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By Catherine Edwards
cedwards@InsightMag.com
Courageous Christians in Indonesia, North Korea and the Sudan are facing hardships of biblical proportions for their beliefs – including slavery, imprisonment and execution.
Christina’s Christmas was a little different last year. In December 2000, while preparing
for the holiday, her village on the Indonesian island of Kesui in the Moluccas archipelago
was raided by fanatical Muslims. Christina and other Indonesian Christian women were
herded into a room with a plastic chair. A razor blade rested beside it. One by one the
women were forcibly circumcised. They received no medication before or after the
mutilation. As they stumbled wounded from the room they were told they had been
“Islamized.”
Testimony concerning what happened to these women was recorded on video and
distributed in the United States by the human-rights group Moluccas Watch Network. It is
just one example of the violence visited on Indonesian Christians in the Moluccas during the
last 15 months.
Sadly, religious persecution is not uncommon. Human-rights groups such as Freedom
House and Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) name Indonesia, North Korea and the Sudan as
the most difficult places in the world for Christians to practice their faith. In other countries,
such as the People’s Republic of China, persecution of Christians and other faithful is
notorious.
At the end of March, the Bush administration expressed its commitment to religious
freedom worldwide. In a letter to the Institute on Religion and Public Policy in Washington,
Vice President Dick Cheney wrote that the administration was committed to advancing the
protection of individual religious freedoms as an integral part of its foreign-policy agenda.
The religious war in Indonesia is of special concern, not only because of the atrocities it
has generated, but because of what it could portend for other countries where Christians
and Muslims may come into conflict.
For the last two years sectarian violence has wracked the Moluccas islands. The
Indonesian government estimates that 5,000 to 6,000 people have died in the fighting, and
500,000 people have been displaced from their villages after their homes and churches
were reduced to rubble.
Former Moluccan resident Walter Engelen tells Insight that Muslims and Christians
previously lived together peacefully for hundreds of years. But this changed in January 1999
when an altercation between a Christian and a Muslim on the Moluccan island of Ambon
escalated into a communal fight. Mutual attacks between Christians and Muslims continued
until the spring of 2000 when Muslims issued an edict for a laskar jihad, or a call for “holy
warriors.”
Christian sources on Ambon reported at the end of April that Muslim radio openly was
broadcasting the call to jihad. Advocacy of violence there is illegal, but the Voice of the
Moluccan Muslim Struggle has paid no attention to police summonses or court directives to
stop the broadcasts.
On April 27, the following speech was recorded there: “If there is any among the
Muslims who still wants to talk about reconciliation, kill him. Do not be afraid, if needed, to
offer your lives. From now on there will be no business of buying and selling any more
between Muslims and Christian pagans. If a Muslim is caught doing business with a
Christian, kill him, for it is better to slay one Christian than that the whole of the Muslim
community be wiped out.”
Insight has obtained videotape of laskar jihad, clad in white, razing churches and other
buildings and driving Moluccan Christians from their homes. Although the conflict clearly is
between religious groups, observers acknowledge other factors, including ethnic rivalry,
Islamization of Indonesian bureaucracy, migration between the islands and a troubled
Indonesian economy.
Mahendra Siregar of the Indonesian Embassy in Washington tells Insight the violence
in the Moluccas is the worst the government has seen in 20 years. When the government in
Jakarta sent in troops from other islands to quell the conflict, some instead joined in the
violence. Nonetheless, Siregar says, the central government was limited severely in its
ability to intervene in the situation. “The Indonesian government has to focus its energies,”
he says. “We can’t be involved in everything.”
Forced Islamization continues. In the Moluccan islands of Seram, Bacan and Buru,
4,000 Christians have reported being forced to convert to Islam. And human-rights groups
in Washington insist that the chief of police on Ambon, Gen. Firman Gani, be brought to
trial for war crimes. Reports of Gani congratulating jihad warriors for a job well done
circulate among refugees.
Equally desperate is the situation in North Korea. Famine has devastated the
communist country, and reports of starvation and cannibalism prompted the
international-aid community to distribute food there. Many groups, including Oxfam and
CARE, nonetheless pulled out when the Stalinist regime insisted that food be turned over to
the government rather than be delivered directly to the people.
Even as their suffering escalated, people were forbidden from turning to God. Through
it all the government insisted on strict adherence to juche (pronounced joo-chay) the state
philosophy of self-reliance based on Josef Stalin’s communist ideology, according to the
Citizens Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. Defectors from North Korea report that
practice of any other religion results in punishment, including imprisonment in concentration
camps.
VOM has a safe house — to which many from North Korea have fled, risking their
lives to escape — across the turbulent Tumen River in northern China. Lee Baek-lyong, a
38-year-old North Korean, escaped there in the spring of 2000. He brought with him
reports to human-rights groups in Seoul, South Korea, concerning his experience in a
North Korean concentration camp. “I have seen people buried alive,” he wrote, citing the
case of Kim Seung-chol, a 28-year-old man arrested for attempted defection and then
imprisoned in the same camp as Lee. “One of the camp directors pulled him out at night
and pulled a bag over his head. A blow to the head knocked him unconscious, and his
body was thrown into a hole and covered with earth,” Lee says. Guards warned other
prisoners that any antirevolutionary activity would be punished in this manner.
VOM spokesman Todd Nettleton tells Insight that most North Korean Christians who
escape to the organization’s safe house risk their lives to go back and distribute Bibles to
family members rather than escape to safety in South Korea. “Of those trained [as
missionaries] and sent back to North Korea, 99 out of 100 are never heard from again,”
Nettleton tells Insight. Those caught on the riverbank summarily are shot.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, established by Congress as
a result of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, has confirmed reports of the
North Korean government imprisoning and executing religious believers. The commission
insists that any normalization of U.S. relations with North Korea must include an easing of
religious persecution.
There also is continuing religious persecution in the North African country of Sudan,
where a decades-old religious war waged by Muslim Arabs in the north against black
Christians and animists in the south has claimed the lives of more than 2 million people and
displaced another 4 million from their homes. The commission’s March 2001 report on
the Sudan condemned the Khartoum government as the world’s most violent abuser of
religious freedoms. Since May 2000, the Sudan has intensified its deliberate bombing
attacks on Christian civilian and humanitarian targets. The report confirms that
government-sponsored militia groups continue to abduct women and children into slavery.
The Bush administration may force change. In March, Secretary of State Colin Powell
said, “There is perhaps no greater tragedy on the face of the Earth than the tragedy that is
unfolding in the Sudan.” Later the same week, President George W. Bush made a point of
mentioning Southern Sudan as he dedicated the USS Ronald Reagan, the nation’s newest
aircraft carrier.
Also, after many years of silence from the black community on the issue of slavery in
the Sudan, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a
statement in February condemning outrages there and urging rigid sanctions on the African
nation. The Revs. Al Sharpton and Walter Fauntroy, a former D.C. delegate to Congress
and head of the Black Leadership Roundtable, have threatened to protest slavery at the
Sudan’s U.N. mission in New York City. Other activists have been arrested outside the
Sudanese Embassy in Washington.
Bill Saunders, a human-rights lawyer and chairman of the Bishop Gassis Sudan Relief
Fund, which raises money for the humanitarian efforts of Sudan’s central Catholic diocese,
tells Insight he is pleased that the situation in the Sudan finally is getting the attention it
deserves. “But the situation is only going to get worse unless something is done to stop the
genocide and enslaving of women and children,” he says. Saunders advocates buying
slaves out of captivity, a practice criticized in the West as fueling the slave trade.
“I am tired of this criticism,” he says. “What are the alternatives? Anyone whose
family member was kidnapped would pay a ransom to get them back.” In the meantime,
Saunders and others are calling on the Bush administration to intervene at the diplomatic
level to try to shut down this religious persecution and end the slavery.
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