The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution

by John L. Allen

  However these five factors unfold, Johnson said, there’s no reason to believe that a famous insight from a Jesuit priest named Rutilio Grande, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1977 for his advocacy on behalf of the poor, won’t continue to apply.

  “It’s a dangerous thing,” Grande said, “to be a Christian in this world.”

  2

  AFRICA

  As Rwandan troops poured into the eastern part of what was then Zaire in the fall of 1996, Roman Catholic archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa issued a final, fervent plea for help. “We hope that God will not abandon us and that from some part of the world will rise for us a small flare of hope,” he said in an October 28 radio message, broadcast to anyone, anywhere, who might have been listening.

  As it turned out, no one was.

  The civil and military leaders of the region, representing the last shreds of the crumbling autocratic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, had fled weeks before, knowing that Mobutu was doomed and the Rwandans were unstoppable. Those Rwandan soldiers were largely members of the country’s Tutsi minority, who blamed Mobutu for harboring Hutu militants, and as their armed bands moved east they were killing anyone who got in their way.

  Munzihirwa, bishop of the Diocese of Bukavu in eastern Zaire since 1993, had long criticized all parties to the region’s violence. His last hope, shared with the handful of missionaries and diocesan personnel who stayed behind with him to shelter the refugees, was for rapid intervention by the international community.

  It was not to be. Less than twenty-four hours later, in the afternoon of October 29, death came for the archbishop.

  Munzihirwa, a Jesuit who called himself a “sentinel of the people,” was shot and killed by a group of Rwandan soldiers, his body left to decay in the deserted streets. It took more than a day before a small group of Saverian seminarians was able to recover the body and prepare it for burial. Munzihirwa had surrendered himself in the hope that two companions might be able to get away in his car; they too, however, had been caught and executed.

  Born in Lukambo in 1926, Munzihirwa was ordained a priest in 1958 and joined the Jesuits in 1963. He studied social science and economics in Belgium but returned to his country in 1969 to become the formation director for Jesuits in Kinshasa province. His prophetic streak surfaced in 1971, when Seko’s CIA-backed government responded to a youth protest movement by forcibly enrolling university-age people, including seminarians, in the military. Munzihirwa insisted on being enlisted alongside his novices, much to the embarrassment of the regime.

  Munzihirwa became the Jesuit provincial superior for Central Africa in 1980. In 1986 he was made a coadjutor bishop in Kasongo, and in 1993 he became archbishop of Bukavu. He quickly earned fame for his refusal to accept patronage from Mobutu. That occasionally created headaches, as in 1995 when a Catholic missionary and members of an international solidarity movement were arrested in Kasongo. When Munzihirwa demanded their release, military officials taunted him for not being a “friend” of Mobutu. Munzihirwa solved the problem by saying that until the group was let go, he would sleep outside their cell. They were freed that evening.

  Munzihirwa was unafraid to denounce what he considered military misconduct. During a mid-1990s Mass to install a new bishop in Kasongo, in a time in which Mobutu had ordered the city sacked because he believed it was harboring dissenters, Munzihirwa said: “Here before me I see these soldiers. I see the colonel. Stop troubling the people! I ask you, I order you: Stop it!”

  The commander wanted Munzihirwa taken into custody, and he replied: “I am ready. Arrest me.” Other bishops present, however, intervened and prevented the arrest.

  After the genocide began in Rwanda in 1994, Munzihirwa became an outspoken protector of the Hutu refugees who flooded his diocese. His martyrdom was not unexpected, at least not to him. Munzihirwa had written in an Easter meditation: “Despite anguish and suffering, the Christian who is persecuted for the cause of justice finds spiritual peace in total and profound assent to God, in accord with a vocation that can lead even to death.”

  At his November 29 funeral, someone recalled Munzihirwa’s favorite saying: “There are things that can be seen only with eyes that have cried.”

  AFRICA: OVERVIEW

  According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, the current statistical center of gravity for the world’s Christian population is somewhere near Timbuktu, in the African nation of Mali. That location reflects the massive shift to the south in the global distribution of Christians during the twentieth century, and Africa is the clear pacesetter. In 1919, just 9 percent of Africa was Christian. As of early 2013 it was 63 percent, for a grand total of 380 million Christians on the continent. Those folks are scattered across a stunning 552,000 congregations and 11,500 denominations, most of which are indigenous to Africa and essentially unknown in the West. Most of this growth has occurred since the last quarter of the twentieth century and is the result of indigenous African evangelizing efforts rather than Western missionaries.

  Just as Africa leads the pack in terms of Christian growth, it has also become one of the primary fronts in the global war on Christians. Western missionaries have found themselves in danger as shifting waves of African conflicts have lapped up against their schools, clinics, and convents. Native African Christians, without the same degree of backing from global religious communities and Western governments, generally are even more vulnerable to instability and violence whenever it erupts. In the two Congo wars from 1996 to 2007, an estimated 5.4 million people lost their lives, and inevitably, killing on such a vast scale creates scores of new martyrs such as Munzihirwa—people of faith who lose their lives because they refuse to turn away from danger.

  In some cases, this new host of victims might not pass the most rigorous traditional Christian tests of what being a “martyr” signifies. For the most part, the faithful are not being asked to sacrifice to idols or sign off on a king’s illicit divorce. In a large number of instances, they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “I was once confronted by a guy in Liberia who wanted to steal our car,” said Catholic bishop Kiernan O’Reilly of Ireland, a veteran missionary in Africa, in 2001. “I could have been stubborn and gotten myself killed. I suppose the folks back home in Ireland would have said, ‘How wonderful! He died for the faith.’ The truth is I would have been dead because I didn’t want to give up the keys. This guy couldn’t have cared less if I was an Anglican priest, or a Buddhist monk, or whatever.”

  Yet when pressed about what he was doing there in the first place, O’Reilly acknowledged that his choice to remain in a place where such confrontations are the stuff of daily life—and similar choices made by missionaries and native believers all across Africa—was a matter of faith. While the motives of his attacker may not have been religious, O’Reilly’s reasons for exposing himself to that risk certainly were.

  “Presence is the key point,” O’Reilly said. “It’s a gospel principle.”

  The following are among the zones in today’s Africa where presence alone sometimes exposes people to the hazards of the global war on Christians.

  DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

  Encyclopedia entries and geopolitical commentary often talk as if the great Congo wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had a formal ending, but the truth is that there never was any armistice or surrender. Today the fighting continues, periodically waxing and waning. In the fall of 2012, a new round of violence in eastern Congo produced another wave of refugees, with at least a hundred thousand people heading for the hills and forests, leaving behind refugee camps and host communities where they had previously sought safety. Most observers report that the violence is being carried out by numerous militia groups, both large and small, which operate with almost total impunity and are responsible for murder and systematic rape, generally as part of campaigns to loot the area’s rich natural resources.

  Whenever the violence spikes in Congo, so too d
o attacks on Christian targets, generally because Christian churches and their personnel are often the lone social institution that doesn’t pull out. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is roughly 95 percent Christian, with the Catholic Church the largest single denomination, claiming thirty-five million of the country’s seventy-one million people. Among other things, that means Christians are often the only ones in a position to give witness to the atrocities being perpetrated. That makes them equal-opportunity targets, at risk from government-sponsored armies, private militias, terrorist outfits, and criminal gangs, not to mention armed bands working on behalf of corporations and entrepreneurs with a financial interest in the region. The lion’s share of the world’s deposits of cobalt, for instance, an essential mineral in the manufacture of cell phone batteries, is found in eastern Congo.

  During Christmastime 2008, as many as four hundred people lost their lives during attacks on villages in eastern Congo near the border with both Sudan and Uganda. The killings were carried out by the Lord’s Resistance Army, the notorious Ugandan rebel movement, which made the decision to wait until Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to attack civilian populations in an effort to pound them into submission. The rebels targeted people at their churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, surrounding them and killing them by crushing their skulls with axes, machetes, and large wooden bats. The victims were hacked into pieces, decapitated, or burned alive in their homes, and several people reportedly had their lips cut off as a “warning not to speak ill of the rebels.” A pair of three-year-old girls reportedly suffered serious neck injuries when rebels tried to twist their heads off. More than 20,000 people were reported to have been displaced by the attacks, with as many as 225 people, including 160 children, abducted and more than 80 women raped.

  In December 2012, the evangelical group Barnabas Aid reported that Christians in Congo, Protestant and Catholic alike, are being targeted by the rebel movement M23, which is trying to overthrow Congolese leader Joseph Kabila. The report indicates that when M23 moves into an area, it typically subjects women to systematic rape, with one estimate holding that forty-eight Congolese women are raped every hour. Men are often killed or conscripted, as are the children of the region.

  In some cases, the killing of Congolese Christians has seemed deliberately calculated to intimidate and muzzle any criticism of the militias. In December 2009, for instance, Fr. Daniel Cizimya Nakamaga, age fifty-one, was shot in the head at point-blank range when gunmen broke into his presbytery during the night in Kabare, outside the eastern Congolese city of Bukavu. Less than forty-eight hours later, attackers struck at a nearby Trappist monastery, murdering Sr. Denise Kahambu. The nun had been the monastery’s guest mistress, and when she opened the door to these strangers, they chased her down a hallway, shot her to death, and left her in a pool of her own blood. Because they didn’t steal anything and left the other sisters alone, the impression was that it had been an “intimidation” killing.

  Many observers drew the same conclusion from the November 2010 murder of Fr. Christian Mbusa Bakulene, the pastor of St. John the Baptist Church in Kanyabayonga in the province of North Kivu. The priest and a parish worker were returning to the church when two men in military uniforms stopped them and asked, “Which one of you is the priest?” They shot Bakulene while leaving his companion unharmed, prompting most observers to conclude that the aim was to frighten priests into either silence or flight.

  The scale of the slaughter in Congo is so vast that it’s easy for the individual stories of its victims to get lost. It’s from those stories, however, that the overall narrative of the global war on Christians emerges.

  Victims include Pastor Mbumba Tusevo, assassinated in December 2011 amid a wave of postelection violence. He was a member of the Kimbanguist Church, an African-originated denomination founded by Simon Kimbangu in 1921 and composed of over ten million people who believe Kimbangu was a prophet. Mbumba was blamed by one political faction for harboring members of a rival group in his church and slain in a reprisal killing. There’s also Sr. Jeanne Yemgane, a native Congolese physician and former superior of the St. Augustine congregation of Dungu, who was shot to death by rebel forces in 2011. There’s Marie-Thérèse Nlandu, a Christian human rights activist and attorney who survived 160 days of torture and abuse in a Congolese prison in 2007 for defending the country’s most vulnerable and abused people. While behind bars, Nlandu lost almost sixty pounds, suffered a heart attack, got a chest infection, and was ravaged by malaria. She was denied medical attention because guards had heard her singing and leading the other women in songs of praise, and said, “If you are well enough to sing, you don’t need a doctor.” Also among the victims is a Catholic nun named Sr. Liliane Mapalayi, who was stabbed to death on February 2, 2012, in Kananga, in western Kasai. Mapalayi worked in a high school run by her congregation and was attacked while in her office at school. On hearing the screams, the director of the school and a nun rushed into the office of Sr. Liliane, who died in their arms with a kitchen knife stabbed in her heart. Sources say that militants and criminal bands had threatened the school before, but Mapalayi refused to leave.

  What’s remarkable about Congolese Christians such as Mbumba, Yemgane, Nlandu, and Mapalayi is not the suffering they experienced, which is commonplace, but rather that we know their names. Most of Congo’s victims die in anonymity or are recorded merely as one among hundreds of people killed in a given incident. Stitching together the personal stories we do have, however, is enough to make clear that the Democratic Republic of Congo is among the most intense front lines in the global war on Christians.

  IVORY COAST

  A nation of roughly twenty million, Ivory Coast in some ways is Africa in microcosm. Both Christianity and Islam have a strong footprint, with each representing a bit less than 40 percent of the population. Islam tends to be strongest in the north, Christianity in the south. An additional 25 percent of the country practices some form of indigenous religion. As is often the case in Africa, religion and politics tend to be easily blurred, so it’s little surprise that a bloody 2011 civil war opened a new front in the global war on Christians.

  In 2010, the country’s incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, a Roman Catholic, declared victory in a disputed election against Alassane Ouattara, a Muslim. Most observers felt that Ouattara had actually won, and after months of unsuccessful negotiations, violence broke out. Fairly quickly, Ouattara’s forces took control of most of the country, with Gbagbo and his loyalists concentrated in and around the country’s commercial capital, Abidjan. International monitors reported serious human rights violations by both sides as the conflict escalated. Given the fact that Gbagbo is a Christian and Ouattara a Muslim, it was inevitable that many people in Ivory Coast would frame the conflict in religious terms, and Christians in particular often paid a steep price for popular resentments against Gbagbo and his regime.

  During the peak of the fighting in mid-2011, the evangelical organization Open Doors reported that several churches had been burned to the ground by rebel forces and their sympathizers, with the pastors often harassed and beaten up and members of the congregation driven into refugee status. Likewise, the Catholic bishops’ conference of Ivory Coast reported that forty churches and religious structures had been attacked and damaged during roughly the same period, including the bishop’s house in the Diocese of San Pedro.

  Few assaults were more gruesome than what happened in the central Ivory Coast village of Binkro on May 29, 2011. Rebel forces loyal to Ouattara, the Muslim challenger, entered the largely Christian village that day in search of weapons they believed had been secreted by Gbagbo loyalists. The rebels seized two peasant brothers who lived in Binkro and demanded they reveal the secret caches of weapons. When the brothers, both evangelical Christians, professed not to know anything about any weapons, the rebels gave them both severe beatings, and then decided to subject them to “the example of Christ” by crucifying them, nailing their hands and feet to cross-shaped plan
ks with steel spikes. One of the brothers, Raphael Aka Kouame, died of his injuries, while the other, Privat Kouassi Kacou, survived the ordeal. In the end, the rebels did not find any weapons in Binkro, only a store of medical supplies, which they looted before abandoning the village.

  All told, the estimate is that at least a thousand people died in deliberate assaults on Christian targets during the spiral of violence in Ivory Coast, with thousands more injured and rendered at least temporarily homeless. At one stage in April 2011, a Catholic mission run by the Salesian order in Duékoué, Ivory Coast, was struggling to accommodate more than thirty thousand people who had been displaced by the fighting, the vast majority of whom were local Christians who had been targeted by the rebel forces.

  To be sure, Christians weren’t the only ones to suffer. Yet most observers believe that the Christians were the only religious community to be specifically targeted during the insurrection, and many Christians in the country report a deep sense of insecurity about what the future may hold. That’s perhaps especially the case in western Ivory Coast, where reports suggest that the traditionally Christian Guéré ethnic group is exposed to systematic harassment and persecution by criminal gangs, mercenaries, and undisciplined elements of the former rebel militias.

  NIGERIA

  Nigeria, the “Lion of Africa,” is not only Africa’s most populous nation but also the world’s largest mixed Muslim/Christian society, with roughly eighty-five million Christians and the same number of Muslims. Imam Sani Isah of the Waff Road Mosque in Kaduna, the capital of the Muslim-dominated north in Nigeria, says that his country is “Saudi Arabia and the Vatican rolled into one.” While there are many impressive examples of Muslim/Christian harmony, there are also multiple fronts in the global war on Christians. That’s especially the case in the twelve northern states, which are majority-Muslim and where beginning in 1999 efforts to impose Islamic shariah law led to periodic outbreaks of violence that left thousands dead.