‘Fleeing Christians should go to front of queue’: archbishop
Sydney Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher has called on the Abbott government to increase overall refugee numbers ‘very substantially’ to accommodate thousands more Christians. Picture: Renee Nowytarger
Australia should prioritise persecuted Christian refugees over other groups fleeing the Syrian conflict, says Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher.
Archbishop Fisher called on the Abbott government to increase overall refugee numbers “very substantially’’ to accommodate thousands more of the Christians fleeing Islamic State to Turkey and Europe.
He told The Australianthe “monumental crisis’’ justified “last resort’’ military action, including Australia extending airstrikes to Islamic State targets in Syria as well as Iraq.
“There are concerted campaigns to drive Christians from the Middle East,’’ he said. “Other groups are also suffering badly and being persecuted but many Syrian Christians have relatives and a cultural affinity in Australia and we should be honouring those ties and connections.’’
Archbishop Fisher said negotiation and diplomacy were always preferable to military action. Even carefully targeted airstrikes killed and injured “people other than just the evil doers’’.
“But sometimes force is all that you have got to bring about justice and advance a solution,’’ he said.
Brisbane’s Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge said the church’s welfare agencies and migrant communities were equipped to settle, accommodate, feed and educate Syrian refugees.
“We are already doing that,’’ he said. Archbishop Coleridge said Australia, through its involvement in two Iraq wars, had contributed in a small way to the international political failures that had added to the “demonic tapestry’’ woven by Islamic State and other terrorists.
“Unlike communism and Nazism that were atheistic ideologies, Islamic State is a lethal combination of totalitarianism and radical Islam,’’ he said.
Archbishop Coleridge said a bombing campaign was unlikely to shorten a very long conflict.
In a statement, Australia’s Anglican primate, Melbourne Archbishop Philip Freier, warned that Australians could expect a heightened risk of violence on our soil if military action were extended into Syria. Australians should think about the consequences of being engaged “in a hot war of that kind, and the domestic responses which seem to be an unacceptable restricting of our freedom’’.
The Anglican Church has called on the Abbott government to allow an extra 10,000 refugees from Syria into Australia.
Melbourne Bishop Philip Huggins, chairman of the Anglican Church’s Working Group on Refugees and Asylum-seekers has written to Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton offering to facilitate the settlement of refugees: “The focus of Christmas would also provide an opportunity for exceptional generosity.”
Archbishop Fisher was meeting Syrian Catholic leaders and the heads of church welfare agencies and parishes to discuss what might be done to provide housing in families, parishes and convents, and to provide welfare, healthcare, employment services and friendship to traumatised newcomers from the Middle East.
He said the current persecutions were the worst against Christians in history, including those under maddened Roman emperors. “It’s estimated 100,000 Christians are now martyred every year, 11 killed for their faith every hour.”
In Sydney, Syrian Catholic priest Father Rahal Dergham, 33, who came to Australia to serve the Syrian community in 2008, said he had left a flourishing country, but as a result of the “catastrophic’’ Arab Spring his family was now scattered between Lebanon, Moscow and Brazil. His home village, near the city of Hama, was recently shelled by Islamic State.
Islamic State had beheaded one of his former colleagues, Father Francois Murad, and posted the footage online. Entire villages had been kidnapped, he said, with the women and girls taken into sexual slavery. His parishioners knew of people who had been kidnapped by Islamic State and whose families had sold houses, land and cars to pay “huge ransoms’’.
“Some were then returned to their loved ones, cut in small pieces,’’ he said.
Father Dergham favoured a combination of allied airstrikes and ground fighting by the Syrian army to tackle Islamic State.
“Someone has to stand and fight to recover the territory Islamic State has taken,’’ he said.
Father Dergham said his parishioners, who attended churches in Concord and Fairfield in Sydney, could take in 200 to 300 Syrian refugees immediately. Local Iraqi communities were ready to help and those in Melbourne and Brisbane would also respond generously.
Australia should give Christian refugees priority and avoid the radicals Islamic State was planting among those fleeing Syria. “Islamic State has said it will send half a million jihadi into Europe as refugees that way,’’ he said.
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