Miguel
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Call for revenge in city that let Iraqi dictator into its heart
(Filed: 07/04/2003)
Immigrants are desperate for war to end soon, writes Marcus Warren in Detroit
Saddam Hussein holds a special place in the affections of Detroit, home to America's largest concentration of Iraqi-Americans, to which he was once even given the "Keys to the City". ![[Big Eyes]](graemlins/darthmavis.gif)
Nowhere is the tie between the tyrant and his US victims more piquant than in the complex of buildings that could be called: "The Church that Saddam Built."
Saddam donated a million pounds to the Sacred Heart Church, its cultural hall next door and a nearby day care centre. In return the priest presented him with a key to Detroit, courtesy of the mayor.
In that same hall Chaldean Christians, speakers of Aramaic, the language used by Christ and his disciples, called this week for revenge and the speedy downfall of their one-time benefactor.
At the same time tensions among the 150,000 Iraqi-Americans based in Detroit, divided between Christians and Muslims, rose.
Chaldeans, the majority in Detroit but a small minority in Iraq, suspect local Shi'ites of being fanatics. Shi'ites whisper that leaders of the Chaldean community in the US collaborated with Saddam.
The Rev Jacob Yasso has at one time been accused of being too cozy with the regime. The initials SH for Sacred Heart on the wall of the cultural centre were interpreted by his enemies as standing for Saddam Hussein. He took them down.
The bond between the nation's number one enemy and the centre of its car industry now lives on in immigrants' efforts to catch up with news from the mother country - and the fate of its leader.
As in the clubs, bakeries and restaurants patronised by Iraqi-Americans across the city, there is no euphoria. The mood is rather one of pained determination to see this conflict through.
"The greatest nation in the world is pitted against a small country, poor, battered, destroyed, in slavery," said the Rev Mr Yasso mournfully. "We want this war to have a happy ending."
A bearer in a RAF Officers' Mess in the Second World War, Shamoun Shamoun picked up the theme, still shaken by a phone conversation with his daughter in Baghdad four days ago. All she would say was: "We are fine."
"Now the war has started, it must finish," said Mr Shamoun, 77, who has been in the US for less than two years. "Saddam is a madman." ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
For longer-term residents, watching their homeland under bombardment by the military of their adopted country is proving tough.
"I would not wish this on the worst of my enemies," said Asaad Kalasho, a prominent Chaldean businessman. "It's like living in a house where your mother and father are fighting all day."
As he spoke in his office in the Palace of Southfield, a Chaldean club, al-Jazeera flashed pictures of dead Christians being hauled out of rubble after a missile attack. Nuns tended to the wounded.
The most upbeat assessment of the war was that of Hachem al-Saychet, who witnessed the execution of fellow Shi'ites during the 1991 uprising before fleeing.
His brother in Umm Qasr had borrowed mobile phones from British soldiers or journalists to ring his sibling in Detroit four times. The news was good. The British were working hard to make the city habitable again, he said.
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Romans 9:11-24
Our Eschatology may vary even our Ecclesiology may be disputed among us but our Soteriology most assume a singularity and exclusivity which in biblical term is known as Quote; "The Narrow Way" and Quote!
Posts: 2792 | From: Stockton,Ca | Registered: Jun 2002
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