West's Policies 'hurting Middle East Christians'

Christians in the Middle East are suffering from being associated with British and US foreign policy, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.

Dr Rowan Williams was addressing a conference for BibleLands, an independent Christian charity working in the region, and spoke alongside Paul Sayah, Maronite Archbishop of Haifa and the Holy Land, and Bishop Angaelos, general bishop of the Coptic Orthodox church in the UK.

Williams said there was an urgent need for people in the UK to "wake up to the fact" that the indigenous Christian population in the Middle East was living through a time of change "more dramatic and more costly than anything seen for a thousand years and more".

"The military policies of the west in the last few years have firmly cemented in a great deal of the Middle East the notion that Christianity is a foreign, aggressive and western presence."

Christians had played a leading role in social, cultural and intellectual change in the Middle East but risked becoming mere "museum pieces" in a "theme park" region because of persecution, he added.

"Apart from the tragic situation of Christian refugees from Iraq, there is a quiet but numerically huge exodus of Christians ... The remaining Christian communities are left exposed to violence or extremism in many countries, and the societies they live in are deprived of some of their most creative and resourceful citizens."