By Mairead Maguire
BELFAST, Dec 31 2015 (IPS)

In November 2015 I visited Syria together with an International Peace delegation. This was my third visit to Syria in the last three years. As on previous occasions I was moved by the spirit of resilience and courage of the people of Syria.

Mairead Maguire

In spite of the fact that for the last five years their country has been plunged into war by outside forces the vast majority of the Syrian people continue to go about their daily lives and many have dedicated themselves to working for peace and reconciliation and the unity of their beloved Syria. They struggle to overcome their fear, that Syria will be driven by outside interference and destructive forces within, to suffer the same terrible fate of Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Yemen, and so many other countries.

Many Syrians are traumatized and in shock and ask ‘how did this happen to our country’? Proxy wars are something they thought only happened in other countries, but now Syria too has been turned into a war-ground in the geo-political landscape controlled by the western global elite and their allies in the Middle East.

Many of those we met were quick to tell us Syria is not experiencing civil war but a foreign invasion. To tell us too that this is not a religious conflict between Christians and Muslims who, in the words of the Patriarch Gregorios III Laham ‘Muslims and Christians not only dialogue with each other but their roots are inter-twined with each other as they have lived together over 1436 years without wars, despite disagreements and conflicts…over the years peace and co-existence have outweighed controversy.’ In Syria our delegation saw that Christian and Muslim relationships can be more than mutual tolerance, they can be deeply loving.

During our visit we met hundreds of people, local and national political leaders, government and opposition figures, local and national Muslim and Christian leaders, members of reconciliation committees and internally displaced refugees. We also met numerous people on the streets of town and cities, Sunni Shia, Christian, Alawite, all of whom feel that their voices are ignored and under-represented in the West.

The youth expressed the desire to see a new state which will guarantee equality of citizenship and religious freedom to all religious and ethnic groups, and protection of minorities, and said this was the work of the Syrian people, not outside forces, and could be done peacefully. We met many Syrians who reject all the violence and are working for conflict resolution through negotiation and implementation of a democratic process.

Few Syrians we met were under the illusion that their elected (7O percent) leader President Assad, was perfect yet many admired him and felt he was much preferred to the alternative of the government falling into the hands of the Jihadists fighters, fundamental extremists with ideology that would force the minorities (and moderate Sunnis) to flee Syria (or many to get killed).

This had already been experienced with the exodus of thousands of Syrians, when they fled in fear of being killed or homes destroyed by jihadist foreign fighters, and alleged moderates, trained funded and accommodated by outside forces. In Homs we witnessed the bombed out houses when thousands fled after Syrian rebels attacked Syrian forces from residential areas, and the military responded causing lethal damage to civilians and buildings (the rebel strategy of Human Shields) and they also done the same with cultural sites (cultural shields).

In the old city of Homs we had a meeting with members of the reconciliation committee, which is led by a priest and sheikh. We also visited the grave of a Jesuit priest who was murdered by IS fighters and visited the rebuilt Catholic church, the original of which was burned down. During the meeting by candlelight, because of regular power blackouts, we heard how Christians and Muslims in the town had been instrumental in the rehabilitation of fighters who choose to lay down their arms and accept the Syrian Government’s offer of Amnesty.

They appealed to us to ask the international community to end the war on Syria, and support peace, and it was for our delegation particularly sad and disappointing that that very day the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, (UK), publicity announced his support for the UK vote to bomb Syria! (And subsequently the UK Government, voted for War on Syria). (If the UK/USA/EU, etc., wish to help the Syrian people they can immediately lift the sanctions which are causing great hardship to the Syrian people).

We also visited the Christian Town of Maaloula, where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken and it is one of the oldest Christian towns in the Middle East. We visited the church of St. George and the priest explained how after their church was burned to the ground by western backed rebels, and many Christians killed, the people of Maaloula, carried a table onto the ruins of the church and after praying started to rebuild their church and homes. Sadly also in this place some Muslim neighbours also destroyed Christian neighbours’ homes and this reminded us all of the complexities of the Syrian conflict and the need to teach nonviolence and build peace and reconciliation. It also brought us to a deeper awareness of the plight of not only moderate Sunnis from extremists, but the huge numbers of Christians now fleeing from Middle Eastern countries, and that if the situation is not stabilized in Syria and the Middle East, there will be few Christians in what is called the cradle of civilization and birth of Christianity, and where the followers of the three Abrahamic faiths have lived and worked as brothers and sisters in unity. The Middle East has already witnessed the tragic and virtual disappearance of Judaism, and this tragedy is happening at an alarming rate to the Christians of the Levant.

But there is hope and Syria is a light to the world as there are many people working for peace and reconciliation, dialogue and negotiations, and this is where the hopes lies and what we can all support by rejecting violence and war in Syria, the Middle East and our world.

(End)

Excerpt:

March by people of faith, civil society groups and communities impacted by climate change in Rome on Jun. 28 to express gratitude to Pope Francis for the release of his Laudato Si encyclical on the environment. Photo credit: Hoda Baraka/350.org

By Sean Buchanan
ROME, Jun 28 2015 (IPS)

People of faith, civil society groups, and communities affected by climate change marched together in Rome Sunday Jun. 28 to express gratitude to Pope Francis for the release of his Laudato Si encyclical on the environment, and call for bolder climate action by world leaders.

Under the banner of ‘One Earth One Family’, the march brought together Catholics and other Christians, followers of non-Christian faiths, environmentalists and people of goodwill. The march ended in St. Peter’s Square in time for the Pope’s weekly Angelus and blessing.“The truth of the matter is that all of humanity needs to stand united in addressing the crisis of our times. Climate change is an issue for everyone with a moral conscience” – Arianne Kassman, climate activist from Papua New Guinea

The celebratory march was animated by a musical band, a climate choir and colourful public artwork designed by artists from Italy and other countries, whose work played a major role in the People’s Climate March in New York City in September last year.

“As we stand at this critical juncture in addressing the climate crisis, we are particularly grateful to the Pope for releasing this encyclical as an awakening for the world to understand how climate change impacts people across all regions,” said Arianne Kassman, a climate activist from Papua New Guinea who took part in march to speak about the reality of climate change in the Pacific.

“The truth of the matter is that all of humanity needs to stand united in addressing the crisis of our times. Climate change is an issue for everyone with a moral conscience,” she added.

Among the messages relayed to the Pope during the march was a request to make fossil fuel divestment part of his moral message in the urgent need to address the climate crisis.

“The fossil fuel divestment campaign is hinged on the same moral premise communicated by Pope Francis in his encyclical,” said Father Edwin Gariguez, Executive Secretary of Caritas Philippines.

“The campaign serves to highlight the immorality of investing in the source of the climate injustice we currently experience. This is why we hope that moving forward and building on this powerful message, Pope Francis can make fossil fuel divestment a part of his moral argument for urgent climate action.”

A petition urging Pope Francis to rid the Vatican of investments in fossil fuels has already gathered tens of thousands of signatures.

Over recent months, dozens of religious institutions have divested from coal, oil and gas companies or endorsed the effort, including the World Council of Churches, representing half a billion Christians in 150 countries.

In May 2015, the Church of England announced it had sold 12 million pounds in thermal coal and tar sands and just this week the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) announced that it will exclude fossil fuel companies from its investments and call on its member churches with 72 million members to do likewise.

More than 220 institutions have commitments to divest from fossil fuels, with faith institutions making up the biggest segment.

As world leaders prepare to meet in Paris later this year for U.N. climate talks, the growing divestment movement will continue to fuel the ethical and economic revolution needed to prevent catastrophic climate change and growing inequality, a key message from Pope Francis’ encyclical.

“The clear path required to address the climate crisis is one that breaks humanity free from the current stranglehold of fossil fuels on our lives and the planet,” said Hoda Baraka, Global Communications Manager for 350.org, one of the organisers of the march.

“This encyclical reinforces the tectonic shift that is happening – we simply cannot continue to treat the Earth as a tool for exploitation.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Is this one of those rare occasions where policy-makers self-critically correct a gigantic blunder? Or is it a cold turnabout guided by pure self-interest?

On August 15, the foreign ministers of the European Union gathered in Brussels and decided that each would henceforth be free to supply arms to Kurdish rebels fighting Sunni extremists of the Islamic State in the north of Iraq. Even Germany which in the past had been unwilling to furnish military supplies to warring parties  in ‘conflict zones’, is now ready to provide armoured vehicles and other hardware to the Kurds opposing the Islamic State’s advance.

The decision of Europe’s foreign ministers may surprise some because, barely a year and four months ago, in April 2013, the European Union had lifted a previously instituted ban on all imports of Syrian oil.

Peter Custers

Moreover, the lifting of this boycott was quite explicitly intended to facilitate the flow of oil from areas in the north-east of Syria, where Sunni extremist rebel organisations had established a strong foothold, if not overall predominance over the region’s oil fields.

The Islamic State was not the only Sunni extremist organisation disputing control over Syrian oil fields. Yet there is little doubt that the fateful decision that the European Union took last year helped the Islamic State consolidate its hold over Syrian oil resources and prepare for a sweeping advance into areas with oil wells in the north of Iraq.

The outcome of the recent Brussels’ meeting thus appears to overturn a disastrous previous decision. To underline the point it is useful to briefly describe the extent to which Sunni extremist rebels have meanwhile established control over oil extraction and production in both Syria and Iraq.“Is this one of those rare occasions where policy-makers self-critically correct a gigantic blunder? Or is it a cold turnabout guided by pure self-interest?”

The Syrian oil fields are basically concentrated in Deir-ez-Zor, a province bordering on Iraq. Whereas oil extraction in Syria has always been very limited in size if measured as a percentage of world supplies, control over the Syrian oil wells plus its refinery has become crucial for the financing of the Islamic State’s war efforts.

In neighbouring Iraq, oil reserves are not concentrated in one single geographic region as they are in Syria. The bulk of the oil wells are to be found in the country’s south, at great distance from the Islamic State’s war theatre in the north. Only one-seventh of Iraq’s oil resources are said to be located in areas controlled by the Islamic State on the one hand, and Kurdish fighters on the other. Nevertheless, recent reports indicate that the Islamic State controls at least seven major oil wells in Iraq alone.

Using expertise gathered after it established control over wells in Syria, the Sunni extremist organisation is able to draw huge profits from the smuggling and sale of oil. It is the Islamic State’s oil-backed armed strength amassed in two adjacent civil wars that has now sent shivers throughout the Western world.

If the European Union’s April 2013 decision appears to have helped trigger the Islamic State’s current success, the situation created is historically novel. To my knowledge, never before has a rebel force fighting a civil war in the global South been able to base its war aspirations on control over oil.

True, in most of the civil wars that have rocked Africa over the last thirty years, access to raw materials has been fundamental. Witness the cases of Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo (DRC) and Sudan. It is also true that oil exports have been a specific mode of war financing, for instance in Angola and the Sudan.

Yet, in those cases, the state remained in command of the oil wealth. In Angola, the right-wing rebel movement UNITA relied heavily on smuggling rough diamonds towards financing its war, while the country’s oil fields were located at great distance UNITA’s war theatre.

In Sudan, oil fields are concentrated in the country’s south, that is, close to and in the region which was disputed by the rebel movement. But the regime of Omar Al-Bashir pursued an inhuman policy of depopulation through aerial bombardments, massacring hapless villagers and forcing survivors to flee. In the self-same process the rebels were deprived of access to people and oil.

Hence, strictly speaking there is no precedent for the oil-fuelled civil wars waged by Sunni rebels in Syria and Iraq.

Now – in turning from de facto supporters to opponents of the Islamic State – Europe’s foreign ministers have followed the U.S. lead, because the United States had just started bombardments of Islamic State positions in Iraq’s north.

Though loudly defended on the grounds of the Islamic State’s relentless persecution of minorities, the renewed U.S. military intervention is not devoid of self-interest. Uppermost in the minds of Pentagon officials is the nexus between oil and arms.

Shortly after President Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from Iraq in October 2011, the United States clinched a huge deal for the sale of F-16 fighter planes and other armaments to Iraq’s military, valued at 12 billion dollars. At least four in five of the top U.S. military corporations are beneficiaries of Iraqi purchases.

Coincidentally, around the time when the U.S.-Iraq agreement on arms’ sales was sealed, the extraction of Iraqi crude was back to old levels, crossing the threshold of three million barrels per day in 2012. As the Iraqi government’s income from oil extraction and exports rose exponentially, U.S. and competing Russian arms’ manufacturers both lined up to bag the orders.

And there is robust confidence that the oil-and-arms nexus can be sustained – according to euphoric projections of the International Energy Agency (IAE), the body of Western oil consumer nations, Iraq holds the key to future increases in world production of crude!

Western policy-makers are feverishly espousing the cause of Muslim Shias, Christians and Yezidis, who are persecuted in areas of Iraq controlled by the Islamic State and, yes, there is no doubt that the Sunni extremist force is guided by a Salafi ideology that severely discriminates against religious minorities, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.

But at what point in the past have Western states consistently defended religious minority rights in the Middle East? The idea seems to have emerged as an afterthought of the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq.

And are Muslim and Christian Arabs in Israel, Muslim Shias in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain – to name just some of the groups mistreated by the West’s close allies – likely to be charmed by the West’s resolve to save the Yezidis of Iraq?

In any case, it is high time that the policy reversals in Brussels be questioned.

To recap: a turnabout in relation to the twin civil wars in Syria/Iraq was staged twice. First, in September 2011, a general prohibition on investments in and exports of oil from Syria was imposed, affecting both Assad’s government and Syria’s opposition. Then, in 2013, the European Union shifted de facto towards a position favourable to Syria’s Sunni extremist rebels.

Although the European Union’s foreign ministers now appear to have realised their sin, the damage can no longer be repaired without a complete overhaul of E.U. policy-making towards the Middle East.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

*  Peter Custers, an academic researcher on Islam and religious tolerance with field work in South Asia, is also a theoretician on the arms’ trade and extraction of raw materials in the context of conflicts in the global South. He is the author of ‘Questioning Globalized Militarism’. 

Volunteers have planted a garden in the courtyard of the burned St. Mary's Church in Homs. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

By Eva Bartlett
HOMS, Syria, Jul 8 2014 (IPS)

Al-Waer, Homs’s most populated area and the city’s last insurgent holdout, might soon achieve the truce that Hom’s Old City saw in May this year when, in an exchange deal, the insurgents left their strongholds.

Today, Al-Waer’s population stands at more than 200,000, many of them internally displaced persons (IDPs) who fled their homes in other parts of Syria, only to find themselves caught in the middle of the efforts of the Syrian army to eradicate the armed militants.

Homs, Syria’s third largest city and dubbed in the media as the “capital of the revolution”, suffered nearly three years of the insurgents’ presence and the Syrian army’s fight to oust them and restore calm. By May this year, many areas had been destroyed by both army bombing and insurgent rockets and car bombs.

On May 9, 2014, Homs’ Governor Talal Barazi was reported as having declared Homs “empty of guns and fighters” and under a truce agreement, the roughly 1,200 insurgents who had taken over most of the Old City in early 2012 were bussed out and residents could finally return to their neighbourhoods.Many of them [residents of Homs’ Old City] argued that what had happened in Homs was not revolution, as Dutch Jesuit priest Frans van der Lugt had argued before he was assassinated, just one month before Homs was liberated.

Some of those residents who had stayed on in the Old City of Homs during the siege talked to IPS about their ordeals and losses at the hands of armed groups, including Nusra and Farooq brigades. Many of them argued that what had happened in Homs was not revolution, as Dutch Jesuit priest Frans van der Lugt had argued before he was assassinated, just one month before Homs was liberated.

“I was baptised in this church, got married in it, and baptised my children in it,” said Abu Nabeel, a resident of Homs’ Old City. The St. George Church, with its crumbling walls, is one of 11 reported destroyed in the Old City. It no longer has its wooden ceiling and ornately-carved wooden ceiling panels and wall lattice lie in heaps outside the ancient church.

“Most of the damage is from the last days just before the insurgents left,” he said. “But we’ll rebuild.”That rebuilding has already begun, with residents scraping away rubble and re-paving small areas that had been damaged.

The arched interior of the St. Mary’s Church (Um al-Zinnar) bears the char marks of its burning by retreating insurgents. Like many others, the church was looted of objects and vandalised, with the insurgents leaving sectarian graffiti on the walls. “Symbols related to Christianity were removed. Even from inside houses. If you had a picture of the Virgin Mary, they removed it,” said Abu Nabeel.

Volunteers have now planted a garden in its courtyard, which they say is an attempt to “bring some beauty back” to Homs.

In the courtyard of the Jesuit church sat a lone plastic chair adorned with flowers and a photo of Father Frans van der Lugt, the Jesuit priest assassinated on April 7, 2014.

Nazim Kanawati, who knew and respected the Jesuit, arrived moments after the 75-year-old priest had been shot in the back of the head.”We were surrounded and under siege. This was the only place we could go to. Everyone loved it here,” he said. Like Father Frans, Kanawati refused to leave Homs while others fled. “I didn’t want to leave, I’m a Syrian, I had the right to be there.”

Although he chose to stay in the Old City, Father Frans was critical of the insurgents. In January 2012, he had written: “From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”

“People in Homs were already armed and prepared before the protests began,” said Kanawati. “If they hadn’t been planning for the protests from the beginning, the people wouldn’t have had the quantity of arms that they had.”

Abu Nabeel explained that in addition to the Hamidiyeh district where various old churches are to be found, Christians in other areas occupied by the armed insurgents also fled. “There were an estimated 100,000 Christians living in the Old City of Homs before it was taken over by terrorists. Most fled in February 2012. By March, only 800 had stayed, and by the end just over 100 remained,” he said.

The siege that the Syrian army enforced on the Old City in an attempt to drive out the insurgents had a drastic effect on the daily lives of those remaining. Before Homs was freed of the armed insurgents, who were also stealing from homes, life had become impossible. “There was food at the beginning, but it started to run out. At the end we had nothing, we ate whatever we could collect,” said Kanawati.

Mohammed, a Syrian from the Qussoor district of Homs, is now one of the reported 6.5 million internally-displaced Syrians.

“I’m a refugee in Latakia now. I work in Homs, two days a week, and then return to Latakia to stay at my friend’s home. I left my house at the very end of 2011, before the area was taken over by al-Nusra and al-Farooq brigades.”

He spoke of the sectarian nature of the insurgents and protests from the very beginning in 2011.

“I was renting a home in a different neighbourhood of Homs, while renovating my own house. Just beyond my balcony there were protests that did not call for ‘freedom’ or even overthrowing the ‘regime’.They chanted sectarian mottos, they said they would fill al-Zahara – an Alawi neighbourhood – with blood. And also al-Nezha – where there are many Alawis and Christians.”

The windows and door handle to the home of Aymen and Zeinat al-Akhras were missing, but the house itself was intact. Zeinat, a pharmacist, and Aymen, a chemical engineer, survived the presence of the armed men and the resulting siege on the Old City.

“I’ve gained five kilos!” Zeinat said. “I dropped to 34 kilos. Aymen told me to weigh myself. I got on the scale and said, ‘What’s 34 kilos?’. A ten-year-old weighs more than that! And Aymen was 43 kilos. For a man, 43 kilos,” she said laughing.

“Thirty-eight times they came to steal our food. The first couple of times, they knocked on the door, after that they just entered with guns. The last things they took were our dried peas, our cracked wheat, our olives, finally our avatar (wild thyme). We started to eat grass and whatever greens we could find in February, 2014, and that’s all we had till Homs was liberated,” Zeinat said.

“The last time they came all we had were some spices. I was putting the spices on the grass and weeds that we were eating at that point, to give themsome flavour. They even took the spices. They didn’t leave us anything.”

Meanwhile, despite the return of calm to Homs’ Old City, insurgents continue their campaign of car-bombing civilian areas of Homs. Tens were killed by car bombs and rocket attacks in June alone.Then, on June 26, the Nusra brigades, an al-Qaeda affiliate and one of the main factions which occupied Homs, is reported to have pledged allegiance to the Takfiri extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria(ISIS).

This allegiance to a group documented to have beheaded, mutilated, crucified and flogged Syrians and Iraqis gives more credence to Homs’ residents’opinion that the events in Syria are no revolution.

Muslim women were the first to venture back to their homes following deadly riots in southwest Sri Lanka on Jun. 15, 2014. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2014 (IPS)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on the Sri Lankan government to “take necessary measures” to prevent any further attacks against minority Muslims in the country.

Asked to respond to reports of violence there, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told IPS “the secretary-general is concerned about reported attacks against Muslim communities in southern Sri Lanka”."We must address our problems ourselves and...resist the ready temptation to seek outside interventions to address essentially domestic issues." -- Ambassador Palitha Kohona

He said the secretary-general recalls the Human Rights Council resolution of March 2014, which urges the government of Sri Lanka to investigate alleged attacks on members of religious minority groups and to take steps to prevent such attacks in the future.

“The secretary-general calls on the government to take necessary measures to prevent any deterioration of the situation, to immediately investigate the incidents and to ensure the safety of all Sri Lankans,” Dujarric added.

The Association of Sri Lankan Muslims in North American (TASMinA), which held a protest rally outside the United Nations last week, has sought intervention by the secretary-general.

“We kindly request you to intervene and ask the Sri Lankan government to prevent hatred and violence against Muslims and other minority communities in Sri Lanka, and bring the perpetrators of the recent murder and violence to justice,” says a letter addressed to the secretary-general.

In a statement released Wednesday, three U.N. human rights experts called on Sri Lanka “to adopt urgent measures to stop the promotion of racial and faith-based hatred, and violence against Muslim and Christian communities by Buddhist groups with extremist views, and bring perpetrators of this violence to justice.

“More than 350 violent attacks against Muslims and over 150 attacks against Christians have been reported in Sri Lanka in the last two years. Muslim and Christian communities are reportedly subjected to hate speech, discrimination, attacks and acts of violence throughout Sri Lanka frequently,” the statement added.

Asked for a response, Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative Ambassador Palitha Kohona told IPS, “Sri Lanka can ill afford any inter-racial or inter-religious conflict at this stage, especially at a time the country is recovering from 27 years of terrorist-inspired violence.”

He said the economy is rebounding and “we have a wonderful opportunity to ensure a better life for all our people.

“While inter-racial and inter-religious intolerance is not unique to Sri Lanka, the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa has unequivocally condemned the recent violence in the country,” he said.

Kohona also promised that justice will be meted out to the wrongdoers.

“We must also address our problems ourselves and seek solutions from within and resist the ready temptation to seek outside interventions to address essentially domestic issues,” he said.

David Griffiths, deputy Asia Pacific director at Amnesty International, told IPS the London-based human rights organisation “is extremely concerned about the upsurge in violence against religious minorities in Sri Lanka and the impunity with which these attacks are taking place.

“We have received hundreds of reports of threats and attacks on Christians and Muslims and their places of worship in the past two years,” he added.

These have often been led by members of hardline Buddhist groups with apparent links to government officials and none of them have been adequately investigated, he said.

“There are numerous reports that police failed to intervene to protect minority Sri Lankans from attacks. All these incidents must be effectively investigated and perpetrators brought to justice.”

Griffiths said authorities could wield considerable influence over supporters of these groups and must work much harder to resolve tensions and rein in the violence.

An editorial in the New York Times last week said “hate-mongering Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka have set off the country’s worst wave of anti-Muslim violence in years.”

Most Sri Lankans, including the overwhelming Buddhist majority, want nothing to do with the Bodu Balu Sena (BBS), which is accused of instigating the violence, the Times said.

“Sri Lanka needs healing. Mr. Rajapaksa’s statements on Monday directing the police to act against any individual or group fomenting ethnic or religious hatred are welcome. But the president did not repudiate the Bodu Bala Sena by name,” the editorial noted.

Rita Izsk, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, told IPS she was “extremely concerned over the situation in Sri Lanka and what seems to be a pattern of attacks emerging over recent months”.

She urged the government to act decisively to bring targeted violence against religious minorities to an end as soon as possible. Concrete actions are required to address impunity, she added. “The Penal Code must be amended so that hate speech and incitement of hatred can be prohibited and punished.”

She also said the government must send a strong signal that perpetrators of violence will be prosecuted for their actions and not allowed to act with impunity.

Failure to act and to investigate fully all attacks that have taken place may result in further violence.

“While I am encouraged by comments from the government that action will be taken to investigate incidents of violence and that the President is appointing a High-Level Panel to inquire into recent disturbances, as he says, this must be swift and independent in order to gain the confidence of affected communities”.

The government has a “responsibility to protect” all persons and it must live up to that responsibility in practice. This principle places the primary responsibility on States to protect their populations from all forms of violence and through all appropriate means, Izsk added.

In his letter to Ban, Najaf Jamsheed, president of TASMiNA said: “We believe Buddhism is peaceful and non-violent. We respect Buddhism and we love Sri Lanka – our motherland”.

The recent attacks against Muslims in Sri Lanka and their property by Sinhala extremist elements led by Bodu Bala Sena, are highly abominable incidents of racism, he said.

The letter says that while TASMiNA is sincerely grateful to President Rajapaksa for taking personal responsibility to ensure that the victims of last month’s anti-Muslim riots are taken care of and compensated for their losses and that those responsible for their suffering are brought to justice, “we strongly urge the government of Sri Lanka to counter perceptions that it supports the activities of organisations like the BBS.”

The letter urges the government to take immediate and decisive actions to (i) ensure that security forces do not allow religious extremists to attack innocent civilians and vandalize houses of worship and homes, (ii) proscribe the hate mongering and end the climate of fear perpetuated by extremist organizations like BBS and (iii) uphold the rights of all Sri Lankans to equality and non-discrimination as enshrined under Sri Lanka’s constitution and law.

A Sutoro miliitaman holds his rifle in Derik in northeast Syria. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
QAMISHLI, Syria , May 4 2014 (IPS)

Malki Hana says his men are afraid of cameras. “Most of them are army defectors and they may easily get in trouble,” says this commander of a mostly unknown armed group in Syria.

From his headquarters in Derik, 700 km northeast of Damascus, Hana, 34, briefs IPS on his militia comprising almost exclusively members of Syria’s Christian community.

“We started to organise ourselves as the regime pulled out from the northeast and the Kurds took over the region. Sutoro – ‘protection’ in Syriac language – is our alternative to the chaos gripping the country,” says the commander, a former mechanic.There are discordant voices within the community.

In July 2012 Syrian Kurds took control of regions in the north of the country where they are compact. So far they’ve managed to keep distance from both the government and the armed opposition.

Hana speaks of a “fluid collaboration” with Kurdish security forces. “We have just 100 fighters Derik but we are in full coordination with the Asayish – the Kurdish police – and we even conduct joint operations.”

Translators are sometimes necessary. “We do not speak Kurdish and some of them are Kurds from Turkey who do not speak Arabic,” he says.

Pre-war census figures suggested an Assyrian Christian population about 10 percent of the total population of 23 million.

The east has been a safe haven for Christians – especially those fleeing the war in neighbouring Iraq. But many parts of Syria have turned into a lethal trap for non-Muslim minorities.

The United Nations says more than two million Syrians have fled the country since March 2011. It is uncertain how many of them have been Christians.

Many Christians have reportedly sided with the Damascus regime of President Bashar Assad during the crisis, but there are discordant voices within the community.

Among these is the Syriac Union Party (SUP) established in 2005. It remained underground until the new scenario in the northeast allowed them to surface in places like Qamishli, 600 km northeast of Damascus.

SUP chair Isoue Geouryie laments that many of his kin have vowed for “security” rather than “rights”.

“Both Hafez Assad (former president and father of the current president) and his son denied us our legitimate rights because they did not even recognise the existence of the Syriac people in Syria,” Geouryie tells IPS.

He says he has no fear of reprisals even though many of his party members are in prison.

Easter processions in Qamishli are famous all over Syria. But the political situation here is unparalleled: government forces are still in control of the airport and the city centre, where portraits of the Assads, including a large statue of Hafez, remain untouched. The suburbs and the rest of the northeastern Jazeera region remain under Kurdish control.

Geouryie says he prefers the latter. “One of the most important steps that we have recently taken was to declare our autonomy and release a social contract that recognises our (Syriac) language as co-official along with Kurdish and Arabic.”

In late January this year, Jazeera declared its own autonomous provincial government which includes Kurdish, Arab and Syriac representatives.

Geouryie sees the Sutoro as “a necessary and legitimate body” although he draws a line between “those who work hard alongside the Kurds, and those who still support the regime.”

At the militia headquarters in the west of Qamishli, local commander Luey Shamaaon puts the full number of Sutoro militiamen “around 400”. He confirms the existence of a fellow Christian group aligned with Assad.

This split came seven months ago. “The regime arrested several of our men but we managed to exchange them for some guards we captured at their checkpoints,” recalls this 33-year-old Syriac. He insists that the “real” Sutoro is his group, “and not the others.”

According to local information, Christian militias allegedly loyal to Assad boast a different logo and identify themselves on their uniforms and their vehicles as “Sootoro”. Given the constant refusal of the Syrian government to grant a visa to this reporter, the only way into Qamishli was after crossing the border from the Iraqi Kurdish region without consent from Damascus. IPS was therefore unable to check such information about other Christian militias independently.

“Of course we have contact with them but only at a personal level. When I take off my uniform I can talk politics with anyone, and in a most civilised way,” a Sutoro militiaman who didn’t want to disclose his name told IPS.

Despite the ongoing conflict, it is evident in downtown Qamishli that ties remain in place among the local Christian community with differing loyalties.

Lara, a 21-year-old Christian university student says at one of the many Internet cafes in town that she feels comfortable with the Sutoro and their Kurdish allies.

“Were it not for the YPG (Kurdish acronym for ‘People’s Protection Units’ run by Kurds), Islamists would have wiped us out all long ago,” she tells IPS. Al-Qaeda linked groups, many of them entering the area through the Turkish border, have maintained a siege on the region since autumn 2012.

Other Christians at the cafe distance themselves from the Sutoro. “Sutoro has appointed itself as a defence body for the Christians but none of us asked them to do so,” says Maryam. “As far as I know, Assad’s forces are the only legitimate armed forces in Syria.”

She is struggling to chat online with a relative in Sweden. “Most of my family is there now,” she adds with a sad smile.

Attacks between Séléka-aligned Muslims and Christian vigilante militias in the Central Africa Republic displaced a quarter of the country’s 4.6 million people and plunged the nation into bloody anarchy. Credit: EU/ECHO/Patrick Lambrechts/ CC by 2.0

By Matthew Newsome
ADDIS ABABA, Feb 28 2014 (IPS)

While wrangling over Central African Republic’s (CAR) wealth in natural resources played a role in the country’s crisis, its future peace and stability still partly depends on a solution that factors in how to equitably distribute its national wealth.

“The conflict is multifaceted and does reflect tensions between groups over the control for land and natural resources. Neither side is fighting in the name of god, though paradoxically there is a religious tone that has complicated the crisis,” Comfort Ero, the Africa programme director for the International Crisis Group, told IPS. "Séléka was in the end a consortium of malcontents...It is to a large extent a fight for political power/control and safe guarding communities..." -- Comfort Ero, International Crisis Group

Violence between Séléka-aligned Muslims and and the anti-balaka Christian vigilante militias has killed two thousand people and displaced a quarter of the country’s four million population since Séléka rebels staged a coup last March.

Although the violence has escalated along religious lines between Muslims and Christians, the conflict’s origins in a political feud between ethnic groups for control over CAR’s resources, including the country’s rich diamond reserves, should not be overlooked, said Ero.

“Séléka was in the end a consortium of malcontents…It is to a large extent a fight for political power/control and safe guarding communities, especially those who have historically felt marginalised,” she said.

The Séléka coalition, whose name means “alliance”, launched a rebellion in 2012 that led to its leader Michael Djotodia seizing power from President Francis Bozizé in March 2013.

Djotodia claimed afterwards that his northern tribespeople — the Gula — felt betrayed after Bozizé requested their support for staging a coup in 2003 and then excluded them from his sphere once in power.

Bozizé proceeded to exploit the country’s wealth for the enrichment of his own ethnic group and family members, which created discontent throughout the country about rampant corruption and nepotism.

Since independence from France in 1960, CAR has suffered five coups and multiple rebellions. Although CAR is rich in diamonds, timber, gold, uranium and oil, the country’s per capita income is only 510 dollars, making the troubled country one of the poorest in Africa.

“Bozizé created major grievances throughout all the country’s ethnic groups about a discrimination of wealth from resources such as diamonds only going to his family and to his tribe — the Gbaya. It was this discrimination that fuelled the Séléka rebellion,” a researcher at the Institute of Security Studies told IPS. 

During his presidential reign, 11 members of Bozize’s family held positions in parliament.

A subsequent refusal to distribute the country’s wealth created a climate of marginalisation and disenfranchisement in the north that helped create conditions for an armed rebellion explained Ero.

“His [Bozizé’s] family’s control of the security and finance sector, including state-owned companies, and their stranglehold on the management of public finance, significantly fuelled the crisis in the country,” said Ero.

Neighbouring country, Chad, also played an understated role in triggering the bloody crisis after its ambitions of tapping into CAR’s resource wealth went awry. Chad’s President Idriss Déby Itno backed Bozizé’s seizure of power with the Chad presidential guard in 2003 but soon took affront after Bozizé started cultivating relations with South Africa.

“By 2012, Chad was openly backing the Séléka and the fact that the Chadian fighters among the rebels fought against the South African military contingent was not entirely unrelated to the fact that Bozizé had given uranium and other mineral concessions to South African firms instead of to Chad, which wanted some of the very same resources Déby sought as part of his quest for regional hegemony,” Peter Pham, director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council, a research institute for U.S. and European policy approaches to Africa, told IPS.

As a response to feeling snubbed, Chad released Séléka leaders into northern CAR, a move that helped to rally Séléka forces and foment a rebellion that led to the overthrow of Bozizé.

“These individuals were and continue to be motivated by a more personal grievance, that they themselves weren’t the ones controlling the resources,” Pham said.

Revenge killings between the Séléka militia and the anti-balaka militia has sidelined the issue of ramping up policing of the country’s warlord-controlled diamond mining industry and created a situation where the precious stones could be funding rebel activity.

“We need to be sure that diamonds are not leaking out of the country, allowing revenues to contribute to the ongoing conflict. The high risk that diamonds may have financed armed groups in CAR stresses once again why transparency is vitally needed in the diamond sector both nationally and internationally,” Alexandra Pardal, a campaign leader at anti-corruption watchdog, Global Witness, told IPS.

There are an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 mostly artisan miners working for middle men who sell the stones to smugglers.

“Séléka’s members and supporters include dissatisfied economic actors, the diamond collectors. One of the demands put forward by Séléka and some rebel commanders was for the ‘unconditional return of diamonds, gold, cash and other goods taken by the government in 2008,’” Ero said.

CAR has been suspended from the Kimberley Process, an international body responsible for halting the trade in conflict-tainted diamonds, due to the military clashes in the country.

A plan for reform and stronger governance of CAR’s resource industry would substantially help break the cycle of armed conflict and also help to democratise the benefits of the country’s major sources of wealth.

“Rebuilding the country’s economy, including protecting the diamond sector — the country’s main export is an immediate priority,” Ero said.

Rwandan soldiers wait in line at the Kigali airport Jan. 19. U.S. forces will transport a total number of 850 Rwandan soldiers and more than 1,000 tons of equipment into the Central African Republic to aid French and African Union operations against militants during this three week-long operation. Credit: U.S. Army Africa photo by Air Force Staff Sgt. Ryan Crane.

By Matthew Newsome
ADDIS ABABA, Feb 4 2014 (IPS)

There are growing concerns that the massive funding crisis for peacekeeping operations in the Central African Republic (CAR) will jeopardise any prospect of restoring stability to the country. 

“The resources being allocated to the crisis are so inadequate to the task. The notion that a few thousand troops – even if they were well-trained and equipped, which is true for the French and some, but certainly not all, of the African contingents – are enough to provide security for an area larger than France itself is risible at best,” Peter Pham, director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council, a research institute for U.S. and European policy approaches to Africa, told IPS. “The notion that a few thousand troops ... are enough to provide security for an area larger than France itself is risible at best.” -- Peter Pham, director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council

As peacekeepers in CAR recaptured the key town of Sibut from rebel fighters on Feb. 2, donor countries made a 315-million-dollar pledge to boost peacekeeping operations in the conflict-ridden country. But this response from the international community has been criticised for being tardy and insufficient to adequately equip the fledgling African Union (AU) mission and fill a security vacuum that has caused 2,000 deaths.

“That’s why the forces have largely limited their activities to Bangui, the country’s capital, and one or two other centres while the countryside has largely been left unsecured,” Pham said.

Last year, inter-religious violence gripped the Central African nation after Michael Djotodia, backed by the Islamist Seleka rebel group, seized power from elected Christian leader Francois Bozizé.

Vicious attacks and counter attacks between Seleka-aligned Muslims and Christian vigilante militias displaced a quarter of the country’s 4.6 million people and plunged the land-locked nation into bloody anarchy.

The new funds offer modest support to the cash-strapped International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA) – an AU-led operation currently around 5,500-strong supported by 1,600 French troops. But Pham says a poverty of resources for overstretched peacekeeping troops will fail to de-escalate violence spreading throughout the lawless jungle countryside. The impact of the conflict goes beyond CAR as the violence threatens to destabilise the region.

To try and close the funding gap the international community, including Japan, Norway and Luxembourg, pledged 315 million dollars – which is just short of MISCA’s operational budget of 409 million dollars for 2014. The largest single donation came from the Central African Economic Community, which pledged 100 million dollars to the MISCA force.

In addition, the United Nations World Food Programme has requested 95 million dollars from donors to stem a spiralling humanitarian crisis and provide food assistance to the population.

The European Union (EU) donated 61 million dollars, half of which will support MISCA. The other half will be dedicated to the preparation of elections at the earliest date possible to hasten a return to constitutional order. The EU also plans to send 600 troops by March to support the AU force.

“The EU is committed to financially supporting the AU to find military equipment for the troops, MISCA is still establishing its modus operandi and is in urgent need of equipment to support the troops,” Nicholas Westcott, Africa director at the European Union, told IPS.

Although France has requested that the U.N. take over the peacekeeping operation, the AU maintains that MISCA should lead the mission for at least 12 months to allow the regional force to show its military mettle. MISCA comprises soldiers from the Central African countries of Burundi, Rwanda, Chad, Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville.

The appointment of Catherine Samba-Panza, mayor of Bangui, as interim president of the transitional government, has also raised hopes that a return to political process might stem the blood-letting between Christian and Muslim groups. Her election follows the resignation of Djotodia and his prime minister on Jan. 10 due to international pressure.

“The new transitional government does not have more financial capacity than the previous one but, when it comes to the reconstitution of state security forces, it has three advantages. It has more competence within its ranks, it has more legitimacy in the eyes of the Bangui population and it has the backing of the African and French security forces and the Europeans,” Thierry Vircoulon, from the International Crisis Group, told IPS.

The newly-elected interim prime minister, Andre Nzapayeke, attended a donor event at the AU headquarters in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and said his country needed “a real Marshall plan” and that “in a period of international economic crisis these pledges have a special value.”

Pham says that if there is to be a lasting solution to the crisis, a non-military campaign for dialogue and reconciliation between sparring factions must be considered as being just as important in ending the orgy of violence as the need to buttress peacekeeping troops with funds and equipment.

“Uncoordinated, atavistic violence of the sort we are seeing in CAR cannot be stopped by military force alone since both the would-be killers and their victims are largely civilians. Rather, it requires massive police forces to prevent multiple small-scale atrocities over a sustained period and, then, an extended period of dialogue and peace building to restore peace in the community,” Pham said.

Over 900,000 people have so far been uprooted from their homes since the conflict in CAR escalated. Close to half a million are in the outskirts of the capital Bangui with 100,000 taking refuge at the airport. Credit: © EU/ECHO/Pierre-Yves Scotto/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 30 2014 (IPS)

Reports of horrific revenge killing continued to emerge from the Central African Republic Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the Security Council voted to increase the international troop presence there and levy sanctions against those it suspects of war crimes.

Over 2,000 people have been killed and one million – a quarter of the population – displaced since a coalition of northern, predominantly Muslim rebels calling themselves Seleka (“alliance” in the local Sango language) seized power in March 2013.“Today, two men were killed in the street - one had his head cut off. They were cut to bits." -- Joanne Mariner

Following the deployment of peacekeepers and the resignation of president and former Seleka leader Michel Djotodia earlier this month, the group began a hasty but violent retreat from the capital and several contested rural towns.

Violence against the Christian community was highest in early December, when marauding ex-Seleka elements killed hundreds of civilians. But since then, the 1,600 French and 5,000 African Union peacekeepers have proved unable to fill the security vacuum left in the Seleka’s wake and civilians in areas where fighters had based themselves have come under increasingly vicious attacks from Christian anti-balaka militias seeking revenge.

“The Seleka are the worst thing that could have happened to Muslims in the Central African Republic,” said Joanne Mariner, senior crisis response adviser at Amnesty International, who estimates over 100,000 Muslims have already fled.

“I’ve spoken to hundreds of Muslim civilians and almost every single one tells me that at this point they want to get out of the country,” she told IPS.

On Tuesday, interim president Catherine Samba-Panza told French radio she would request that an official U.N. peacekeeping mission take over from the joint French-African Union mission that the 15-member U.N. Security Council authorised in December, something human rights groups have called for since last year.

But the council again stopped short of sending such a “blue-helmet” mission, authorising only 500 additional European Union troops who will be expected to spell French “Sangari” soldiers guarding 100,000 displaced people camped at Bangui’s airport.

On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch emergency director Peter Bouckaert tweeted a photograph taken at the airport appearing to show a crowd mutilating the corpses of two Muslim men, just 15 yards, he said, from French troops.

Last week, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay warned “the disarmament of ex-Seleka carried out by French forces appears to have left Muslim communities vulnerable to anti-balaka retaliatory attacks.” Other officials have warned of the potential for genocide in the country and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged for a peacekeeping mission with up to 9,000 soldiers. But the Security Council demurred.

Rwandan soldiers wait in line at the Kigali airport Jan. 19. U.S. forces will transport a total number of 850 Rwandan soldiers and more than 1,000 tons of equipment into the Central African Republic to aid French and African Union operations against militants during this three week-long operation. Credit: U.S. Army Africa photo by Air Force Staff Sgt. Ryan Crane.

In recent days, anti-balaka have made regular incursions into Bangui’s two remaining Muslim enclaves, known locally as PK5 and PK12, killing dozens of residents and driving out hundreds. PK12 is a main transit point and Muslims from villages surrounding Bangui have congregated there, awaiting passage to Chad and Cameroon.

Last Friday, 22 civilians were murdered in a convoy on the highway to Cameroon, many hacked to death with machetes.

“In PK5, when people leave that area there are lynchings,” Mariner told IPS from the northwest town of Bozoum. “Today, two men were killed in the street – one had his head cut off. They were cut to bits.”

She added, “Bangui used to be an enormously mixed city. That is completely over.”

In PK13, another traditionally Muslim neighbourhood now emptied of its residents, newcomers have already written their names on abandoned houses and made plans to turn the local mosque into a youth centre.

“You come back in a year and you’ll never know that there were Muslims there,” said Mariner. “Unless there’s real action taken, that’s where the country is going.”

Information is sparse outside of Bangui but the situation is believed to be dire north and northwest the capital, where the peacekeeping presence is light and where anti-balaka have actively pushed Muslims out of their towns.

In the western town of Baoro, the only Muslims left have taken refuge in a local church guarded by peacekeepers. But elsewhere, in towns like Bossembele, Yakole and Boyali, most have fled.

Until the Chadian-backed Seleka began fighting, sporadic violence in the country had never broken so deeply along religious lines.

Disorganised violence

Because the Christian militias are only loosely coordinated at best, negotiations have been impossible in many parts of the country.

“There’s no command and control structure, so even within a single region, they may have five anti-balaka groups vying for power,” said Mariner.

But unlike in the capital, where better organised gangs have access to automatic weapons and grenades, the lightly armed and often young anti-balaka in the countryside travel on foot and are seen fleeing from peacekeepers.

“Obviously you can’t have peacekeepers on every block, but you can have peacekeepers in every town. Even a few peacekeepers make a huge difference,” said Mariner.

“They mostly have hunting rifles, shotguns, you see a lot with bow and arrows, they are no match to real soldiers. And when there are real soldiers they get out of the way. There are attacks that almost certainly could have been avoided had there been peacekeepers in place.”

Mission confusion

The EU contingent will add a third element to an already piecemeal force that has at times appeared overwhelmed.

After the initial Security Council vote in December, observers expressed concern that a streamlined mission – of the kind that had seen moderate successes in Mali against an organised foe – would fail to prevent violence that had devolved into communal, tit-for-tat killings, nor would it address long-term development needs that fostered conflict.

French Ambassador Gerard Araud spoke this week of the need for a full U.N. mission replete with up to 10,000 peacekeepers. But Tuesday’s vote accomplished neither of those goals.

Ainsley Reidy, senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch, says the international community has a responsibility to bolster the intervention.

“We see protection of the civilian population and accountability for crimes committed by all as the two priority responsibilities of the international community,” said Reidy. “For that reason we continue to remain convinced of the need for the quick deployment of a properly resourced U.N. peacekeeping mission to respond to the scale of the violence.”

Such a mission would augment BINUCA, the small, non-military “peace-building” office already in the country. Groups have for months criticised what they see as a lack of public human rights reporting coming from observers there, a problem they place in the generally disjointed nature of the intervention. Without a unified mandate for all observers and peacekeepers, human rights groups worry accountability and reconciliation will be waylaid.

“We think ultimately there needs to be a fully fledged U.N. mission that addresses both the security needs and can contribute to holding people accountable,” Reidy told IPS.

The December resolution left the door open for the possibility of a larger U.N. peacekeeping mission and would only require an additional vote to initiate a transition. At the time, there was speculation that Security Council members, in particular the United States, were hesitant to budget for another peacekeeping mission at a time when the U.N. has more troops deployed worldwide than ever before. That state of affairs appears unaltered.

In neighbouring South Sudan, where the Security Council voted earlier in December to increase the blue-helmet mission there by 5,000, the transfer of troops has been delayed and thousands have yet to arrive.

“We do know these deployments tend to be slow and can take up to six months,” said Reidy.

“If we take what has happened to civilians between mid-December and mid-January as an indication of how quickly things can happen on the ground in CAR, then six months is too long a time. The U.N. and others can’t afford to drag their feet on this.”

CAR refugees seek safety in a church. Credit: ©EU/ECHO/Ian Van Engelgem

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
YAOUNDÉ, Dec 19 2013 (IPS)

“We couldn’t stand the violence anymore,” said 27-year-old Baba Hamadou shortly after alighting from a chartered flight at the Douala International Airport earlier this week.

Hamadou is one of 202 Cameroonians repatriated from the Central African Republic (CAR) on Tuesday, bringing the total number of Cameroonians who have returned from the war-ravaged country to 896 in four days.“My neighbour was butchered like an animal.” -- David Nchami

As the sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims worsens, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya decided that it was time to evacuate Cameroonian citizens living there. Altogether, there are about 20,000 Cameroonians in the Central African Republic.

The new arrivals have been narrating gory tales of violence they witnessed.

“Four Cameroonians – a man, his wife and two children – were roasted to death in Bangui before my very eyes,” Hamadou told IPS.

“My neighbour was butchered like an animal,” added another Cameroonian, David Nchami, who worked as a builder in Bangui.

“A woman was raped and her genitals removed in the capital,” said yet another, Marie-Louise Tebah.

Divine Abada, a miner from southwest Cameroon, told the Cameroon state broadcaster CRTV that the scale of the violence was so terrible he decided to return home.

“These crazy Séléka rebels caught me in the bush, beat us very well, took everything away from us. The only thing that saved me was that they did not see my passport,” he said.

Identifying Abada’s nationality would likely have made things worse, given the apparent hatred the Séléka rebels have for Cameroonians since President François Bozize was ousted from power in March and sought refuge there. The transitional government that took his place has failed to quell the armed clashes and attacks on civilians.

Séléka has also targeted Cameroon for reprisals. In November, a group of suspected rebels crossed over from CAR and attacked military installations at Biti, a border village in Cameroon’s East Region.

A firefight between the rebels and Cameroon’s security forces led to the deaths of seven people, two of them Cameroonians.

The African Union is boosting its troop levels in CAR to 6,000 soldiers, who join 1,600 French soldiers already on the ground in the former French colony.

The governor of Cameroon’s East Region, Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua, also says his own government has strengthened security along the border.

“We have deployed troops along the 800-km-long border line that divides the two countries,” he told IPS.  “We can’t afford to leave our compatriots at the mercy of evident death.”

Even as Cameroonians at the CAR border live in perpetual fear of attacks by Séléka rebels, thousands of Central Africans are flocking into Cameroon, escaping the violence and bloodshed in their own country.

In early November, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced that Cameroon was already host to some 90,000 Central African refugees.

Thousands more fled last weekend by boat across the Oubangui River to Zongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), even though the border is officially closed and they risked being shot at.

According to U.N. figures, some 210,000 people have been forcibly displaced by violence in the last two weeks in the embattled capital, Bangui.

The rather large influx of CAR refugees into Cameroon has been causing a lot of unease among the local population.

In September, hundreds of the refugees abandoned their camp in Nadoungué, a small village in Cameroon’s East Region, and relocated to a nearby village in search of better services.

“All we are looking for is water, healthcare, food…these things are not found here,” Dominique Mendo, a CAR refugee, told IPS.

But the continued influx has brought them into conflict with the local population, sometimes necessitating the intervention of security forces.

The Cameroonian government has committed over 500 soldiers to join the AU peacekeeping force, according to Defence Minister Edgar Alain Mebe Ngo’o.

In addition, the 1,600 French troops used Cameroon as a transit port, along with ammunition, bound for Central Africa.

Mebe Ngo’o said Cameroon cannot stay indifferent to the mayhem that is affecting millions of people in CAR.

According to the United Nations, over 500 people have been killed in the capital Bangui alone since Dec. 5.

The U.N. also says the conflict has affected the entire 4.6 million population, with one in 10 fleeing their homes and a quarter of the people going hungry.

Christian youth watch an Israeli military exercise ahead of joining the Israeli army. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

By Pierre Klochendler
QATSRIN, Occupied Golan Heights, Nov 11 2013 (IPS)

In the municipal sports hall with an army officer to his side, Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox Arab priest in full regalia, briefs Arab Christian twelfth-graders on the merits of serving in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). “It’s only natural that the country which protects us deserves that we contribute to its defence,” he tells them.

A Christian teenager calls on the officer to reckon on the Christian conscripts’ cultural needs. The officer’s proclamation is unassuming: “The IDF is a melting pot.”

One in five Israelis is an Arab of Palestinian descent. Muslims constitute the overwhelming majority of this sizeable minority.

The 130,000-strong Arab Christian community is a tiny minority within the minority. They’re the original Christians of the Holy Land, the living stones on which the bi-millennial faith was built.“Jews call us ‘Arabs’. For Muslims, we’re ‘Christians,’ not Arabs. We’re Israeli Christians, nothing short of that.”

Encouraged by Nadaf to take advantage of Sunday rest, some 250 youth have preferred to show up at an event organised by the IDF Social Branch than to attend mass.

Entitled ‘In the fighters’ footsteps’, the week-long event brings twelfth-graders from around the country to the nearby Ahmadiyah training ground where, in order to boost their motivation before conscription, military prowess is demonstrated in front of them with the pyrotechnics of live ammunition exercises.

“Deep in the heart a Jewish soul…” the lyrics of the HaTiqva national anthem might have sounded awkwardly discordant to Arab Christians’ ears, yet these boy and girls throw in their lot wholeheartedly in this country.

Anan Nitanes is determined to join those who must join the army. “Israel gives me a lot. So I must give her back,” he tells IPS.

Father Nadaf’s endeavour is beginning to bear fruit – according to the IDF, some 100 Arab Christians are currently serving in the army, up from 35 in 2012, whilst an additional 500 are performing civil service, up from 200 during the same period.

Last year, as he was officiating in the Church of the Annunciation, Nadaf was called up by Bishara Shlayan, a boat captain who resides in Nazareth – Israel’s largest Arab city once dominated by Christian churches, now two-third Muslim.

Shlayan required the priest’s religious imprimatur to his local Forum for the Enlistment of Christian Youth.

Originated in his difficulty to get his son Amir into the army, the initiative exposes conflicting identity dilemmas.

“Jews call us ‘Arabs’. For Muslims, we’re ‘Christians,’ not Arabs. We’re Israeli Christians, nothing short of that,” Shlayan tells IPS.

“We’re Palestinian Christians, an integral part of the Palestinian people,” retorts Azmi Hakim, chairman of the Greek Orthodox community in this Galilee town. “No schizophrenia here.”

Shlayan’s project has also thrown Israel’s Arab Christians into the national “one people, one draft” debate over sharing the national burden more equitably.

Israel is a Jewish state in the sense that its defence is above all the duty of its six million Jewish citizens. Military service is compulsory for 18-year-olds – or should be.

In effect, some 40 percent potential draftees – mostly ultra-orthodox Jews, roughly 12 percent of age-draft youth – are traditionally exempt from it.

The other segment of the population exempt from the draft is the Arab citizens of Palestinian descent. They’re branded by fellow Jewish citizens a “fifth column” suspected of “double allegiance”.

Most Muslims don’t serve in the army. Exceptions to the sweeping exemption, Bedouin, who are Muslim, enlist in the army on a voluntary basis; for Druze, an offshoot of Islam, military service is mandatory.

Shlayan’s forum has now expanded into the Sons of the Alliance Christian party which preaches greater loyalty to the State of Israel.

“Arab citizens enjoy security, but many in their heart dream of Israel’s destruction. Whatever happens to the Jews will happen to us as well,” Shlayan charges.

Hakim reproves Shlayan’s accusation: “This army occupies Palestine. My state fights against my people. This forum for enlisting Christians is a Zionist conspiracy to separate the Christians from the rest of the Palestinians.”

“Besides, ultra-orthodox Jews don’t serve and yet their rights are respected,” Hakim protests.

Arab citizens are made to feel second-class citizens. An endemic dearth of building permits affects their towns and villages. Higher unemployment, inferior municipal services, unequal allocation of resources in education and housing are their common lot.

Banned from the Church of the Annunciation for promoting the draft, Nadaf was embraced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the sports hall, it is Deputy Defence Minister Danny Danon who has come to pledge his support.

“I salute your willingness to integrate into the society,” Danon tells the assembly of age-draft Christians.

“We’re citizens who aspire to become full citizens,” Nadaf tells Danon.

Inducements in the form of cheaper loans, job opportunities, government allowances and tax breaks often lure non-Jewish military service aspirants.

“The government plans to advance land re-zoning plans and allocations of plots for Christian ex-servicemen and women,” Danon promises. “The State of Israel is opening its doors to you. We want you ‘equal amongst equals’.”

A question flies from the hall. “When will housing projects break ground?” asks a teenager determined to give the government’s preacher a hard time.

“Our objective isn’t to build houses but to issue tenders for the allocation of plots for those who served in the army,” cautions Danon. “You mustn’t join because you may get a plot of land. Don’t be afraid. Be strong. Do the right thing.”

Samir Jozen encourages his daughter Jennifer to join the army next summer. “So what if we don’t get 100 percent of our rights. What we have, Syria’s or Egypt’s Christians don’t have,” is his declaration of faith.

For now, Arab Christian youth seem to see in the military service a communion of sort with Israel, a conversion from being Arab to being Israeli, a rite of passage from being rejected to hoping to be accepted, and the core of a stronger Christian identity in a precarious area.

An injured Christian woman is taken to the ambulance after the bomb attack on a church in Peshawar that left 85 dead, and scores injured. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 23 2013 (IPS)

Like most Christians in Pakistan, Johar Maseeh did a little cleaning job. He was a sweeper in a factory in Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in northern Pakistan.

He was among the many killed in a bomb attack on the All Saints Church in Peshawar last month. He was also among the hundreds of thousands of Christians in Pakistan considered filthy by large numbers of the majority Muslims for doing such a cleaning job.

“Nobody is ready to shake hands with Christians,” local tailor Rafiq Maseeh told IPS. “Literally, they are treated as an untouchable community.” He said he had many Muslim customers but the majority were unwilling to talk to him.

“The majority of the Christian population is concentrated in Peshawar because they are afraid to live in rural areas due to reprisals by the local population.”“Nobody is ready to shake hands with Christians. They are treated as an untouchable community.”

Vast numbers of Christians live in utter poverty in slums where they lack water, sanitation and health facilities. “We live in a two-room mud and brick house which has too little space to accommodate our 10-member family,” Javid Pyara a sweeper at the University of Peshawar, told IPS.

Such as they are, they are often considered agents of the West.

“Whenever incidents of blasphemy take place anywhere in the world, the Christians in Pakistan bear the brunt,” advocate Shamshad Khan told IPS. Last year, a church was burnt in nearby Mardan when riots erupted following the production of a blasphemous film by a U.S. filmmaker.

“People see Christians as non-Muslim and don’t like them,” he said.

The constitution of Pakistan bars Christians from the positions of president or prime minister. “They have been allotted one percent seats in the provincial and national assemblies but that doesn’t mean that they are part of the country’s politics,” Shamshad Khan said.

“Many of the people don’t want a handshake with the Christians,” he said. “None in Pakistan would like to share food with them.”

The only hope for many is to see their young lead a better life. “There is now a trend among young Christians to get education and get well-paid jobs. They are unwilling to take up cleaning jobs,” 60-year-old Bhuta Maseeh, a sweeper in a government office, told IPS.

“I have graduated from a local college and now I am a cashier in a bank,” his son Akram Maseeh told IPS. “About a dozen of my friends have also found good and lucrative jobs because they had got university education.”

Many young Christians do see a better future than their parents have known. “We have Muslim friends. We sit together, eat together and discuss politics and other matters together. We respect one another,” Mukhtiar Maseeh, a sweeper’s son and a student of Islamia College in Peshawar, told IPS.

“Most Christian girls join nursing because the local girls don’t,” said local resident Jalal Maseeh. “They also get jobs as teachers in private and also government-run schools.”

Now that move towards better living is shaken. The devastating suicide attack at the All Saints Church in militancy-stricken Peshawar has led to renewed fear among the poor Christian community. The bombing left 85 dead and 140 injured.

About 100,000 Christians living in Peshawar now struggle with terrorist threats after the fight to find acceptance and a decent living.

“We have no protection at all. The terrorists have diverted their guns towards us. We need tight security measures,” Jamil Maseeh, 29, who was injured in the Sep. 22 attack, told IPS.

Muhammad Karim, a Peshawar-based religious scholar, said the attack aimed to create a rift between Muslims and Christians. “We should be thankful to the Christians because they are cleaning our hospitals, offices and markets. We must not harm them as they serve our people. Our religion Islam also advocates living in peace with non-Muslims.”

“It is extremely shocking and shameful that we are unable to protect minorities,” Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, chairman of the Ulema Council, told IPS. “According to the holy prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, it is the duty of the state to protect the places of worship of non-Muslims.”

But friction with orthodox Muslims is a constant danger. “Relations between churches and mosques are not as cordial as they should be,” Maulana Zafar Gul, a Muslim scholar, told IPS. He said the majority of Muslim clerics oppose churches but keep silent due to government and international pressure.

“We already lead miserable lives in Pakistan,” chairman of the Pakistan Minority Movement Saleem Grabble told IPS. “Our people have been doing cleaning jobs on meagre wages. Now terror attacks are trying to eliminate us physically.”

The latest attack against Christians was aimed at drawing international attention at a time when the government is determined to hold a dialogue with the Taliban, said Sawar Shah, a Lahore-based political science teacher. “Terrorists have been targeting mosques, the Shia community, funeral ceremonies, schools, marketplaces and government buildings to express their anger over Pakistan’s role in war against terrorism.”

The caretaker at the Al Misbah mosque in Bekasi looks through a hole of the sealed door. Credit: Rebecca Lake/IPS

By Sandra Siagian and Rebecca Lake
JAKARTA/NEW YORK, May 31 2013 (IPS)

Standing in front of the two-metre concrete wall, barbed wire and corrugated iron fence that surrounds his mosque, Muhammad Iqbal says he feels like a second-class citizen in his own country.

The head of a beleaguered Ahmadiyya Muslim sect in the Bekasi, West Java was forced out of his mosque in April after local authorities shut it down following protests from Islamic hardliners.“The Yudhoyono government’s failed to confront militant groups whose thuggish harassments and assaults on houses of worship and members of religious miniorities has become increasingly aggressive." -- HRW's Andreas Harsono

The Al Misbah mosque in Pondok Gede, about an hour away from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, was barricaded with an iron sheet by the local municipality to prevent its members from entering.

Sixteen people from the Ahmadiyya community remain locked inside as a means of protest, relying on the community to throw food and supplies over the high barricade.

“I feel uncomfortable because there is no freedom to practice religion,” Iqbal told IPS on Tuesday in front of his mosque, which has been offering a place of worship since 1998.

“The head of the Satpol PP [regional public order agency] said that we couldn’t practice here. But we have nowhere else to go. As an Indonesian, we should get the same treatment. We are very sad and uncomfortable.”

This situation experienced by Bekasi’s Ahmadiyya is certainly not an isolated one.

In the same province as the Al Misbah mosque, local authorities demolished a Christian church in March after they claimed the congregation did not hold a valid building permit to worship.

Pastor Torang Simanjuntak of the HKBP Taman Sari church in Setu, could only stand back and cry with his congregation as they watched the destruction unfold before their eyes.

“Where is your heart and feeling Mr. SBY?” a congregation member screamed in reference to Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono before the church was knocked down.” When people cry out in other countries, people will hear. But when we cry out in our own country, people don’t hear us.”

Intolerance on the rise

International world leaders have often praised the archipelagic nation, which requires its citizens to choose from one of only six official religions, as a model for religious harmony.

But recently human rights groups have documented a rise in religiously motivated conflict and discrimination. Attacks on minority religious groups including Ahmadiyahs, Bahai, Christians, and Shia Muslims have increased, from 244 violent attacks in 2011 to 264 in 2012 according to the Jakarta-based Setara Institute.

Many critics, including international rights group Human Rights Watch, point to the government’s “inaction”, “complicity” and the nation’s discriminatory laws which include permit regulations for houses of worship and the highly controversial 2008 Ahmadiyya decree, which bans the minority Islamic faith from propagating their belief.

But Indonesia’s secretary general for the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Bahrul Hayat, dismisses any ideas of intolerance in his country, deeming the nation a model place of religious harmony.

“In Indonesia, the process of democracy I think gives open space to everybody and of course there are limitations,” Hayat explained. “So I don’t see that this [intolerance] is appropriate to label this as an increase in terms of religious conflict in the country.”

Indonesia is among the top 15 countries in the Pew Research Center’s 2012 social hostilities index, which monitors religious freedom of 197 countries, and is listed as a country with “very high government restrictions on religion,” alongside Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

Daniel Baer, the U.S. Department of State’s deputy assistant secretary for the bureau of democracy, human rights and labour, who was a witness at last week’s Human Rights Commission Hearing on Indonesia in Washington D.C., acknowledged that Indonesia’s issues regarding religious intolerance were complicated.

He highlighted a combination of factors that are fueling the issue which he said included “deep societal prejudices which are something that won’t be solved in the short term by the government.”

However, Baer noted that despite the complexity there were certainly proactive actions that the government could and should take now.

Governments don’t just a have a responsibility to participate but they have an affirmative responsibility to protect people,” he told IPS.

“There are steps the government can take including repealing blashphemy laws. They can change the laws regarding the anti-Ahmadiyya decree in 2008. Laws send a signal. They not only have a direct implication but they send signals to the broader community about who counts and who deserves sole protections.”

Contradictory award

Aggravating this already contentious issue is an award that Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono received by New York-based interfaith coalition the Appeal of Conscience Foundation on Thursday night.

After significant criticism from Indonesians, which included protests and petitions, Yudhoyono accepted the World Statesman award in recognition of his work to support human rights and religious freedom in the country.

The Foundation, whose officials declined to be interviewed for this story, instead issued a statement explaining their decision to honour Yudhoyono.

“As the first directly elected President of the world’s most populous Muslim Country, President Yudhoyono is recognized for his pursuit of peace and helping Indonesia evolve into a democratic society and an opponent of extremism,” the Foundation said.

An IPS request for comment from the Indonesian Mission to the United Nations was not responded to by deadline.

However, John M. Miller, National Coordinator for the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, who organised the protest, told IPS there has been little willingness to prosecute previous human rights abuses.

“[ETAN’s] position is that the Indonesian Foreign Ministry has been asked to find awards for the president, and are trying to burnish his image as a statesman and humanitarian” before he leaves office, Miller said.

Kurnia Hutapea, an architect, traveled from Baltimore to attend the protest. A Christian, his family had their church destroyed in Indonesia.

“To [have to] get a permit to build churches, that’s not freedom of religion at all, and that’s why I smell something behind this award,” Hutapea told IPS.

Andreas Harsono, Indonesia researcher for Human Rights Watch, also believes that President Yudhoyno’s leadership is in direct conflict with the foundation’s ethos.

“The Yudhoyono government’s failed to confront militant groups whose thuggish harassments and assaults on houses of worship and members of religious miniorities has become increasingly aggressive,” Harsono told IPS.

Iqbal said on Tuesday that he hoped the award would be an incentive for improvement.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if the president could fix religious intolerance in his own country first?” the Ahmadiyya leader said.

“He is happy to help other countries fight intolerance like in Myanmar, but he needs to fix intolerance problems in his own country first. He hasn’t directly instructed his government to fix the problems.”

Emilia Az, a Shia Muslim who helps mediate resolution conflicts between religious groups, echoed Iqbal’s concerns.

It would be OK for him [the president] to accept the award, but he has to solve the problems of minorities before he decides to go,” Az told IPS, who gathered with minority groups on Sunday to present a mock award to the president showcasing images of intolerant acts from across the country.

“He’s saying that this is for the Indonesian people, but all these minority groups’ problems have not been solved.”

*Lucy Westcott reported from New York.

Soldiers in Bashiqa, Iraq, an area where Iraqi Christians are seeking autonomy. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
BASHIQA, Iraq, May 20 2013 (IPS)

Luis Shabi nostalgically recalls his nine years of novitiate in Rome and a “fantastic road trip through Europe” before returning to Iraq in 1969. “Those were the good times,” sighs the Chaldean Archbishop of Baghdad from a bunker in the heart of the Iraqi capital.

His office, in the basement of the church of Saint Mary of the Rosary, east of the city, is a humble temple. Yet it is protected today by high concrete walls, barbed wire and soldiers on guard next to an armoured vehicle at the entrance.s

“We have always been a peaceful and hardworking people, with a reputation for contributing to Iraqi culture with many writers, poets, philosophers,” the priest, wearing an immaculate black cassock and a pink bonnet, says of Iraqi Christians.

“But since the invasion in 2003, the extremists have reinforced the idea of us being ‘newcomers’, something like an ‘extension of the West’ in the Middle East,” laments Shabi, stressing that the fact that there were some Christian ministers during the years of Saddam Hussein “makes things even worse”.

“What has Europe done to help us? What about Rome? Neither civil authorities nor the religious ones in Europe have moved a single finger to assist us in one of the worst moments of our history.”

Targeting Christians

With Iraqi Mandaeans quite literally decimated – nine out of 10 have either died or fled since 2003 – the local Christian community has suffered significantly over the last decade. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that about half of that population has left the country since 2003.

The Assyrian Council of Europe, an independent non-governmental organisation, goes further, pointing to the Iraqi Constitution as one of the culprits of marginalisation faced by minorities in Iraq.

“Islam is the state religion and a basic foundation for the country’s law,” states Article 2.1 of Iraq’s 2005 Carta Magna.

“We are not Arabs but Semitic,” Shabi proclaims. “We’ve been speaking Aramaic in Mesopotamia since the times of Hammurabi. We are the grandsons of Abraham and of Nebuchadnezzar, but our future in Iraq does not go any further than tomorrow.”"Our future in Iraq does not go any further than tomorrow.”
-- Luis Shabi

From his underground bunker, it’s just a ten-minute walk to the modern and majestic white facade of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The church was renovated last year, but here no one has forgotten what happened here less than two years ago.

“They were five. They jumped over the concrete walls and entered the church yelling ‘God is great’,” remembers Aysur Said, the current pastor of the church. “They said they belonged to the Islamic State of Iraq – a Sunni group linked to al-Qaeda. It was Oct. 31, 2011. We were attending mass.”

Said’s predecessor, Father Waseem, was one of 50 killed in the most severe attack against this community since 2003. “Some died by gunfire and others by suffocation. A number of them were locked in a room that we use to dress up. There are no windows and the air ran out right away,” Said told IPS.

A place in Eden

Immediately after the brutal attack, the Christians of Iraq demanded their own autonomous region in the plains of Nineveh region, in the northwest of the country, bordering the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq.

In those plains, where the Bible places the Garden of Eden, is a compact Christian population. Today the area is disputed by Kurds and Arabs. Its administrative capital is the former Baathist stronghold of Mosul, a place shaken by sectarian clashes since mass protests began taking place last December.

Bashiqa, 30 kilometres from Mosul, is one of the places that many Christians claim as part of their would-be autonomous region. From the Orthodox church of Mart Shmouni, 23-year-old Father Daniel underscores “the importance of unity among Iraqis”, though he admits that unity is not easy.

“This is chaos. The new authorities in Baghdad are unable to protect us, so our people continue to flee in the thousands,” Father Daniel told IPS. “However, in recent months we have also welcomed many Christian families arriving from Syria and knocking the doors of our monasteries and churches. Many of them [come] with virtually nothing.”

Despite its proximity to volatile Mosul, Bashiqa enjoys relative stability, something that Father Daniel attributes to the deployment of Kurdish soldiers in the area. “For many, Bashiqa is just a stop along their way to the Kurdish Autonomous Region, where security is complete,” explains the pastor.

Kirkuk, 230 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, also languishes in a legal limbo between Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government.

Imad Yokhana Yago, a member of parliament in Baghdad for the Assyrian Democratic Movement, denounces “genocide at the hands of Islamists” and the “continuous mass flight” of his people since 2003. At the same time, he advocates for a project tailored to his dwindling community.

“We fear there will be a new war in the country due to the tensions between Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs,” Yago tells IPS from Kirkuk, calling for Christian autonomy in Nineveh region that would “protect our community and also work as a ‘buffer zone’ between the warring sides”.

The project, however, is a controversial one, as many fear that such region could turn into a ghetto into which Christians from all the country would be displaced.

“The repression we are suffering does not come exclusively from the Iraqi Arabs,” asid Yousif Eisho, executive of the Assyrian Christian Movement. “Iran, Saudi Arabia… there are too many foreign agents involved in the ethnic cleansing of our people.”

“The said ghetto will eventually turn real if the constant interference from the outside remains,” Eisho warned.

On Mar. 9, 2013, Muslim mobs torched the Christian neighbourhood known as Joseph Colony in Lahore. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Apr 28 2013 (IPS)

Younas Gill, a self-employed tax accountant, sits on the pavement in Joseph Colony, Lahore, staring at the place where, until about a month ago, his home had stood.

It was burnt to ashes on Mar. 9, when a mob of Muslims tore through this Christian neighbourhood in the Badami Bagh district of Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, torching homes and displacing over 150 families.

Gill and his family now rely on government support and charitable contributions while they struggle to piece their lives back together. On Apr. 22, the Lahore diocese of the Church of Pakistan distributed a fridge, ceiling fans, pedestal fan, a two-burner stove, bicycle and iron to each of the affected families.

“The provincial government helped with the reconstruction of our house and NGOs and relief organisations are constantly supporting the locals since the tragedy occurred,” Gill told IPS.

But the passage of time, and the return of a sense of normalcy, has not replaced the fear that swept through this settlement just over a month ago. Gill says residents “fear reprisal from accused arsonists who have won bail from the courts.”

They are now back on the streets, “some of them with vengeance”, Gill said.

Men like Gill, and his fellow community members, represent the precariousness of life for Pakistan’s 2.8 million Christian residents, a tiny minority in a country of 170 million people, who have borne the brunt of so-called blasphemy laws that prescribe the death penalty for defamation of the Prophet Muhammad and life imprisonment for those who desecrate the Holy Quran.

New clauses introduced between 1980 and 1986 during the reign of former president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq opened the door to broad interpretation of the law: between 1986 and 2013 1,100 cases of blasphemy have been brought to the courts, a significant number of which are against Christians, says Peter Jacob, secretary of the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCPJ), formed by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Pakistan.

Jacob and other experts say these allegations are often trumped up and fabricated, and used by clerics and other religious leaders to incite mobs to attack Christian communities.

Joseph Colony, a three-acre settlement, was caught in the line of fire of one such blasphemy charge when a resident named Sawan Masi was accused of making “objectionable” remarks about the Prophet Muhammad.

Christian residents from the colony told IPS that the fateful day began with police instructing them to vacate the area for their “security” and not to worry about their properties.  The locals complied – and returned the next day only to find their homes burnt to ashes by a mob of 3,000 Muslims.

As information trickled in, it became clear that the police had been expecting the attack on the colony, yet failed to prevent it.

Just hours after the police chief of Badmi Bagh vowed to bring his police force to heel, and ensure the protection and security of all Pakistan’s citizens, a violent mob attacked the Christian colony of Francis Abad in the northeastern city of Gujranwala.

The incident began when a quarrel between clerics and a Christian youth accused of playing loud music outside a mosque erupted into a full-fledged street brawl between members of the two communities, which the police once again failed to prevent or halt.

Haroon Suleman, a Lahore-based lawyer who often appears in court over blasphemy-related issues, told IPS, “Most of such cases have been filed… to take over prime real estimate that Christian minorities inhabit.”

Many Christians who came to the cities as menial labourers settled on vacant state land decades ago.

As Pakistan’s cities expanded and businesses sprouted around these informal settlements, the land became highly lucrative, selling for millions of dollars per acre and quickly attracting the attention of Pakistan’s notorious urban land mafia. In Joseph Colony, the site of the Mar. 9 attack, an acre of land costs 2.4 million dollars due to its location in the heart of a highly commercialised wholesale steel scrap market.

The first step of land acquisition involves middlemen bargaining with residents for compensation of the entire settlement in order to set up godowns (warehouses).

“When the settlers refuse to accept cash offers and vacate their properties, tactics like (violence and intimidation) are use to get the desired results,” Suleman told IPS.

The political leadership of the country is well aware of the issue, but fear of reprisals from religious extremist groups prompts many to remain silent. None of the major political parties, including the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), have raised the issue in their manifestos ahead of the May 11 parliamentary polls, knowing that those who dared in the past to speak up paid a fatal price.

For instance, former Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was shot dead by his own security guard Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri in January 2011 for supporting a Christian Pakistani woman, Asia Bibi, sentenced on blasphemy charges.

Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian leader and then-federal minister for minorities, was killed the same year for his vocal opposition to the misuse of blasphemy laws.

With elections approaching in just a few weeks, the Christian community is calling attention to their total lack of representation in parliament, with some leading minority parties calling for a boycott of the 2013 polls.

The national assembly has 10 reserved seats for minorities, among 272 elected members. Under the current system, Christians and other minorities vote for Muslim candidates from various political parties and the reserved minority seats are then awarded to those parties in proportion to the seats they have won. The parties, in turn, award that seat to their “loyalist”.

Dr. Nazir S. Bhatti, founder of the Pakistan Christian Congress (PCC), told IPS his party is against this practice, saying his constituency wants to elect their own representatives on a one-person one-vote basis.

On Monday, Apr. 15, Bhatti submitted a letter to the election commissioner of Pakistan, urging the official to ensure the safety of minorities – Christians, Hindus and Ahmedis – who choose to stay away from the voting stations.

(END)

Hundreds of young Egyptian Christian girls have mysteriously disappeared. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

When a young Christian girl goes missing in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, her family will call on a certain Muslim sheikh in the nearby town of El-Ameriya.

The local Salafi leader, whose ultra-conservative views condone the marriage of girls as young as nine, has a history of abducting Coptic Christian girls and forcing them to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men, claim rights activists.

And so the sheikh and his associates are the natural starting point for any investigation into missing underage Christian girls. And, according to activists, that is usually where they find them.

“Whenever a young girl disappears in the area the trail leads to this sheikh,” says Mamdouh Nakhla, chairman of the Al Kalema Organisation for Human Rights.

In a recent case, a 13-year-old Coptic Christian girl from a village near Alexandria was allegedly kidnapped and held for over a week as her abductors tried to force her to renounce her religion.

According to her testimony, she was drugged unconscious while in a taxi on her way home from school. She woke up in a secluded house with two Salafi sheikhs and an elderly woman. Her abductors forced her to wear niqab, a full veil covering the body and face, and beat her when she refused to convert to Islam.

Girgis claims she was released nine days later when the sheikhs became nervous after her family organised large demonstrations for her return. The Salafis turned her over to police, who feared the girl’s testimony would spark sectarian clashes, and so tried to convince her to claim she had wilfully gone to a sheikh seeking to convert to Islam.

“The only thing unusual (about this case) was that the girl was returned,” says Nakhla. “In one case I investigated a kidnapped girl was allowed to call her parents, but in all others the girl was never heard from again.”

Christian rights watchdogs say abductions and forced conversions of young Egyptian Coptic girls have been going on for decades right under the noses of local authorities. But the frequency of the kidnappings has increased alarmingly since the uprising in 2011 that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak and brought an Islamist-led government to power.

More than 500 Christian girls have been abducted in the last two years, according to the Association of Victims of Abduction and Forced Disappearance (AVAFD), which documents the disappearances. A growing number of cases involve girls between the ages of 13 and 17.

AVAFD head Abram Louis claims the abducted girls are taken to ‘safe’ houses, where they are manipulated or blackmailed into converting to Islam and forced to marry Muslim men, often to serve as second wives.

“If we inform the police where the kidnapped girl is being kept, they inform the Salafis, who then move her away to another home and then we lose all trace of her,” Louis said in a recent interview.

“Egypt has laws in place to protect girls under 18, but Salafis do not accept them,” says Amal Abdel Hadi, head of the New Woman Foundation. “To them, a girl is only a minor until she has her first period.”

However, Salafi leaders have categorically denied any role in abducting Christian girls or forceful proselytising. They claim that so far as they know, the girls converted to Islam of their own free will, in some cases after falling in love with a Muslim man.

Ishaak Ibrahim, a religious rights researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), says inter-faith love affairs and conversions are dangerously provocative issues in Egypt. Rumours of such have led to outbreaks of sectarian violence.

He says many of the alleged abductions involve young Christian girls who appear to have converted to Islam to escape bad relations with their families, or after having engaged in pre-marital relations (taboo in conservative Egyptian culture) with Muslim men.

“The girls appear to have chosen to change their religion,” Ibrahim told IPS. “But because the family is ashamed, and because the police don’t investigate to find their daughter, the family chooses the easiest solution, which is to say the girl was kidnapped by Muslim extremists.”

Such cases only present a problem when the girl is a minor, he says, as Egypt’s Child Law criminalises the marriage of any girl under 18, even if by her own free will.

But Nakhla, who is representing the families of 20 missing Coptic girls, says there are clear signs that young girls have been coerced into converting and marrying.

Referring to one recent case, he asks if it makes sense that a 15-year-old Christian girl would suddenly choose to convert to Islam and serve as a second wife, without any legal rights, to a firebrand Salafi sheikh over 40 years her senior. The girl has never spoken or written to her parents since her disappearance – unusual behaviour in a country where family ties run deep.

“In Egypt it is a crime to marry a minor, and you can’t legally change your religion until you’re 18… yet the government refuses to investigate these cases and arrest those responsible,” complains Nakhla.

While Ibrahim argues that all Egyptians should have the right to change their religion at any time, he says authorities also have a responsibility to ensure that women – particularly minors – are protected from coercion and exploitation.

“The family should be allowed to meet their daughter and get her to explain what she wants in the presence of the public prosecutor,” he says.

Salafi leaders have rejected any state intervention, and have warned against attempts by parents and human rights organisations to return the girls to their families.

Jewish groups have reacted furiously to a letter to Congress by 15 leaders of Christian denominations asking for a review of whether some of the three billion dollars in annual United States aid to Israel is being used in violation of U.S. law and policies.

After pulling out of an interfaith dialogue conference, several Jewish groups stepped up their attacks on the Christian leaders, accusing them of bias against Israel and even of anti-Semitism.

The Christians’ letter stated that they believed that the unconditional U.S. aid given to Israel contributes to the “deteriorating conditions in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories which threaten to lead the region further away from the realization of a just peace… sustaining the conflict and undermining the long-term security interests of both Israelis and Palestinians.”

The letter was sent to Congress by leaders of such prominent Protestant denominations as the Presbyterians, Methodists, United Church of Christ and the National Council of Churches (USA), among others.

It called for “an immediate investigation into possible violations by Israel of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act and the U.S. Arms Export Control Act which respectively prohibit assistance to any country which engages in a consistent pattern of human rights violations and limit the use of U.S. weapons to ‘internal security’ or ‘legitimate self-defense.’”

The church leaders state that their concerns are based on witnessing the questionable use of U.S. weapons firsthand as well as the annual report of the U.S. State Department, which, they say, “details widespread Israeli human rights violations committed against Palestinian civilians, many of which involve the misuse of U.S.-supplied weapons.”

Jewish groups, led by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), responded angrily. The JCPA stated, “(The churches’) stony silence to the use of anti-Judaism and relentless attacks on the Jewish state, often from within their own ranks, speaks loudly to their failure to stand up and speak the whole truth about what is occurring in the Middle East.”

The criticism spanned a wide spectrum of U.S.-Jewish politics. Prominent neoconservative Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. official who also headed the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he frequently clashed with church peace groups, called it “the latest chapter in the unending hostility to Israel that has marked several of the mainline Protestant denominations.”

Abrams, like the more mainstream Jewish groups, sees the letter as motivated by hostility toward Israel. Like them, he does not engage directly with the substance of the letter, nor does he answer the charges of systematic human rights abuses by Israel, but instead raises questions not directly related to the letter’s content to support his contention that the letter is motivated by anti-Israel malice.

And, while Abrams is surely correct in asserting that “It is unlikely that the churches’ letter will affect the level of aid to Israel,” he does not explain why, if that is the case, such a wide spectrum of the Jewish community has reacted so strongly to it.

The centrist J Street was just as critical as Abrams, though with a far more conciliatory tone. In an op-ed on Newsweek’s Daily Beast web site, the vice president of their education fund, Rachel Lerner wrote: “J Street opposes proposals to condition or cut security assistance to Israel…As with so many efforts to address this complex situation, the letter fails to weigh criticism of Israel’s behavior with appropriate criticism of, for instance, rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli civilian areas…

“We also question the timing of the letter – coming as it does a few short weeks before Election Day, when this sensitive issue has already become too much of a political football.”

These specifics were cited by Abrams, the JCPA and the ADL as well. But the letter asks not for a cut or conditioning of aid, but a review of whether that aid is being given in compliance with U.S. law, something that has been done frequently with U.S. foreign aid.

The letter also makes several mentions of Israeli hardships, specifically rockets fired from Gaza, and consistently equates Israeli and Palestinian suffering.

“Over the years, a number of members of Congress have asked the State Department to report on whether specific incidents constituted violations of the Arms Export Control Act, Foreign Assistance Act or other U.S. laws by Israel,” Joshua Ruebner, the National Advocacy Director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, told IPS.

“Even though the State Department’s annual report on human rights in the Occupied Territories regularly documents abuses, the reports come back clean every time. Even though the Christian leaders’ letter asks for a comprehensive review, which has never been done before, the Jewish groups’ response seems like an overreaction.”

Indeed, Ruebner documents that just under the last two U.S. presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. has cut or placed under review aid to five countries – Zimbabwe, Colombia, the Phillipines, Pakistan and Bahrain – due to violations of U.S. law in the use of weapons supplied through U.S. military aid.

“The United States has in the past sanctioned both Israel and other countries for violations of U.S. laws,” Ruebner said. “Yet, despite Israel’s systematic human rights abuses during this period, not once since 2000 has any administration formally or publicly held Israel accountable for its misuse of U.S. weapons in violation of its own laws.”

The Christian leaders who wrote the open letter have remained quiet, neither responding to the attacks on them nor backing away from the substance of their letter. But they have also received support from some Jewish circles. The group Jewish Voice for Peace, and more importantly, their Rabbinical Council, came out in strong support of the Christian letter.

As dismay among more liberal U.S. citizens with Israel’s ongoing occupation and intransigence on negotiations grows, it is possible that this letter will come to be seen as the beginning of a wider debate within mainstream churches over U.S. policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Some church organisations which have been actively working for peace for some time and are part of denominations which signed the letter are apparently energised.

“Israel’s grave and systematic abuses of Palestinian human rights and violations of international law have been thoroughly documented for many years by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and even by the U.S. State Department,” said Rev. Jeff DeYoe, Advocacy Chair of Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

“We’re pleased and encouraged that church leaders from a growing number of denominations are recognising this and taking a stand in favour of justice and freedom for all the peoples of the Holy Land. We hope members of Congress will do the same.”

Coptic Christians demonstrate in Cairo's Tahrir Square following last October's 'Maspero massacre' in which dozens of Copts were killed. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani/IPS.

By Walter García, Adam Morrow, and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
CAIRO, Sep 20 2012 (IPS)

Many of Egypt’s Coptic Christians met the recent assumption of the presidency by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi with trepidation, even panic – some even made plans to leave the country. Almost three month’s into Morsi’s term, these fears, say some experts, appear largely unfounded.

“Copts were mortified when Morsi won. It was as if the sky had fallen,” Youssef Sidhoum, editor-in-chief of Coptic weekly Al-Watan and expert in Coptic affairs, told IPS. “But such fears appear be to be overblown. Since assuming the presidency, Morsi hasn’t done anything – at least until now – to justify such alarmism.”

The largest concentration of Christians in the Middle East, Egypt’s Coptic community is thought to account for about ten percent of the country’s population, which currently stands at some 91 million. The rest of the Egyptian population is almost entirely Sunni Muslim.

In an effort to reach out to Egypt’s wary Christian minority, Morsi, shortly after assuming the presidency, met with representatives from all of Egypt’s churches. Speaking to Coptic, Catholic and Evangelical leaders, he stressed his intention to serve as a “president to all Egyptians” – in what has become a common refrain – regardless of religion or political orientation.

Such moves, however, have been greeted with scepticism on the part of some Copts, who question the new president’s sincerity.

“I don’t trust them,” Joseph, a 47-year-old Coptic resident of Cairo, said of the Brotherhood, preferring not to give his last name. “Morsi’s nice words to the Christian community are only cosmetic. We know that the Brotherhood wants to Islamise the country and Egyptian society.

“They say they’ll respect Christians’ rights, but they’ll end up enforcing strict dress codes – like in Iran – and banning alcohol, thus destroying Egypt’s tourism industry,” added Joseph, who is currently mulling emigration to New Zealand.

Sidhoum, however, sees such attitudes as unnecessarily alarmist.

“We’ve now had a Muslim Brotherhood presidency for three months, and up until this point we’ve been given no reason to fear for our community’s well-being,” said Sidhoum. “We ought to give Morsi a chance; see what he does before drawing conclusions.”

In line with promises made before June’s presidential runoff (in which Morsi defeated Mubarak-era premier Ahmed Shafiq by a slim margin), Egypt’s first civilian president has not issued any decrees affecting Egyptian social norms, such as dress codes, alcohol sales, or so-called ‘morality’ policing.

Early this month, the presidency expressed its annoyance when the Netherlands formally began accepting applications for political asylum from Egyptian Coptic Christians based on claims of alleged ‘religious persecution’.

“It is not acceptable under any circumstances for any foreign parties to intervene in this matter (Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt),” presidential spokesman Yasser Ali declared at a press conference on Sep. 9. “This is an entirely Egyptian affair in which we will not accept any outside interference.”

The spokesman added: “The position of the presidency is clear on this issue – all Egyptians have the same rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis the state. The presidency does not draw any distinctions between Egyptians, Muslim or Christian.”

Yet despite these sentiments, many Coptic Christians point to the sporadic eruptions of sectarian violence that have followed last year’s revolution as proof of their worsening situation.

Last October, during Egypt’s military-administered ‘interim phase,’ dozens of unarmed protesters – most of them Christians – were killed during clashes with security forces in Cairo’s Maspero district. The incident sparked days of angry Coptic demonstrations, in which charges of state-sponsored religious persecution were frequently aired.

More recently, in early August, crowds of angry Muslims in the city of Dahshur south of Cairo destroyed several Coptic-owned shops and homes after a young Muslim man was killed by a Coptic neighbour in a personal quarrel. Calm was eventually restored, however, following the convention of a traditional ‘reconciliation council’ through which the damaged parties were satisfactorily compensated.

Facing the first such flare-up of his presidency, Morsi dismissed the episode’s “sectarian nature”, insisting that what had happened in Dahshur had been an “isolated incident” not reflective of Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt.

Sidhoum, for his part, is critical of the traditional mechanisms employed to defuse such sectarian explosions, which, under the Mubarak regime, had become an increasingly frequent phenomenon.

“Incidents like these always end with reconciliation councils and compensation for the Christian victims, but the perpetrators are never penalised,” he said.

Reconciliation councils are the traditional method by which local disputes between clans or families are resolved, especially in rural or desert regions. Family heads and community leaders – along with local clergymen if the dispute has a sectarian dimension – usually take part in such councils, through which a mutually acceptable agreement is negotiated, generally involving compensation to the more injured party.

Such councils are conducted outside the purview of the state, which, in such cases, has been historically inclined to let local tradition take its course.

But according to Sidhoum, this antiquated method of conflict resolution does little to deter such sectarian venting, since it allows the perpetrators of sectarian crimes to go unpunished.

“If the law were applied to whoever participated in sectarian aggression, be they Muslim or Christian, it would serve to re-establish the standing of the state and guarantee coexistence,” he said. “It would go a long way towards ending the phenomenon of sectarianism once and for all.”

Mena Thabet, a Coptic Christian rights activist specialised in Coptic affairs, agreed.

“The Mubarak regime used to actively promote division between Muslims and Christians for its own political interests,” Thabet told IPS. “It allowed sectarian problems to persist by failing to execute the law and bring perpetrators to justice. Had it done so, such incidents would have been much less common.”

Both men also agree that the issue will ultimately depend on the country’s new constitution, currently being drafted by Egypt’s majority-Islamist Constituent Assembly.

“The problems traditionally faced by Egypt’s Christians will be resolved when there’s a constitution that ensures Egypt’s democratic and civil nature,” said Sidhoum. “Such a charter would lead to the passage of laws that don’t draw distinctions between citizens based on race or belief.”

“If the new constitution genuinely guarantees equality for all Egyptians, the political orientation of the president – Brotherhood, Salafist, or whatever – will become irrelevant,” Thabet concurred.

Egypt’s Constituent Assembly is expected to unveil a draft constitution within the next two months, after which the proposed charter will be put before a nationwide referendum for public approval.