Copyright © 2013 by John L. Allen Jr.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
IMAGE is a registered trademark, and the “I” colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-7704-3736-7
Jacket design: Base Art Co./Drue Dixon
v3.1
This book is dedicated to Laura Hebert Frazier, my grandmother, who died at the age of ninety-eight as the manuscript was being written. I doubt she would have read the finished product, even if her short-term memory hadn’t pretty much evaporated by the end. She was always proud of my work, but not always eager to consume it. She would often say my writing is too long and too complicated, and people who’ve stumbled across my stuff over the years might well share that assessment. Even if it wasn’t necessarily her cup of tea, everything in this book, and whatever else I’ve accomplished, in many ways is the fruit of her inspiration, support, and love. St. Laura, pray for us!
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE:
ANTI-CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION AROUND THE WORLD
1. Overview
2. Africa
3. Asia
4. Latin America
5. The Middle East
6. Eastern Europe
PART TWO:
MYTHS ABOUT THE GLOBAL WAR ON CHRISTIANS
7. The Myth That Christians Are at Risk Only Where They’re a Minority
8. The Myth That No One Saw It Coming
9. The Myth That It’s All About Islam
10. The Myth That It’s Only Persecution if the Motives Are Religious
11. The Myth That Anti-Christian Persecution Is a Political Issue
PART THREE:
FALLOUT, CONSEQUENCES, AND RESPONSE
12. Social and Political Fallout
13. Spiritual Fruits of the Global War
14. What’s to Be Done
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Over the course of my career, I’ve had many occasions to come into firsthand contact with victims of anti-Christian violence and persecution. I’ve met Christian refugees from Syria attending an open-air papal Mass on Beirut’s waterfront, people who have no idea if they’ll ever be able to go home and whose most desperate message they wanted to relay to the West was, “Don’t forget about us!” I’ve stood in the ruins of bombed churches in Nigeria and spoken with a Nigerian evangelical pastor named James Wuye who once led an armed Christian militia into pitched battles with Muslims, losing his right hand in the process, and who today partners with a Nigerian imam in promoting peace and reconciliation. I’ve sat in rectories in Eastern Europe listening to Christian clergy, both Orthodox and Catholic, describe their experiences in Soviet gulags. Several of these clergy still bore the physical scars of the experience, in the form of limps where their legs had been shattered, coughs from untreated diseases, and gnarled digits where the fingers on their hands used to administer blessings had been broken. I’ve interviewed a twentysomething Chaldean Catholic refugee from Iraq named Fatima, a survivor of the siege of the Basilica of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad on October 31, 2010. She made it through by playing dead, pulling the corpses of two slain Christian friends over her on the church floor and waiting for four hours for the church to be liberated, thinking every moment might be her last. While I am not an expert on religious persecution, it’s fair to say these personal experiences inspired this book and shaped my approach to it.
That said, the vast majority of the detailed accounts I summarize throughout this book are not the fruit of my own reporting. While I don’t cite individual source material, because doing so would be too cumbersome, I want to acknowledge the main organizations, media outlets, and individual experts upon whom I’ve relied:
• The annual World Watch List published by Open Doors, which provides a global overview of anti-Christian persecution during the year under consideration, and country-by-country accounts of places where Christians face the gravest danger.
• Aid to the Church in Need, a widely respected Catholic relief organization based in Germany, which also publishes occasional reviews of anti-Christian persecution, including detailed incident reports from a variety of different countries.
• Fides, the Vatican’s missionary news agency, which publishes an annual report on Catholic pastoral workers killed around the world during the previous year, including bishops, priests, brothers, deacons, nuns, and laywomen and -men who worked professionally for the Catholic Church.
• Asia News, another Catholic news agency sponsored by the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions and directed by Fr. Bernardo Cervellera, a dynamic Italian who, among other things, is one of the best Sinologists in the Catholic world. In my experience, Asia News probably does the best job, day in and day out, of documenting cases of anti-Christian persecution in the developing world, not just of Catholics but of all stripes of Christians.
• Forum 18, a Norwegian human rights organization that promotes religious freedom, and which is especially adept at monitoring the situation in the former Soviet sphere. Its regular news bulletins and analyses are extremely useful for understanding what’s happening in that part of the world.
• Nina Shea, Paul Marshall, and others at the Hudson Institute, who have done yeoman’s work over the last two decades to bring the issue of anti-Christian persecution to the forefront of American consciousness, and who continue to provide regular dispatches and overviews.
• The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in Washington, D.C., which provides the most reliable hard data on religious harassment and persecution around the world.
• The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, which has pioneered the statistical investigation of Christian martyrdom and remains the lone serious source for estimates of the number of contemporary martyrs.
• The Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), which has almost a century of experience delivering humanitarian and pastoral support to the churches of the Middle East, assisting not just Catholics but people of all faiths, and whose personnel often know the lay of the land better than anyone.
• Francesca Paci, a veteran print and broadcast journalist in Italy, whose 2011 book Dove muoiono i Cristiani (Where Christians are dying), published by Mondadori, was so good that I almost decided not to write this one. Communications 101, however, teaches us that sometimes the key to getting a point across is repetition. I hope this book accomplishes in English some of what Paci achieved in Italian.
Obviously, any misrepresentation or inaccuracies in the presentation of the incidents described in these pages is my fault alone and shouldn’t be attributed to any of the organizations or individuals listed above.
Looking back, it’s often hard to know exactly where the inspiration for a book came from, but I can date with precision the first time I considered global anti-Christian persecution as a possible topic. It was during a 2009 conversation with Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who mused that perhaps Christians haven’t roused themselves to confront the pr
oblem because we don’t have our own Holocaust literature. He meant that Christians haven’t told the stories of their new martyrs in a compelling way, in the same fashion that Jewish authors have described the horrors of the Shoah. This book is my own small contribution to a budding Christian genre dedicated to telling these stories, and I want to thank Cardinal Dolan for that nudge.
I’d like to take this chance to express gratitude to the team at Image, including Gary Jansen, Johanna Inwood, Carrie Freimuth, and their colleagues. As I’ve had the opportunity to say to them personally, they are “the best, the very best,” and this book would not exist without their support. As always with my book projects, thanks also go to the editorial team at the National Catholic Reporter for tolerating both my growing obsession with the subject of anti-Christian persecution and my occasional absences to produce the manuscript.
Finally, the most profound thanks go to my wife, Shannon, and our beloved pug, Ellis, without whom … well, they’re my sine quo nihil—without whom, nothing.
INTRODUCTION
This book is about the most dramatic religion story of the early twenty-first century, yet one that most people in the West have little idea is even happening: the global war on Christians. We’re not talking about a metaphorical “war on religion” in Europe and the United States, fought on symbolic terrain such as whether it’s okay to erect a nativity scene on the courthouse steps, but a rising tide of legal oppression, social harassment, and direct physical violence, with Christians as its leading victims. However counterintuitive it may seem in light of popular stereotypes of Christianity as a powerful and sometimes oppressive social force, Christians today indisputably are the most persecuted religious body on the planet, and too often their new martyrs suffer in silence.
The Me’eter military camp and prison, located in the Eritrean desert off the coast of the Red Sea, is a compelling place to begin the tale.
The prison’s signature bit of cruelty is the use of crude metal shipping containers to hold inmates, with so many people forced into these 40-by-38-foot spaces, designed to transport commercial cargo, that prisoners typically have no room to lie down and barely enough to sit. The metal exacerbates the desert temperatures, which means bone-chilling cold at night and wilting heat during the day. When the sun is at its peak, temperatures inside the containers are believed to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. One former inmate, lucky enough to be released after serving up a coerced confession, described the containers as “giant ovens baking people alive.” Because prisoners are given little water, they sometimes end up drinking their own scant sweat and urine to stay alive.
When not in lockdown, prisoners are forced into pointless exercises such as counting grains of sand in the desert at midday, and scores die of heatstroke and dehydration. There are no toilets inside the containers, just crude buckets overflowing with urine and feces, placing inmates at risk of infection with diseases such as cholera and diphtheria. Prisoners have no contact with their families or friends, no legal representation, and no medical care. Forms of torture at Me’eter (also transliterated as “Meiter” and “Mitire”) include making inmates kneel on a tree trunk and beating the soles of their feet with rubber hoses; hanging prisoners by their arms and exposing them to the sun, sometimes for forty-eight hours or more; and forcing prisoners to walk barefoot over stones and thorns, with beatings for not going fast enough. Survivors say sexual abuse is also common.
Me’eter was opened in 2009 by Eritrea’s single-party regime, controlled by the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, and is still going strong, despite the fact its horrors are well documented. Diplomatic cables released in 2011 by WikiLeaks reveal that U.S. officials had interviewed escapees from Eritrea’s concentration camps and passed along reports to the State Department.
Here’s how one female survivor described life at night inside the shipping containers in a 2009 book:
A single candle flickers, its flame barely illuminating the darkness. They never burn for more than two hours after the door is locked; there’s not enough oxygen to keep the flame alive. The air is thick with a dirty metallic tang, the ever-present stench of the bucket in the corner, and the smell of close-pressed, unwashed bodies. Despite the proximity of so many people, it’s freezing cold.
This survivor described being forced to squat on her haunches and lift three different sizes of rocks while moving them from one side of her body to another, over and over again. At one point she was tossed into a container with a female inmate who had been beaten so badly her uterus was actually hanging outside her body. The survivor desperately tried to push the uterus back in, but cries for help went unanswered and the woman died in agonizing pain.
The unavoidable question is why the abuse at Me’eter doesn’t arouse the same horror and intense public fascination as the celebrated atrocities that unfolded at Abu Ghraib, for instance, or at Guantanamo Bay. Why hasn’t there been the same avalanche of investigations, media exposés, protest marches, pop culture references, and the other typical indices of scandal? Why isn’t the whole world abuzz with outrage over the grotesque violations of human rights at Me’eter?
In part it’s because Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were operated by the United States, a country that styles itself a champion of democracy and the rule of law. Nobody really has the same expectations of Eritrea, a one-party state ruled since 1993 by a strongman who prevailed in a bloody civil war. More basically, however, the difference comes down to this: Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay formed chapters in a war everyone cared about, meaning the U.S.-led “war on terror,” while Me’eter is an equally dramatic chapter in a war that almost no one is aware is even being waged.
SNAPSHOTS OF A GLOBAL WAR
For all intents and purposes, Me’eter is a concentration camp for Christians. It’s a military complex converted to house religious prisoners, most of whom adhere to a branch of Christianity not authorized by the state. While precise counts are elusive, most estimates say that somewhere between two thousand and three thousand Christians are presently languishing in Eritrean prisons because of their religious beliefs. The testimony quoted above comes from an evangelical gospel singer named Helen Berhane, an Eritrean Christian jailed from 2004 to 2006 after refusing to sign a pledge promising not to engage in religious activities. She was released thanks to a worldwide pressure campaign, but most of her fellow Christians haven’t been so lucky.
Eritrea is far from an isolated case. The evangelical group Open Doors, devoted to monitoring anti-Christian persecution, estimates that one hundred million Christians worldwide presently face interrogation, arrest, torture, or even death because of their religious convictions. Protestant scholar Todd Johnson of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, an expert on religious demography, has pegged the number of Christians killed per year from 2000 to 2010 at one hundred thousand. That works out to eleven Christians killed every hour, every day, throughout the past decade. Some experts question that number, but even the low-end estimate puts the number of Christians killed every day on the basis of religious hatred at twenty, almost one per hour.
This is a truly ecumenical scourge, in the sense that it afflicts evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Anglicans, Orthodox, Catholics, and Pentecostals alike. All denominations have their martyrs, and all are more or less equally at risk. A 2011 report from the Catholic humanitarian group Aid to the Church in Need described the worldwide assault on Christians as “a human rights disaster of epic proportions.”
Though such language could seem to smack of hyperbole, consider these snapshots of what’s happening:
• In Baghdad, Iraq, Islamic militants stormed the Syrian Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation on October 31, 2010, killing the two priests celebrating Mass and leaving a total of fifty-eight people dead. Though shocking, the assault was far from unprecedented: of the sixty-five Christian churches in Baghdad, forty have been bombed at least once since the beginning of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The effect of this campaign of v
iolence and intimidation has been devastating for Christianity in the country. At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq boasted a flourishing Christian population of at least 1.5 million. Today the high-end estimate for the number of Christians left is around 500,000, and many believe it could be as low as 150,000. Most of these Iraqi Christians have gone into exile, but a staggering number have been killed.
• India’s northeastern state of Orissa was the scene of the most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early twenty-first century. In 2008, a series of riots ended with as many as five hundred Christians killed, many hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals; thousands more were injured, and at least fifty thousand were left homeless. Many Christians fled to hastily prepared displacement camps, where some languished for two years or more. An estimated five thousand Christian homes, along with 350 churches and schools, were destroyed. A Catholic nun, Sr. Meena Barwa, was raped during the mayhem, then marched naked through the streets and beaten. Police sympathetic to the radicals discouraged the nun from filing a report and declined to arrest her attackers.
• In Burma, members of the Chin and Karen ethnic groups, who are strongly Christian, are considered dissidents by the regime and routinely subjected to imprisonment, torture, forced labor, and murder. In October 2010, the Burmese military launched helicopter strikes in territories where the country’s Christians are concentrated. A Burmese air force source told reporters that the junta had declared these areas “black zones,” where military personnel were authorized to attack and kill Christian targets on sight. Though there are no precise counts, thousands of Burmese Christians are believed to have been killed in the offensive.
• In Nigeria, the militant Islamic movement Boko Haram is held responsible for almost three thousand deaths since 2009, including eight hundred fatalities in 2012 alone. The movement has made a specialty out of targeting Christians and their churches, and in some cases they seem determined to drive Christians completely out of parts of the country. In December 2011, local Boko Haram spokespeople announced that all Christians in Nigeria’s northern Yobe and Borno states had three days to get out, and followed up with a spate of church bombings on January 5–6, 2012, which left at least twenty-six Christians dead, as well as two separate shooting sprees in which eight more Christians died. In the aftermath, hundreds of Christians fled the area, and many are still displaced. Over Christmas 2012, at least fifteen Christians are believed to have had their throats cut by Boko Haram assailants.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 1