COMPASS DIRECTGlobal News from the Frontlines

February 7, 2003

Compass Direct is distributed monthly to raise awareness of Christians worldwide who are persecuted for their faith. Articles may be reprinted or edited by active subscribers for use in other media, provided Compass Direct is acknowledged as the source of the material.

Copyright 2003 Compass Direct

**********************************************************************IN THIS ISSUE

CHINA

Letters from ChinaChristians reveal personal trials and triumphs.

COLOMBIA

Insurgents Assassinate Pastor Another escapes murder attempt at Sunday worship.

EGYPT

Egypt Postpones Verdict on El-Kosheh Retrial***Murder rulings tied to ‘political’ situation.

INDIA

Attack on American Evangelist Triggers Deportation More expulsions of foreign missionaries are likely to follow.

Militant Hindu Group Cleared of Staines’ Murder***Prosecution witness says Bajrang Dal was not involved in triple homicide.

INDONESIA

Christian Peacemaker Faces Trial***Meanwhile, justice system acquits leader of Muslim Laskar Jihad.

JORDAN

Christian Widow Appeals to Jordan’s King***Court arrest warrant to be enforced in February.

MEXICO

Evangelicals Blamed for Fatal Shootings But investigators say politics and ‘organized crime’ provoked violence.

NIGERIA

Christian Retaliation Increasing in Religious ViolenceBoth sides reveal growing frustration with Muslim-Christian conflict.

Farm Dispute Leads to Death

PAKISTAN

Authorities Silent on Church Attack InvestigationPolice claim culprits caught, but none have been identified.

Christians’ Blasphemy Appeal Awaits Decision***Defense lawyer says: ‘definitely a case for acquittal.’

PERU

Peru Strikes Down Faulty Anti-Terrorism Laws***However, Christian lawyer sees little hope for innocent prisoners.

QATAR

Indian Christian Family Deported Government refuses explanation, diplomatic appeals.

UGANDA

Save Uganda’s FutureThe predominately Christian Acholi people are losing their children to an evil war.

VIETNAM

Government to Allow Protestant Ministerial TrainingProtestant leaders see permission as a small step towards religious freedom.

Vietnam Announces New Measures to Control ReligionGreater communist infiltration of religious organizations is planned.

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***********************************Letters from ChinaChristians Reveal Personal Trials and Triumphs

Anhui“We are very short of preachers here. Furthermore, a preacher greatly endowed with faith called Brother Zhang was recently arrested and imprisoned. He was sentenced to two years in jail, so now we are even shorter of preachers.”– Letter from Mr. Cheng, dated November 2002

Fujian“Last month, several of us were arrested by the atheistic authorities because we held an evangelistic meeting. The police surrounded the church. The reason they gave was that no preaching was allowed except on Sundays. They dragged several co-workers and myself off and arrested us. Later, as they had no real ‘crime’ for which to accuse us, they put us in jail for several days for ‘disturbing social order.’”– Letter from Mr. Li, dated October 20, 2002 Henan“Our church is in crisis. At the end of September, the Religious Affairs authorities made a big investigation and said that as our procedures were not in order, we must stop meeting.” – Letter from Mr. Xu, dated November 6, 2002

“There is one thing I must tell you. Since I started corresponding with you overseas in early 2000, I have been under surveillance by the local Ministry of National Security. At first I used my wife’s address, but they investigated her and warned her at her workplace. Later I changed to using my home address, but some of the letters I received had already been torn open and my home telephone was bugged. I am unafraid. I am a Christian. I am a patriot and would never harm my country. But I just thought I should mention this.”– Letter from Mr. X to Hong Kong, dated October 15, 2002[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is just one of many such letters received. We believe that all mail to and from China is still censored and all international telephone calls monitored. Those writing from overseas to Christians should still be very careful. China is very far from being an open society, despite surface appearances.]

Jiangsu“Please pray for me and the Bible class I lead. We are not able to meet as openly as before. Because in July they posted on the door of the church a proclamation from the government which said all meetings must be registered. If not, they are illegal and will be fined between 200 and 10,000 RMB ($24 to $1,208). But it’s extremely difficult to get registration. So I don’t know whether our Bible study class can continue. Many house churches have stopped meeting and now go to the [government-controlled] Three Self

church. Some house church meetings continually change their venues. Our work and preaching the gospel have become more and more difficult. So I believe that before persecution comes, I must train up the young people and those straying lambs so that they will be clear about God’s will. If they are firmly rooted, when persecution comes they will continue in the faith and will not lose their faith through a hostile environment.”– Letter from Auntie Wang, dated October 30, 2002

Sichuan“Here in Wenjiang county where I live, the church is very unhealthy. The religions permitted by the government suffer limitations. The authorities demand that both Catholics and Protestants should not preach that ‘Christ is the only Savior, the Resurrection and the Life.’ These vital doctrines are forbidden. Instead, they only encourage people to do good and conform to the world and other things, which do not ‘adversely influence the government.’ So many true Christians can only meet in house churches, even though these suffer hindrances and discrimination.”– Letter from Mr. Chen, dated October 12, 2002

Yunnan“At present, the Chinese church is facing a great challenge. The Three Self church recognized by the government is opposed to the house churches, which are not recognized by the government. The government labels the house churches ‘illegal,’ or the ‘underground church.’ They not only say this, but often they secretly dispatch officials to persecute the brothers and sisters and Christian workers in the house churches. This seriously hinders the work of the gospel.”– Letter from Mr. Yang in Kunming, dated October 10, 2002[Return to Index]

***********************************Insurgents Assassinate Pastor in ColombiaAnother Escapes Murder Attempt at Sunday Worshipby David Miller

BOGOTA (Compass) -- On January 27, unidentified gunmen in Colombia assassinated Rev. Jose Juan Lozada Corteza, pastor of the Evangelical Christian Church of San Antonio, while Lozada was traveling between his home and Chaparral.

According to the Commission on Human Rights and Peace of the Evangelical Council of Colombia (CEDECOL), uniformed men stopped the public bus in which Lozada was traveling and singled out the clergyman from the rest of the passengers. The assailants forced him off the vehicle and, in full view of bystanders, shot Lozada in the head.

The gunmen, members of an illegal armed group fighting in the country’s protracted civil war, reportedly also killed a member of Rev. Lozada’s church who was traveling with him. At press time, CEDECOL officials were trying to confirm the identity of the second victim.

The area around San Antonio, a small town in the department of Tolima three hours’ drive south of Ibagué, has experienced intermittent violence as guerrilla groups, paramilitary units and government forces vie for control of the territory. The motives for Lozada’s murder remain unclear.

Officials of the human rights commission said that Lozada was married, but did not disclose the names of his spouse or children.

At least 72 Protestant pastors and 33 Catholic priests have died violently in the past decade in Colombia. Armed groups known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Army of National Liberation (ELN) and the Auto Defense Union of Colombia (AUC) commit the majority of the murders, although in some cases investigations have implicated corrupt politicians and drug traffickers.

The CEDECOL human rights commission is in the process of creating a support network for victims and their families. The organization also documents incidents involving kidnapping, extortion, threats and displacement of church members and ministers.

Recently, CEDECOL leaders urged Rev. Esnilder Popó, pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church and president of the local ministerial association in Santander, Cauca, to leave the community following an attempt on his life two months ago.

The incident occurred during Sunday worship on November 13, when two strangers entered the church as Popó was preparing to preach. During the morning message, one of the men stood up and moved toward the pulpit, then abruptly turned around and walked out. The other man remained until the end of the service.

When Rev. Popó finished preaching, the second man approached the pulpit and fell on his knees in front of the pastor. Weeping, he asked for help. “What do you need?” Popó asked.

“I’m frightened,” the man replied. “I came here on a mission to kill you.” A moment later, he rose from his knees and quickly left the church.

The following Wednesday at noon, the same man returned to Popó’s church as CEDECOL representatives were meeting to discuss what to do about the matter. Two local ministers recognized the individual and took him to an adjoining room. “Why do you want to kill Rev. Popó?” they asked.

The man said he did not know why, only that orders had come “from northeast Antioquia” for him to assassinate Popó in the pulpit. “But I could not bring myself to do it,” he said, before abruptly disappearing again.

Fearing that assassins would continue to stalk Popó until they succeeded in their mission, CEDECOL leaders urged the pastor to leave Santander with his wife and daughter for an undisclosed location.

The conflict in Colombia is now in its fourth decade, making it the longest-running guerrilla war in Latin American history. According to statistics compiled by Amnesty International, more than 60,000 persons have died in the fighting since 1985, with civilians comprising 80 percent of the victims. Colombia also suffers the world’s highest rate of kidnapping, an average of four per day. Ransom payments generate the second largest source of income, after cocaine trafficking, for illegal armed groups.[Return to Index]

***********************************Egypt Postpones Verdict on El-Kosheh RetrialMurder Rulings Tied to ‘Political’ Situationby Barbara G. Baker

ISTANBUL (Compass) -- An Egyptian court in southern Egypt has postponed for another month a retrial verdict due in late January against 96 people implicated in violent Muslim-Christian clashes three years ago.

Held under tight police security, the January 27 hearing at the Sohag Criminal Court lasted only three minutes, Middle East Online reported. Presiding Judge Lotfi Suleiman announced February 27 as the new date for a final ruling, declaring that the justices examining the evidence needed more time to study the 9,000-page case file.

Only seven of the 96 defendants were present in the courtroom, along with some of their family members. Although some were murder suspects, all had been released from jail in December 2000, weeks before the court announced its first verdict.

The millennium weekend violence in Sohag’s El-Kosheh village left 21 Christians dead and 260 of their homes and businesses destroyed or looted. One Muslim was shot dead accidentally by a fellow Muslim.

The delay was labeled a “political decision” by Coptic lawyer Mamdouh Nakhla, who noted that the “tense, volatile situation in the Middle East” over the standoff between Iraq and the United States may have made the judges reluctant to announce severe rulings on such a “sensitive” case.

“A murder investigation should not be related to international politics,” Coptic Orthodox Bishop Wissa of Baliana Diocese told Christian Solidarity Worldwide on January 27. Delaying the verdict was in itself an injustice, he said.

However, an Egyptian correspondent who attended the hearing stressed that any convictions handed down against the Muslim murder suspects could have “disastrous effects” against the Christian villagers in the area.

“So, we expect a verdict that will not differ very much from the previous one,” one Coptic source told Compass.

“The dirty work on this has already been done by the police,” the source said, “because they have not put any solid evidence in the hands of the court. So this makes the court unable to make any informed ruling.”

The 14-month retrial had been expected to correct the first trial’s failure to satisfy either Egypt’s Coptic Christian community or the nation’s prosecutor general that justice had been done. In the initial verdict issued in February 2001, all 96 suspects were handed blanket acquittals except for four Muslim defendants. The latter were jailed on minor convictions, none of them murder.

According to a January 27 posting on Middle East Online, Coptic Christians considered the initial ruling to be “so lenient that it practically encouraged Muslims to kill Copts.” Western observers monitoring the trial proceedings noted that the whitewashed verdict implied that police investigators were either incompetent or part of a deliberate cover-up.

“There is no doubt that 21 people were killed,” the prosecutor general had declared, demanding that the court re-investigate the El-Kosheh killings as “premeditated murders, not accidental homicides.”

But since “the government wants nothing to affect relations between Muslims and Copts which could cause instability within the society,” Nakhla commented, the verdicts will most likely be “quite mild” when finally pronounced.

Appeal Ignored for 30 MonthsMeanwhile, Egypt’s highest court of appeal has stalled for more than 30 months on

the case of Shaiboub William Arsal, the illiterate villager victimized in the first scandal that made El-Kosheh village a household name across Egypt.

Accused of killing his cousin and another young Coptic Christian who were found murdered in August 1998, Arsal became the scapegoat in a flagrant cover-up of police brutality against at least 1,000 El-Kosheh Christians. Police officials refused to investigate the Muslim murder suspect accused by the Christian villagers, and instead determined to find a Christian culprit. Despite invalidated testimony by the two Copts forced to sign statements against him, Arsal was convicted and sentenced to 15 years at hard labor in June 2000.

Although defense lawyers filed an appeal two months later before the Court of Cassation, so far there has been no response. Under the Egyptian legal system, the court can choose to ignore his case completely.

Arsal, now 42, is jailed at the Tora maximum-security prison farm on the southeast edge of Cairo, 330 miles from his family. His wife and three children are allowed to visit him once a month for 30 minutes.[Return to Index]

***********************************Attack on American Evangelist Triggers Deportation from IndiaMore Expulsions of Foreign Missionaries Likely to Followby Abhijeet Prabhu

BANGALORE, India (Compass) -- When American missionary Joseph Cooper was attacked and then deported from India, it brought attention to foreign missionaries and visa regulations in the world’s most populated democracy.

At least 50 missionaries could be deported in the near future if government authorities act on a list of names compiled by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP or World Hindu Council).

American evangelical missionary Joseph Cooper, 68, sustained major injuries on January 13 when an armed gang attacked him at the Koppam Harijan colony in Kilimanoor, Kerala state. Authorities believe the assailants to be activists from the hard-line Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

According to the police, the gang attacked Cooper and his companions about 9:45 p.m. as they were being escorted to their vehicles following a preaching service at the Koppam Protestant Convention.

The assailants exploded a home-made bomb to create panic, and then attacked the victims with knives, sticks, swords and crowbars. Seven other Christians, including evangelists Jayakumar and Mercy Christudas and local pastor Sam Benson, his wife Sali, and daughters Joy and Judith, were injured in the attack.

Cooper, recovering from head injuries and a deep cut on his right palm, described the attack from his hospital bed. “I fell down and repeatedly cried for mercy, but they did not pay heed to my pleas. I do not wish to go to court against the attackers. I will instead pray for them.”

“It was literally a silent attack. The assailants did not utter a single word, even though we pleaded with them to reveal their motive,” Benson said. “We could identify most of the 10-member gang. All of them are known RSS activists in the locality, and we have mentioned this in the police complaint.”

However, local RSS leader R. Santhosh said that his organization had nothing to do with the attack. He blamed the assault on “communally inflammatory” sermons that Cooper and others preached, claiming that their remarks were “insulting to practitioners of the Hindu faith.”

Local Christians admitted that a number of foreign missionaries from fundamentalist Christian groups in the U.S. have made open-air speeches urging Hindus to convert. Remarks like “your gods are dead; Jesus is a living God” and “you worship deaf and dumb idols” were not uncommon in the preaching.

Before the attack on Cooper, Indian church associations had issued statements asking both local and foreign evangelists to exercise sensitivity to local religious and cultural sentiments.

Christian leaders feel the venue of the Koppam Protestant Convention could have helped trigger the attack. The Dalit (untouchable) colony likely gave militant Hindus the impression that the American was converting the poor by inducement.

Even before he fully recovered, Cooper was ordered to leave the country on grounds of visa violations. Police said that local Hindu groups were planning to file charges against Cooper for having violated his tourist visa and indulging in missionary activity. On January 20, District Superintendent of Police T.K. Vinod Kumar ordered Cooper to leave India within seven days.

As Cooper boarded a plane for his home in New Jersey, U.S., VHP district secretary K. Sughathan filed a court petition seeking the American’s prosecution for “hurting religious sentiments.”

The incident has created difficulties for a number of foreign missionaries who teach at seminaries or Bible colleges or perform ministries in various parts of the country.

“We have names of 50 foreign missionaries and our local units are gathering more information,” the VHP state secretary, Kummanam Rajasekharan, told the media. He said the VHP would submit the list to the home ministry, seeking immediate deportation of any missionary found violating visa regulations.

“If the government fails to act, then it will have to face ‘direct action’ in the form of agitations,” Rajasekharan said.

Meanwhile, police arrested over 15 persons, including 10 activists of the RSS, in connection with the attack. The RSS has denied that any of its members were involved.[Return to Index]

***********************************Militant Hindu Group Cleared of Staines’ MurderProsecution Witness Says Bajrang Dal was not Involved in Triple Homicideby Abhijeet Prabhu

BANGALORE, India (Compass) -- Four years after the brutal murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons, the murder trial took a bizarre turn when

the last of the 55 witnesses for the prosecution testified that none of the defendants are members of the militant Hindu group Bajrang Dal.

On the night of January 22, 1999, a mob surrounded Staines and his two young sons, Philip and Timothy, as they slept in their jeep in Manoharpur, Orissa state, and burned them alive. The shocking crime triggered international condemnation.

The First Information Report on the case lodged by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) named six assailants, including prime suspect Dara Singh, as members of the Bajrang Dal. Numerous eyewitnesses also claimed they heard the attackers chant Bajrang Dal slogans as they attacked the missionary and his sons.

The Bajrang Dal is actively engaged in training “warriors of the Hindutva revolution” and openly equips volunteers with weapons and firearms.

Nevertheless, last week a CBI investigator told district court judge M.N. Patnaik that, in the light of his findings, he had no proof that any of the 18 defendants are members of the Bajrang Dal.

In December, Indian Christians were outraged when a high-ranking Hindu official honored Singh’s mother during his birthday celebration. They see this latest development as an attempt to exonerate the Bajrang Dal from complicity in the Staines’ murders.

On the other hand, Christians expressed satisfaction that the trial proceedings cleared the martyred missionary’s name. On January 16, investigating officer Jogendra Nayak testified that Staines was not using fraudulent means to induce tribal peoples to convert to Christianity, as militant Hindus allege.

Replying to defense counsel questions regarding Staines’ activities in Baripada, where he lived, Nayak said the veteran Australian missionary managed a home for lepers.

Nayak also revealed that relationships between Christians and Hindus in Manoharpur were strained in January 1999 because Christians had refused to halt work to honor a Hindu festival.

International concern has focused on the inordinate delay in the progress of the trial. CBI indicted the 18 suspects in June 1999, but the trial did not begin until March 2001. Dara Singh was not arrested until January 2000, over a year after the crime.

Of the 18 defendants, only 15 are in custody. The other three remain at large. Although the CBI produced an initial list of 108 witnesses, only 55 were asked to testify in court.

Sources in India attribute the judicial delays, in part, to high-level political pressure.

Last December, Christian organizations expressed their “utter disgust” when Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) president Vishnu Hari Dalmia awarded Dara Singh’s mother, Raj Rani, a gift of Rs 25,000 ($524) at a function openly endorsing Singh’s role in the murders. Also honored that evening were Singh’s brother, Arvind Kumar, and Mukesh Jain, president of Dharmarakshak Shri Dara Sena, a lobby formed to press for Dara Singh’s acquittal.

A statement from the All India Christian Council and All India Catholic Union said the gestured showed “extreme callousness towards the feelings of the Christian community.”

“We had expected that national leaders, such as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and others in BJP [the Bharatiya Janata Party] would express their outrage at this travesty,” the statement said.[Return to Index]

***********************************Christian Peacemaker Faces Trial in IndonesiaMeanwhile, Justice System Acquits Leader of Muslim Laskar JihadSpecial to Compass Direct

JAKARTA, Indonesia (Compass) -- The Rev. Rinaldi Damanik, General Secretary of the Synod of the Protestant Church of Central Sulawesi and Director of the Tentena Crisis Center, went on trial in a Palu court February 3, accused of carrying weapons while traveling between Christian villages under attack in August 2002. At the time, Damanik was attempting to encourage and evacuate victims and prevent them from retaliating against Muslims who attacked and burned entire Christian communities in the Poso region of Central Sulawesi.

An advocate of peace, Damanik is one of the Christian representatives who signed the Malino Agreement in December 2001. He told Compass shortly afterward that he did not believe the Muslims would adhere to the agreement. He said that there were already cases in which the agreement had been violated, such as the bombing of churches in Palu on New Year’s Day.

The agreement had been hailed by authorities as an important peace treaty in the conflict between Muslim and Christian communities in Poso. In reality, most of the Christians have been forced out of the city of Poso. Many villages further south on the way to the lakeside town of Tentena have been totally destroyed. The armed forces often stood by and did nothing to protect Christian communities from destruction, and in some cases, joined the Muslim aggressors to cleanse the area of Christians.

Damanik was arrested in early September but the police failed to mount a case against him until now. He has been held without bail. According to the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty e-mail conference, an army commander who agreed to testify

on Damanik’s behalf has been murdered, and an attempt was made to poison Damanik himself after he was moved from Jakarta to Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi region.

Meanwhile, Ja’far Umar Thalib, the leader of the former militant extremist group Laskar Jihad, was acquitted by the East Jakarta District Court of provoking violence, spreading hatred and defaming the president. The accusation brought by the state prosecutor cited a speech made by Thalib at the Al Fatah mosque in Ambon, the capital of South Maluku, on April 26, 2002.

Some 5,000 Muslims heard Thalib say, “From today, we will no longer talk about reconciliation. Our ... focus now must be preparing for war -- ready your guns, spears and daggers.” He declared the Malino peace accord to be treason and urged Muslims to rally together in holy war against the Christians.

Early on the Sunday morning following Thalib’s speech, masked men dressed in black attacked the Christian village of Soya, east of Ambon, stabbing to death at least 21 people, including a child of six years. They burned 30 houses and a church.

So far, not one Muslim leader has been successfully tried for complicity in the violence in Central Sulawesi or the Malukus, although several Christians have been given the death sentence. One writer commented that it seems justice is meted out according to influence. The authorities have the most to fear from radical Muslims, whereas minority Christians hardly pose a threat.

Thalib’s organization, which was disbanded after the bombing in September 2002, included 10,000 militant followers trained in martial arts, handling of weapons and bomb-making. Some of the trainees attended camps in Afghanistan. Reports say foreign “experts” from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen have been training followers in Indonesia itself.

Despite its claim to be humanitarian, Laskar Jihad was totally committed to jihad or the Muslim “holy war,” in which it is acceptable to kill non-Muslims who refuse to accept Islam. The organization has reportedly been involved in arms smuggling and sniper attacks. Militant Muslims have staged thousands of forced conversions and circumcisions and “cleansed” entire regions of Christians.

The Crisis Center of the Protestant Church in Central Sulawesi asked for prayer for Rev. Damanik as he faces trial in what some describe as a biased legal system.[Return to Index]

***********************************Christian Widow Appeals to Jordan’s KingCourt Arrest Warrant to be Enforced in Februaryby Barbara G. Baker

ISTANBUL (Compass) -- Christian widow Siham Qandah was informed on January 31 that apart from direct intervention by Jordanian King Abdullah II, she will be jailed in early February for refusing to hand over her two minor children to be raised as Muslims.

In a written order sent from their Amman headquarters, Jordanian security officials declared that they could not do anything to help Qandah in her nearly five-year legal battle to retain custody of her children.

“It’s a sensitive, Muslim-Christian issue,” a JID representative explained to Qandah. At this point, he admitted, the only person who could do something for her was the King of Jordan. Although palace sources claimed that King Abdullah had been briefed on Qandah’s case in mid November, local Christians now wonder if he really knows about her plight.

The Irbid Court of First Instance issued a warrant for Qandah’s arrest in mid January, although she was not informed until January 20. The court order sentenced her to 30 days’ imprisonment if she failed to surrender her children to their Muslim guardian.

“I was very surprised to receive such a decision,” Qandah said last week, after learning the court had ordered her arrest. “I did not do anything or harm anybody. I am not a criminal. I feel so sad and so scared of losing my children.”

According to Michel Hamarneh, an aide to Prince Hassan assigned to monitor Qandah’s case, the Irbid arrest order has been “deferred” for two weeks. “So we are trying our best to postpone the decision of the court to jail her for one month,” Hamarneh said. “I hope that we will be able to succeed.”

The aide told Compass that he had been meeting with various lawyers who were studying the case, although he admitted, “You know that through the courts, we cannot do anything whatsoever.”

Qandah’s Christian husband died in 1994 while serving as a Jordanian soldier in the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Kosovo. A few months later, an Islamic court informed her he had allegedly converted to Islam several years earlier, producing a so-called “conversion” certificate signed by two Muslim witnesses. There was only a scrawled “X” for her husband’s signature.

Incredulous, Qandah protested that her husband was given a Christian funeral and was buried in the church graveyard, strictly forbidden by law if he was actually a Muslim. But a conversion paper certified by the Islamic courts cannot be contested, so under Jordanian law her children were automatically considered Muslims.

In order to collect the children’s army benefits, Qandah had the court appoint her brother, who had converted to Islam in his youth, as their legal Muslim guardian. But the maternal uncle, who by then had become a mosque leader, eventually objected to the

children’s Christian upbringing and opened a civil case in May 1998 so he could raise them as Muslims.

Jordan’s ecclesiastical courts for its Christian citizens refused to tackle the controversial case, leaving jurisdiction in the hands of the Islamic and civil courts. Based on the alleged conversion of her Christian husband to Islam, two lower courts and the Court of Cassation all ruled against Qandah.

In February of last year, Jordan’s Supreme Court denied Qandah’s final appeal and ordered her to surrender her daughter Rawan and son Fadi, now 14 and 13, to the custody of their Muslim uncle.

But Jordanian authorities have not yet enforced the ruling, which has attracted media coverage abroad and prompted a wave of diplomatic appeals to government officials and the royal family.

With the winter school break just concluding, Rawan and Fadi should start classes again at the Catholic school in Husn. “She will not send them to school now,” a friend said. “She doesn’t know what to do.”

“I just want to be free from the pressure of my brother, the court, the unfulfilled promises,” Qandah told Compass. “I want to live in peace with my children.” [Return to Index]

***********************************Evangelicals Blamed for Fatal Shootings in MexicoBut Investigators Say Politics and ‘Organized Crime’ Provoked Violenceby David Miller

MIAMI (Compass) -- Traditionalist caciques (village leaders) in Chiapas, Mexico, blamed Tzotzil-speaking evangelical Christians for the deaths of seven people -- three civilians and four policemen -- killed in two separate shooting incidents in the village of Tres Cruces during the last week of January.

In an open letter to Mexican President Vicente Fox, traditionalists called upon the chief executive to take swift action against the perpetrators. Otherwise, they warned, they would resort to “the law of talion,” or eye-for-an-eye vengeance.

However, district attorney Mariano Herrán Salvatti said that none of suspects taken into custody for the crimes are evangelicals and attributed the killings to a local dispute over water wells. “There is no religious showdown here,” Herrán told reporters.

The first of the two fatal shootings occurred on Sunday evening, January 26, when unidentified gunmen ambushed and murdered Romero López Patishtán, 18, and Agustín López Heredia, 21. Two other youths, Miguel López Pérez, 19, and Fernando López López, 12, suffered gunshot wounds. A third companion, José Pérez, escaped injury.

Cacique spokesmen told the Mexico City newspaper Reforma that 10 evangelical Christians from the community of Bautista Chico carried out the attack and claimed survivors could identify the assailants as members of the Regional Organization for the Welfare of Evangelicals of Chiapas.

Early Tuesday morning on January 28, nearly 100 police officers entered the village of Tres Cruces, some nine miles from the district capital of San Cristobal de las Casas, to search for suspects. When shooting erupted, a local resident, Gregorio Heredia Hernandez, emerged from his home to see what was happening and was killed by gunfire.

Snipers hiding in several houses and on a hill overlooking the village opened fire on police with high-powered rifles and automatic weapons, killing two Chiapas state policemen and two Chamula municipal officers. According to witnesses, the gun battle lasted 30 minutes before police managed to overwhelm the gunmen and capture three of them.

In a press conference later that day, Herrán rejected accusations that evangelicals were behind the bloody attacks, confirming that all three suspects in custody were Catholics.

The district attorney attributed the violence to a months-long dispute between traditionalist caciques, who adhere to an unorthodox blend of Catholicism and ancient Mayan religion, and members of the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PDR). Local PDR officials have proposed a plan to divert water in Tres Cruces’ wells to supply surrounding communities. Traditionalists consider the wells sacred and oppose the project.

Chiapas state governor Pablo Salazar was accompanying President Fox on an official visit to Europe last week when he learned of the clashes. Salazar told the Mexico City newspaper Reforma that “bands of organized criminals” were behind the Tres Cruces attacks.

“We have paid a very high price for our decision to enforce the law,” Salazar said of the confrontation in which the four police officers died. “The government of the state confirms its pledge to do away with impunity in Chamula, nor will we allow bands that operate as organized crime in Chamula to continue to disguise their activities under the pretense of religious conflict.”

Evangelical Christians have suffered religious persecution for nearly four decades in the Chiapas highlands because they refuse to participate in traditional religious rituals. Caciques employ threats, beatings, arson and other forms of harassment to drive evangelical Tzotzils from their native communities.

For example, 27 evangelical families from Los Pinos remain in hiding in San Cristobal de Las Casas three months after a violent confrontation with caciques in which

seven persons suffered bullet wounds. The evangelicals fear reprisals for the November 14 incident should they return to their village.

What’s more, 11 Los Pinos refugees face arrest for their involvement in the clash, due to cacique charges that the evangelicals attacked them with high-powered rifles. Witnesses say it was the caciques who did the shooting, later lying to investigators in order to incriminate the evangelicals.

Human rights attorney and Presbyterian minister Abdías Tovilla has filed requests for an injunction against the arrest warrants, hoping to gain an opportunity for the accused refugees to defend themselves. He said the caciques’ tactics represent “a way to keep the evangelical Christian church from prospering in Los Pinos and other regions of Chamula.”

“Evangelical Christians reject chronic alcoholism, so they have improved their income and begun to challenge the caciques,” Tovilla said. “Now they are aspiring to political office and that affects cacique interests. It goes against their authority as well as their revenues.”

Despite the unrelenting pressure, evangelical Christianity is growing steadily throughout Chiapas. According to census figures, 35 percent of the state adheres to evangelicalism, up from 16 percent of the population in 1991. Chiapas now has more Protestants per capita than any state in Mexico.

Correction:In last month’s report “Inner-City Church in Mexico Forced to Meet on the Street,”

Compass Direct mistakenly stated: “(Alejandro) Tonatiuh’s congregation is one of 40 churches affiliated with the Central Presbytery of the Interdenominational Christian Church, or ICIRMAR, a Pentecostal organization of about 2,500 members.” We later learned that the statement should have concluded with “2,500 local congregations.” We regret the confusion our error has caused.[Return to Index]

***********************************Christian Retaliation Increasing in Nigeria’s Religious ViolenceBoth Sides Reveal Growing Frustration with Muslim-Christian Conflictby Obed Minchakpu

ABA, Nigeria (Compass) -- Seventeen Christians from various church denominations in Aba, a city in Nigeria’s southern Abia state, were arrested in late January over reprisal attacks on Muslims. Sources said Christians were reacting to “incessant” attacks on Christians in northern Nigeria by Muslim extremists.

Abia state police authorities reported that the central mosque and several Muslim businesses were damaged in the January 18-19 attacks.

One of the Muslim victims, Alhaji Idi Ningi, told Compass that 20 Muslims were injured and are currently receiving treatment in three hospitals in the city. “Hundreds of our people have escaped to the police barracks,” Ningi said. “They are taking refuge at the central police station. Many of them are also women and children.”

However, the Abia state police commissioner, Olusegun Efuntayo, told Compass in Umuahia, the state capital, that he had visited the area and the situation was not very serious and has been brought under control.

But both Muslims and Christians are concerned about the increasing religious violence taking place throughout Nigeria. Senator Adolphus Wabara, a member of Nigeria’s National Assembly, called on the Nigerian government to find a lasting solution to the religious conflicts in the country. Alhaji Tanko Bello, a Muslim community leader in Aba city, said they have never supported the attacks on Christians in northern Nigeria. He blamed his fellow Muslims there for creating the conflict.

Clashes on January 11 between Muslims and Christians in Central Nigeria’s Plateau state left two Muslims and one Christian dead. Joel Nimfa, a Christian leader in the Kanam community, was killed in his farmhouse when Muslim bandits attacked the farm and other Christian settlements. According to a police report, two Muslims leaders were beheaded when they led a group of bandits to attack a Christian village.

“Plateau state has suffered so many setbacks as a result of these incessant clashes between Muslims and Christians. We would not allow this to continue,” said Innocent Iluozuoke, the Plateau state police commissioner. “All religious and ethnic killings, which characterized the state on the whole of last year, must stop. This is because the taking of human life for any reason is not a part of God’s plan for us as a people and nation.”

Conflicts between Muslims and Christians flared up in Plateau state in September 2001, beginning in Jos, the state capital. The crisis escalated and continued throughout 2002.

Both sides are showing an increasing frustration with the religious conflict.

Christian leaders in the northern state of Kaduna have filed a lawsuit against the Nigerian government, the Kaduna state government, and a Nigerian newspaper, ThisDay, over last November’s religious riots.

The crisis was ignited by an article in ThisDay that led to the death of an estimated 1,000 people and the destruction of about 125 churches in the city of Kaduna.

Dr. Joseph Danlami Bagobiri, Catholic Bishop of Kafanchan Diocese and the Chairman of the Kaduna state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), announced the court action on January 26, saying, “CAN has taken stock of all the

churches and property of Christians destroyed during the riots with a view to demanding compensation from the government and ThisDay.”

He added, “While we pursue this case, we would leave the fate of the casualties to God, since vengeance is for Him. We are also aware that no amount of wealth can pay for a single human life, and that is why we are demanding compensation for destroyed churches and not for lives.”

He called on all Christians in northern Nigeria not to allow “these acts of evil unleashed on us in Kaduna state and other parts of northern Nigeria to discourage the strength of our faith.”

The Kaduna state governor called on the federal government to take measures to stem the rising wave of religious fundamentalism.

“The nation is sitting on a religious time bomb that can explode any moment with devastating consequences,” said Governor Alhaji Ahmed Makarfi on January 18 during the launch of his biography.

Kaduna state has become the center of religious fundamentalism in Nigeria.

“We go to the pulpits or the rostrum either in the churches or in the mosques, and in the name of our Creator make speeches, which can bring about violence in this country. We forget that we shall all give account to the almighty Allah for all our actions,” Makarfi said.[Return to Index]

***********************************Farm Dispute Leads to Death in Nigeriaby Obed Minchakpu

YOLA, Nigeria (Compass) -- A dispute between a Muslim cattle rancher and a Christian farmer in the Song local government area of northern Nigeria’s Adamawa state led to the death of at least nine people.

Muslim-Christian clashes allegedly broke out on January 11 when a Muslim rancher allowed his cattle to destroy the crops of the Christian farmer. An unknown number of Christians gathered and retaliated.

Local sources said there has long been hatred between the two religious communities.

“At the time I got my report, at least eight persons had been killed and four houses razed as a result of the fighting,” said Alhaji Abdulmumuni Song, a Member of Parliament representing the area in the Adamawa House of Assembly. However, Compass confirmed the burial of nine people killed in the clashes.

Professor Jubril Aminu, Nigeria’s Ambassador to the United States, hails from Adamawa State. He disclosed at a news conference in Yola that religious clashes between Muslim and Christian farmers are a new development in the area. In the past, Aminu said, the problems were seen as mere communal conflicts, but have recently taken on a religious dimension.[Return to Index]

***********************************Pakistan Authorities Silent on Church Attack InvestigationPolice Claim Culprits Caught, But None Have Been Identifiedby Barbara G. Baker

ISTANBUL (Compass) -- Five weeks after grenade-throwing assailants attacked a village church in Pakistan’s remote northern Punjab region, local police officials remained tight-lipped concerning their promise to take “quick and stern action” to arrest and prosecute the culprits.

It was nearly three weeks after the deadly Christmas night attack before Gujranwala’s deputy inspector general (DIG) Malik Iqbal announced, on January 12, that one of two accused suspects had been taken into custody. Citing security concerns, Iqbal refused to name the captured suspect or his counterpart still at large, although he stated that under police interrogation, the man under arrest had “confessed his involvement” in the attack.

Five days later, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf told reporters in Lahore that he had just been informed that the culprits who carried out the Daska church attack had all been arrested.

Three young girls were killed and another 13 worshippers injured in the December 25 attack near Daska in Chianwali village, where Christian families had gathered for their annual Christmas program in a small Presbyterian chapel.

Local Christians directly implicated a local Islamist cleric, Mohammed Afzal, filing a formal First Investigation Report (FIR) against him at the police station. Afzal is accused in the FIR of instigating the attack in recent months by the violent anti-Christian rhetoric in his mosque sermons, which repeatedly called on “every good Muslim” to kill Christians.

Over the next few days, police officials announced that the mosque leader, his sons and several other associates had been put under arrest. All are said to be open supporters of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of Mohammed), a banned group of Islamic militants fighting Indian rule in disputed Kashmir. But it remains unclear whether they are still in custody or will face charges over the deadly attack.

The actual attackers, who were unmasked and identified by eyewitnesses as two young men named Rashid and Dildar, reportedly fled the scene by running into Afzal’s “madrassah” (Islamic school) nearby.

After his second fact-finding visit to the Daska area on January 22, coordinator Joseph Francis of the Center for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS) noted that the police chief heading the investigation was “not confirming anything,” including the identity of the alleged culprits in custody.

“When we met him last time, he was not giving any solid answers,” Francis said. “He is still saying, ‘Oh yes, we have arrested the two sons of the maulvi [mosque leader],’ but he is not really mentioning anything.”

Even more disturbing, local Christians publicly testified at an Islamabad press conference January 20 that they were being “warned that Christians should not press the police to carry on with the investigation,” Reuters news agency reported on January 21.

“We have been receiving calls from people harassing us with a message: shut your mouth, or we will shut your mouth,” local activist Jonathan Rehmat Gill told the assembled press.

Although Pakistani authorities claim to have arrested or killed all of the perpetrators of six terrorist attacks launched against Christian churches and institutions in Pakistan in the past 15 months, few suspects have been named and none formally charged and put on trial.

To date 42 Pakistanis have been killed and another 88 injured in the attacks, apparently mounted by Islamist militants opposing Islamabad’s support of the U.S.-led offensive against the former Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda movement.

Teenage Survivor Re-HospitalizedA month after the Christmas church attack, the Pakistani government fulfilled its

promise to provide monetary compensation to the victims’ families and the injured survivors. In a joint ceremony in Chianwali attended by both the federal and Punjab ministers for minorities and youth affairs, checks totaling 300,000 rupees ($5,000) were given to each of the three victim’s families, with 150,000 rupees ($2,500) allocated for each person injured.

During the January 22 presentation, Federal Minister Rais Munir Ahmad was quoted in The Nation newspaper as saying that the minorities in Pakistan were “freely enjoying their religious rights without any fear and pressure. The worship places of all minorities are safe,” the minister declared, reiterating that the Chianwali culprits had been caught and would be “punished under the law.”

By this time, all the wounded had been discharged from the hospitals, although the following day teenager Shakila Masih was re-admitted to the neurology ward of Lahore’s Mayo Hospital.

“Shakila is in a very critical condition,” a CLAAS representative said. Due to severe head wounds, the 14-year-old girl remained in a coma for an extended period, and is still “not in her senses,” the representative said. “The government has said that they will allow Shakila to come back to the hospital for further treatment.”

Doctors have confirmed that three of the injured Christians will be permanently disabled by the loss of one or both of their eyes in the blast. Afzal Masih was totally blinded, while his brother Aslam lost one eye and is still fighting infection in his other eye. Despite surgery, Asiya Masih is expected to lose her sight in one eye as well.[Return to Index]

***********************************Pakistani Christians’ Blasphemy Appeal Awaits DecisionDefense Lawyer: ‘Definitely a Case for Acquittal’by Barbara G. Baker

ISTANBUL (Compass) -- Some 32 months after a Pakistan court handed down life prison sentences to two Christian brothers for alleged blasphemy, the Lahore High Court is expected to make a final decision sometime in February on their appeal.

A formal appeal hearing for Rasheed and Saleem Masih had been delayed repeatedly since a lower court verdict was issued against them in May 2000. The case had been posted on the court’s appeal docket four times since last June, but each time it was postponed -- usually when time ran out on the high court’s overloaded case schedule.

However, the Lahore High Court finally considered the case, ordering lawyers of the defendants and their accuser to present their final arguments before Lahore High Court Justice Rustam Ali Malik on January 24. Although that hearing was postponed, Judge Malik finally heard the appeal in two sessions held January 31 and February 3.

“This is definitely a case for acquittal,” the Masihs’ defense lawyer Pervez Aslam Chaudhry told Compass.

“We are very hopeful about this appeal,” another Lahore source agreed.

Nevertheless, the accuser’s lawyer has called for the Masih brothers’ execution, demanding in a petition last May that the court “enhance” their 35-year prison sentences and give them the death penalty.

But according to a team of lawyers from the Lahore-based Center for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS), the long-delayed blasphemy case against the Masih brothers is fraught with blatant legal irregularities.

Jailed without bail since June 1999, Rasheed and Saleem Masih were accused of slandering the Muslim prophet Mohammed during an argument with an ice cream vendor. The incident occurred in the Pasrur region of northeastern Pakistan, when the

Muslim vendor refused to serve the two Christians from the same bowls used by Muslims.

The brothers’ defense team has tried to expose a number of discrepancies between the testimony of the original plaintiff, Maqsood Ahmed, and that of other prosecution witnesses. Although the initial complaint to the police only reported a fistfight, when a formal accusation was filed six days later, the accuser claimed that the two had committed blasphemy.

According to CLAAS investigators, however, the Muslim plaintiffs carried a grudge against the two brothers after losing a civil land dispute against them. Although litigation documents were submitted which proved one of the prosecution witnesses had lied about this to the court, the evidence was ignored in the lower court judgment.

In terms of legal procedure, the brothers had been booked under Section 295-C of Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which carries a mandatory death sentence for anyone convicted of slandering the prophet Mohammed. But inexplicably, the lower court judge in Pasrur who found them guilty sentenced them to 25 years in prison.

Additional Sessions Court Judge Rana Mohammed Yousaf also tacked on another 10 years each for “insulting Islam” under Section 295-A. Since the law stipulates this accusation can only be tried in the country’s Anti-Terrorist Courts, Judge Yousaf did not have any legal jurisdiction to rule on this statute.

After being jailed for the first 18 months in Sialkot, the two Christians were then transferred to Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat Jail while awaiting the appeal of their conviction. Then last June, a convicted murderer incarcerated in the same prison shot and killed a Muslim inmate who was also appealing an alleged blasphemy sentence.

With their defense lawyers expressing mounting concern for the Masih brothers’ safety, Punjab authorities ordered them transferred in September to the Sahiwal Central Jail “for security reasons.” But according to a Dawn newspaper report on September 30, the authorities simultaneously transferred with them the very prisoner who had committed the June murder at Kot Lakhpat Jail.

Two months ago, the two brothers escaped injury when a riot broke out in the Sahiwal prison, leaving one prisoner dead and another 30 injured. Death row cells of 150 prisoners were broken open, the gallows set on fire and five jail employees taken hostage before police regained control with a heavy barrage of gunfire and tear gas.

Their September transfer to the Sahiwal jail moved the Masih brothers 150 miles away from their wives and children in Sabu Mohaal village, near Pasrur. The distance has made it difficult and expensive for their families to visit them, CLAAS confirmed to Compass. “It’s a full day for them to go and come by bus, about six hours each way and they can only see them maximum for half an hour, not more,” a CLAAS representative said.

Rasheed Masih, now 36, has five children, and Saleem, 32, has three. During their first two years in prison, their elder brother Hamid Masih had provided for his two sisters-in-law and their eight children in their home village. But after his home was robbed and his wife raped by four assailants in June 2001, Hamid Masih moved his family out of the region to the relative anonymity of a large city.

The Masih brothers’ village is less than 20 miles from Chianwali, where three Christians were killed and another 13 injured in a Christmas night attack on a village church last month.[Return to Index]

***********************************Peru Strikes Down Faulty Anti-Terrorism LawsHowever, Christian Lawyer Sees Little Hope for Innocent Prisonersby Deann Alford

AUSTIN, Texas (Compass) -- When ex-president Alberto Fujimori governed Peru in the early 1990s, he implemented stringent laws aimed at breaking the Shining Path terrorist group besieging the country. Among these were laws that established secret military courts to try civilians for treason.

Over the next few years, “faceless” judges, so-called because their identities remained concealed under heavy hoods, presided over these courts. They admitted secret, often fabricated evidence against the accused -- including confessions made under torture and testimony from alleged criminals who were promised more lenient sentences if they denounced terrorists. The military tribunals denied defense lawyers to defendants accused of terrorism and gave them little means to prove their innocence. Military judges convicted some 800 civilians -- many of them Christians -- of “treason against the homeland.”

In early January, those anti-terrorism laws were struck down as unconstitutional by Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal. On January 14, a judge nullified convictions of civilians in military courts and ruled that civilian courts will retry the cases.

While the news is seen as a positive step, it actually worsens the plight of some prisoners, said Wuille Ruiz, a lawyer for the Lima-based Peace and Hope Association, an evangelical legal aid group that defends Christians falsely accused of such crimes. Ruiz, himself wrongly convicted of terrorism in 1993, said the January ruling won’t help those who, like him, were tried in equally sham civilian courts -- the great majority of cases that Peace and Hope represents.

The Constitutional Tribunal struck down the laws because they violated international norms of justice. Yet even though Peruvian courts no longer operate with faceless judges, the ruling did not strike down convictions handed down by the masked jurists. Nor did

the tribunal offer reparations to victims, some of whom have lost more than a decade of their lives in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Peace and Hope director Alfonso Wieland said that since the government began its heaviest crackdown on Shining Path in 1992, his group has defended about 10 Christians wrongly convicted for terrorism in secret military tribunals.

Ruiz is not optimistic that the new trials will guarantee defendants due process of law. “But we hope that international standards are adhered to in this sense, that a number of these cases would be resolved, including those of innocent people in prison,” he said.

Peruvians are concerned ’that innocent people wrongly convicted of crimes will remain jailed while actual rebel militants will go free.

Shining Path killed scores of Christians in its quest to impose communism on Peru. In all, some 30,000 people, mostly innocent civilians, died in the war between guerrillas and Peru’s military.

Many question President Alejandro Toledo’s pledge that violent militants will not be freed. The government will not announce details of the ruling until late February, Ruiz said.

The ruling blocked two promising paths to justice for one evangelical Ruiz represents, labor leader Walter Cubas Baltazar, who worked at Lima’s La Union clothing factory.

When the factory closed without paying its workers, Cubas Baltazar joined the protest. On January 20, 1993, anti-terrorism police arrested him on what he and Ruiz say were trumped-up charges: taking part in a riot, painting anti-American graffiti in downtown Lima and possessing a gun that belonged to a Peruvian military operative killed by the Shining Path in 1992.

Fujimori supported La Union’s corporate plan to break the union by accusing unionists of terrorism, according to human rights lawyers. Dozens of other protesting La Union workers also were slapped with dubious charges.

Police tortured Cubas Baltazar until he incriminated himself. A military tribunal sentenced him to life in prison. He is serving his sentence in Lima’s Castro Castro Prison.

In March 2002, Ruiz presented Cubas Baltazar’s case to ’the same pardon commission that had ’recommended Ruiz’ release in 1998. After last month’s judicial ruling, however, the commission dropped all plans to review military cases. With the January Constitutional Tribunal ruling, Peru’s Supreme Council of Military Justice also resolved not to rule on civilians it convicted.

“[Other courts and authorities] are washing their hands of this completely,” said a journalist in Lima who asked not to be identified.

That means that Cubas Baltazar and the hundreds of others who were tried by military courts will have to wait at least two years until their cases come up before the new civilian tribunals.

Even though Cubas Baltazar is innocent, Ruiz said, he could still be found guilty and sentenced to 20 years. “This worries me, as well,” Ruiz said. “[On the other hand], if there are to be more trials, there will be new possibilities for people to prove their innocence. We still don’t know what will happen.”

Because Ruiz himself served five years and four months for a terrorist crime he did not commit, he can easily identify with the plight of Cubas Baltazar and hundreds of others like him whom the Constitutional Tribunal ruling will not help.

“If I were still in prison, I would say that this process was of no help because they only nullify the sentence or declare the possibility of a new trial.” Ruiz said.

Asked whether he thinks his client Cubas Baltazar will get a fair trial, Ruiz said, “For this type of situation, you have to be hopeful, but knowing the judicial system ...”

Ruiz’s voice trailed off, then he added, “I hope that now with this new process, what really happened can truly be clarified.”[Return to Index]

***********************************Indian Christian Family Deported by QatarGovernment Refuses Explanation, Diplomatic Appealsby Barbara G. Baker

ISTANBUL (Compass) -- Indian Christian Stanislas Chellappa and his family were deported from Qatar on January 28 by order of the Qatari Interior Ministry, which still refuses any explanation for his arrest and expulsion.

Chellappa left from Doha International Airport on Gulf Air with his wife Esther and 12-year-old son Gnayna, flying back to their home near Madras in India’s Tamil Nadu state.

“They are not saying what is the reason,” Chellappa told Compass two days earlier, as he was loading his family’s personal effects into a container. “I am a Christian, and that is why they don’t want to say why.” A practicing Christian who says he spoke openly about his faith, Chellappa pastored a small congregation of Tamil-speaking Christians in Doha, the capital of Qatar.

After working for the Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) in Qatar for 22 years, Chellappa was arrested without warning in early December and sent to the Gulf state’s deportation center. Two weeks later, the Interior Ministry granted him a one-month “temporary bail,” which expired on January 22.

The government refused to implement any due process of law for Chellappa to appeal the unilateral deportation order. Last week, however, Qatari authorities allowed Chellappa a one-week extension on his deportation, since his packing container had not arrived to ship his personal goods back to India.

According to inquiries made by the Christian advocacy group Middle East Concern (MEC), it has not been possible to confirm the role which Chellappa’s faith had in his arrest and unilateral ouster from Qatar.

When Indian Ambassador to Qatar Ranjan Mathya asked his Qatari counterparts the reason for the Indian’s forced deportation, he was told, “His company didn’t want him any more.” Chellappa, 51, was working as a technician in the hospital’s engineering department.

But if his employers wanted to fire him, Chellappa said, this was not the proper or legal way to do it. “This is not the way, after I worked for this company for almost 23 years,” Chellappa said. “I did not expect that I would ever have any treatment like this in Qatar.”

According to a consul officer at the Indian Embassy in Qatar, the Qatari Foreign Ministry declined to give the embassy a reason for Chellappa’s deportation. “We took it up with the authorities, and asked for the reason,” the consul said, “but we got no answer.” He admitted, however, that an “informal” reason had been suggested by Chellappa’s wife and colleagues, that the action was caused by the lay preacher’s Christian activities.

The hospital’s director of personnel told Compass that HMC policy follows the local laws, which require a minimum two months’ notice to any employee whose contract is to be terminated. “Even if we don’t want him, we have to give him that notice,” he told Compass.

“But if he has been arrested, then this is something to do with the Ministry of Interior,” said the hospital representative, who identified himself as Mr. Khalid. However, he said he had no direct information on Chellappa’s case, since he had been away on leave recently.

One Western diplomatic source who inquired into the reason for Chellappa’s arrest was told it was linked to a publicized corruption investigation involving employees at Hamad Hospital, Qatar Petroleum and the local municipality. The English daily Peninsula newspaper reported that a HMC employee was among three individuals

arrested on bribery charges. “No one else has raised religion as a motive for these arrests,” the diplomat concluded.

Chellappa told Compass he was shocked at these new claims that he had been accused of corruption. Surely if that was the case, he said, his ambassador would have been told that was the reason for his arrest.

“I personally met my ambassador three times,” Chellappa said, “and he told me that each time he asked why I was being deported, they said, ‘His sponsor does not want him.’”

Chellappa said that during the past weeks since his ordeal began, neither the Qatari authorities nor representatives at his workplace had made any mention of corruption charges against him. “Every time when I asked what is the reason, they told me, ‘We don’t know the reason,’” Chellappa said. “The police asked me several times if I was a Christian,” he noted, “but they said nothing about corruption.”

The unanswered question, according to one of Chelleppa’s local friends, was why a foreign national working in Qatar could be “dumped first in jail, and then advised later that his services were no longer needed?”

“This is an illegal detention,” the friend declared, “and inhumane treatment on the part of Hamad Medical Corporation, one of the finest and most modern medical institutions in the Gulf.”

Known as one of the more moderate Gulf states, Qatar has expanded its democratic freedoms in recent years by allowing expatriate Christians to meet freely for private worship. [Return to Index]

***********************************Save Uganda’s FutureThe Predominately Christian Acholi People are Losing Their Children to an Evil Warby Jenny James

KITGUM, Uganda (Compass) -- Nineteen-year-old John Okwir was forced to kill his own brother.

As the younger boy lay quietly with his face in a pit dug for this specific act, Okwir was ordered by rebel soldiers to break his brother’s neck with a club -- and “greet him” as he died -- so the boy’s last thought would be of the one who had killed him.

Such calculated horror is what keeps northern Uganda’s intractable “civil war” going. The so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a cult-like rebel group that purports to follow the Ten Commandments while mixing Christianity with traditional beliefs, is headed by Joseph Kony. According to the London-based Campaign for Human Rights in

Uganda, the LRA has abducted 26,000 children, boys as well as girls, over the last 17 years, and uses terror to prevent them from escaping.

And the continuance of almost incomprehensible violence brings a desperate search for a solution.

In late January, Ochola Baker, former Anglican Bishop of Kitgum, one of the three districts of the Acholi people plagued by the LRA, met with British government officials and media. The amnesty initiative he headed with Catholic Archbishop Odama and other Ugandan religious leaders -- called the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, which resulted in the Amnesty Act 2000 -- has failed.

Ochola’s own wife was killed by a land-mine three years ago. His daughter was abducted, tortured, raped -- and committed suicide as a result of her ordeal. The vehicle in which his wife died still sits in the garden of the diocesan compound, where the new bishop, Benjamin Ojwang, and his family now live.

Or try to live.

Bishop Ojwang’s six children and a friend were abducted from the compound last year. The six returned. The friend never did. The children are now sent into town each night to sleep; the compound is dangerously isolated, two kilometers outside the town. Margaret, the bishop’s wife, lost both her parents to LRA killers just after Christmas.

Kitgum, located about 325 kilometers north of Kampala, is all but cut off. Only three flights of a 19-seat jet come in each week. The road to Gulu, about 90 kilometers to the southwest, is closed due to ambushes. Several students -- one an Anglican priest training at Uganda Christian University at Mukono, Kampala -- were ambushed and killed, begging for mercy, on Christmas Eve as they returned for the holiday. All 230 schools in the district are closed.

More than 800,000 people -- one-fifth of the total population of the northern region -- have been herded by the government into so-called “protected villages.” These are now dubbed “concentration camps” by local clergy, where villagers not only continue to be picked off during rebel attacks, but where they are now beginning to starve. The World Food Program, which supplies the camps, has run out of food, according to local sources, because their convoys cannot get through. In August 2002, one hundred children were taken from one village and 1,100 huts were burned.

“We have a humanitarian disaster here,” said former bishop Ochola in London. “Yet there has been a conspiracy of silence by the international community, because of the glorious image of Uganda. Uganda has emerged from the dark days of Amin and nobody dares criticize it.”

The politics of the situation are complex, with both sides in the neighboring Sudan war playing a part in assisting the LRA for their own reasons, and corruption among

politicians and the otherwise respected UPDF -- the official Ugandan army -- is now a way of life.

Ochola keeps the focus on the plight of the children. He is asking for international support for negotiations with LRA leader Kony and safe haven for Kony’s cohorts in another country, since any military solution merely endangers the lives of the children Kony controls.

“Officers are getting fat military allowances from the war zone so it’s become a business. Meanwhile, Uganda is fighting its own children,” said Ochola at the offices of the Church Mission Society, Partnership House in London.

“We must declare northern Uganda a disaster area and call on the international community to help, but that’s a challenge for the nation’s image.”

Kony has lived in the bush since 1987. He fought alongside Yoweri Museveni’s rebel Uganda People’s Defense Army to oust the government of Milton Obote. Both Kony and Museveni were rebel leaders using similar tactics, who fell out with each other. When Museveni’s militia reached an agreement with the government in 1988, Kony refused to join them -- and continued to target fellow rebels and civilians.

The picture is complicated by the alienation of the Acholi people, once the foundation of the UPDF, the official Ugandan army. Rebel retaliation has left the Acholi at the bottom of national statistics. According to a recent report titled, “It’s for You to Give a Hand” by Okumu Reagan, MP for Aswa county, one of the worst affected areas, the “northern region is the poorest in terms of development indicators such as household size, education levels, health expenditure and child survival.” Only 10 percent of the arable land in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader is under production, and over 70 percent of the children are underweight or stunted, according to the report.

Foreign intervention with massive funding for the so-called “Iron Fist” initiative to flush out the rebels exacerbated the suffering by simply killing more enslaved teenagers. The people do not side with Uganda president Museveni. But they certainly do not back Kony either. Kony’s aunt, Alica Lakwena Auma, was also a cult leader who founded the “Holy Spirit Movement,” and whose mantle Kony has inherited. His bizarre tactics and black propaganda have kept his own people enslaved.

Children make up 90 percent of the LRA. Half of the 26,000 abducted have never been accounted for. Women are made to fight with their babies on their backs. One 14-month-old girl was found strapped to her dead mother -- an LRA commander. Gang rape and death are the penalties for insubordination.

The Amnesty Act 2000 was meant to encourage LRA soldiers to return to “civilization” without penalty -- yet a Terrorism Act implemented after September 11, 2002, complicated the matter. Rebels brave enough to flee into the bush face recapture and death in Kony’s clutches, or imprisonment by UPDF forces.

The pervasive evil has brought great suffering throughout northern Uganda.

“They come for you between 4 and 5 in the morning,” said Bishop Ojwang, which makes it difficult to sleep. “I am the shepherd of my people. How can I possibly leave?”

Such courage, to an outsider, is almost unfathomable. In Kitgum, the atmosphere is tense and listless, but there is little anger. This normally ebullient, educated Christian people live under a terrible shadow. The town is desperately run-down. The Asian population, deported by former dictator Idi Amin, never returned here, as they have in Kampala. So the Anglican diocese has begun buying up the businesses never reclaimed and turning them into hostels for orphans and girl soldiers.

The government has encouraged the construction of a mobile phone tower, but even the bishop is too poor to use it, and there’s no e-mail. The British High Commission in Kampala betrays its own contempt for the people’s plight with a sign in the office that says. “Don’t cross the Karuma Bridge.” The bridge, located at the Karuma Falls on the Nile, signifies to them the limits of civilization.

Those who have escaped the LRA describe Kony as a demonic predator whose cult has no legitimacy; a religious paranoid seduced by occultism. The “returnees” speak of how they have to pray with him, and how he reads them the Bible -- the military parts. His personality is volatile; it changes suddenly and then he kills because he enjoys it, they say. He uses children because they can be brainwashed to kill like he does.

Some church leaders have talked of forgiveness and amnesty for Kony. President Museveni has moved his administration north to Gulu to signal his concern and has cut all government budgets by 23 percent to fund the “war effort.” He even offered Kony safe passage out of the country.

But Kony has refused all offers. Observers believe this is now an international crisis and that Kony and his commanders must be found with outside help – and tried for crimes against humanity.[Return to Index]

***********************************Vietnam Announces New Measures to Control ReligionGreater Communist Infiltration of Religious Organizations PlannedSpecial to Compass Direct

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (Compass) -- The powerful Central Committee of Vietnam’s Communist Party went into its Seventh Plenum on January 13 promising to carefully address the sensitive issues of religion, land and ethnic minority unrest. It emerged nine days later, on January 21, to announce that it had passed four new resolutions, including one to better control religion.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Vu Khoan, this was the first time the Central Committee has passed a resolution specifically on religion. Usually, religious matters are left to lower, less powerful governmental bodies.

The issues arose because of minority unrest in the Central Highlands two years ago over confiscated land and lack of religious freedom. Vietnam responded to that unrest in a heavy-handed way. It has been accused by organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International of serious human rights violations of Montagnards, a collective name for Vietnam’s many minority tribal groups inhabiting the Central Highlands. Compass reported last month that authorities had disbanded over 400 churches in Dak Lak province alone in the fall of 2002, falsely accusing virtually all minority Christians of involvement in a political plot to overthrow the regime.

According to an official communiqué provided to Compass by Vietnamese sources, the resolution on religion appears aimed at Vietnam’s six approved religions. It calls for the establishment of cells of Communist Party members within the approved religious organizations.

A January 27 South China Morning Post article described the development as “cementing the control of religion from within.”

Vietnam observers believe this will cause problems for the Evangelical Church of Vietnam (South), which received legal recognition two years ago. So far, the ECVN (S) has successfully resisted being controlled by a small number of “government-friendly” leaders who have close relations with the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

Protestant Christian leaders, many of whom belong to groups still considered illegal by the government, express even more alarm. They reason that if “legal” religious organizations will be subject to an “increase of state management and guidance of religious affairs,” then pressure will increase on the majority of Protestants, especially Montagnard and Hmong Christians, whom the government considers illegal. These groups have long been subject to Vietnam’s internal policy on religion, with its systematic campaigns of harassment, control, repression, and persecution.

Vietnam also calls on religious believers to “volunteer” in the struggle “to foil hostile forces who abuse religious and ethnic minority issues to sabotage the great national unity and act against the political regime.” Any questioning of the regime’s policies is illegal and considered a hostile activity.

It is certain that the effects of harsher scrutiny of religion will serve to drive even more religious activity underground. This is happening at a time when Vietnam has been severely criticized by governments and by human rights organizations, and has been on a public relations blitz to try to convince the world that it is making steady progress in the area of human rights.

As if to emphasize that hardliners were in complete control of the government, the People’s Daily reported on January 23 that the Government Board for Religious Affairs had been awarded the Independence Order, First Class, for “its significant contributions to the target of great national unity. The religious work has made great steps in promoting the state management of religious affairs … and control over the observance of law on religious activities by Vietnamese and foreign individuals and organizations.”

“Vietnam is clearly going backwards,” is how one long-time Vietnam observer summarized recent events. “When you hear words like ‘guidance’ and ‘control’ and ‘hostile forces’ in connection with religion, you can be sure people of the Christian faith will suffer even more.”[Return to Index]

***********************************Vietnam Government to Allow Protestant Ministerial TrainingProtestant Leaders See Permission as a Small Step Towards Religious FreedomSpecial to Compass Direct

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (Compass) -- Twenty-seven years after forcibly shutting down the Nha Trang Theological Seminary, Vietnamese authorities granted permission on January 3 to the Evangelical Church of Vietnam (South), or ECVN (S), to open a class for training church leaders. Although a few see it as a hopeful sign, most of Vietnam’s Protestant leaders see it as a very small step on the road to religious freedom.

The ECVN (S), representing over half of Vietnam’s 1.2 million Protestants, received official recognition in April 2001 after some 27 years of existing in legal limbo.

Hundreds of thousands of minority Christians historically related to the ECVN (S) are still considered “illegal” by the communist government. Over 400 churches in Dak Lak province were forcibly disbanded in the fall of 2002.

The ECVN (S) made the opening of a Bible college its foremost request since legal recognition was granted in 2001. For years the church had sought the return of its substantial seminary campus at Hon Chong in Nha Trang, confiscated in 1976.

Authorities told the church that new negotiations to open a school could not include reference to the seized campus. Rather, the church could prepare a temporary facility in Ho Chi Minh City and, pending permission, use it for two years while it built a new seminary. Under this arrangement, the ECVN (S) requested authorization to train 100 students.

The permission, long delayed, came with further conditions. Only one class of 50 male students would be allowed to study. The prospective students would also need approval by the government after being accepted for study by the church. The ECVN (S) hopes to have an opening ceremony for this class of seminarians on February 14.

While Vietnam’s authorities will cite this modest move as evidence of religious freedom, Vietnam’s Protestants see this at very best as a glass half empty, rather than half full.

Hundreds of Protestant congregations formed in the last quarter century successfully developed alternate means for the training of pastors/leaders. Those systems will likely continue, even as the church experiments with a legal seminary under the watchful eye of the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

The only other government-approved training of church leaders allowed since 1976 was for one class of 15 students in Hanoi, trained in the early 1990s under the auspices of the small ECVN (North). Until now, the government still has not approved the appointment of some of the graduates of that program to church positions.[Return to Index]

**********************************************************************COMPASS DIRECTGlobal News from the Frontlines

David Miller, Managing EditorGail Wahlquist, Editorial AssistantSuzi Quinones, Design

Bureau Chiefs:Barbara Baker, Middle East

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