People of Divergent Faiths Battle Scourge of Religious Persecution

Wherever he goes to speak, Buddhist monk Palden Gyatso carries these tools of torture as gruesome testament to his 33 years in Chinese-operated prisons and labor camps in his native Tibet:

The electric cattle prods that shattered his teeth and disabled his tongue when forced into his mouth. The thumb cuffs that held his arms in a pretzel around his back and eventually dislocated his shoulders. The handcuffs that squeezed more tightly every time he moved and left permanent indentations in his bony arms.

But little has changed in Tibet despite his logging hundreds of thousands of miles speaking to Congress and human rights groups since his release in 1992, says Gyatso, who made his first speaking tour of Los Angeles this week.

Despite such Hollywood movies as “Seven Years in Tibet,” the high-profile activism of the Dalai Lama and President Clinton’s visit to China this year, Gyatso says religious persecution has only intensified.

Now he--and a host of religious groups--see one new glimmer of hope on the horizon: congressional passage last week of legislation to support international religious freedom.

The legislation, which Clinton has said he will sign, sets up fact-finding agencies in Congress, the White House and the State Department to publish annual reports on religious persecution around the world. It also requires the president to choose a response to an offending country from 15 options, ranging from a private diplomatic rebuke to a ban on government purchase of goods from the nation.

Because of a crucial compromise that led to passage, however, the president may waive a response by declaring an “important national interest.”

Still, even those who had hoped for stronger measures see the legislation as an important tool in dealing with what many say is the worst century of religious persecution in history. Sectarian oppression has increased, activists say, since the Clinton administration cut the link between human rights and preferential trade status in 1994.

“This bill restores religious liberty to the place it belongs in foreign policy: front and center,” said Steven T. McFarland of the Christian Legal Society.

From the genocidal slaughter of Bosnian Muslims to the kidnapping, enslaving and rape of Sudanese Christians, from the imprisonment of Catholic bishops in China to the demolition of thousands of Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, 77 nations were cited last year in a State Department report on religious discrimination and persecution.

Activists say Christians in particular are suffering unparalleled levels of persecution--an estimated 200 million victims around the world, according to the book “Their Blood Cries Out.” They believe the world has not adequately responded.

That neglect raised too many “eerie parallels” with his own people’s past, said Jewish activist Michael Horowitz, and led him to spearhead the drive for the religious liberty legislation. Despite the Christian suffering, he said, he would hear comments about it that were hauntingly reminiscent of world indifference to the Holocaust: “We can’t focus our foreign policy around them.”

“I’m a Jew who has come to feel that they have killed too many of my people to be useful scapegoats for things. So evangelical Christians and Catholics have become in the 21st century the scapegoats of choice for [repressive] and brutal regimes,” said Horowitz of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank based in Indianapolis.

“What began as a campaign to save lambs quickly became a campaign to understand why these human rights victims were treated in such a hostile and indifferent fashion,” he said.

The rising persecution is partly a backlash against the worldwide explosion of Christianity, as the faith wins millions of converts in such places as Asia and Africa, experts say.

Other factors include the emergence of “radical Islamic fundamentalism” in places like Egypt and Pakistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union--which raised fears among rulers in China and other Communist countries about the free practice of religion, said David Adams of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

The synod has several hundred missionaries in 50 countries and has received numerous reports of indigenous believers being persecuted. (Western missionaries are generally not targeted “because it draws too much attention,” he said.) One of the synod’s current cases involves a Lutheran pastor in the former Soviet state of Belarus, who was sentenced to three years in prison on “trumped-up charges” of pedophilia, Adams said.

The Southern Baptist Convention, whose 4,200 missionaries in 124 nations give it one of the largest world outreach programs, says it has received reports of persecution but declined to speak publicly about them for fear of jeopardizing the missionaries’ work. As a result of such concerns, some organizations declined to support the religious freedom bill, said one congressional source.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations opposed the legislation for a different reason: fear that it would be used to scapegoat nations in which Muslims are a majority, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the group’s Southern California office in Anaheim.

Indeed, religious activists point to Islamic regimes as among the worst perpetrators of human-rights abuses today.

Sudan, the desperately poor African nation now gripped by civil war, is often cited as the worst offender. There, government forces have massacred entire villages, taken thousands of women and children as “war booty” for rape and slavery, bombed the largest refugee camp in September and routinely barred famine relief planes from landing, said Nina Shea, director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom in Washington. As a result, 1.5 million Sudanese have died--more than the toll in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo combined--and millions more are in danger of starvation, she said.

“It’s fundamentally a religious war, with the largely Christian south fighting against the imposition of Sharia [Islamic law] on non-Muslims,” she said.

In Egypt, long a moderate haven of religious freedom and the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, Christians are fleeing rising persecution by radical groups uncontrolled by the government, Shea and others said.

In September, about 1,000 Coptic Christians were arrested and some tortured to prevent an uprising over the killings of two Christians allegedly by five Muslim men, Shea said. When the Coptic bishop complained to the human rights committee in Cairo, he was arrested and charged with criticizing the government and dividing national unity, crimes punishable by death or lengthy imprisonment, Shea said.

Ayloush and others, however, say some reports have been exaggerated or taken out of context. The harsh laws in Saudi Arabia--several Christian converts were reportedly beheaded last year--are not necessarily emblematic of Islam in general and must be understood as a “special case” of protecting the religion’s holy birthplace, Ayloush said. And moves to impose Islamic law in places like Pakistan are sometimes a defensive reaction to aggressive campaigns of Christian conversion that take advantage of the poor and ill, he added.

Persecution is also rising in China and other Communist nations, experts say. China allows state-run churches for some groups, such as Catholics, Protestants and Muslims. But activists say it has arrested hundreds of high-ranking clergy, including eight Catholic bishops, for practicing outside the state-run churches. Only 10 million of an estimated 50 million Chinese Christians worship in state churches, which demand allegiance to the state as the highest authority, experts say.

In Tibet, Chinese authorities have launched a repressive “strike-hard” campaign in the last few years aimed at coercing Buddhist nuns and monks into denouncing the Dalai Lama and forcing from their religious order those who refuse, said Los Angeles activist Tseten Phanucharas. A European Community report in May found that 3,754 individuals had been dismissed.

In addition, at least 10 prisoners are believed to have died from beatings and other repression after a protest in May.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not return calls for comment.

The European report, however, said the regime’s tight control of Tibet was not driven by hostility to religion per se but by efforts to stamp out the independence campaign espoused by many Tibetan religious activists.

Protests against Chinese treatment of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s political and spiritual leader, are what landed Gyatso, now 67, in prison in 1959. Three decades of incarceration would rob him of his youth and break his body with near-starvation diets of clear soup once daily, with beatings and with burnings. Even more stressful than the physical torture was relentless interrogation, he says.

Every time his captors hauled him before interrogators, forcing him to kneel on shards of glass, they would demand to know if he had changed his attitude toward the Dalai Lama and Chinese authority over Tibet. Every time, he would answer: “I remember a Tibet where no Chinese ever ruled, and this is the Tibet I love.”

Sometimes he would spit at his captors to bait them into killing him so he could be released from his agonies.

But they never did--apparently cognizant, he says, of the global ramifications of killing a political prisoner.

Finally, in 1992, Gyatso was released after repeated appeals from Amnesty International. He bribed an official to sell him the tools of torture so he could take his story--and the story of thousands of others like him--to the world.

“I never intended to lead a normal, happy life,” Gyatso said. “I don’t want the world to forget that this torture and repression is happening even today.”