As of October 2012, the United Nations estimated that 300,000 Syrians had fled the country, while at least 1.5 million were internally displaced. A disproportionate share of those refugees and displaced people were believed to be Christians. What’s distinct about the Christian exiles, according to the CNEWA report, is that they generally haven’t headed for major refugee camps in Turkey or Jordan under the auspices of either the UN or international NGOs, fearing further exposure to rebel forces and to Islamic radicals. Instead the Christians have headed for southern Syria and Lebanon, relying on extended family and friends. As a result, these Christian refugees are not being reached by major international relief efforts, and are expected to be most at risk of hunger and disease.
The CNEWA report cites several waves of displacement among Syria’s Christians since the anti-Assad uprising erupted in March 2011:
• In Homs, anti-government militants have expelled 90 percent of the city’s Christians and confiscated their residences by force, according to the Fides news agency. Sources say the militants went door-to-door in the neighborhoods of Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan, “forcing Christians to flee, without giving them the chance to take their belongings.” At least fifty thousand Christians sought refuge in the Wadi al-Nasara area (the name means “Valley of the Christians”), in western Syria near Lebanon, as well as in Damascus and Tartous.
• In Qusayr, nine miles from Homs, a Christian population estimated at ten thousand was compelled to flee following an ultimatum from the military chief of the armed opposition. Some mosques relaunched his message, announcing: “Christians must leave Qusayr within six days, which expires this Friday.” The ultimatum expired June 8, and sources say the vast majority of Christians left the area.
• Rableh is a Christian village around fifteen miles to the north of Homs, near Qusayr. Half of its seven thousand people were Greek Catholic, and the rest were Maronite. It became a refuge for five thousand of the Christians displaced from Qusayr, and following their arrival, the village was placed under siege by the rebels. Government forces then imposed a siege on the rebels, and the village turned into a battlefield. Hundreds of Christians are believed to have died.
• In Deir el Zor, around five hundred Christian families left their homes following acts of violence and threats against them by the opposition militants. Many found refuge in a nearby town called Al Hassake, which has a Kurdish majority.
• In Aleppo, the second-largest city in Syria, the situation of the large Christian population is increasingly imperiled as fighting spreads from one neighborhood to another. In November 2012, a Catholic missionary in Aleppo described the situation in one Christian neighborhood this way: “It’s one of the poorest parts of Aleppo, and one of the most devastated by the fighting.… Many of these Christians now don’t have a home, they don’t have any work, they’re penniless, and on top of all that, most of the refugee centers are for Muslims. Although in general co-existence is good, that doesn’t lessen the risk posed by fundamentalist Muslims taking advantage of the situation. They’re a threat to minorities, and many Christians don’t go to the refugee centers out of fear.”
In January 2012, the Catholic relief group Aid to the Church in Need said that a secret report out of Syria, whose author could not be identified for security reasons, charged that Christians were being murdered and kidnapped as part of the violence spreading across the country. The report said that the anti-Christian attacks had intensified in the three weeks following Christmas 2012. Accounts provided in the report included the story of two Christian men, one age twenty-eight and the other a thirty-seven-year-old father with a pregnant wife, who were allegedly kidnapped by rebels in separate incidents and later found dead. The first was found hanged, and the other was reportedly cut to pieces and thrown in a river. Four more Christians were kidnapped and abducted, with their captors threatening to kill them too if they didn’t convert or leave the area.
In March 2012, a deadly car bomb exploded in the heavily Christian Suleimaniyeh neighborhood of Aleppo, leaving at least two people dead and thirty more wounded. Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, the Orthodox archbishop of Aleppo, said at the time that his people were terrified and many were planning to leave the city.
In April 2012, there were no Easter services in the churches of Homs for the first time in centuries. The three principal Christian churches in the city were deserted, while smaller churches and places of worship had already been destroyed. Priests and worshippers gathered in private homes, in secret, for fear of reprisals.
In July 2012, the German magazine Spiegel interviewed a group of Christian refugees from Qusayr. Rim Khouri, a young Christian woman who fled the town with her family, said: “Last summer Salafists came to Qusayr, foreigners. They stirred the local rebels against us.… They sermonized on Fridays in the mosques that it was a sacred duty to drive us away. We were constantly accused of working for the regime, and Christians had to pay bribes to the jihadists repeatedly in order to avoid getting killed.”
Khouri said that her own husband had fallen victim to anti-Christian animosity. “He was stopped at a rebel checkpoint near the state-run bakery,” she said. “The rebels knew he was a Christian. They took him and then threw his dead body in front of the door of his parents’ house four or five hours later.”
In October 2012, a car bomb went off in the Christian heart of Damascus, in the Bab Touma (“Thomas Gate”) square, killing at least ten people and leaving fifteen others seriously injured. Some observers believed the attack was a response to a Vatican announcement that a delegation of five senior bishops from around the world would lead a peace mission to Syria, while others saw it more broadly as an attempt to strike fear in the Christian population of Damascus. Because of the violence, as well as logistical difficulties, the Vatican delegation never materialized.
In November 2012, a car bomb exploded in front of the Orthodox Church of the Annunciation in the city of Raqqah, in northeastern Syria, causing two deaths and injuring a woman, all civilians. According to sources cited in a report by the Fides news agency, the Christians of the area had almost entirely fled. The attack came on the heels of two other church bombings in October, one directed at the Evangelical Church of Damascus and another in front of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Deir Ezzor.
Also in November 2012, a Syrian Catholic nun named Agnes-Mariam de la Croix reported that a Christian taxi driver named Andrei Arbashe had been pulled from his vehicle by rebel forces in western Syria and beheaded, with his body scattered in parts on the ground as food for stray dogs. Sr. de la Croix told reporters at the time, “The uprising has been hijacked by Islamist mercenaries who are more interested in fighting a holy war than in changing the government,” and she added that “Christians are paying a high price.”
The kidnapping of two prominent Orthodox bishops in April 2013 further underscored the dangers. The Syriac Orthodox bishop of Aleppo, Msgr. Youhanna Ibrahim, and the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo and Iskenderun, Msgr. Boulos al-Yaziji, were taken from their car by a group of armed men on the road to Aleppo, while their driver, a Syriac Orthodox deacon, was shot to death. Kidnapping Christians reportedly has become a growth industry among armed factions seeking revenue streams. In late February 2013, the website Ora Pro Siria, operated by Italian missionaries in Syria, launched an emergency fund-raising appeal it called “Ransom a Christian.” The website said the going price for a kidnapped priest was in the neighborhood of $200,000.
In June 2013, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, a Catholic group representing the Franciscan order that has a centuries-long presence in the Middle East, reported that a cluster of Christian villages along Syria’s Orontes River had been almost totally destroyed in the fighting.
“Of the 4,000 inhabitants of the village of Ghassanieh, as just one example, the local pastor reports that no more than 10 people remain,” said Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, director of the Custody, adding that bombs had also seriously damaged a Franciscan monastery in Kna
yeh near the border with Lebanon. “There is no longer any glass in the windows, the roofs have been damaged, water is leaking everywhere and people are in terror as the bombs continue to fall,” he said.
The Custody issued an emergency appeal for food and medicine to aid Syria’s Christian population.
In August 2013, a well-known Italian Jesuit priest and pro-democracy activist named Fr. Paolo Dall’Oglio disappeared under mysterious circumstances in Syria. The Vatican issued a communique lamenting the uncertainty about Dall’Oglio’s situation, as well as “the absolute silence that weighs on the fate of the two [Orthodox] bishops and priests kidnapped months ago, as well as so many others, Syrians and foreigners, in the same painful situation.”
TURKEY
Turkey may be an officially secular state, but sociologically it’s an Islamic society, with a population of seventy-five million that’s 97 percent Muslim. There are just 150,000 Christians in the country, mostly Greek Orthodox. Only the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities are officially recognized, so other forms of Christianity are forced to operate in a juridical gray zone—not quite illegal, but not quite fully legitimate either. In general, the greatest threat facing Christians comes not from the most religiously zealous forms of Islam but from ultranationalists who see Christians as agents of the West, often accusing them of being in league with Kurdish separatists.
Christians report various forms of harassment, including difficulties in obtaining permits to build or repair churches, surveillance by security agencies, unfair judicial treatment, and discrimination in housing and employment. The Greek Orthodox Halki Seminary is an emblematic case. Founded in 1844 as the principal school of theology for the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, it was considered one of the premier centers of learning in the Orthodox world. It was forced to shut down in 1971, after Turkey adopted a law prohibiting the operation of private universities. Today the buildings and grounds are maintained by monks, while a global campaign to reopen the facility has been under way for more than forty years. Many Orthodox believers see the closure as a way of gradually suffocating the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Toward the end of 2009, Bartholomew I, the normally reserved and diplomatic Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes. He shocked Turkey’s political establishment by arguing that Turkey’s Christians are second-class citizens and said that he felt “crucified” by a state that wants to see his church simply die out.
Christian converts from Islam experience strong opposition, frequently being disinherited by their families and losing their employment. Foreign missionaries are often denied residency permits if they identify themselves as religious workers. Christian worship is officially permitted, but congregations report they experience various forms of harassment and verbal abuse. When Turkey was negotiating membership in the European Union, it adopted a series of reforms intended to protect religious minorities in keeping with the Copenhagen criteria on human rights, but local sources say the implementation of those guarantees is inconsistent. As a result of these pressures, Turkey’s already small Christian community is today in further decline.
During the past decade, physical attacks on Christians have become increasingly common. In January 2006, a Protestant church leader named Kamil Kiroglu, a Muslim convert to Christianity, was beaten unconscious by five young men. The attack followed church services on January 8, and Kiroglu later reported that one of the young men, wielding a knife, had shouted, “Deny Jesus or I will kill you now!” Another reportedly shouted, “We don’t want Christians in this country!” As the attackers left, they told a friend of Kiroglu’s that they had left a gift for him. It turned out to be a three-foot-long curved knife, left behind as a further warning against Christian activity.
In February 2006, a well-known Italian Catholic missionary priest named Fr. Andrea Santoro was gunned down by a sixteen-year-old Muslim in the small city of Trabzon. The teen reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” as he fired. The young man told police that he had been angered by Danish cartoons insulting Muhammad. Other observers floated different theories about the motive. Some suggested the teenager had been put up to the killing by the mafia, angry at Santoro for his opposition to the thriving local trade in prostitutes. (In a letter to the pope published after his death by L’Osservatore Romano, Santoro had quoted from three Georgian victims of the prostitution trade asking the pope to visit Turkey to speak out on their behalf.) Others believed the teenager had heard rumors that Catholic priests would give money to Muslims to convert to Christianity, and became angry when Santoro declined. For his part, the boy’s father said he had a history of mental illness, and styled the attack as a senseless act of madness.
Santoro’s bishop at the time, Luigi Padovese, insisted that a virulent climate of anti-Christian propaganda was part of the backdrop. (Padovese would later be killed himself.) As one example, Padovese cited a rural Turkish newspaper that in 2006 carried an article titled “A Priest Sighted.” It reported that local children had seen a priest in the vicinity of their town but chased him away, to great applause. The article quoted a local politician: “Priests who arrive in our area want to reestablish the Christian Greek Orthodox state that was here before. There are spies among these priests, working for the West.”
Three other Catholic priests were attacked shortly after the murder of Santoro. Fr. Martin Kmetec, a Slovenian, was threatened by nationalists in the city of Izmir, while a mob reportedly chanted, “We will kill you all!” A French priest named Fr. Pierre Brunissen was stabbed with a knife in Samsun, while a French Capuchin priest named Fr. Henri Leylek was attacked in the Mediterranean city of Mersin. A forty-seven-year-old man was arrested for the assault on Brunissen, but police denied any religious motive, saying the perpetrator suffered from mental illness. Witnesses, however, said the man had complained that the seventy-four-year-old priest was attempting to convert Muslims. No arrests were made in the other cases.
In January 2007, a Turkish journalist of Armenian descent named Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul. A prominent Protestant, Dink was known as an advocate for human and minority rights, including criticizing Turkey for its denial of the Armenian genocide. He had been prosecuted three times for “denigrating Turkishness,” and he frequently received death threats. He was shot to death by Ogün Samast, a seventeen-year-old Turkish nationalist, shortly after the premier of a documentary on the Armenian genocide. Dink was a member of both the Armenian Apostolic Church, a branch of Orthodoxy, and an Armenian evangelical fellowship. Though he was killed primarily for his pro-Armenian politics, most observers said Dink’s Christian beliefs also provided a pretext. Observers also said that the Dink assassination illustrated the increasing militancy of the Turkish nationalist underground.
In April 2007, a particularly gruesome murder took place in the central Anatolian city of Malatya, where three Protestant Christian missionaries, two Turks and one German, were tortured, stabbed, and strangled. The five young assassins, armed with knives and covered in blood, were arrested at the scene of the crime. All five turned out to have links to Turkish nationalist groups. The victims were:
• Necati Aydin, a Turkish convert to Christianity from Izmir, who operated a small Christian publishing house in Malatya called Zirve (the name is Turkish for “peak”). Since 2005, he had served as the minister of the small Protestant community in Malatya.
• Tilmann Geske, a German missionary and pastor of a Protestant Free Church in Germany. He had moved to Turkey in 1997 along with his wife and three children to teach English, and he also preached in the local community.
• Ugur Yuskel, who came from an Alevi family in Elazig, a province of Turkey east of Malatya. He had studied in Izmit, where he came into contact with a local Protestant community and converted to Christianity. He had worked for the Zirve publishing house since 2005.
A crescendo to the violence came in June 2010, when Luigi Padovese, the Catholic Apostolic Vicar for Anatolia and presid
ent of the country’s Catholic bishops’ conference, was killed by his driver and longtime aide, Murat Altun. The murder took place at the bishop’s residence in Iskenderun. An autopsy showed that Padovese had received multiple stab wounds to the chest and was then beheaded. Although both Turkish and Vatican officials played down any religious motive, suggesting the driver suffered from mental illness, some experts believe the pattern of wounds reflected an Islamic ritual killing. Witnesses reported that Altun had shouted, “Allahu Akbar, I have killed the greatest Satan!” A fellow Catholic bishop in Turkey, Ruggero Franceschini, claimed that the killing was the work of “religious fanatics and ultranationalists.”
In December 2011, a journalist writing for the Turkish daily Zaman complained that “the Vatican is not doing anything” to ensure that the investigation of Padovese’s death “is handled in a serious manner.” Columnist Orhan Kemal Cengïz wrote that if the Vatican would take a more aggressive stance, it would “really contribute to the well-being of all non-Muslims” and offer “a huge contribution to the promotion of human rights and freedom of religion in Turkey.”
Profile: The Martyrs of Algeria
Perhaps the most compelling martyrology of the last two decades belongs to seven Catholic monks in Algeria who went to their deaths in 1996 amid that country’s bloody civil war, after having been kidnapped and held by militants for two months. They belonged to the legendary Trappist order and lived in an Algerian monastery called Notre-Dame de l’Atlas de Tibhirine, developing deep friendships with their Muslim neighbors. The story of the Tibhirine monks has been told in books, in sermons, and even in an award-winning 2010 French film titled Of Gods and Men.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 17
