Christian persecution growing

An array of activists yesterday offered a grim assessment of religious freedom around the world, saying that 2005 years after Jesus’ birth, many of His followers are severely repressed.

The chief villains in a “Christmas Under Siege Around the World” panel at the Capitol were Indonesia, China, Uzbekistan, Iran and North Korea.

“Anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world … is ugly, it’s growing, and third, the mass media seem to generally ignore or downplay its gravity,” Catholic Archbishop of Denver Charles Chaput said.

The press has been particularly remiss, he said, in covering Indonesia, where three teenage Christian girls recently were beheaded by Muslim militants.

“News reports tend to describe Indonesia’s violence as generically ‘sectarian,’ as if Muslim and Christian extremists were mutually responsible,” the archbishop said. “This is troubling and flatly false. The bloodshed is overwhelmingly provoked and carried out by Islamic militants against the Christian minority.”

The archbishop was one of eight panelists who painted disturbing portraits of life for the average Christian in about a dozen countries.

The setting — a small chamber off the Senate galleries with hot chocolate and cookies as refreshments and brightly colored buttons offering Christmas greetings in Chinese, Korean and Arabic — was incongruous with large photos of a tortured or imprisoned Pakistani and Laotian Hmong Christians.

Jeff King, a panelist representing International Christian Concern, offered attendees a chance to view photos of the beheaded girls. There were no takers.

Indonesia, he said, had made it “practically impossible” for a Christian congregation to get a building permit. The government is drafting new laws about church buildings, “but the bottom line is, the cure is worse than the cold.”

Notwithstanding the photos about the room of the second Bush inauguration, the Bush administration came in for criticism by Lawrence Uzzell, president of the International Religious Freedom Watch.

“We’ve known for the last decade that most of the State Department bureaucracy needs constant pressure to give these issues the attention they deserve,” he said. “We now know that the White House also needs pressure, no matter which party is in power, sometimes especially with an administration that’s tempted to think that it can take its religious supporters for granted.”

Mr. Uzzell’s chief complaint was with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, describing both as “remote desert dictatorships” that are “the most vicious persecutors of religious faith” among the former Soviet republics.

Muslims of all stripes get the brunt of bad treatment in Uzbekistan, he said, and the country’s reputation as “among the leading torturers of all Eurasia” is a result of its horrendous treatment of even the most moderate Muslim.

“The fact that Washington has not named Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan as ‘countries of particular concern’ under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act ought to be a major scandal,” he said.

Uzbekistan is “one of the places where renditions are said to happen,” he said, referring to the U.S. practice of sending foreign captives to Third World countries for imprisonment and torture.

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