Sanctions Sought to End Religious Persecution

The stories are distressingly similar and far too richly detailed to be written off as hoaxes. People in Sudan, China, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Egypt, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and some other countries face starvation, murder, rape, kidnapping, forced conversion and other atrocities, all because of their religious beliefs.

Many of the victims--though by no means all of them--are Christians. Until recently, these massive violations of human rights have been largely ignored by the U.S. public, its government and even most churches.

That is about to change. A well-organized movement, determined to make persecution of Christians the hot-button issue of the post-Cold War world, is demanding that the U.S. government punish the worst of the persecutors.

So far, the movement’s effort to reshape U.S. foreign policy has generated enthusiasm in Congress and some apprehension in the Clinton administration, especially the State Department, which takes a much more nuanced view of the subject.

This week, the House International Relations Committee is scheduled to hold its first hearing on legislation sponsored by Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) to establish a White House office to monitor religious persecution. The office would impose automatic trade, economic and political sanctions on nations found to violate religious rights, whether they do so directly through government action or indirectly by allowing mobs to get away with atrocities against members of competing religions.

That bill, with more than 90 co-sponsors from both parties, is expected to pass easily and reach President Clinton’s desk by early next year.

It will require government action against an evil that may be as old as humanity but in recent decades has been overlooked by most Americans, who enjoy religious freedom at home and often cannot imagine that people in the late 20th century are dying for their faith.

The measure focuses on persecution of Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and Bahais. It singles out China, Vietnam, Sudan, Cuba, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, North Korea, Indonesia, Egypt and Laos for immediate attention. The office would be authorized to study other countries once a report is completed on the nations already listed.

But critics of the legislation point out that some persecuted religious groups, such as Muslims in Serb-held parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, seem to be left out, and some countries with doleful human rights records appear to be getting a free pass.

The narrow focus of the campaign is both its strength and its weakness. Supporters say they want to keep the issues simple and direct by concentrating on acts of total savagery directed against a major worldwide religion. They say the addition of Tibetan Buddhists and Bahais to the legislation already may have muddied the waters.

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At the same time, critics, including some senior officials of mainline Christian churches, complain that the movement is oversimplifying the issue and is ignoring the plight of many non-Christians who face the same sort of tyranny that Christians do.

While the issues are as stark as a man in Sudan dying under the treads of a tank that he challenged with nothing more than a cross and a Bible in his hands, they are far from simple. Oftentimes religious atrocities also have political motivations. And there are well-documented cases of religiously motivated atrocities by Christians against other Christians and Muslims against other Muslims, as well as other acts of persecution that cannot easily be explained by a slogan on a bumper sticker.

Sudan provides a case in point. Secular human rights groups and Christian organizations almost always class the African nation’s Muslim-dominated government as the world’s worst offender. The State Department, in a report on religious persecution, said the Sudanese government forces Christians and adherents of indigenous African religions to convert to Islam under threat of death, condones a slave trade that preys on Christians and is engaged in a concerted effort to wipe out all non-Muslim religions.

In his book “Their Blood Cries Out,” a worldwide survey of anti-Christian persecution, Paul Marshall writes: “The word ‘genocide’ is a harsh one, thrown around too frequently and too cheaply. In the case of Sudan, however, it is simply a factual description.”

But even there the issues are complex. The government is engaged in a 14-year-old civil war against rebels who are mostly Christians and believers in traditional African religions; it maintains that the 1 million who have been killed were casualties of war.

Christian groups estimate the toll is at least 50% higher and say the vast majority of victims were women, children and other civilians, some of whom starved to death in concentration camps because they refused to convert to Islam.

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The situation in China is even more complex. The government tolerates only officially sanctioned religious organizations that it has infiltrated and can control. Religious leaders who refuse to go along are treated harshly.

The State Department says four Roman Catholic bishops in China and thousands of other believers are in prison or “reeducation” camps or have disappeared.

At the same time, at least 14 million Chinese belong to officially registered Christian churches. Many of these believers suffered in earlier crackdowns but have reached an understanding with the government that lets them practice their faith--under government scrutiny.

Backers of the anti-persecution legislation list China as a prime target. But Richard J. Jones, associate professor of missions and world religions at Virginia Theological Seminary, says sanctions against China might disrupt relations between the government and authorized churches. Leaders of these churches “have already put in their time of suffering,” Jones says, and do not deserve additional retribution caused by U.S. attempts to punish religious persecution.

Still, leaders of the drive to raise public concern about religious tyranny are determined to keep the message simple and direct. Much of the grass-roots support for the campaign comes from fundamentalist Christian groups and is energized by Christian-oriented radio talk shows.

Some leaders of more liberal Christian churches are uncomfortable with the emphasis on Christian suffering, suggesting that Christians should be concerned about all religious persecution.

Michael Horowitz, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington and one of the early leaders of the campaign, says it is essential to keep the focus on Christians because they “are the scapegoats of choice” of tyrannical regimes around the world. And because Christianity is the religion with by far the most adherents in the United States, a campaign that concentrates on Christians has an automatic constituency.

“The human rights establishment is beginning to understand how the political arithmetic of human rights becomes different, radically different, once 30% of the American voting population begins wondering why we do business as usual with a regime that murders and tortures pastors and priests and bishops, torches churches, systematically assaults female worshipers--and old ones at that--and makes it a practice to punch their teeth out when they attend services at unregistered churches,” he says.

He predicts that a campaign to save persecuted Christians will damage China and other “anti-human rights regimes” the same way the drive to save Soviet Jews undercut the Soviet Union. A Jew himself, Horowitz says he is returning the support that the campaign for Soviet Jews received from Christian groups.

The Wolf-Specter bill appears to be directed first of all at China. It imposes five automatic economic and political sanctions, most of which are likely to cause far more pain in China--which has a profitable commercial relationship with the United States--than in Sudan, which does not.

The measure would also disrupt U.S. relations with several Islamic countries, especially Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. The stakes are especially high for Egypt because the bill would cut off all but humanitarian foreign aid. Egypt receives about $2 billion in U.S. aid every year. Most of the other target countries don’t get any.

Religious atrocities in Egypt are well documented. But it is unclear whether the government of President Hosni Mubarak condones the attacks (which would trigger the sanctions) or simply has been unable to stop them (which would not).

Most governments targeted by the campaign are Communist or Islamic. Some U.S. Muslim leaders have accused Christian activists of anti-Muslim prejudice. With Muslim mobs burning churches in Pakistan, Egypt and some other countries and with Saudi Arabian police arresting Christians for praying in the privacy of their own homes, they say it is easy to demonize Islam.

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But the Rev. Patrick P. Augustine, a Pakistani-born Episcopal priest from Waynesboro, Va., and a member of the church’s advisory committee on Christian-Muslim relations, insists that it is possible to focus on atrocities in Islamic countries without condemning Islam.

“This is not Christians against Muslims,” he says. “It is a question of the violation of human rights. Have we not spoken for the rights to Bosnian and Kashmiri Muslims?”

At least at the outset, leaders of the anti-persecution effort hope to concentrate on murder, torture, rape, imprisonment, starvation and other blatant atrocities. More subtle forms of discrimination, such as prohibiting members of some religious groups from owning land, will be ignored.

There may be good tactical reasons for this. Some forms of religious discrimination are practiced in Israel, Russia, Greece and elsewhere. Drawing those nations into the net would blur the message and generate controversy that leaders of the campaign hope to avoid.