The persecutions of Christians are going on for the most part in countries with an Islamic majority, conducted by fundamentalist groups. Churches set on fire and desecrated in Indonesia, villages and Christian schools demolished in Nigeria, forced conversions in refugee camps in Sudan, faithful murdered in Egypt, missionaries killed in the southern Philippines, religious material confiscated in Saudi Arabia

BY CAMILLE EID

Proclaiming one’s Christian faith is in many places tantamount to risking one’s life. The massacre, last October 28th, of eighteen Pakistani faithful inside St Dominic’s Church in Bahawalpur is just the latest episode of a tacit persecution which has been going on for some time in Pakistan, today an indispensable ally of the West in the war against terrorism. Indeed, for some years there has been a progressive adaptation of the country’s institutions to Islamic law. Christians denounce in particular certain provisions of the Criminal Code, like the law on blasphemy, which sentences to death anyone accused of offending Mohammed and life imprisonment for anyone who offends the Koran. Despite the guarantees of safeguarding the rights of minorities, abuses of this law by radical Islamic individuals or groups are frequent. In 1998, as a sign of protest against the death sentence of a Catholic youth, the Bishop of Faisalabad, John Joseph, shot himself in the head after leading a prayer vigil against an arrogant abuse of power masked by religious motives. General Musharraf’s decision to restrain ascertained “abuses” in the application of the law called forth protest on the part of many Muslim leaders. “Allah’s curse will fall on anyone who dares amend the law,” the religious men thundered.

Nor is there any lack of atrocities. In May of 2000 near Lahore, masked men blocked a van carrying women workers home from their jobs and proceeded to separate the Christians from the Muslims. The first group, eight girls, were repeatedly raped under armed threat. Subsequently arrested, the guilty parties were found to be members of Lakshar-e-Taiba, an integralist Muslim organization. Before their trial, Ashiq Masih, the uncle of one of the victims, was beaten by four men who threatened him with death if the charges were not dropped.

Even more tragic is the situation of the 40 million Christians who live in Nigeria. Murders and slaughters are a daily affair in the northern part of the country, where some twenty regional states (Zamfara, Sokoto, Kano) have introduced or are considering introducing Koranic law. The tensions erupted at the end of February 2000 into clashes in the city of Kaduna and the State of Abia, which resulted in more than a thousand dead, including many religious. The spokesman of the Diocese of Kaduna, Peter Yakubu, states that the extremists have put a price of 100,000 naira (about a thousand dollars) on each priest’s head. Three parish priests, eight seminarians, and thirty-eight Protestant pastors from various denominations were killed, among them the 26-year-old Fr Clement Ozi Bello, a convert from Islam. These clashes, even more virulent after the American raids against the Afghan Taliban, have taken the lives of hundreds of innocent victims.

Another explosive situation is in the southern Philippines, where the Moorish National Liberation Front threatens to break the agreement reached in 1998 with the government in Manila, to start up again its war for the independence of the southern regions, where the Muslim minority is concentrated. But the terrorist group of Abu Sayyaf has been active for some time against the local Christians; in April 2000 it beheaded two Christian professors, chosen from among the 29 Catholics kidnapped from two schools in the province of Basilan. To free the hostages, the terrorists had demanded not only the release of one of their leaders who is in prison in the United States, but also the banishment of crosses from the island of Mindanao, on which they want to set up an independent Islamic state. A few months later, the Islamic rebels of this group once again kidnapped 21 Christians in the province of Lanar del Sur, subsequently slaughtering them inside a mosque.

The centuries-old coexistence between Islam and Christianity in Egypt is also at risk. The Jubilee Year started off in the worst way possible. An argument between two merchants, a Copt and a Muslim, which erupted in the village of al-Kosheh, 700 miles south of Cairo, degenerated into plunder which then spread to the neighboring villages, causing 25 deaths, all Christian. In this country where Islam is the state religion, the equality of “all citizens before the law” provided for by the Constitution is often theoretical, and Christians encounter great obstacles in attaining key positions and numerous difficulties in the building or restoration of churches. Upper Egypt, the area of the greatest concentration of Christians, is also where the Islamic integralists are active, killing more than 1,400 since 1992, of whom at least 160 were Copts. Attacks are usually aimed at government officials or tourists, but they also involve local Christians. In 1997, an Islamic commando murdered 12 Christians inside the church of Abu Qorqas, and three weeks later another commando attack erupted in the Coptic shops in Nag Hammadi, firing at random.

The situation of Christians in another country that is “a friend of the West,” Saudi Arabia, is less well known. Here every form of non-Muslim religious worship, even private, is forbidden. In order to gather together, the luckiest among the 600,000 Christians who have immigrated into the Kingdom must meet in extraterritorial locations, such as embassies. The others, those whose diplomatic representatives do not give them this opportunity, are forced to form clandestine prayer or Bible study groups, which meet in private homes. Participation in these meetings is obviously not without risk, with the religious police always lurking about. The latest episode tells of the arrest of 16 Philippinos (among them five children), surprised as they read and discussed the Holy Scriptures in an apartment in Riyadh.

The introduction of Islamic law in 1983 was the first act in the attempt to “Islamize” Sudan from the top. Here, the military government of General Omar al-Bashir, which came to power in 1989 in a coup d’etat fostered by the National Islamic Front of Hassan al-Turabi, calls the war that pits the Muslim north against the Christian and animistic south a “jihad.” Countless atrocities and discriminations against Christians have been perpetrated in eighteen years of war, including the whipping and crucifixion of four catechists from the Diocese of Rumbek for having refused to convert to Islam; the kidnapping of children belonging to the Toposa ethnic group, to force them into a program of Islamic education; and the enslavement of thousands of Christian faithful. In January 1999, the Swiss association Christian Solidarity International “bought” and freed 1,050 Sudanese, paying an average “price” of $40 per head to the Muslim dealers.

The civil war which broke out in 1992 in Algeria closely affected the small Christian minority. Seventeen priests and sisters who stayed to witness to the message of love in this heavily Islamic country paid with their lives. Among these new martyrs were the four White Fathers missionaries who were brutally killed at Tizi Ouzou at the end of 1994; the seven Trappist monks of the monastery of Tiberine who were kidnapped and beheaded by the GIA in March 1996; and even the Bishop of Orano, Pierre Clavarie, known as the “Bishop of the Muslims” because of his passion for dialogue with Islam, who was murdered by a bomb in August 1996.

In Indonesia too, political and social tensions, which culminated in the war of independence in East Timor erupt in a harsh conflict between Muslims and Christians. It is calculated that in the Moluccas Islands, where the majority of the population is Christian, in two years 5,000 people have been killed and a half million sent away from their homes. The movements that press to impose the Sharia (Islamic law) in the country of Pancasila, the official multi-religious doctrine, spare no means to feed the Christians’ fear and make the “inter-religious” conflict more explosive and visible, from sending mujjahidin volunteers to fight against the independence of East Timor to the series of explosions last Christmas Eve which damaged numerous churches in the capital, including the Catholic cathedral, causing 14 dead and dozens of wounded.