Practicing Faith Under Fire

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 28, 2001 | by Catherine Edwards

Courageous Christians in Indonesia, North Korea and the Sudan are facing hardships of biblical proportions for their beliefs -- including slavery, imprisonment and execution.

Christina's Christmas was a little different last year. In December 2000, while preparing for the holiday, her village on the Indonesian island of Kesui in the Moluccas archipelago was raided by fanatical Muslims. Christina and other Indonesian Christian women were herded into a room with a plastic chair. A razor blade rested beside it. One by one the women were forcibly circumcised. They received no medication before or after the mutilation. As they stumbled wounded from the room they were told they had been "Islamized."

Testimony concerning what happened to these women was recorded on video and distributed in the United States by the human-rights group Moluccas Watch Network. It is just one example of the violence visited on Indonesian Christians in the Moluccas during the last 15 months.

Sadly, religious persecution is not uncommon. Human-rights groups such as Freedom House and Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) name Indonesia, North Korea and the Sudan as the most difficult places in the world for Christians to practice their faith. In other countries, such as the People's Republic of China, persecution of Christians and other faithful is notorious.

At the end of March, the Bush administration expressed its commitment to religious freedom worldwide. In a letter to the Institute on Religion and Public Policy in Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney wrote that the administration was committed to advancing the protection of individual religious freedoms as an integral part of its foreign-policy agenda.

The religious war in Indonesia is of special concern, not only because of the atrocities it has generated, but because of what it could portend for other countries where Christians and Muslims may come into conflict.

For the last two years sectarian violence has wracked the Moluccas islands. The Indonesian government estimates that 5,000 to 6,000 people have died in the fighting, and 500,000 people have been displaced from their villages after their homes and churches were reduced to rubble.

Former Moluccan resident Walter Engelen tells Insight that Muslims and Christians previously lived together peacefully for hundreds of years. But this changed in January 1999 when an altercation between a Christian and a Muslim on the Moluccan island of Ambon escalated into a communal fight. Mutual attacks between Christians and Muslims continued until the spring of 2000 when Muslims issued an edict for a laskar jihad, or a call for "holy warriors."

Christian sources on Ambon reported at the end of April that Muslim radio openly was broadcasting the call to jihad. Advocacy of violence there is illegal, but the Voice of the Moluccan Muslim Struggle has paid no attention to police summonses or court directives to stop the broadcasts.

On April 27, the following speech was recorded there: "If there is any among the Muslims who still wants to talk about reconciliation, kill him. Do not be afraid, if needed, to offer your lives. From now on there will be no business of buying and selling any more between Muslims and Christian pagans. If a Muslim is caught doing business with a Christian, kill him, for it is better to slay one Christian than that the whole of the Muslim community be wiped out."

Insight has obtained videotape of laskar jihad, clad in white, razing churches and other buildings and driving Moluccan Christians from their homes. Although the conflict clearly is between religious groups, observers acknowledge other factors, including ethnic rivalry, Islamization of Indonesian bureaucracy, migration between the islands and a troubled Indonesian economy.

Mahendra Siregar of the Indonesian Embassy in Washington tells Insight the violence in the Moluccas is the worst the government has seen in 20 years. When the government in Jakarta sent in troops from other islands to quell the conflict, some instead joined in the violence. Nonetheless, Siregar says, the central government was limited severely in its ability to intervene in the situation. "The Indonesian government has to focus its energies," he says. "We can't be involved in everything."

Forced Islamization continues. In the Moluccan islands of Seram, Bacan and Buru, 4,000 Christians have reported being forced to convert to Islam. And human-rights groups in Washington insist that the chief of police on Ambon, Gen. Firman Gani, be brought to trial for war crimes. Reports of Gani congratulating jihad warriors for a job well done circulate among refugees.

Equally desperate is the situation in North Korea. Famine has devastated the communist country, and reports of starvation and cannibalism prompted the international-aid community to distribute food there. Many groups, including Oxfam and CARE, nonetheless pulled out when the Stalinist regime insisted that food be turned over to the government rather than be delivered directly to the people.