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

by John L. Allen

  In December 2011, a Christian church in West Java was ordered to halt its activities by the local mayor on the grounds that it represented an alien presence. Despite an order from the Supreme Court of Indonesia, the local authorities refused to lift the ban on Christian activity. In the run-up to Christmas in 2011, Islamic fundamentalist groups in West Java issued warnings to local Christians that they would be attacked if they persisted in holding holiday services. In particular, they targeted the Catholic parish of St. John the Baptist in Parung, which at the time was attempting to construct a new church building. Members of the Islamist group organized public demonstrations against the church and shouted warnings about violent consequences if the construction should continue, even though the parish had held the necessary permit for six years. In the end, the faithful moved their celebrations to an undisclosed location.

  In June 2013, the powerful Indonesian Ulema Council (known by its local acronym MUI) issued a fatwa declaring that Catholic schools in Central Java province, where an estimated 96 percent of the population is Muslim, are haram, in this case meaning “forbidden” or “morally unsound.” The edict follows efforts both by clerical authorities and the local government in Central Java to compel the schools to teach Islam, given that the majority of students in these schools are Muslims. Although the schools typically score well in assessments of educational quality, and many Muslim parents actually came to their defense, local authorities have periodically threatened to shut them down.

  LAOS

  A landlocked nation of roughly 6.5 million, Laos remains an officially one-party socialist state in which only three Christian denominations are tolerated: Catholicism, the Laos Evangelical Church, and the Seventh-day Adventists. The activities of any other form of Christianity are considered illegal. Even officially registered churches, however, report routine harassment and persecution. The preferred religion of the state is Theravada Buddhism, and local sources say the government encourages Buddhist monks and village shamans to keep Christians under observation and make reports about their activities. Christian leaders say the faith is growing among poor tribal groups, which has increased the backlash from the state. Anti-Christian repression tends to be especially strong among members of the Katin and Hmong tribes, who are seen as challenging to the regime.

  In late 2011, police entered Savannakhet province in force to disrupt Christmas celebrations in a village where some two hundred Christians had gathered for worship, apparently with at least the tacit permission of the local village chief. Eight Christian leaders were arrested and detained, placed in handcuffs and wooden stocks. Human rights groups say that wooden stocks are commonly used in Laotian prisons and are sometimes combined with exposure to red ants as a form of torture. The leaders were later informed they had been charged with violating hilt, the traditional spiritual cult of the village believed to be important for safety and prosperity.

  Three days later, fifty Christians belonging to four extended families were threatened with eviction from another village in southern Laos if they didn’t give up their faith. In yet another village, officials forced a Christian family to renounce their faith in order to secure permission to bury a relative, a woman who died on Christmas Day. (The village is located in a tropical location, where immediate burial is essential because of the heat.)

  NORTH KOREA

  North Korea is widely regarded as the world’s leading persecutor of Christians. Indeed, some observers regard the isolated state as occupying a category all by itself, engaging in systematic barbarity against Christians and other perceived dissidents reminiscent of the world’s most appalling human rights violations, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

  Open Doors has placed North Korea at the top of its World Watch List of the worst persecutors of Christians for eleven consecutive years. The organization estimates the total number of Christians in North Korea to range from 200,000 to half a million, with at least a quarter of those believers currently behind bars in prison camps.

  Defectors say that any form of adherence to the Christian faith, even the mere possessing of a Bible, can be considered a reason for arrest or deportation. They recount atrocities that almost defy the imagination, reports generally confirmed by a few external observers who manage to poke around. In 2005, for instance, a respected human rights investigator interviewed a North Korean army member who described his unit being dispatched to bulldoze a Christian church whose members refused to take part in the cult around the national leader. According to this soldier, the unit rounded up the church’s pastor, two assistant pastors, and two elders. The five bound men were placed in front of the bulldozer and given a final opportunity to renounce their Christian faith. When they refused, they were crushed to death in front of other members of the church.

  Christian Solidarity Worldwide estimated in July 2013, on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Korean War, that at least 200,000 people are detained in camps for political prisoners and enemies of the regime, with a substantial number of those inmates being Christians. According to the report, as many as 70 percent of these prisoners are “severely malnourished,” and “torture, rape, and public executions are common.”

  PAKISTAN

  The world’s second-largest Muslim nation after Indonesia, Pakistan contains both a massive Sunni majority and a sizable Shi’ite minority. It also has small pockets of both Hindus and Christians, each group representing less than 2 percent of the population of 180 million. With the rise of Islamic radicalism and anti-Western tensions, Pakistan has become one of the primary battle zones in the global war on Christians. Like Asia Bibi and her family, many Pakistani Christians are the descendants of poor Hindu tribals who converted to Christianity to escape the caste system, so they often carry a powerful double social stigma, consigned to menial jobs and denied public services.

  A 2009 anti-Christian atrocity in the town of Gojra, in Punjab province, is emblematic of the exposure of the country’s Christian population. Seven members of a Christian family, including two children and three women, were burned alive by a frenzied Muslim mob after rumors had circulated that pages from a Qur’an had been burned during a Christian wedding the week before. Clerics in local mosques reportedly laced their sermons that week with anti-Christian rhetoric, inspiring a mob estimated at twenty thousand people to storm Gojra’s Christian colony. They met some resistance from the Christians, but eventually they picked a house more or less at random, shot dead a family elder, and then set the home ablaze when the rest of the members of the family barricaded themselves inside. Although a hundred other homes were also torched, there were no other reports of fatalities. An investigation did not result in any prosecutions.

  Acts of anti-Christian violence in Pakistan have become depressingly commonplace. Here’s an incomplete sampling of events over the last decade:

  • In 1998, a Christian man named Ayub Masih was convicted under the country’s blasphemy law for allegedly voicing support for author Salman Rushdie, though in court proceedings he insisted the charge had been brought by a Muslim neighbor to force his family off their land and seize control of their property. Masih was eventually released.

  • In October 2001, a gunman on a motorcycle opened fire on a Protestant congregation in Punjab, killing eighteen people.

  • In August 2002, masked gunmen stormed a Christian missionary school in Islamabad, leaving six people dead and three more injured.

  • Also in August 2002, grenades were tossed at a church on the grounds of a Christian hospital in northwest Pakistan, killing three nurses.

  • On September 25, 2002, two terrorists entered a Christian “peace and justice” institute in Karachi, where they proceeded to separate the Muslims from the Christians and then murdered seven of the Christians by shooting them in the head. The hands of the victims had been tied behind their backs and their mouths covered with tape.

  • On Christmas Day 2002, radicals tossed a hand grenade into a church near Lahor
e, leaving three young girls dead.

  • In November 2005, some three thousand Muslim radicals assaulted Catholic, Salvation Army, and United Presbyterian churches in Sangla Hill, supposedly in response to violation of the blasphemy laws by a young Christian man. Dozens of people were injured.

  • In June 2006, a Pakistani Christian stonemason was working near Lahore when he reportedly drank water from a public facility and was assaulted by a group of Muslims who called him a “Christian dog.”

  • In August 2007, a Christian missionary couple, Rev. Arif and Kathleen Khan, were gunned down by Islamic radicals in Islamabad. Authorities said that Khan had been killed over accusations of sexual abuse lodged by a member of his congregation, but local Christians disputed that account.

  • In November 2011, an eighteen-year-old Catholic girl named Amarish Masih was murdered in her small village near Faisalabad, allegedly because she refused the advances of a local Muslim man. No charges were filed, which is not uncommon in Pakistan, where rape victims are sometimes imprisoned for unlawful sex and released only on the condition that they marry the rapist.

  • On December 26, 2011, a young Christian man near Lahore was arrested and imprisoned over the charge of blasphemy, allegedly because he burned pages of the Qur’an to prepare tea. The man said the charge was actually a pretext, arising from a rent dispute with his Muslim landlord.

  • Also in late December 2011, a pregnant Christian woman and her husband were arrested by police and charged with theft on the basis of complaints by local Muslims. The couple complained of being beaten while in police custody, and the woman, Salma Emmanuel, thirty, was hospitalized for life-threatening injuries both to herself and to her unborn child. Her husband, a TV repairman, said police told him the beating would stop if he agreed to convert to Islam.

  SRI LANKA

  An island nation of roughly twenty million people, Sri Lanka is 70 percent Buddhist but it also is home to sizable pockets of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, with Christians (mostly Roman Catholics) accounting for around 8 percent of the country. A long-running civil war between the majority Sinhalese, who dominate the government, and the Tamil minority is the most chronic source of conflict in the country, but Sri Lanka has also seen a spike in anti-Christian violence in recent years.

  Beginning in 2009, the National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka began reporting an uptick in attacks. In July 2009, an Assemblies of God church in the Puttlam district was burned to the ground, almost a year to the day after an earlier act of arson had destroyed the original structure. The pastor of a Foursquare Gospel church and his wife had to barricade themselves inside their home after a mob surrounded the house and shouted that they would not tolerate any further Christian activity in the village. In June 2010, a mob consisting of more than a hundred people, including angry Buddhist monks, surrounded the home of a female Foursquare Gospel pastor and then broke in, shouting insults, destroying furniture, and threatening the pastor’s thirteen-year-old daughter if she didn’t abandon the area. Later, in the presence of Buddhist monks, she was forced to sign a document promising not to host worship services for anyone not a family member.

  In the Kurunegala district, Buddhist radicals wielding swords attacked the Vineyard Community Church in mid-July 2009, leaving several people hospitalized and the structure damaged. Other attacks followed, including one in which the interior of the church was desecrated with human feces. At around the same time, a mob of more than a hundred people, half of whom were estimated to be Buddhist monks, forcibly entered an Assemblies of God church and posted notices on the walls declaring that “any form of Christian worship in this place is completely prohibited.” Another Pentecostal pastor was reportedly stopped by a group of men on motorcyles who attacked him with knives while shouting “This is your last day! If we let you live, you will convert the whole town!” The pastor sustained severe cuts to his arms.

  As of November 2012, a group of some 212 Tamil Catholic families were still living in a refugee camp after having been driven from their native village in 2007 by incensed mobs, who blamed them not only for supporting the Tamil rebels but also for undercutting the Buddhist identity of the town. The Christian refugees had been living in ramshackle huts in the Marichchikattu jungle, fearing the next strong rain could once again wipe away their flimsy residences.

  “If we could go home, we wouldn’t have to wait for other people to bring us food and clothing,” one of the refugees told a reporter. “We want to earn our living, feed our children, and get back to a normal life. Instead, we are stuck here to suffer.”

  VIETNAM

  Historically Vietnam is an overwhelmingly Buddhist society, though polling suggests that today a strong majority of Vietnamese, some 81 percent, are atheists. Christians make up about 8 percent of the population, divided between some six million Catholics and a million Protestants. Although state law ostensibly recognizes religious freedom, authorities keep religious activities under tight control, often charging Christian leaders with causing “social disturbances” and “subversion.” Public religious activity is subject to surveillance, and religious leaders are routinely detained for interrogations. Members of minorities who are largely Christian, such as the Hmong, are frequent targets for harassment and occasional armed assaults by security forces.

  In late December 2011, a campaign of arrests of young Christians broke out in northern Vietnam, apparently as part of a broad government effort to tighten the screws on potential sources of dissent. A young Catholic named Pierre Nguyen Dinh Cuong was abducted on Christmas Eve, one of at least sixteen cases of Christians disappearing during the period. Witnesses later reported that the young man had been taken to the provincial public security headquarters, though officials would not confirm that he was being held nor what charges had been filed against him. Local sources said that many of the kidnapping victims had been active in a local Catholic group that speaks out against violations of human rights and the repression of political dissent in Vietnam. Catholic sources in Vietnam saw the abductions as a clear way of sending a shot across the church’s bow, warning believers what would happen if their activism continues to embarrass the regime.

  In July 2012, a missionary chapel in Con Cuong, a rural area of the Nghe An province, was shut down by authorities, following raids on local worshippers by armed gangs. Dozens of Catholics were injured during a Mass. According to news reports, local Christians said they were the target of a “religious cleansing” campaign intended to wipe out any trace of the faith in the region. They also complained that local authorities had hired criminal thugs to intimidate and harass believers in the area. On Saturday, July 1, thugs and plainclothes police tried to prevent a priest from entering the chapel to say Mass, beating him when he refused. One of the laity who tried to come to the priest’s rescue, Mrs. Maria Thi Than Ngho, suffered a fractured skull in the fracas and was hospitalized in critical condition, while several other parishioners were arrested. The mob also desecrated a statue of the Virgin Mary while shouting abuse at the congregation.

  The priest injured during the assault vowed not to back down. “To die on the altar,” said Fr. J. B. Nguyen Dinh Thuc, “would be such a blessing to me.”

  Profile: Shahbaz Bhatti

  As a moral and spiritual matter, no one martyr’s death surpasses the significance of another’s. In terms of shock value, however, the assassination of Pakistani politician and human rights leader Shahbaz Bhatti on March 2, 2011, has an undeniable pride of place. Just forty-two when he was killed, Bhatti had been the lone Catholic in Pakistan’s cabinet, serving as minister of minority affairs.

  In death as in life, Bhatti stood with followers of other religions committed to defending human rights and the rule of law. Bhatti’s assassination came just two months after a Muslim politician, Salmaan Taseer, was killed for opposing the blasphemy law and for supporting Asia Bibi. A bodyguard shot Taseer twenty-six times, and when the assassin was later brought to trial, supporters showered h
im with rose petals. The judge who sentenced the killer was forced to flee the country for fear of reprisals, and Taseer’s own son was kidnapped by militants.

  Immediately after Bhatti was killed, there was a short-lived attempt by some investigators to shift blame to “internal Christian squabbles,” but most independent observers now agree the killing was carried out by a Pakistani offshoot of the Taliban. One such group took public credit for the murder.

  Of Bhatti’s Catholic piety, there can be no doubt. In an interview shortly before his death, he said, “I know Jesus Christ who sacrificed his life for others. I understand well the meaning of the cross. I am ready to give my life for my people.” There’s momentum in the Catholic world to have Bhatti declared a martyr and a saint of the church. On March 31, 2011, the Catholic bishops of Pakistan wrote to Benedict XVI to say they had unanimously approved a petition that Bhatti’s name be enrolled “in the martyrology of the universal church.”

  Bhatti’s brother, Paul, was a medical doctor who had been practicing in Italy at the time of the assassination. He has since returned to Pakistan to take up his brother’s cabinet post as “minister of national harmony,” and his cause of promoting religious tolerance. In an interview in the fall of 2012, Paul recounted cleaning out his brother’s spartan apartment shortly after he was killed, where the only three items on a small bedside table were the Bible, a rosary, and a picture of the Virgin Mary.

  Paul Bhatti said that he and his brother come from a deeply devout Catholic family in a village where the local church was staffed by Capuchin missionaries. As early as age fourteen, he said, his brother led a protest against a proposal to require Christians in Pakistan to carry special identity cards. Shahbaz led a hunger strike in front of the parliament building, he said, and eventually the proposed law was withdrawn.