Vatican rolls out the red carpet for Tariq Aziz

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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If i am not mistaken, both Aziz and Naji Sabri are two Chaldean Christians among Saddam Hussein’s senior-level Ba’ath officials.

Apart from the usual we can all find to bicker about, there is a little bit of interesting religious history in this article:

Vatican rolls out red carpet for Christian Aziz, Richard Owen
Times (UK), 13 February 2003

THE Vatican is rolling out the red carpet for Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, as part of a last-ditch attempt by the Pope to avert an “unjustified war”.

The newspaper Corriere della Sera said that Mr Aziz would be “treated like a media star” when he arrives today for a five-day visit to Rome and Assisi. He will be staying in a luxury hotel on the Via Veneto with his own staff and bodyguards. The Vatican is hoping to engineer a meeting between Mr Aziz and Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, who arrives in Rome on Monday. However, the visit of Mr Aziz, a Chaldean Christian, is causing political embarrassment in Italy, whose Centre Right Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has sided with the United States by offering bases, airspace and moral support.

Pierferdinando Casini, the Speaker of Parliament, said yesterday that he would refuse to meet Mr Aziz because this would give legitimacy to the Baghdad regime. It is not clear if Mr Aziz will meet Signor Berlusconi but he is likely to be received by Franco Frattini, the Italian Foreign Minister.

Avvenire, the Italian Catholic daily, said that there was a “long list” of Italian and Vatican figures “lining up to shake Tariq Aziz’s hand” despite claims by human rights organisations that his hands were “stained with crimes against humanity”. Diplomats said that Mr Aziz might also meet unnamed “European politicians linked to the Franco-German plan for disarming Iraq without recourse to war”. The highlight of Mr Aziz’s trip will be his audience with the Pope in the Vatican tomorrow, when he is expected to invite the pontiff to Baghdad. Although some conservative Catholics have sought to persuade the Pope that conflict with Iraq is a just war, many Catholic bishops and dioceses have echoed the Pope’s assertion that war is always a defeat for humanity.

The Pope who opposed the 1991 Gulf War, regards Iraq as the cradle of Christianity because it contains the birthplace of Abraham at Ur of the Chaldees. His personal envoy is on a peace mission in Baghdad and likely to meet President Saddam Hussein today. Avvenire said that Mr Aziz’s visit would be one long round of ceremonies, receptions and dinners. He is to visit the Italian Parliament and then meet “stars from the world of Italian culture” at a dinner in his honour. He is to appear on a television chat show tonight and at the Foreign Press Club tomorrow.

Mr Aziz travels to Assisi at the weekend, a visit apparently timed to ensure that he is not in Rome for Saturday’s anti-war march, expected to attract a million protesters. Father Vincenzo Coli, custodian of the Basilica of St Francis, said that there was intolerable hostility towards Mr Aziz. The Franciscan friars, he said, “hold out the hand of peace to everybody”. “We don’t ask people to account for themselves. Ex-terrorists have come here to pray to St Francis, and industrialists accused of corruption. They all come to find themselves.” He said that Mr Aziz would light a lamp of peace at Assisi and pray at the tomb of St Francis.

He would also handle one of the Basilica’s greatest treasures, a small ivory horn given to St Francis by Sultan Kamil of Egypt in 1219 when the saint was in the Middle East seeking to halt the Crusades, which he regarded as hypocritical and bloodthirsty and driven by Western economic, rather than religious, interests. The horn was used by St Francis to summon the faithful to prayer.

The visit was organised by Father Jean-Marie Benjamin, a French priest in Rome who has often visited Baghdad. However, Charles Forrest, of the British human rights organisation Indict, who is in Rome, said that Mr Aziz deserved a Nuremberg-style trial. “This is his first visit to Europe for five years and a chance to arrest him,” Mr Forrest said. "He is implicated in a long list of crimes against humanity including the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the maltreatment of hostages during the 1991 Gulf War, the torture and murder of thousands of opponents of the regime and genocide against the Kurds.

“He is as barbaric as Saddam Hussein himself. It is scandalous that he can travel freely and be received by the Pope and the Italian authorities.” There are almost a million Christians in Iraq, 70 per cent of them Chaldeans, in a predominantly Muslim population of 23 million. According to Raphael Bidawid, Patriarch of Babylonia of the Chaldees, Iraqi Christians enjoy the protection of Saddam Husain.

The Chaldeans are descended from the Nestorians, named after Nestorius, a 5th century monk from Antioch who was condemned for heresy for claiming that the Incarnate Christ was not God and man simultaneously but separate persons, one human and one divine.

The Nestorian Church survived, with its headquarters in Baghdad from the 8th century. It was later reconciled with Rome and is in communion with the Pope.

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And a lil more:

At Assisi, Iraqi Envoy Publicly Prays for Peace, Frank Bruni, New York Times, 15 February 2003

The public relations battle between Baghdad and Washington came today to this unlikely hilltop front, where a senior Iraqi official found the ripest of metaphors for his claims that his country is harmless and doing all it can to avoid war.

Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, traced the footsteps of St. Francis, the patron of peace and protector of the weak.

As religious pilgrimage met media event, Mr. Aziz knelt before the gray stone tomb of the saint. The somber strains of organ music were punctuated by the percussive snap-snap of news photographers’ cameras. Mr. Aziz, a Chaldean Christian, walked and talked among the saint’s followers, devotees of peace who greeted him before a phalanx of television crews. He prayed, and in a special guest book on an altar near the tomb, he inscribed a wish.

“May God the Almighty grant peace to the people of Iraq and the whole world,” he wrote. “Amen.”

Mr. Aziz’s visit to Assisi, where St. Francis was born in 1182 and died in 1226, occurred at the same time that demonstrators gathered in cities around the world for a large-scale protest against a possible American-led military invasion of Iraq. The two events, vastly different in scale but similar in goal, reflected an increase in efforts to sway international opinion and to influence the course of events as a moment of American decision seems to draw nearer.

Mr. Aziz, who had a private meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome on Friday, said that the purpose of his visit to Assisi was simple. “My message is peace,” he told reporters outside the Basilica of St. Francis.

“The people of Iraq want peace, and millions of people around the world are demonstrating for peace,” he said, referring to the day’s protests. “So let us all work for peace and resist the war and intentions of aggression.” In a news conference in Rome on Friday night, Mr. Aziz had repeatedly characterized American plans for a possible strike against Iraq as unprovoked, unwarranted and imperialistic. He said Iraq was cooperating fully with weapons inspections and trying to pave a path toward peace.

The time he spent in this storied central Italian city of famous religious monuments represented a symbolic complement to those comments. He was welcomed outside the basilica by the Rev. Vincenzo Coli, the leader of the Franciscans here, and by Bishop Sergio Goretti of Assisi.

At a subsequent ceremony in St. Francis’s tomb, underneath the basilica, those Roman Catholic leaders presented Mr. Aziz with two symbols of peace. One was an ivory horn that had been given to St. Francis in 1219 by Melek el-Kamel, the sultan of Egypt. “St. Francis used this horn to call his monks to prayer and the silence of peace,” Father Coli said. “Let us try to remember that today amid all the noise.”

The other symbol was a tiny lamp that commemorated a meeting here early last year, when the pope brought together leaders of various religions to pray for peace in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. During the ceremony, Bishop Goretti made an impassioned plea against war.

“We are convinced that wars have never resolved the problems of humanity,” he said. “They have always left a frightening wake of suffering.”

His remarks, however, were directed at a larger audience than the United States, perhaps including Iraqi officials and Mr. Aziz, who listened quietly, his hands clasped in front of him. “We condemn every form of terrorism, which is the new worrying plague of humanity, as well as building the devastating weapons of destruction,” the bishop said.

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Great stuff, never new the Nestorian Church had anything to do with the Papacy?! Surely the're diametrically opposed?

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Re: Vatican rolls out the red carpet for Tariq Aziz

[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Nadia_H:

If i am not mistaken, both Aziz and Naji Sabri are two Chaldean Christians among Saddam Hussein's senior-level Ba'ath officials.

[/QUOTE]

That is true, and may other Christian's hold top positions in the Iraqi government, military and Ba'athist party. In fact Iraq has always been ruled by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Christians leaving the majority Shia's and Kurds out.

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“A unilateral war of aggression would constitute a crime against peace and against the Geneva Convention,” said Tauran.

Unilateral attack on Iraq “a crime” -Vatican](Clarifying the Complex | Homepage | Thomson Reuters) Reuters

VATICAN CITY, Feb 24 (Reuters) - The United States would be breaking international law if it attacked Iraq without U.N. authorisation, a senior Roman Catholic Churchman said on Monday. Maintaining the Church’s fierce anti-war stance, Vatican Foreign Minister, Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran, told a religious gathering that only the U.N. Security Council had the right to order a strike against Iraq. “A unilateral war of aggression would constitute a crime against peace and against the Geneva Convention,” said Tauran.

“Nothing in international law allows one or more states to resort to the use of force,” he added. The United States and Britain are expected to submit later on Monday a new U.N. resolution that would set the stage for war. However, both Washington and London have said they do not believe a new resolution is legally essential before any attack.

Pope John Paul has been at the forefront of efforts to avoid a war, dispatching an envoy to Baghdad and discussing the crisis with a host of foreign visitors, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz. The pope has called for a day of peace, fasting and prayer for March 5 to appeal to all sides to draw back from war.

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>>The United States would be breaking international law if it attacked Iraq without U.N. authorisation, a senior Roman Catholic Churchman said on Monday. ...] "A unilateral war of aggression would constitute a crime against peace and against the Geneva Convention."<<

Thank you for the article, DhP.
i wonder if the above signifies that, in the event of a second Resolution 'authorizing' force (regardless of how the Resolution was coerced/bullied/forced through the Security Council), would the Vatican endorse it? Probably.

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i realize it is always so much more convenient and fun to detract discussions by arguing how many of us are hardcore anti-Americans, but - a few more articles related to this issue:

Morality for sale, The Guardian, 22 February 2003

Full text of Archbishops’ statement on Iraq, The Guardian, 20 February 2003

Blair in ‘prickly’ meeting at the Vatican, Sophie Arie Rome, The Observer, 23 February 2003

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I'm not sure that visiting with the Pope necessarily is indicative of anything good about Tariq Aziz or the current Iraqi regime. After all, this is the very same Pope who stood side by side with General Augusto Pinochet on the Presidential balcony in Chile waiving at the crowds and paid a memorable papal visit to Nigeria when it was under the control of the very ruthless dictator General Sani Abacha.

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Re: Vatican rolls out the red carpet for Tariq Aziz

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Nadia_H: *
If i am not mistaken, both Aziz and Naji Sabri are two Chaldean Christians among Saddam Hussein's senior-level Ba'ath officials.

Apart from the usual we can all find to bicker about, there is a little bit of interesting religious history in this article:
[/QUOTE]

You are right they both are Caldean. I grew up near soo many Caldeans and they even have their own language.

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I would have to agree with you, everyone in Iraq lives peacefully with each other. Muslims and non-Muslims, there hasn’t been much trouble.

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DHP: For once think without your usual anti-us stance. for 10 yrs the Iraqi gov't has flouted the UN decrees. For 10 yrs palaces adn mosques have been made rather than prioritizing. For 10 yrs, the french have been waiting for their lucrative oil contracts to come to pass that they signed with the Iraqi gov't. For 10 yrs, the UN and the world has been made a fool of by teh Iraqi gov't.

It is time for this to end for the sake of the middle east, UN, and all those who are against dictators hell bent on killing their own people.

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I’m sure the Shi’a population in the south, the Kurds in the north and anyone in between that defies Saddam would vehemently argue with the notion that there is NO ethnic cleansing, there is NO civil war, and there is NO threat to any of the minorities and that they live in peace together.

C’mon, do you realize how pathetic and biased one’s arguments become when they deny the obvious to justify their position? To apologize for Saddam and minimize his atrocities against his own people to further a point of view is unfathomable and an insult to the oppressed Iraqi people. Your tears for the alleged 1.6 million dead Iraqi children ring hollow when you to deny that Saddam continues to commit gross human rights violations, in particular against Iraqi minorities and political opponents.

The same crowd also argues that Saddam has cooperated with the UN and has followed through with his commitments following the Gulf War. But yet the UN has passed 18 Resolutions since then condemning Iraq non-compliance. You can be against the war (and a majority of people in the world are), butto argue that Saddam has complied with his terms of surrender is foolishness.

Here’s just a taste Iraq’s human rights violations. You can get thousands more by going to google and typing in “iraq human rights violations”.

Human Rights Watch

The Iraqi government continued to commit widespread and gross human rights violations, including the extensive use of the death penalty and the extrajudicial execution of prisoners, the forced expulsion of ethnic minorities from government-controlled areas in the oil-rich region of Kirkuk and elsewhere, the arbitrary arrest of suspected political opponents and members of their families, and the torture and ill-treatment of detainees..

Government opponents and relatives of political detainees continued to report numerous executions of political suspects and those convicted of ordinary criminal offenses, as well as former army personnel suspected of disloyalty to the authorities. Scores of civilians detained in Abu Ghraib prison were apparently executed in early March, among them five Shi’a Muslims from al-Najaf province who were arrested in December 2001 after reportedly failing to cooperate with the authorities in the capture of army deserters…

The government continued to implement its “Arabization” policy of forcibly expelling Kurdish, Turkman, and Assyrian families from their homes in areas under its control in Kirkuk, Khaniqin, Sinjar, and other areas, and replacing them with Arab families brought from southern Iraq. The vast majority of those expelled were Kurds, who were moved to Kurdish-held areas in the northern provinces, with a smaller number expelled to southern Iraq. In September, Human Rights Watch interviewed scores of expelled Kurdish and Turkman families, some within days of their expulsion. Officials forced them to leave their homes with very few personal possessions, and stripped them of all documentation except for their identity cards…

In a resolution adopted on December 19, 2001, the General Assembly condemned systematic and widespread human rights violations perpetrated in Iraq, and called upon the government to cooperate with U.N. human rights mechanisms, in particular by giving the special rapporteur access to the country…

On May 16, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the human rights and humanitarian situation in Iraq, as well as issues relating to regional security and disarmament. The resolution condemned the “regime of terror against all levels of society” and the continued perpetration of gross human rights violations. The resolution urged the government to abide by its international treaty obligations and to comply with relevant Security Council resolutions. It called for the deployment of human rights observers in Iraq and the creation of an international commission to investigate disappearances throughout the country. It also called for the establishment of an ad hoc international tribunal under U.N. auspices “to bring those Iraq regime officials responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law” to justice…

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The whole 'Attack Iraq Doctrine' is nothing but a sham, WHY all of a sudden does Bush want to oust Sadam and install another puppet, why wasnt this done long ago, why wait over 10 years to make threats against Iraqs alleged WMD.. ??? At the end of day, the world knows its all about OIL, nothing more, nothing less.

The threats to Iraq's admitted, not alleged WMD have been going on for 12 years. Remember, Iraq denied their existence for 4 years until 1995. Now they can't prove their destrcution. Just because the inspectors can't find a needle in a haystack doesn't mean the needle doesn't exist. Is the world supposed to believe Saddam this time? Has he had an epiphany that turned him overnight into a noble and honest man after a lifetime of deceit? And why would the US wait 10 years (even though there have been several UN Resolutions in that time demanding Iraq cooperation) because of oil??? If it is about oil in 2003 then surely it was about oil 10 years ago. It's not like the US dependence on oil is a new thing.