It was a sight never before seen in Iraq – at least 20,000 Christians taking to the streets to protest a new election law that no longer guarantees their participation. What some view as yet another slight against Christians is adding momentum to the drive for some sort of independence in the Nineveh Plain.

“I think we’re on the path to gaining our rights,” said Robert Dekelaita, a Chicago attorney and member of the Chaldean Assyrian Syriac Council of America (CASCA). “I’m very hopeful.”

Hope is in high demand following a particularly violent October for Christians living in Mosul. Several bombings and at least a dozen murders sent more than 8,000 Christians fleeing the northern city (see related article, page 30). On October 12, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered National Police forces into Mosul to protect Christians and secure their churches.

Meanwhile, in some Nineveh Plain villages, Christians have already established their own militias to protect their citizens with armed patrols and checkpoints. “The terrorists want to kill us because we are Christian,” militia group leader Abu Nataq told www.middle-east-online.com. “If we don’t defend ourselves, who will?”

Parliament’s new election laws scrapped Article 50, which guaranteed seats for Christians and other minorities. That move sent up howls of protests from Iraq’s Christians, with support from others as divergent as al-Maliki, the Kurdish Regional Government, Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party and the United Nations.

Dekelaita said the removal of Article 50 was a long-needed wakeup call for the dwindling Christian community.

“It was a little like our September 11,” he said. “It was like, ‘you Christians have very little anyway, and now we’re going to take that away.’”

Dekelaita also likens recent Christian protests to the Civil Rights movement in the United States. “We’re going, fast-forward, through what African-Americans went through in the 1950s and ‘60s,” he said. “For the first time in history our people demonstrated in a very powerful way, asking for a political solution to their plight. They’ve never done that before.”