During the era of French colonial occupation, when Algeria was incorporated as a territory of France, the country had a flourishing Christian presence largely due to the more than one million pieds-noirs, or European settlers. The vast majority left after Algerian independence in 1962. Life became precarious for the country’s tiny remaining Christian community in 1992, when the militant Islamic Salvation Front won Algeria’s first democratic elections, only to have the results annulled and military rule imposed. Several waves of violence ensued, leading to a civil war that resulted in a hundred thousand deaths and more than a million people injured or left homeless.
In their own quiet way, the monks of Tibhirine had been pioneers in Muslim/Christian relations. They gave their Muslim neighbors part of the monastery to use for daily prayer, taught them French, delivered their babies, and watched over their health. Algerians said the monks were regarded not just as Catholic brothers but also as “true Muslims.”
The monks were well aware of the risks of staying. In 1993, a band of militants showed up at the monastery demanding money and logistical help. Told they were interfering with preparations for Christmas Mass, the soldiers departed, apologizing for interrupting the religious observances. As things turned out, however, it was a temporary retreat.
Fr. Christian de Cherge, prior of the monastery, wrote the following words on Pentecost Sunday in 1996, a matter of weeks before his death at the age of fifty-nine:
If it should happen one day—and it could be today—that I become a victim of the terrorism that now seems ready to encompass all the foreigners in Algeria, I would like my community, my church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country.
I would like them to be able to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones allowed to fall into the indifference of anonymity. My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less.
I don’t see how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder.… I know the contempt in which Algerians taken as a whole can be engulfed.
This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills: immerse my gaze in that of the Father, to contemplate with him his children of Islam as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and to refashion the likeness, playing with the differences.
De Cherge and six other monks were kidnapped by elements of the Armed Islamic Group on March 27, 1996, and initially offered for ransom. Two months later, their severed heads were found. Three heads were hanging from a tree near a gas station; the other four had been tossed onto the grass. Besides de Cherge, the other victims were Celestin Ringeard, sixty-two; Christophe Lebreton, forty-five; Bruno Lemarchand, sixty-six, who was visiting from a monastery in Morocco; and Brs. Paul Favre Miville, fifty-seven, Michel Fleury, fifty-two, and Luc Dochier, eighty-two.
The monks of Tibhirine offer an antidote to facile theories about the relationship between Christianity and Islam. Their complex lives and deaths debunk both overly romantic notions of tolerance and coexistence as well as any hawkish insistence on an inevitable “clash of civilizations.” These Algerian martyrs were artisans of the patient and often painful work of building relationships, overcoming stereotypes, and confronting hard truths with both honesty and hope.
6
EASTERN EUROPE
Pastor Dritan Prroj, a thirty-four-year-old father of two, knew full well that leaving his exile in the United Kingdom in 2010 and returning to his native Albania would make him a marked man. Five years earlier in the city of Shkodra, where the family lived and where Prroj pastored a thriving evangelical church, his uncle had shot and killed a twenty-eight-year-old man who came into his place of business after hours. The man had been tossed out the night before, because he had been obnoxious and was bothering other customers, and the uncle suspected he was back to cause trouble—which seemed especially likely given that the man was armed and had brought a bodyguard. The uncle pulled out a gun and, in what he insisted was self-defense, killed the intruder.
In Albania, that’s rarely the end of things. The incident triggered a blood feud rooted in the kanun, a centuries-old set of traditional Albanian laws. According to the kanun, the uncle’s entire extended family was now subject to vengeance. Because the intruder had been shot in the face, which is considered a special form of disgrace, the kanun specified that two relatives of the shooter should pay for his offense with their own blood. Most members of the family immediately went into hiding.
For a time Dritan Prroj tried to maintain life as normal, but he repeatedly discovered people with guns sitting in cars outside his house hoping to get a shot at him. Friends went to the family of the killed man on his behalf, hoping to secure forgiveness, but they were always rebuffed. (The kanun specify that priests are off-limits, but the family of the killed man apparently didn’t think that applied to an evangelical pastor.) Eventually Prroj and his wife, Elona, decided to move to England, where Prroj ministered in another church. Albania, however, continued to gnaw at him. Friends say he felt God was calling him to return to the country and to continue building the church in Shkodra.
When Prroj came back, his routine was to take his children to school in the morning, go to the church for study, leave the church at 1:00 p.m., and then go pick up his children, Gabriel and Sarah (ages nine and seven at the time of his death). On October 8, 2010, as he was leaving the church to round up his kids, the twenty-one-year-old brother of the man shot by Prroj’s uncle fired six bullets into his body, including three in the head. Prroj died a short time later in a local hospital. An off-duty policeman chased the shooter and caught him. As he wrestled him to the ground, the shooter reportedly asked the policeman, “Did I kill him? Is he dead? Tell me he is dead!”
Prroj was well aware that one day the blood feud might claim his life. Friends and family members reportedly begged him to stay out of public view, but Prroj insisted he had to continue serving the community. He led his congregation in worship at regular times and predictable places, despite the risks. In the weeks prior to his death, he led the distribution of humanitarian aid provided when floods swallowed nearby villages, causing hundreds of Albanians to be without homes, food, or clothes. A week before his death, he and his wife had dinner with friends, who recalled him saying that he felt God had told him his life was in God’s hands. His brother later revealed that he and Dritan had agreed that if one of them was killed, the other would forswear vengeance, in a deliberate imitation of Christ. Prroj reportedly told friends that he suspected God might use his life to bring an end to the plague of the blood oath.
At the time he was shot, Prroj had two items in his hands. One was a Bible and the other was a briefcase containing notes for an essay he planned to write trying to convince Albanians to abandon blood feuds, which, according to a national reconciliation committee, have been responsible for as many as ninety-five hundred deaths since 1991. In a sign of the respect Prroj enjoyed, the local Catholic parish agreed to host his funeral, because his own small church could not contain the overflow crowd. His widow has started a foundation to fight the cultural tolerance of blood feuds in Albania and to minister to those affected by it, while she and Prroj’s brother continue to lead the congregation he pastored.
During the funeral, Elona summed up her husband’s view this way: “True revenge … is in forgiving.” During a massive rally in Tirana, the Albanian capital, two weeks after Prroj died, participants carried signs that read TO FORGIVE IS MANLY—an inversion of traditional cultural understandings, and a hint that Prroj’s witness had made a difference.
It might be tempting to conclude that Prroj did not die in the global war on Christians, given that he was slain for his blood ties, not his religious beliefs. Yet the manner in which he accepted that risk and the use he hoped that God would make of his death make clear that it’s impossible to understand the death of Pastor Dritan Prroj without a
lso grasping the reasons for which he lived.
EASTERN EUROPE: OVERVIEW
The term “Eastern Europe” can mean different things depending on who’s using the term. Some use it to mean everything east of Germany; some think it refers only to former members of the Warsaw Pact; others think it basically designates the majority-Orthodox states of the European continent. Without getting sucked into a geopolitical debate, we’ll use the term here to designate twenty-one states that, in one way or another, were once part of the Soviet sphere of influence: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.
In terms of religion, this definition of “Eastern Europe” includes five states where Catholicism is the dominant tradition (Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia), one country that’s overwhelmingly Muslim (Azerbaijan), and two others with mixed Muslim/Christian populations (Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo), which leaves thirteen where Orthodoxy sets the cultural tone. That includes Ukraine, though the country is also home to the largest Eastern Catholic church in the world, the Greek Catholic Church, which plays an important role in national affairs. The Czech Republic was historically home to both a large Catholic population and the Bohemian Reformation, though today it’s one of the least religious societies on earth, with only 16 percent of the population professing belief in God. (Social scientists often say the Czech Republic and the former East Germany are societies in which atheism is the “state church.”)
For much of the twentieth century, Eastern Europe was ground zero for the global war on Christians. The Soviet era unleashed several massive waves of anti-Christian persecution, generating millions of new martyrs. Prayer and activism for the church behind the Iron Curtain, often referred to as the “Church of Silence,” became a staple of Cold War Christian activism. Though conditions have improved dramatically with the collapse of Communism, there are still victims of the global war on Christians across Eastern Europe as a result of a variety of forces. In some cases, the protagonists are Muslim radicals; in others, authoritarian states or criminal gangs; in others the violence is Christian-on-Christian; and in still other instances, Christians fall prey to ancient cultural viruses, as the example of Dritan Prroj illustrates.
BELARUS
Sometimes considered the last surviving dictatorship in Europe, Belarus is dominated by fifty-eight-year-old President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the country since 1994. Human rights observers routinely rank Belarus under Lukashenko among the world’s worst offenders, charging that his regime provides almost no space for political opposition and represses any potential centers of dissent, including religious groups. The campaign of intimidation reportedly intensified following a disputed 2010 presidential election.
In theory, the constitution of Belarus provides for religious freedom and the equality of the different denominations. Yet the Orthodox Church remains the state church, some 85 percent of the population is Orthodox, and most other forms of Christianity are seen as a nuisance by the state. The Catholic and Lutheran churches are tolerated but not recognized, while other Christian denominations are often harassed and discouraged. Observers say that obtaining registration of a church in Belarus is often difficult, if not practically impossible. In practice, they say, it is impossible to carry on unauthorized religious activity without running the risk of severe sanctions. A 2002 Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations law makes unauthorized religious activity a crime subject to two years in prison and/or heavy fines. Among other complaints, church leaders routinely report difficulty in obtaining visas for clergy, even after remedial action is promised by government officials.
According to Open Doors, even officially registered religious organizations do not have the right to develop their own media, to establish educational institutions, to train personnel, or to invite foreign clergy to minister to their membership. Adherents do not have the right to share their convictions or to carry out religious activity beyond the borders of the location where the community is registered. Tolerated traditions, such as Catholicism and Lutheranism, are subject to surveillance by the state security agencies, and unsanctioned forms of Christianity such as evangelical and Pentecostal churches face arrest and punishment. In August 2009, a coalition of fifty Protestant pastors, many of whom had been punished for religious activity, wrote Lukashenko to complain about the lack of religious freedom.
Pro-democracy Christian activists are often special targets. Several leaders of the Christian Democratic Party in Belarus have been sentenced to long stretches in prison, with two party leaders dispatched to a labor camp. A youth leader in the party, Dzmitry Dashkevich, suffered inhumane conditions in prison and was subjected to forms of torture including sleep deprivation, denial of food, and constant psychological assault.
Church property also remains a contentious issue. An estimated 95 percent of the Orthodox churches that had been seized by the state during the Soviet era have been returned, but the Catholics and Lutherans have not had similar success. Officials have announced plans to turn several historic Catholic and Lutheran churches into museums or hotels, including a famed seventeenth-century monastery in Minsk. Church leaders also report steep difficulties in obtaining permits for the construction of new facilities, and say that stringent quality control checks imposed by the state typically cause costs to soar.
In May 2007, a legally registered Pentecostal congregation was raided and its pastor was arrested by police during a service attended by a hundred people. Pastor Antoni Bokun of John the Baptist Pentecostal Church was detained overnight at Minsk’s Central District Police Station, according to the human rights group Forum 18. Bokun was heavily fined, an amount roughly twenty times the minimum monthly wage, for holding an “unsanctioned mass meeting.”
In January 2009, a Catholic priest named Fr. Zbigniew Grygorcewicz, of Polish origins, was told that he was being expelled from Belarus for organizing a Christian music festival. In the same month, the New Life Church, a charismatic Christian group in Minsk, lost its appeal against the seizure of its church building. Prosecutors charged that the facility had begun life as a cowshed and was being used illegally for religious purposes, while church leaders complained they had repeatedly sought registration and been denied. In the same month, a Baptist pastor named Alexaander Yermalitsky was fined for hosting a religious event at which the Bible was read in his home.
In February 2009, two Danish visitors in Belarus were deported for “expressing ideas of a religious nature.” They had been filmed participating in a service at the Living Faith Church, a Pentecostal congregation located in the city of Gomel. One month later, a Christian rehabilitation program for alcohol and drug addicts was twice raided by police, on the grounds that residents had been overheard singing Christian hymns. Later in 2009, two Polish priests were informed by security agents that they had to cease all religious activity or face deportation.
In March 2010, an evangelical pastor in Belarus was twice fined more than a typical month’s wage for leading an unregistered church, following a police raid on his church’s worship service. In July 2010, another evangelical pastor named Viktor Novik was fined three times in one day for sharing his faith in a local village. Novik asserted that he had repeatedly applied for permission, although that was disputed by local officials.
In December 2012, the New Life Pentecostal Church on the outskirts of Minsk was once again under fire from government officials, who had established a December 5 deadline to evict the church from its premises, only to belay that order temporarily. Leaders of the church organized a thanksgiving service to celebrate their temporary victory but acknowledged that because the land and the building technically belong to the state, they have little leverage to compel a happy ending. At one stage in 2006, church members had organized a hunger strike to stave off an earlier attempt to evict the church and bulldoze the st
ructure. Church leaders claimed they were the victims of “the hostility of the dictatorial government of Alexander Lukashenko.”
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Bosnia and Herzegovina is officially made up of what it calls three “constituent peoples”: Bosniaks, the term for the Muslim ethnic group; Serbs, who are overwhelmingly Orthodox; and the Catholic Croats. Functionally, the country is divided into two essentially autonomous states: the Federation of Bosnia and the Republic of Srpska, with Catholics and Muslims living in the former and Serbian Orthodox in the latter. All that makes the country a cauldron for interreligious and intra-Christian tensions, and thus it’s little surprise that Bosnia and Herzegovina is among the combat zones in the global war on Christians. Ethnic, political, and social discrimination are serious problems against non-Serbs in the predominantly Serbian region, against non-Croats in western Herzegovina, and against non-Muslims in central Bosnia. Quite often, these forms of conflict easily give way to, and augment, religious violence.
Leaders of religious minorities routinely complain about discrimination in the regions of the country where they live, both by government officials and at the grass roots. Christians often face difficulties in using their own properties for religious purposes. The Alliance of Protestant-Evangelical Churches in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for instance, has run into problems while seeking registration with the state, allegedly because bureaucrats didn’t know what to make of the term “alliance” in a religious context.
Many Christian leaders have also expressed concern about what they see as increasingly radical forms of Islam. Some reports suggest that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a training ground for Muslim terrorists, charging that more than a hundred thousand Bosnian Muslim youth have been exposed to an extremist Wahhabi vision of Islam through a variety of organizations active in the country, many of them enjoying foreign financial support. Some media accounts say that young Bosnian men who attend officially registered Islamic youth camps receive training in marksmanship and explosives.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 18
