When Archbishop Dieudonné Nzapalainga (46) of Bangui preached on 21 July at the anniversary of his ordination, his distress was palpable.
"I can't remain silent while
the sons of this country are the victims of the worst kind of
barbarism.
"I
can't remain silent while Central Africans are being tortured and
killed, squashed like flies.
"I can't remain silent while our
mothers and sisters are being raped.
"I can't remain silent while the dignity of
the Central African is being trampled underfoot, while innocent people
are being robbed, while the just and well-earned fruit of our country is
being destroyed and looted as though we were in a house of cards.
"I
can't remain silent when impunity reigns and a dictatorship of arms is
being set up.
"I dare to hope that
one or other person will hear in my voice the Central African people's
cry of suffering."
See:
People in Central African Republic being killed ‘like flies,’ says prelate
Catholic World News, 25 July 2013
Other new and important articles on the crisis in Central African Republic.
‘Beelzebub inhabits hearts in this country’
Jonathan Luxmoore says clergy are being kidnapped, tabernacles profaned and Church hospitals ransacked in the Central African Republic
By Jonathan Luxmoore, for catholicherald.co.uk
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
Fear stalks Central African Republic after rebel takeover
Saudi Gazette, 20 July 2013
Central African Republic: Seleka Forces Kill Scores, Burn Villages
UN Security Council Should Sanction Abusive Seleka Leaders
Human Rights Watch, 27 June 2013
----------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Kendal is the author of
Turn Back the Battle: Isaiah Speaks to Christians Today
(Deror Books, Dec 2012)
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
C.A.R: Letter from Bangui
For background on the diabolical yet totally ignored situation in Central African Republic, see: Churches targeted as Muslim rebels seize Bangui in an orgy of raping, killing and looting
By Elizabeth Kendal, Religious Liberty Monitoring, 13 May 2013
AND
Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin, label: Central African Republic (CAR)
The Church must not let this crisis be whitewashed or covered over by foreign forces interested only in power and economic gain.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,
for the rights of all who are destitute.
Speak up and judge fairly;
defend the rights of the poor and needy.
(Proverbs 31:8-9 NIV)
"Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." (Matthew 25:45 NIV)
The following letter was written by a local who is trapped in Bangui, to a former colleague now living in the West.
--------------------------------------
LETTER FROM BANGUI
--------------------------------------
Bangui, 19th June 2013
Dear Rosie,
It is with much bitterness that I seize once more this opportunity to describe to you the situation in which we are living at this present time. But first of all I ask you to accept my apologies for the long silence between you and me. If you have noticed that I have not called you lately, it is simply because we are enduring Calvary, but it is by the grace of God that we survive.
At the moment of my writing to you we enjoy good health, but it is the suffering that is torturing us. In actual fact since the "Seleka" coalition took power on the 24th March 2013 our country has regressed by a century. I hope that you have read everything on the internet about everything we are going through at the moment. The country is literally ruined. Everything has been destroyed, devastated and plundered. Since then, until today, total insecurity rules. The weapons crackle all the time. We don't sleep at night because of the sporadic shooting. They are everywhere in the town and drive at great speed with heavy weapons in their vehicles.
They commit extortion and rape to mention only these two. I assure you, that I have no desire to live in the C.A.R. If it wasn't for my family, I would prefer to go and live peacefully somewhere else, but unfortunately I can't do anything. The rebels are so numerous; they have spread across the whole country. Their number is estimated to be 20,000 men. Can you imagine? It is total anarchy and hysteria. Even worse they have destroyed everything. In the townships which they occupied before entering Bangui, they destroyed wooden tables to use the wood for firewood. We wonder why they chased the ex-president out of the country.
They control the government finances, such as customs and taxes. All the takings they detect go into their pockets and the state treasury remains empty. Among them are Chadians and Sudanese who make their own laws. From what we are currently experiencing we have the impression that it is Islam – at the expense of Christianity – that is in the process of settling in our secular country. If you saw the pictures of everything I am telling you, you will not believe it. Since the coffers of the State are empty, I assure you that we have not been paid since the 24th March 2013. They came to enrich themselves and not to liberate us as they say.
This week there is so much misery that a saucepan concert starts at 18h [6 pm] when the whole population strikes their saucepans together to indicate that they are starving. Sometimes we don't eat for two or three days. We have just to be content with stodge like cassava leaves prepared without peanut paste and without palm old, just only with salt.
In any case if you saw us in your magic mirror, we have all lost weight. We are in a truly difficult situation. At the moment our country is under embargo. As a result there is no assistance coming through. As the transition period is going to last 18 months, we are all going to die before the end of this period. As I am thinking so much, I have melted so that you would not recognise me if you saw me.
What worries me a lot is our baby. She has already started to eat thin porridge made with maize flour, which is not very nourishing. As she is not getting enough to eat, she suckles her mother a lot. As a result her mother has lost a lot of weight. Sometimes when we wake up in the morning the children have not a single fritter for breakfast. [The writer then confesses that he is considering sending his children to live with relatives in a remote region, far from Bangui, where the situation is less dire.]
I think that I have said enough. So I am going to leave you, firmly hoping to have a favourable response to my grievances. My children and their mother embrace you. They unanimously begged me: "Papa, tell Rosie not to turn her back, because we are dying of hunger!"
Goodbye and until soon,
(Name withheld for security purposes)
END
---------------------------------------------------
Please raise this issue with your MPs, speak about it through your media and with your colleagues, neighbours and friends -- that the church in CAR might not be forgotten.
Most of all -- please pray for the church in Central African Republic.
For prayer suggestions see RLPB 210 (13 May 2013)
------------------------------------
Elizabeth Kendal is the author of
Turn Back the Battle: Isaiah speaks to Christians today
(Deror Books, Dec 2012)
By Elizabeth Kendal, Religious Liberty Monitoring, 13 May 2013
AND
Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin, label: Central African Republic (CAR)
The Church must not let this crisis be whitewashed or covered over by foreign forces interested only in power and economic gain.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,
for the rights of all who are destitute.
Speak up and judge fairly;
defend the rights of the poor and needy.
(Proverbs 31:8-9 NIV)
"Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." (Matthew 25:45 NIV)
The following letter was written by a local who is trapped in Bangui, to a former colleague now living in the West.
--------------------------------------
LETTER FROM BANGUI
--------------------------------------
Bangui, 19th June 2013
Dear Rosie,
It is with much bitterness that I seize once more this opportunity to describe to you the situation in which we are living at this present time. But first of all I ask you to accept my apologies for the long silence between you and me. If you have noticed that I have not called you lately, it is simply because we are enduring Calvary, but it is by the grace of God that we survive.
At the moment of my writing to you we enjoy good health, but it is the suffering that is torturing us. In actual fact since the "Seleka" coalition took power on the 24th March 2013 our country has regressed by a century. I hope that you have read everything on the internet about everything we are going through at the moment. The country is literally ruined. Everything has been destroyed, devastated and plundered. Since then, until today, total insecurity rules. The weapons crackle all the time. We don't sleep at night because of the sporadic shooting. They are everywhere in the town and drive at great speed with heavy weapons in their vehicles.
They commit extortion and rape to mention only these two. I assure you, that I have no desire to live in the C.A.R. If it wasn't for my family, I would prefer to go and live peacefully somewhere else, but unfortunately I can't do anything. The rebels are so numerous; they have spread across the whole country. Their number is estimated to be 20,000 men. Can you imagine? It is total anarchy and hysteria. Even worse they have destroyed everything. In the townships which they occupied before entering Bangui, they destroyed wooden tables to use the wood for firewood. We wonder why they chased the ex-president out of the country.
They control the government finances, such as customs and taxes. All the takings they detect go into their pockets and the state treasury remains empty. Among them are Chadians and Sudanese who make their own laws. From what we are currently experiencing we have the impression that it is Islam – at the expense of Christianity – that is in the process of settling in our secular country. If you saw the pictures of everything I am telling you, you will not believe it. Since the coffers of the State are empty, I assure you that we have not been paid since the 24th March 2013. They came to enrich themselves and not to liberate us as they say.
This week there is so much misery that a saucepan concert starts at 18h [6 pm] when the whole population strikes their saucepans together to indicate that they are starving. Sometimes we don't eat for two or three days. We have just to be content with stodge like cassava leaves prepared without peanut paste and without palm old, just only with salt.
In any case if you saw us in your magic mirror, we have all lost weight. We are in a truly difficult situation. At the moment our country is under embargo. As a result there is no assistance coming through. As the transition period is going to last 18 months, we are all going to die before the end of this period. As I am thinking so much, I have melted so that you would not recognise me if you saw me.
What worries me a lot is our baby. She has already started to eat thin porridge made with maize flour, which is not very nourishing. As she is not getting enough to eat, she suckles her mother a lot. As a result her mother has lost a lot of weight. Sometimes when we wake up in the morning the children have not a single fritter for breakfast. [The writer then confesses that he is considering sending his children to live with relatives in a remote region, far from Bangui, where the situation is less dire.]
I think that I have said enough. So I am going to leave you, firmly hoping to have a favourable response to my grievances. My children and their mother embrace you. They unanimously begged me: "Papa, tell Rosie not to turn her back, because we are dying of hunger!"
Goodbye and until soon,
(Name withheld for security purposes)
END
---------------------------------------------------
Please raise this issue with your MPs, speak about it through your media and with your colleagues, neighbours and friends -- that the church in CAR might not be forgotten.
Most of all -- please pray for the church in Central African Republic.
For prayer suggestions see RLPB 210 (13 May 2013)
------------------------------------
Elizabeth Kendal is the author of
Turn Back the Battle: Isaiah speaks to Christians today
(Deror Books, Dec 2012)
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Religious Freedom and Realpolitik
By Elizabeth Kendal
On 22 May 2013, the Washington Post published a piece by Lauren Markeo, entitled: ANALYSIS: Does religious freedom report need more 'teeth'?
The title is drawn from the words of Knox Thames, the director of policy and research at the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), who laments that the State Department's International Religious Freedom Report 2012 -- released by Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday 20 May 2013 -- does not include an updated list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPCs). The USCIRF insists that the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Act that mandates the State Department Report also requires new designations of CPCs annually.
As Thames explained to Markoe, for years the annual report and the CPC designations were simultaneous, but that changed late in the Bush administration and has been continued under Obama. And according to Thames, the list of CPCs "is what gave all of this teeth" . . . for the list prompts "countries to do things they don't normally want to do".
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, REALPOLITIK AND DENIAL
On the contrary, the CPC list did not give the US IRF Act its "teeth"; US economic leverage gave the Act its teeth. The CPC list was only effective because aid could be extended or sanctions applied on the grounds of the religious liberty findings. As long as the US had political will and economic leverage, dictators had economic incentive to reign in their most hostile and belligerent elements and pursue at least a modicum of reform.
As I maintain in the introduction to my book, Turn Back the Battle: Isaiah Speaks to Christians Today (Deror Books, Dec 2012), the US IRF Act "only had teeth as long as the US had economic leverage. Thus the financial collapse of 2008 seriously undermined its power."
The reality is, persecution escalated dramatically immediately after the financial crisis: "It was as if the veil of protection that US economic . . . leverage had provided was stripped away in a moment, leaving minority Christians exposed and vulnerable before a rising tide of militant religious nationalism, intolerant Islamic fundamentalism and brutal, atheistic totalitarianism."
Compounding the crisis, US financial collapse converged not only with the rise of China -- and who needs US aid when China gives aid without strings attached? -- but also with the decline of US political and military influence in the Middle East.
That the US IRF Act has indeed lost its "teeth" (economic leverage) is a fact about which most persecuted believers and religious liberty advocates are actually in profound denial.
CASE STUDY: VIETNAM
Thames offers Vietnam as an example of how the CPC designations "work", noting that reforms, pressed by US diplomats, resulted in Vietnam's delisting in 2006.
But that was then -- before the financial crisis -- this is now!
Furthermore, Vietnam never really reformed -- it just did what it had to do in order to get from the US what it wanted to get. Behind the dressed-up facade, Vietnam remained a repressive, Communist regime.
As Human Rights Watch reported in October 2009: "In 2006, the State Department removed Vietnam from the [CPC] list, citing the release of religious prisoners and less-restrictive legislation governing religion. Two months later, the US granted Vietnam permanent normal trade status, which led to Vietnam's membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO)."
See, Vietnam: Sharp backsliding in religious freedom
HRW, 10 Oct 2009
But soon as Vietnam joined the WTO in January 2007, repression and persecution returned. In March 2007 I wrote of a watershed moment. "Through a wave of harassments, arrests and criminal charges against human rights and democracy advocates engaged in peaceful and perfectly legal activities, Vietnam is openly showing its hand and waiting to see if anyone will challenge, or if everyone will fold."
See: Vietnam's crackdown creates watershed
By Elizabeth Kendal, 20 March 2007
In the US, the usual voices spoke out against the persecution -- US Congressmen Chris Smith, Frank Wolf, Ed Royce, Dana Rohrabacher and others -- warning Vietnam that it risked being returned to the CPC list; but to no avail. By September 2008, Vietnam was right back to its old ways: breaking promises and using state violence to crack down hard on Hanoi's Catholics as they followed the courageous Archbishop Kiet into the streets, week after week, in one of the most courageous and phenomenal prayer movements I have ever seen.
See: Vietnam: Govt belligerence escalates against Hanoi Catholics.
By Elizabeth Kendal, 26 September 2008
Persecution in Vietnam's Central Highlands also skyrocketed. The HRW report -- Montagnard Christians in Vietnam: a case study in religious repression (March 2011) -- reveals a campaign of widespread systematic harassment, violence and public shaming through which many hundreds, if not thousands, of Protestant families have been forced to recant their faith.
The reality is, since late 2008, persecution with impunity has become the order of the day -- not just in Vietnam, but worldwide. The US can't prevent it and the persecutors know it!
Today's world is a world of realpolitik, where economic and geo-strategic concerns trump inconvenient human rights abuses -- especially the persecution of Christians -- every day.
END DENIAL AND STEP OUT IN FAITH
It goes against the grain of human pride to admit that we are helpless and powerlessness. It is also very frightening. But I would maintain that this is exactly what we must do if we are to lay hold of what God has promised.
When the Assyrian Rabshakeh and his "great army" arrived at the gates of Jerusalem in 701 BC, the Assyrians had already crushed everything and everyone in whom King Hezekiah had hoped: Babylon (the great city), Tyre and Sidon (the great economic powers), Hezekiah's Western Alliance (collective security) and military aid from Egypt (Judah's ally in the south). With the Assyrians "at the gate", the conquest of Jerusalem was imminent and inevitable . . . until Hezekiah returned to the way of faith, and prayed (Isaiah 36-37). And Isaiah makes it perfectly clear that this is not mere history, this is type with universal application.
Religious liberty advocates would do well to take Isaiah as their role model. In the midst of an existential political and military crisis, Isaiah obeyed the Lord and approached the king -- first Ahaz, then Hezekiah. A prophetic voice -- as distinct from a negotiator or union representative -- Isaiah spoke truth to power without ever putting his faith in that power or in his diplomacy or the political process or military might or collective security or economic leverage. On the contrary, his faith was always in the Lord alone.
The world has changed and US influence and leverage is not what it used to be. Yet I believe this may yet prove to be providential. Without its "teeth" (economic leverage) the US IRF Act may be released to just equip us with truth uncontaminated by political considerations -- truth that is absolutely essential if we are to "fight" effectively (Ephesians 6:14) and turn back the battle. Meanwhile, after more than a decade of looking to the US for help, the Church might finally return to the way of faith and look once more to the one who really does rule this world: the faithful, Yahweh Sabaoth, the Lord of hosts. "Blessed are those who wait for him." (Isaiah 30:18)
---------------------------------
Elizabeth Kendal is the Director of Advocacy at Christian Faith and Freedom (Canberra), and the author of Turn Back the Battle: Isaiah Speaks to Christians Today (Deror Books, Dec 2012)