One of the nastiest by-products of those conflicts was the rise of what’s now known as Boko Haram, a jihadist militant organization founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2001. It’s emerged as something of a “brand” for a loosely affiliated network of terrorist groups apparently bent on fomenting chaos, and in particular on attacking Christian targets such as churches, schools, social service centers, and Christian-owned businesses. In July 2009, around the town of Maiduguri in the northwest, Boko Haram attacked police stations, prisons, schools, and homes, burning pretty much everything in its path. Scores of Christians were abducted and forced, under threat of death, to renounce their faith. The riots continued for five days before police were able to stop them, and an estimated seven hundred people died in the chaos. As it turns out, that outburst was a preview of things to come, with Boko Haram now held responsible for at least three thousand deaths. The overall effect is to create a climate of terror.
In September 2011, extremists attacked a Christian village called Vwang in the predominantly Muslim north, leaving fourteen people dead from gunshot and machete wounds, including five children under the age of fourteen and a pregnant woman. In November, a series of Christian-owned businesses went up in flames across the northern state of Kaduna, with at least sixteen people killed, including members of local Catholic, Anglican, and Living Faith denominations. (Police originally tried to blame faulty commercial gas canisters for the blasts, though an investigation showed that none of the shops actually sold gas.) In early December 2011, a Christian settlement of 425 people, who reportedly worshipped at a local denomination called Evangelical Church Winning All, was attacked, resulting in the shooting death of one unarmed woman and injuries to several people. Just days later, yet another Christian community in the north was attacked, this time leaving five dead and six injured—including a three-year-old girl who had to be hospitalized for the injuries she received from a machete.
Perhaps the signature atrocity carried out by Boko Haram to date was a coordinated series of assaults on Christmas Day 2011, which left at least fifty people dead and hundreds injured. Most of the carnage came in Madalla, a satellite town on the outskirts of the national capital, Abuja, where a bomb went off outside St. Theresa’s Catholic Church that killed forty-four and left an additional eighty people injured, including both Muslim bystanders and Catholics exiting the Christmas Mass, which had just ended when the blast occurred. An additional explosion hit the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Church, an independent Pentecostal community in the northern city of Jos, resulting in at least one death when a policeman confronted the attackers and was shot to death. The situation would have been far worse had an additional two bombs not been discovered and disarmed before they could detonate.
Compounding the sense of tragedy, the vast majority of the dead at St. Theresa’s were very young. They included four-year-old Emmanuel Dilke, who was killed alongside his father, his brother, and his sister. Also left dead was Chiemerie Nwachukwu, an eight-month-old baby killed alongside his mother. Their bishop, Martin Igwe Uzoukwu of Minna, later said: “Our people have suffered so much, but our response should not be one of anger. It should be one seeking peace and justice.”
Both the body count and the symbolism of striking on Christmas Day galvanized attention around the world to the threat posed by Boko Haram, including its specific menace to Christians. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, among the world’s leading Jewish human rights organizations, urged the United States and the European Union to do more to protect embattled Christians around the globe: “As Jews, we recognize all too well when those who want to beat down a group add humiliation and contempt to their murderous violence,” it said in a December 28 statement. “Picking Christmas Day to murder women and children on the steps of their church was calculated to intimidate all other Nigerian Christians.”
In the weeks that followed, rarely a week went by without Christians being targeted at Sunday services. Those responsible also targeted markets, banks, police, government buildings, and schools, but churches usually bore the brunt of the violence. At least nine people died and nineteen more were injured in a shooting at an evangelical church in Gombe, a city in the northeast, in early January 2012. Pastor Johnson Jauro told reporters that gunmen burst into his church, killing people including his wife. He said: “The attackers started shooting sporadically. They shot through the window of the church. Many members who attended the church service were also injured.” At the same time, up to twenty people died in Mubi in Adamawa state when gunmen opened fire in a town hall where Christian traders were meeting and holding prayers.
Any hope that a state of emergency declared by President Good-luck Jonathan in January 2012 would restore law and order was left in tatters, as Boko Haram stepped up its campaign of terror. In March 2012, a Boko Haram spokesman declared that a campaign was under way to eradicate Christians from parts of the north. The spokesman declared: “We will create so much effort to have an Islamic state that Christians will not be able to stay.” Although a deadline for all Christians to evacuate the north established by Boko Haram came and went, thousands of Christians did in fact flee, while others who remain report a constant state of anxiety about when the next Boko Haram attack might come, and whether the police and security forces will be able to protect them when it does. Some observers warned that Nigeria is at risk of a slow-motion form of “religious cleansing” if the state isn’t able to bring Boko Haram under control.
In mid-April 2012, up to forty people died and at least thirty were injured after a suicide bomber detonated explosives in a busy part of the city of Kaduna after being refused entry to a nearby church where an Easter service was taking place. Security guards at the gates of the First Evangelical Church, on Gwari Road, denied access to a man driving a car packed with improvised explosives. The man then drove off and detonated the bomb at a nearby hotel, close to two other evangelical churches, where windows were smashed by the explosion. An estimated sixty buildings within a 1,600-foot radius of the blast were severely damaged, and eight cars and several commercial vehicles were burned. At the same time, at least twenty-one people were killed and more than twenty others injured in an attack on Christian students attending a Sunday service at Bayero University in Kano state.
In December 2012, Boko Haram launched another round of assaults on Christian churches timed to coincide with the Christmas holidays, prompting Paul Marshall to observe, “In some parts of the world, Christmas is prime time for attacks on Christians.” In Nigeria’s Borno state, a heavily Muslim region in the country’s northeast, six Christians were killed in an attack on the First Baptist Church in Maiduguri. In Yobe state, suspected Boko Haram gunmen entered an evangelical church in Pieri, near Postiskum, and shot six Christians to death, including the church’s pastor, before setting the church and twenty nearby Christian homes ablaze. Earlier in the month, in Kupwal village in the Chibok local government area, suspected Boko Haram militants slit the throats of at least ten people in Christian homes. For the record, 2012 marked the third consecutive year that Boko Haram launched a bloody wave of attacks on Christians during the Christmas season.
During previous cycles of ethnic and religious tension in Nigeria, Christians haven’t been simply victims. They’ve also been perpetrators, organizing themselves into militias in order to defend churches, schools, and homes, but at times taking the fight to their perceived enemies. At the village level, Muslim homes and businesses have sometimes been attacked by Christians, usually ostensibly in reprisal for some previous assault on Christian targets. Though most Christian leaders in Nigeria have called on Christians not to strike back at Muslims in frustration over the Boko Haram assaults, many observers worry that a broader cycle of religious violence could grip the country.
SUDAN
An estimated 2.5 million people died in Sudan’s 1983–2005 civil war, fought between the central Sudanese government under President Omar al-Bashir, committed to strong Islamist rule, and a separatist movement in the largel
y Christian and animist south. The country’s Christian minority had long taken the brunt of the conflict, trapped between al-Bashir’s Islamist forces and the Ugandan-based Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA is generally considered not merely an armed faction but almost a new religious movement blending African mysticism and indigenous tribal beliefs with elements borrowed from Christianity and Islam. Although it claims Christian inspiration, it’s committed some of the most appalling acts of cruelty in the global war on Christians. In the late summer of 2009, for instance, visitors to Ezo in the extreme south of Sudan stumbled across the decaying remains of several Sudanese Christians who had been nailed to pieces of wood and left to die in what appeared to be a mock crucifixion scene. Locals reported that these murdered Christians had been abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army during a church service.
After a referendum led to the creation of the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, in July 2011, prospects for the Christians who stayed behind in the north (usually because that is where their homes and jobs are located) seemed grim. Labeled “cockroaches” by loyalists to the regime, the Christians in Sudan, mostly concentrated in and around the capital city, Khartoum, are subject to a wide variety of both de jure and de facto discrimination, as well as persistent physical danger.
In June 2010, for instance, a Christian teenager named Hilba Abdelfadil Anglo was kidnapped by a gang of extremists and subjected to a series of physical and sexual assaults, including gang rape. Her attackers called her family “infidels” for being Christians, insisting that she needed to become a Muslim. The fifteen-year-old eventually played along and convinced her abductors to relax, allowing her to escape. When she went to the police to report her abduction and abuse, she was told she couldn’t file a report unless she formally converted to Islam. Christian women in Sudan report constant harassment, charged with offenses such as “inappropriate clothing” because they don’t wear a head covering, and often receive floggings by religious police. Christians are also subject to arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention for any behavior perceived by the regime’s personnel as “evangelizing.”
It’s not just the ordinary Christian believer at risk. In October 2010, Cardinal Zubeir Wako, Sudan’s most senior Catholic prelate, was the object of an assassination attempt while celebrating Mass at a church-owned playground in Khartoum. A Muslim man had smuggled a dagger into the Mass and tried to attack the cardinal, but one of the other clergy managed to wrest the knife away and restrain the attacker. Though Wako was unharmed, the fact that he could be targeted during a Mass allegedly under the protection of security services symbolized the vulnerability many Christians in the north feel.
In June 2011, a pro-al-Bashir militia attacked and looted at least three Christian churches in South Kordofan state, which straddles the border between north and south. The assaults prompted many of the Christians in the area to flee, and as they did so the militia randomly detained and killed some of them. One such victim was a Catholic seminarian named Nimeri Philip Kalo; an eyewitness later reported that gunmen forced them to watch as they shot Kalo, warning that if anyone cried they would be gunned down too. The same day gunmen also killed Adeeb Gismalla Aksam, a young Christian bus driver whose father was an elder in an evangelical church. Most observers believed the overall thrust of the violence was to intimidate Christians in the border zone and drive them into South Sudan. Those impressions seemed reinforced a month later, in July 2011, after a rash of attacks on both churches and Christian homes and businesses across South Kordofan.
In January 2012, Sudan’s Ministry of Guidance and Religious Endowments publicly threatened to arrest Christian pastors who were caught praying in public, saying that doing so would be interpreted as an illicit act of “proselytism.” At least one church leader, James Kat of the Church of Sudan, was beaten while in police custody. At the same time, another Christian pastor, Gabro Haile Selassie, was arrested after refusing to vacate his home in Khartoum, which government officials had decided to transfer to a Muslim businessman. In early February, two Catholic priests were abducted from a church compound outside Khartoum, apparently by a regime-affiliated armed group. The abductors demanded a ransom, but when they didn’t get it they eventually let the priests go with minor injuries.
Throughout February and March 2012, attacks in South Kordofan and the Nuba mountains by the Sudanese army and allied militia groups appeared designed to suppress the Christian presence. Heiban Bible College in South Kordofan, for instance, was bombed on the first day it opened for classes. An aid worker put things this way: “The Islamic north sees Nuba Christians as infidels who need to be Islamized through jihad … This war is ethnic cleansing—a religious as well as a political war.” Reports state that between June 2011 and March 2012, twenty Christians were killed and four churches destroyed.
In April 2012, an Islamist mob set fire to a Catholic church in Khartoum frequented by Christians with roots in what is now South Sudan. Witnesses and several newspapers said a mob of several hundred torched the church, shouting insults at “southerners.” Firefighters were unable to put out the blaze. The newspaper Al-Sahafah reported that the church was part of a complex that also included a school and dormitories. Many observers believe it may only be a question of time before the “religious cleansing” campaign succeeds and Sudan is essentially empty of Christians.
Profile: Bishop Umar Mulinde
A well-known preacher and revivalist in the Pentecostal Gospel Life Church International, Bishop Umar Mulinde is, quite literally, a compelling public face of the global war on Christians. He bears the scars on the right side of his face, where Muslim extremists threw acid at him on Christmas Eve 2011, leaving him blind in one eye and threatening his sight in the other. A convert from Islam to Christianity in 1993, he had been among the most outspoken critics in Uganda of a parliamentary proposal to give legal recognition to shariah courts, and it’s widely believed the attack on Mulinde was in reprisal for that position.
The assault came just outside the Ugandan church where Mulinde serves as pastor, which is on the outskirts of Kampala, the national capital. Ironically, a police substation is immediately across the street. As Mulinde describes it, he was on his way back to the church site for a party with the congregation and hundreds of new converts to Christianity when two assailants approached him and threw an unidentified acid directly at his face.
“As I was opening the door of my car, one poured a bucket of acid on my head,” Mulinde recalls. “I had fire from the head up to the toes, to the legs down.”
As he doubled over, the second attacker poured acid over his back. The acid that missed Mulinde burned a hole through the metal of his car, demonstrating its potency. Mulinde’s last recollection of the assault was hearing the words “Allahu akbar” (“God is great,” the signature Muslim chant) echoed three times. Mulinde, who had just turned forty, traveled to Israel throughout 2012 to receive treatment, undergoing multiple surgeries and skin grafts at Sheba Hospital’s burn unit in Tel Aviv. He says he’s forgiven the people who put him in this situation.
“The people who did this to me, they thought they are serving God. But I feel sorry for them and I forgive them, because they didn’t know what they were doing,” he said during an August 2012 interview.
Married with six young children, Mulinde was a lightning rod for radical Islamic outrage, and not merely because of his opposition to the Muslim Personal Law Bill. He’s considered Uganda’s most infamous Muslim apostate, the grandson of an imam and a former sheikh himself who converted to Christianity on Easter Sunday in 1993. He says that when he announced his conversion, his own family drove him away with clubs and machetes, and his brothers refuse to greet him in the street. In 1995 and again in 1998, Mulinde said, extremists attacked prayer meetings he was leading in various parts of Uganda, accusing him of apostasy, and in 2000 during another such assault he was actually beaten into unconsciousness. In 2001, one Muslim extremist attacked Mulinde with a sword during a revival service.
When he led the push-back against the law recognizing Islamic tribunals throughout 2011, Mulinde said, a fatwa was issued against his life by local Islamic jurists, paving the way for the Christmas Eve assault.
Demographically, Christians make up just over 80 percent of Uganda’s population, with Muslims accounting for somewhere between 12 and 15 percent. Over the years, Mulinde has become well known for taking part in debates with local Muslim figures, drawing on his background as a sheikh and his ability to quote the Qur’an to challenge Muslims about their religion. In May 2011, he narrowly escaped a kidnapping attempt when a group of armed men tried to block his car at a location roughly halfway between his home and the church site. They attempted to grab Mulinde, then shot at him as he fled. He reported the incident to local police, but no one was arrested.
Mulinde insists that he’s not looking to lead a holy war. He says he continues to support several Muslim families personally and financially, including some who are his own relatives, and is only interested in a “peaceful evangelism campaign” intended to offer the message of Christ. At the same time, he also insists he will continue to speak out against efforts to impose shariah law on non-Muslims, and to defend the rights and physical safety of former Muslims who have decided to covert to another faith.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 7