WORLD - various international events involving the Catholic Church

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 22, 1999

India prime minister to study atrocities

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has promised a church delegation that he would undertake an on-the-spot study of atrocities against Christians in Gujarat, Northwestern India.

The ecumenical delegation met Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani Jan. 4 to express anguish over an alarming increase in violence against India's Christian community.

Led by Catholic Archbishop Ignatius Pinto of Bangalore and Protestant Church of South India Bishop Vasanth Kumar, the delegation sought federal government intervention to check the attacks, especially in Gujarat.

Vajpayee planned to visit Gujarat Jan. 9 and to meet with Christian and Hindu representatives in addition to the state administration.

On Jan. 6 the federal home ministry suggested that the Gujarat government transfer the magistrates in Dangs and Surat districts, where renewed attacks on Christians have taken place since Christmas Eve.

Meanwhile, India's National Commission for Minorities said after an investigation that Hindu groups triggered violence by forcibly trying to reconvert tribal Christians to Hinduism. The commission's team met with some 20 groups of Gujarat Jan. 7 to assess recent attacks on Christians.

Bombing reports sanitized, priest says

Images of the suffering caused by the U.S. and British bombing of Iraq were "polished" out of Western media reports, according to a French priest whose own graphic video of the aftermath of the bombing was broadcast by the Vatican television service Jan. 2.

Fr. Jean-Marie Benjamin was in Baghdad in late December filming a documentary on the effects of the Western embargo when the bombing began. Benjamin and his cameraman captured shots of civilian homes destroyed, of victims burned and mangled and of hospital conditions that would be considered appalling by Western standards.

The French priest said that when he returned from Baghdad, he was dismayed by the sanitized coverage the bombing received in Western media.

"I looked at what television and satellite networks were showing, especially those from the U.S. and Britain. I was shocked not to see a trace of what we had filmed -- people burned and dying in the middle of the road with no chance for hospital care. People being operated on in corridors with a pair of tweezers left in a jar of dirty water. Children being operated on without anesthesia, just like the middle ages. What happened to these pictures?"

Benjamin strongly condemned the eight-year Western campaign against Iraq. "On the eve of the bombings we were at a music school in Baghdad, surrounded by 8to 10-year-old children, full of talent," he said. "They were asking us, `Why are you starving us to death, why are you bombing us?' What could we say? That because beneath your feet there is oil of such good quality and so easy to extract? Should we tell them this is the reason the embargo is still intact and the reason why they are being bombed?"

The Vatican television broadcast with excerpts from Benjamin's video may be found online at www.vatican.va.news_services/pns_en.htm

Congolese refugees confirm massacre report

Refugees in Tanzania who fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo seemed to support reports by a missionary news agency that rebels massacred hundreds of civilians over the New Year holiday.

The executive secretary of the Kigoma branch of the Catholic aid organization Caritas, Ernest Misozi, said Jan. 7 that refugees arriving in Western Tanzania reported that about 500 people were killed at two villages south of Uvira, in Eastern Congo.

The Rome-based missionary news service MISNA reported Jan. 6 that the rebels killed more than 500 civilians, including many women and children, in the village of Makobola in Eastern Congo. The attacks occurred sometime between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1, the agency said.

MISNA could not be reached to determine if Caritas Tanzania was the source of its report. In a statement issued Jan. 6 in Goma, the rebels denied that they massacred civilians but said they killed hundreds of Burundian Hutu guerrillas in a battle.

Mexican historian says Bishop Ruiz behind rebellion

Mexico's most prominent historian, Enrique Krauze, said Jan. 9 that Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia's work as a missionary with Chiapas' predominantly Indian population had prepared the ground for the insurgency of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Southern Mexico.

The statement appeared in an article titled "The Indians' Prophet" published in the newspaper Reforma Jan. 9. The Zapatista Army, which consists mostly of Indians, took up arms against the government Jan. 1, 1994, demanding political and social reforms. The conflict remains unresolved, despite a cease-fire.

"Even before the Zapatistas, there was a catechist national liberation army," Krauze said, referring to the work of Catholic teachers sent by Ruiz to Indian villages in his diocese. "These teachers had raised the Indians' political consciousness and thus given rise to the rebel movement."

Latin American bishops outline church's challenges