery.
The Trump administration should respect Congress’s efforts to prioritize prevention and reconciliation on a global scale, as evidenced by the recent sweeping, bipartisan support for the Eli Wiesel Genocide & Atrocities Prevention Act in the House and its promising future in the Senate, with already 33 cosponsors from both sides of the isle. To advance religious freedom worldwide, the United States must maintain a broad, nuanced view of human rights, responsive to humanitarian need.