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Friday, October 15, 2004 |
EXODUS OF IRAQI CHRISTIANS IN FULL FLOOD AS TARGETED KILLINGS GROW
By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
BAGHDAD, IRAQ (ANS) -- Seven Christian workers from the Baghdad Hunting Club were recently killed and two others injured when four men, their faces covered by keffiyehs, blasted the believers’ Kia minibus with gunfire, writes Kim Sengupta in an October 12 article on the www.independent.co.uk website.
“It was midnight in Baghdad, not a time to be out in this place of violence. But the workers from the Baghdad Hunting Club had almost made it back home through the deserted streets when the tires of their Kia minibus were shredded by a burst of gunfire,” Sengupta wrote.
“The shots had come from a black Opel saloon which had tracked them from the club -- a prestigious haunt of Iraq's new rich -- after finishing the late shift. Four men, their faces covered by keffiyehs, slid open the door of the minibus and sprayed the occupants with Kalashnikov fire.
“Their targets, seven Christians, were killed almost instantly. Two others were injured but survived. The dead were all breadwinners for their families in the close-knit Christian community in the suburb of al-Doura. These families now want to leave Iraq, joining the exodus of thousands of their co-religionists since the war.”
The murders were the latest deadly attack against Iraq's Christians, a systematic and brutal campaign by Islamic extremists which began soon after the "liberation" by the United States and Britain, Sengupta said.
So far, 110 have been killed. In August, four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul were blown up in a co-ordinated series of car bombings, killing 12 people and injuring 61 others.
“In September, another Baghdad church was bombed. There have also been mortar attacks on community centres, shootings of Christian shopkeepers and kidnappings of businessmen for extortion,” she said.
The result had been a flow of Christians -- mostly middle-class and members of the intelligentsia and entrepreneurs -- out of the country, with a marked acceleration in the past few months. About 45,000 have gone so far out of a community estimated to be between 600,000 and 700,000.
Pascale Warda, the Iraqi interim government's minister for displacement and migration, who is herself a Christian, says there is no chance of halting the exodus while the attacks continue.
Christians in Iraq faced little religious persecution under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, Sengupta says.
Senior members of the Baath party, including Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, were Christians. Now, they say, they receive scant protection from the US and British military in the face of the onslaught. Some of the early killings, mainly of shopkeepers, happened in the supposedly safer, British-run south of the country.
Sengupta writes that he interim government's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, blames the church bombings on followers of the Jordanian-born Sunni militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Iraqi police say fighters from Muqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army could be responsible for those and other sectarian attacks. But whatever the truth, hardly anyone has been arrested.
“Those killed in the minibus shooting worked as cooks and waiters at the hunting club. The expensive institution once used by the Baath elite has now reopened. Membership stands at 1,500 with plenty more willing to pay the annual $450 (£250) subscription to use its tennis courts, pools and restaurants,” she said.
Among the dead were Emanuel Markus, 42, and his 16-year-old son, Maradona. Another son, Elias, 17, who was shot in the arm, is so terrified and traumatized that he has now fled the family home.
Dressed in a black mourning gown, Kisno Markus sat at home clutching photographs of her husband and two sons. The remaining seven members of the family are all women. They now have to survive in an Iraq where work is scarce for all, and even more so for working-class women, Sengupta wrote.
"I know it is going to be very hard, but I cannot think about that now," said Mrs Markus. "I have looked at the dead faces of my husband and my son, and that is what keeps on going through my mind.
"They were very close -- my husband named my son after his favorite footballer. They used to laugh about that. My other son, Elias, has gone to Zakha, the last village in Iraq before you get to Turkey. That is how frightened he is. We are frightened as well. We must leave. We cannot afford to go abroad right now, but we are moving to stay with relations in another part of Baghdad. We are all very scared."
Across the street, 50-year-old Khuki Elias Kreto mourned her son, Nabin, aged 25. "He was my only boy -- the only one -- and they took him away," she said. "What kind of people are these? My son was so quiet that the neighbors said they did not even know when he was in the house. He has never harmed anyone."
Another victim, Emir Shabo Gorgis, supported his wife, six children, an elderly father and his sister on basic pay of $10 a week, Sengupta said.
"He had worked very hard all his life," said his widow, 27-year-old Ilhan. "We never got involved in politics. We have good Muslim friends and neighbours. I do not know why there is so much hatred."
She said the Iraqi police and American forces turned up at the scene of the shooting, but the families say they do not expect anyone to be arrested.
The director of the hunting club, Maksood Al-Sanjary, said: "What has happened is very sad. We would like to help in some way, but these people were the responsibility of a contractor to the club. We are living in very bad times."
Christians are often targeted in Iraq's thriving abduction industry because they are perceived as being well off, Sengupta said. Samir Sajouri, 33, was kidnapped from his furniture shop and held for a week until his family paid a ransom of $35,000. Now he is taking his wife and three children to Jordan.
"We did not have the money," he said. "My wife had to sell stock and borrow to pay this. I was treated very badly by the men who had kidnapped me. They beat me and kicked me. There were always insults because I am a Christian. It is strange -- 90 per cent of those I employed were Muslims," said Mr Sajouri.
At the Church of the Holy Rosary in Karada, Father Butros Haddad was seeing a parishioner seeking her son's baptism certificate.
"It means they are leaving Iraq," he said. "Every day I hear about one or two families leaving from this parish and others. I have been a priest for 35 years and I have never seen the community face such a time of lawlessness.
"It is not bad just for the Christians: our fellow Iraqis -- Muslims -- are also suffering. But on top of all other troubles, the Christians feel they are being especially targeted. The problem is that the Americans don't seem to be able to do anything about security. There is a sense of terrible fear."
. 9:34:15 PM 
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VIETNAM'S CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED AS STATE SEES HIDDEN ENEMY
By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
HANOI, VIETNAM (ANS) -- The Vietnamese congregation of the Protestant church in Hanoi, Vietnam sings enthusiastically, maybe unaware a government official is watching them. It is a very ordinary building sitting amid the graceful pagodas, temples and French Colonial architecture, writes Sandra Jordan in an October 15 article on the www.independent.co.uk website.
The pastor sits at the back of the church, Jordan writes.
"I don't have government permission to give an interview," he said, sweat running down his face even though it was a rare cold day in Hanoi.
Foreign journalists are accompanied everywhere by government minders and it is dangerous for Vietnamese to criticize the government, especially during a visit to one of just 300 legal churches that service Vietnam's two million Protestants, Jordan said.
Outside, a young woman led the way to a group of men in the courtyard.
"They will only talk if I translate," she said. The men were from the Xao tribe from Lai Chau and Caobang in the far north. They had been converted to Christianity by the neighbouring H'Mong, another ethnic minority who had been Christianized when they fought alongside Americans during the war.
Jordan said the Xao men had come to worship in the legal Hanoi church and to apply to the government for permission to open a church of their own. The 4,000 Christians in their region are forced to worship in illegal "house churches." Christians, they said, could practice their religion in the cities but in the countryside they were being beaten for their beliefs, and forced to recant Christianity.
A woman who works at the church told Jordan she had to care for injured Christians from Lao Cai and Caobang who come to Hanoi for treatment because local authorities broke their bones or poured boiling water on them for their religion. A farmer said he'd been arrested and beaten by two policemen for five hours last March for converting to Christianity.
Two thirds of Vietnam's Protestants are ethnic minorities, and many live in remote areas where neighbors are sometimes suspicious of the converts, Jordan writes.
"A lot of people don't understand, so they say he who believes in Jesus Christ is a follower of America and foreigners," said a man called Cao.
Thirty years after Vietnam defeated America, the communist government has made its peace with capitalism. Huge propaganda posters featuring party slogans stand alongside gaudy neon billboards advertising cars and French perfume, unexpected in one of the world's four remaining communist countries, Jordan said.
Last year the US became Vietnam's biggest trading partner, giving Hanoi the second-fastest growing economy in Asia, she said.
She writes that increased economic liberty has brought the Vietnamese personal freedoms unimaginable a decade ago. With the easing of restrictions, evangelical Protestantism has exploded, and is practiced in thousands of illegal "house churches." This is anathema to the communist government who apply strict regulations to "approved" religions.
Jordan said Government officials fear evangelical Christianity, viewed as "a religion that originates in America," is being used to undermine Communism through peaceful revolution.
Last Easter, thousands of ethnic minority tribes people took part in demonstrations in the Central Highlands, she said. They were protesting against the confiscation of ancestral lands and religious repression. The marches, attended by around 30,000, according to Human Rights Watch, were brutally quashed by the military. Most of the Montagnards -- the collective French name for the Highlanders -- are Protestants.
Christian groups in America dubbed it the "Easter Massacre", and the US-based Montagnard Foundation claimed 400 Christians were killed.
Jordan said this figure was furiously denied by the Vietnamese government, which put the death toll at two and called the Montagnard Foundation a terrorist organization. The government is now convinced the hill tribes, many of whom have been pushed off their land for state coffee plantations, are being incited to fight for an independent state by counter-revolutionary exiles in the US.
"The Montagnards have always been at the bottom of the social structure," said John, an undercover western missionary who has been working in the Highlands for nearly 40 years.
"Then along comes the Christian message. For tribal people who have been oppressed by the system. They stand up and say we can't be pushed around. When the systems sees an alternate ideology developing it begins to persecute.”
The "Yardies" of the Central Highlands fought alongside Americans during the war, and US veterans have called for America to impose sanctions on Vietnam. One US doctor who worked in the region during the war said: "After the war was over and the communists won, they still needed an enemy and the protestant faith was a convenient enemy. Religion is seen as a tool to interrupt and overthrow the communist system."
The US designated Vietnam a "country of particular concern" over its religious freedom record. The Vietnamese government points to the American's record in Iraq today and Vietnam 30 years ago, to accuse Washington of "the pot calling the kettle black," Jordan said.
But Hanoi might do well to re-read their own recommendations: "Fighting the contagion of Christianity in the minority areas has the opposite effect... Actually the numbers grow slowly if we have a relaxed policy, and if we crack down hard, Christianity grows faster."
Outside the Hanoi Church the Xao tribesmen were planning to head back to the mountains. "We pray to God to give us aid," said Thang, a farmer, "no foreigner comes and give us food or medicine. Only God helps us."
Google It!. 9:26:29 PM
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NORTH KOREA: Christians murdered, sources state |
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By Magda Hornemann, Forum 18 News Service |
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A North Korean army general who become a Christian was, after he had begun to evangelise in his unit, shot dead by another senior army officer in 2003, Protestant sources have told Forum 18 News Service. Other known Christians are in some cases martyred by being shot, or are imprisoned. The sentence is dependent upon the situation. Forum 18 knows of the execution and torture of Christians continuing, but has not been able to establish if followers of other religions have suffered similarly. North Korean Protestants are said to be "very, very strong believers", resisting material inducements in prison to recant their faith, but when they stubbornly refuse to recant they are then shot. The state is said to be watching the increase in contacts between North Korea and the rest of the world "very carefully", and "false believers" may be used by the authorities to contact missionaries in humanitarian aid initiatives. Details of sources cannot be revealed by Forum 18, for fear of reprisals against them. [read more...] |
Google It!. 9:22:03 PM
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Last Update: 11/1/2004; 8:38:45 AM
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