Special Report:

Ten of the World’s Most Difficult Areas for Christians

Political ideology, religious extremism and social instability continue to provide a
breeding ground for severe Christian persecution worldwide. With the approach of November
14 and the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (IDOP), Compass Direct
wanted to highlight 10 of the worst persecution areas. Of course, these 10 are not the
only places where Christians suffer for their faith, and the problem is often much more
complex than can be easily summarized. Yet for Western Christians just beginning to
understand the extent of attacks on the church, we hope this report will form a basis for
a growing knowledge and involvement.

THE CAUCASUS "Awash in Anarchy"

Infamous as one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, Chechnya has martyred several
of the Christians it held for ransom this past year. Radical Muslims in the breakaway
republic and neighboring Dagestan can be expected to continue kidnapping any Christian
believer left in the region, especially local converts of ethnic Muslim heritage who
convert to Christianity. The Muslim extremists assume that all Christians have well-heeled
contacts in the West who could pay large sums of money. Also, as trained Islamists under
the strident influence of Saudi Wahabbism they want to stop all Christian missionary
efforts among the nominally Muslim populace.

Increasingly cornered in a punishing resistance to the recent Russian military
offensive launched in August, local government leaders are reiterating their commitment to
establishing independent Muslim states, built squarely on Islamic "sharia" law.
However, they remain unable to stop the rampant anarchy in the region, where various
warlords command their own large armed forces.

CENTRAL ASIA "Back to KGB Days"

At least three of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia continue to backpedal
from their initial pledges to establish democratically guaranteed religious freedoms after
they became independent in the early 1990s.

This past year Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and more recently Azerbaijan have taken more
hard-line approaches through their government-controlled Committees of Religious Affairs
to squeeze out the small Protestant Christian communities, many of which include
ministries among the ethnic Muslim majority population. By revising their laws which
require all religious groups to become officially registered, all three states have in
effect made it almost impossible for these small groups to remain legal. However, the
Muslim establishment and the Russian Orthodox Church achieved prompt legal status as the
"accepted" religious communities in each nation.

Repeated police raids against Protestant churches during their regular worship services
continue to intimidate church members and their pastors by interrogations, confiscating
their Bibles and other Christian materials, pressuring employers to dismiss anyone
"caught" in such a raid, and fining their leaders sizeable sums.

All three countries have concocted weak pretexts to imprison Christian pastors, either
temporarily or for long sentences. In the face of an international outcry, Uzbekistan
finally retracted stiff prison terms imposed upon four pastors "convicted" this
past year on fabricated drug charges. In an apparent show of apology, officials began to
process these pastors’ long-stalled church applications for official registration.
But having grown up under the old Soviet system, local Christians are wary, knowing that
in the coming months, new roadblocks could still be created to prevent their churches from
becoming legal entities in their homeland.

CHINA "Tightening the Screws"

"If we (the Communist Party) give you prosperity in the economic realm, you must
give up freedom in the social/political realm." Essentially this was the
"bargain" the late Deng Xiaoping struck with the Chinese people in the 1980s and
is still the arrangement today. Many western analysts believe it is a recipe for
implosion.

It has always been a bad bargain for China’s 60 million-plus Christians—the
vast majority of whom remain outside the official state-controlled Three Self church.
Remaining outside means China’s Protestants are viewed as a "criminal cult"
that if organized could mount a political challenge to the Party’s hegemony. In 1999,
over 50 house church leaders were rounded up, mainly in the central revival province of
Henan. Even in the cities, surveillance has greatly increased, especially before the
October 1 celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s
Republic of China.

The paranoia of the Party is not likely to decrease as social disorder increases.
China’s old men know only one tactic to keep order—tighten the totalitarian
screws. China’s house churches can only expect more suffering under this scenario.

Even within the official church, a more wintry ideological wind is blowing. Annoyed
that within the Three Self over 70 percent of the pastors are evangelicals, a conference
recently decreed that all pastors study the very liberal theology of Bishop K.H. Ding,
long-time leader of the Three Self. Failure to toe this line and think like Ding is
causing a purge at some of the seminaries.

For all the worsening climate however, the oppression is always unevenly spaced.
Implementation of central policy is always up to local cadres, some of which are quite
sympathetic to Christians, and others quite hostile. Not for the first time, the
world’s longest continuous civilization defies easy categorization.

COLOMBIA "Violence and Chaos"

A recent gathering near Bogota of the National Evangelical Commission for Human Rights
and Peace included a talk on why pastors are frequent targets of rival armed factions. A
flyer cited reasons why they’re singled out for threats or murder by the
country’s warring groups. Here are some of those reasons:

• For suspected infiltration.
• For inflammatory language in their sermons.
• For working in human rights, for non-violence and the national peace movement.
• For the economic prosperity of the church or pastor.
• For relations with "gringos"—pastors perceived as US CIA agents.
• For disobeying orders from an armed group, such as to not visit certain towns, to not
  hold services, or to not collaborate with the group by providing it with financing or
  volunteers.
• For perceived indifference to taking part in community service.

Violence between leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, narco-traffickers,
Colombian army special forces and even satanic cults has pushed Colombia to the brink of
anarchy. No group recognizes neutrality as an option in this 35-year-old war that demands
every civilian to take sides. There’s no hiding place within Colombia’s borders,
so refugees flee to neighboring countries and the United States.

In the hemisphere’s most violent country, Colombia’s Bellavista National Jail
was its most violent prison until two believers brought the gospel to the prison in 1990
and stopped a riot. Hundreds of inmates—among them the nation’s most notorious
killers—accepted Christ, and the prison’s murder rate plummeted from sometimes
60 in a month to less than one a year.

Now a Bellavista Bible Institute thrives in the prison. Some graduates who completed
their sentences have become full-time Christian workers in ministries such as halfway
houses that enable other released Christian prisoners to transition to life outside
Bellavista. Informal Bible studies abound in cellblocks once stained in graffiti written
in victims’ blood. Even as Colombia continues its downward spiral into violence and
anarchy, Bellavista’s revival serves as a laboratory case-in-point that the gospel
can rescue this seemingly hopeless nation.

INDIA "Extremism Gaining Momentum"

The resounding defeat of the Congress Party in the September-October elections allows
the Hindu nationalist BJP a possible five-year term, which could be disastrous for
India’s 23 million Christians. To back this up, one need look no further than the
13-month reign of the BJP that ended in April 1999, where a wave of over 140 acts of
violence (including murders and church burnings) took place against Christians.

Though BJP leaders are careful to condemn anti-Christian violence, they ensure that the
momentum of justice moves so slowly that the Hindu extremists responsible will never be
brought to book, thus effectively offering an amnesty to anyone who harasses a Christian
in the name of Hinduism.

Hindu nationalism is based on hatred of Muslims and Christians, the two groups alleged
to have no right to remain on the Gangetic plain. This ideology of hatred has triumphed in
a vacuum, as the secularist position of Gandhi and Nehru has declined, and India’s
Christians remain too small to exert influence on a population that passed the one billion
mark in August. The hate campaign against Christians will surely continue, especially as
Hindu extremists maintain that all the "tribal" Christians were forcibly
converted. Their attempts to coerce Christians back to Hinduism will cause the greatest
flashpoint in the future.

INDONESIA "A Vulnerable Minority"

Indonesia still remains a society lurching from upheaval to upheaval, and in the midst
of this turbulence, the Christian community of some 20 million remains the most
influential, yet most vulnerable, religious minority.

Whenever there is economic instability, Christians are scapegoated for it and attacked.
It is the Chinese Christian community that bears the brunt of this, often with horrifying
consequences. Half of Indonesia’s 6 million Chinese are Christian, and they are very
wealthy, which makes them a target for the outraged poor.

Also, the violence on East Timor has caused Christians to be stereotyped as
separatists. A new, ugly nationalism is rearing its head and maintaining that Christians
want to separate from Indonesia wherever they live—a blatant lie given that most of
the Christians are thoroughly integrated throughout the Indonesian archipelago.

The island of Ambon in Maluku province was earmarked by extremist Muslims as a key
domino, which, if tipped, would trigger "jihad" throughout the land. Since
January, over 500 Christians have been killed and large parts of the island reduced to
rubble in the strife.

The good news is the domino has not toppled, and most of the 90 percent of Muslims in
this country remain unattracted to extremist ideas. But with Megawati and
Habibie—both revealing an alarming amount of political ineptitude—to contest the
presidency at the end of the year, more instability is inevitable.

NORTH KOREA "The Last Stalinist State"

No one knows how many Christians are left in the world’s last Stalinist state, but
one thing is clear—life cannot be tougher for a church anywhere else in the world.
Still in the grip of a severe famine that has cost 2-3 million lives, and still stubbornly
pursuing outdated centralized policies, the prospect looks bleak for North Korea.

Kim Jong Il is hardly in the position to reverse course, for to do so would be to imply
his father, Kim Il Sung, had been wrong. His regime plays a dangerous game of
international brinkmanship, of forcing aid by threatening to make war on the South, making
the Korean peninsula the place most likely to experience a nuclear exchange.

Christians may number between 10,000 and 100,000 — most of them deep underground. They
have no freedom to practice their faith in what is still the world’s most atheistic
state. The only good report is that the famine has made the border with China more porous,
resulting in more contact with Korean Christians in China. It is possible that the Korean
Christian Federation—a fraudulent church for visiting Westerners—may be given an
expanded role, in order to tempt more Christian aid ministries into the country. But it is
unlikely that genuine Korean Christians will "surface."

PAKISTAN "Forgotten on Death Row"

Radical Muslim extremists in Pakistan continue to hold the nation’s Christian
minority hostage with the dreaded power of a single word, "blasphemy." Under the
harsh statutes of the religious blasphemy laws, the mere accusation of blasphemy against a
member of a non-Muslim minority subjects him to police arrest and jailing without bail.
Rarely does a magistrate review the allegations before the case is filed. But if
convicted, the sentence is mandatory execution.

In the volatile environment of extremist Islam, where unruly mobs can be quickly
whipped into a lynching mentality, such Christian prisoners typically remain under arrest
for years on end, allegedly "for their own protection." Courts hearing their
cases move sluggishly, and then only in attempts to transfer the proceedings to another
court. With more than one lawyer and judge targeted by angry assassins for defending or
acquitting Christians accused of blasphemy, the judiciary are understandably nervous.

One such Pakistani Christian jailed three years ago has been on death row for the past
year and a half, his appeal frozen by judges afraid to touch the controversial case. Even
if Ayub Masih is fully acquitted, as evidence would seem to require, he will have to flee
the country to escape the fanatics who have vowed to kill him, regardless of what the
courts decide.

With the overwhelming majority of Pakistan’s Christians at the bottom of the
social and economic scale, the average Christian faces the daily fear that some day he
could end up in Ayub Masih’s shoes.

SAUDI ARABIA "The Heartland of Islam"

Despite bland assurances from the royal family to the contrary, Saudi Arabia’s
notorious "muttawa" (Islamic police) continue their obsession to harass, arrest,
imprison and deport expatriate Christians attempting to worship privately in the Kingdom.
Government officials have insisted since 1997 that any "excesses" committed by
these religious vigilantes against Christians contradict official state policy, claiming
that private worship by non-Muslims is permitted.

But the evidence of recent months proves otherwise. In fact, individual foreigners are
being arrested and jailed for months over alleged evidence that they participated in
Christian worship. Raids of Christian worship services have landed their leaders in jail
and led to eventual deportation, and congregational members have been forced to sign a
promise to never again attend "illegal" meetings. Local authorities are expected
to continue to justify such actions under Saudi’s strict morality laws, which forbid
mixing of the sexes in public gatherings.

Saudi authorities continue to try to quietly force employers to dismiss and send back
to their homelands any employees found to be involved in Christian activities. Some are
detained in the process, and many denied the financial benefits’ package guaranteed
in their job contracts. A few may be tried formally in Islamic courts, which typically
sentence religious offenders to painful lashes at the conclusion of their jail
confinement. On the whole, Filipino Christians bear the brunt of these harsh measures,
although the chance arrest of citizens of the more powerful Western nations can lead to
exertion of greater diplomatic pressure on Saudi authorities. Fortunately, news of such
arrests now circles the globe in the matter of a few hours, or at most, days, making it
relatively impossible to hush up such incidents.

SUDAN "Doing a Double-Talk Squeeze"

For years now, the National Islamic Front (NIF) regime in Sudan has relentlessly
pursued its quasi-legal efforts to confiscate a growing number of long-established church
properties in the capital of Khartoum and its twin-city, Omdurman. In a succession of
ploys ranging from verbal and written threats to armed takeovers by militia or police
forces, the government tries to bully the Catholic, Episcopal and Presbyterian churches
out of lands, buildings and churches held by legal deeds for decades. In addition, dozens
of small churches and church schools located in the massive shantytowns surrounding the
capital continue to be razed to the ground under the pretext of city planning and zoning
regulations.

Sudanese authorities still imprison and charge converts to Christianity with apostasy,
a capital offense under the laws of Sudan. Although one such highly publicized prisoner
was released by the Justice Ministry after he suffered a stroke in prison this year,
another convert remains jailed, sentenced to four more years in prison on contrived
charges.

The government has still to find a face-saving solution to the long-stalemated case
concocted 15 months ago against two Catholic priests, one of whom is the influential
chancellor of the Khartoum diocese. Although accused of masterminding a series of bombing
explosions against the government, the two are believed to be bearing the brunt of
Khartoum’s displeasure over the Catholic Church’s refusal to support its
so-called peace plan with rebels in South Sudan.

Dominated by Muslim Arabs from the North, the Khartoum regime refuses to admit its
complicity in the documented atrocities of genocide, starvation, slavery and forced
Islamization in its fight to gain control over South Sudan, predominantly made up of Black
Africans of Christian and tribal religions.

COMPASS DIRECT

Global News from the Frontlines

Jeff Taylor, Managing Editor

Gail Wahlquist, Editorial Assistant

Suzi Quinones, Design

Bureau Chiefs: Barbara Baker, Middle East – Alex Buchan, Asia

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