THE WORLD’S WORST RELIGIOUS PERSECUTORS
By Nina Shea
March 20, 2012 2:44 P.M.
Today, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (Uscirf)
released its 14th annual report, which it is mandated to do under the
International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. The report identifies the
world’s worst persecutors and makes foreign-policy recommendations,
which are non-binding, to the administration and Congress. Its
decisions are based on the agency’s visits to foreign countries,
and a wide array of other sources, including the State Department’
s own excellent annual compilation of worldwide religious-freedom
violations. The commission is distinctive because it is an independent
federal agency, and it is to make its name-and-shame lists and policy
recommendations unburdened by foreign-policy considerations other
than the defense of religious freedom.
This year, Uscirf named 16 countries as the most egregious and
systematic religious freedom violators in the world and recommended
them for official “Country of Concern” (CPC) designation by the U.S.
State Department. They are:
Burma, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, (north) Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
I thought Afghanistan should be on the list as well and said so in
my dissent, which is excerpted further down in this column.
Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Mandeans, Ahmadiyas, Rohingya Muslims,
Yizidis, Alevis, Shiite and Ismaili Muslims in Saudi Arabia, African
traditional believers in Sudan, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists,
Falun Gong practitioners, Sufi Muslims, Pakistani Hindus, independent
Buddhists in Vietnam, Cao Dai, and many others groups and individuals
are persecuted in these 16 countries. They suffer arrest, torture,
imprisonment and even death for religious reasons, as well as other
pressures. All these groups are covered in the Uscirf report.
Christians are far from the only religious group persecuted in
these countries. But, Christians are the only group persecuted
in each and every one of them. This pattern has been found by
sources as diverse as the Vatican, Open Doors, Pew Research Center,
Newsweek, and The Economist, all of which recently reported that
an overwhelming majority of the religiously persecuted around the
world are Christians. Globally, this persecution is experienced by
all Christian faith traditions from Pentecostal and evangelical to
Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox.
Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for
Promoting Christian Unity, calls this the “Ecumenism of the Martyrs.”
As the Cardinal put it: “While we as Christians and as churches,
live on this earth in an as yet imperfect communion, the martyrs in
their celestial glory find themselves in full and perfect communion.”
In many cases the persecution is at the hands of the government, as,
for example, in China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, but often,
in places like Nigeria and Iraq, it is committed by religious
extremists and vigilantes in the society who operate within a climate
of impunity. In Pakistan and Egypt persecution is sponsored by all
three – the authorities, extremist groups, and vigilantes.
Persecution is intensifying now in the Muslim world, as documented
throughout the Uscirf report. Each year, the report’s cover reflects
a signal event in the global landscape of religious persecution. This
year’s bears a photo of Egyptian mourners gathered in central Cairo
on October 13, 2011, in honor of some 25 Coptic Christians killed
days before by the Egyptian military during a demonstration over an
attack on a church. The commission decided it was important to single
out the Copts. There are rising fears for them now that Egypt will
be governed by Islamists, some of whom, notably from the sizeable
Wahhabi or Salafist parliamentarian faction, have openly declared
their intent of religious cleansing.
Perhaps there is no more poignant and symbolic an assault on
Christianity as a bombing attack against a church full of worshippers
on Christmas, or on any Sunday. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise
of just such attacks on churches in Egypt, Iraq, and Nigeria.
Nigeria’s Catholic bishops report that some 200 individuals, mostly
Catholic worshippers, were killed in coordinated Christmas bombings
in 2011. In Iraq, there have been 70 documented church bombings over
the past eight years.
Turkey, a democracy and NATO member, often held out as a model for
the Arab Spring, was put on the Uscirf CPC recommendation list for
the first time this year.
This may surprise some. After all, Turkey’s methods of
religious control and repression stand in contrast to the bloody,
un-self-conscious crackdowns found in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan,
and North Korea.
These days, Turkey uses more sophisticated, subtler measures that
are resulting in the elimination of its Christian and non-Muslim
minorities. The cudgel is a dense tangle of bureaucratic restrictions
that thwart the ability of churches to perpetuate themselves and,
in some cases, even to meet together for worship.
Turkey’s Ambassador Tan predictably protested the listing as “unfair.”
More surprisingly, after the State Department was tipped off by
a Uscirf commissioner who was appointed by Pres. Obama, assistant
secretary for human rights Michael Posner “reached out” on Turkey
to another commissioner, resulting in his changing his mind after
the report was put to bed. The Turkey decision resulted from a new
analysis that will stir controversy.
As Uscirf chair Leonard Leo explained, “some of the countries we
recommend for CPC designation maintain intricate webs of discriminatory
rules, requirements and edicts that can impose tremendous burdens
for members of religious minority communities, making it difficult
for them to function and grow from one generation to the next,
potentially threatening their existence.”
In casting my vote to put Turkey on the Uscirf black list, I could
not forget the urgent words of a senior Christian religious leader in
Turkey, who, out of fear, requested anonymity: “We are an endangered
species here in Turkey.” Despite ten years of rule, despite its
revolutionary measures in other spheres, such as in the economy,
and despite its powerful mandate from the 2011 elections, AK Party’s
government has failed to take critical actions in favor of religious
freedom. Specifically, it has failed to rescind the regulatory regime
that is contributing to its Christian minorities’ steady decline into
statistical insignificance, now numbering a mere 0.15 percent.
Turkey’s Christian minorities struggle to find places in which they
can worship, are denied seminaries in which to train future leaders,
are barred from wearing clerical garb in public, see the trials of
the murderers of their prominent members end with impunity, and,
above all, lack the legal right to be recognized as churches so that
their members can be assured of their rights to gather freely in
sacred spaces for religious marriages, funerals, and baptisms, and
otherwise carry out the full practice of their respective religions.
Turkey’ s laws, aimed at promoting extreme secular nationalism, also
encourage a culture of animosity toward Christians, who are seen to
undermine “Turkishness,” despite Christianity’ s 2,000-year presence
there. Even starting a discussion about the genocide of Christians
that occurred 100 years ago is a criminal offense in Turkey. Armenian
editor Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in 2006, was himself convicted
of “insulting Turkishness” for trying to do so.
Last year marked the 40th year that the Greek Orthodox seminary of
Halki remained closed and in government hands. The Greek Orthodox
community now numbers less than 2,000, and remains unable to
educate and train its clergy. Indeed, none of the Christians groups
in Turkey is permitted to train its leaders in the country. The
Armenian Church is anxious to train more priests, and, in 2006,
petitioned the education minister to allow the establishment of a state
university faculty on Christian theology including instruction by the
Patriarchate. Their request was ignored again throughout the past year.
The Syriac Orthodox community continued to be denied permission to
have a second church to accommodate its flock of 20,000 in Istanbul,
where the group has gathered for security after having been driven by
violence out of its traditional lands over the last century. In 2010,
the Supreme Court had granted the state’ s treasury parts of the 1,600
year old Mor Gabriel monastery, a site that is a second Jerusalem
for the Syriacs. In November 2011, the government removed from museum
status St Sophia church in Iznik – where the first Christian Ecumenical
Council had met in A.D. 325 – and turned it into a mosque.
In a recent interview, Protestant Association chair Zekai Tanyar
expressed their frustrations with government meetings in trying to
navigate the regulations to open a church:
These visits do not go beyond polite stalling. . . . Churches find
themselves shuttled between municipalities and governorships in
their search for a solution to this problem. Even if one municipality
responds positively, often the state Governor does not give approval.
Sometimes the authorities respond with ridiculous excuses saying
“there are not enough Christians in the neighborhood.” So are we
supposed to do head counts and form ghettos?
Another describes the relentless pressure faced by Christian converts,
who are officially supposed to be legal:
They have to contest for every inch of legal territory. They are
constantly surveilled by national-security agencies. They have been
threatened, attacked, hauled into court on bogus charges, and even
brutally murdered by ultra-nationalists linked to a nationwide plot
to destabilize the Turkish government. It is a disheartening, and
sometimes dangerous, environment in which to worship and share one’s
faith. Although many Turkish congregations meet quietly and safely
on a Sunday, no group anywhere in the country meets without carefully
taking the measure of each new person who walks through the door.
The AKP government points to some improvements for Christians,
including the addition of worship services allowed for a particular
church, citizenship for the leaders of another, and accurate
national-identity cards for converts. But, overall, the downward
trajectory continues for Turkey’s Christian communities.
* * *
I believe that Afghanistan, too, belongs in the ranks of the world’s
worst religious persecutors. Apart from the depredations of the
Taliban, Afghanistan’ s government under President Karzai fails
to respect religious freedom, and its violations are egregious,
ongoing, and systematic, thus meeting the statutory standard for CPC
designation. The State Department’s recent religious-freedom report
on Afghanistan found:
The government’s level of respect for religious freedom in law and
in practice declined during the reporting period, particularly for
Christian groups and individuals.
An example was the razing of that country’ s last remaining church
after its 99-year lease was cancelled, as the State Department reported
last September. This event did not draw the international protest
that accompanied the Taliban’ s detonation of the Bamiyan Buddhist
statues in 2001, but, with respect to the status of religious freedom,
it is equally emblematic.
Afghanistan, therefore, has now joined the lonely company of
hardline Saudi Arabia as a country with no churches. The millions
of Christians in Afghanistan, including some very beleaguered and
oft-jailed converts, must hide their faith and seek the protection
and secrecy of walled embassy compounds to pray in community.
Furthermore, we learn from the State Department report that, in
addition to Christians, particular “targets of discrimination and
persecution” are Hindu and Sikh groups.
The one synagogue, located in Kabul, is shuttered because Jews dare
not venture there.
The Uscirf report itself states:
Conditions for religious freedom are exceedingly poor for dissenting
members of the majority faith and for minority religious communities.
The Afghan constitution fails explicitly to protect the individual
right to freedom of religion or belief and allows other fundamental
rights to be superseded by ordinary legislation. It also contains a
repugnancy clause stating that no law can be contrary to the tenets
of Islam, which the government has interpreted to limit fundamental
freedoms. Individuals who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy
regarding Islamic beliefs and practices are subject to legal action
that violates international standards, for example prosecutions
for religious crimes such as apostasy and blasphemy. In addition,
the Afghan government remains unable, as well as at times unwilling,
to protect citizens against violence and intimidation by the Taliban
and other illegal armed groups.
The Afghan government’s slide into extreme intolerance accelerated this
month when, at the behest of his senior Islamic advisers, President
Karzai publicly backed their statement that women should not mingle
with men in workplaces, schools or other areas of daily life, and
should not travel without a male relative, according to a March 6
BBC report.
For anyone concerned about human rights and religious freedom, the
Uscirf report is unsettling but important reading.
– Nina Shea is a commissioner on the U.S. Commission for International
Religious Freedom, and director of Hudson Institute’s Center for
Religious Freedom.
From: A. Papazian