Somali Christians Murdered (December 2003)

December 22, 2003 (ANS) -- Several Christians and Westerners have been killed in violent attacks as anti-Christian violence spreads throughout the mainly Islamic, impoverished African nation, Barnabas Fund said Friday Dec. 19.

The Barnabas Fund, which supports Christians in the Islamic world, identified Italian nun Annalena Tonneli, known as the Mother Theresa of Africa, as among those Christians murdered in recent weeks along with several other missionary workers.

Sister Tonneli, who had served in Somalia for thirty years "founding a TB hospital, orphanages and schools," was killed October 5 by two armed men in front of the hospital, said Barnabas Fund in a statement seen by ASSIST News Service (ANS).

Soon after British couple Richard and Enid Eyeington, working for SOS Children's villages in Somaliland were shot dead October 20 by several gunmen in their home inside the school compound, while watching television, added the organization.

Last month a Kenyan Christian working for the Seventh Day Adventist mission in Gedo, South West Somalia, was reportedly murdered by Islamist radicals, although no more details were given.

The Barnabas Fund said "the attacks appear to be deliberately anti-Christian and anti-Western," and are likely linked to radical Somali Islamist group, Kulanka Culimada, which threatened violence earlier this year.

The Mogadishu based group urged its supporters to treat all Somali Christians "as apostates from Islam who ought to be killed," after a tiny persecuted Christian community in Somalia sent several delegates to peace talks currently held in Nairobi.

The Christians had demanded the right of freedom of religion and assembly, political representation, and free movement, said Barnabas Fund, which has close contacts with church sources insight the country.

Christian representatives were reportedly "shouted down by Muslim delegates who insisted Somalia had no Christians and who declared Islam to be the official religion of Somalia."

Barnabas Fund said the verbal abuse "seems to mirror prejudices widely held by Muslim Somalis which justify violence against Christians, both indigenous and expatriate."

Complicating the situation is violence between different clans of war lords in the divided nation with reports that at least 60 people were killed and another 90 wounded in renewed fighting this week in the northwest part of Somalia's Galgadud Region.

Over 99 percent of the single party republic's six million people are Muslims, and analysts say many regard Christianity as a foreign religion of their historic enemies in Ethiopia and their former colonial masters, Italy and the Britain.

Christian churches have been driven underground because of persecution and a number of believers have been imprisoned and martyred over the years, human rights organizations say.

"Evangelism is prohibited, and believers worship on Friday to avoid association with foreign Christianity. Most church buildings have collapsed and are in ruins," said Barnabas Fund which has often urged Christians around the world to pray for persecuted believers.

September 19, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Adventure in Asmara
A Report on the Sudanese Resistance.
Michael Novak

http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak091902.asp

I have just enjoyed one of the best short experiences of my life. I have just returned from a trip to Asmara, Eritrea, where in four days I gave six lectures on religious liberty to the leaders of the Sudanese Resistance. These are the leaders of the growing rebellion against the Talibanish regime in Khartoum. These leaders, some 40 of them representing many diverse and widely scattered groups, have few enough occasions to get together (Sudan is a country three times larger than Texas, with few roads or other means of easy transport). Besides, now they are in negotiations, temporarily interrupted, with the Khartoum government, concerning a peace settlement that might keep the whole country together, if at all possible. Most Sudanese really want that, they say. The Resistance pretty much controls the south, with salients (or at least pockets within them) reaching up on the east to the Red Sea and on the west almost to the Egyptian border. They are beginning to outline their future nation.

The delegates are especially eager to talk about religion and the state; they were positively bubbling about it in the lobby. Every morning and afternoon, they come early to the conference room, listen intently, and speak eloquently themselves. They are leaders. Their gift for oratory proves it. They would continue the question periods for hours, if the schedule permitted.

About half the leaders of the resistance groups represented seem to be Arabic speakers and about half English speakers. A majority represents various Sudanese African tribes, and either Christianity or native religions of nature, but a large minority, represents Muslim rebels from different geographical regions, races and social classes. The Muslims are outspoken and emphatic in their disdain for the abuses of the good name of Islam perpetrated by the government in Khartoum. "Our problem is not religion," one after another insists, "but a politicalization of religion, an abuse of religion. They are not true Muslims!"

"But how do you argue," another says, a former professor who came home from a Western country to become a brigadier in the field, "when they quote a text from the Koran on amputation according to sharia law, and ask if you believe in that text? We accept the Koran. We are Muslims. But we do not accept an eleventh-century interpretation of Islam. We are twenty-first century people. We are Muslims, in a country with eleven different major tendencies among Muslims, and we are accustomed to tolerance of one another."

The delegates follow and understand my exposition of John Locke's secular argument for natural rights. "We are with you, we are in favor of human rights, we are with the West on these points — with the world on these points, the Universal Declaration. But we are not secular. We are spiritual. We are religious. We want tolerance. How should we think about this, and how should we argue, and what arrangement should we propose?"

We want "separation," others clarify, but we understand that everything a Muslim does is done for and with Allah, and we don't want to lose the religious feeling about life. The Christians and those of natural religions nod.

The meeting was sponsored by the Sudanese National Democratic Alliance, a group trying to bring all the elements of the Resistance under its broad umbrella, and by a U.S. organization, Worldwide Humanitarian Services, through whom the State Department has funded the meeting, on neutral territory in the country next door to Sudan, in the high mountain city of Asmara, with many architectural and linguistic (and culinary) signs of its Italian past. I have been asked to attend, with three other professors, by the Becket Fund, the nonpartisan religious-liberty law firm and teaching foundation in Washington, which has won an international reputation for its pioneering work on religious-liberty questions, and whose programs have involved much Muslim participation.

When I first received the invitation to take part, I was quite reluctant — the advance warning was abrupt, I was reluctant to face the disease and discomfort of Africa, I was limping around on two broken toes, it was over my birthday, and also over September 11 — I had a lot of hesitations and fears. It turned out to be one of the joys of my life.

The delegates had a huge birthday cake baked by the hotel, and one of the Muslims — he wanted it to be clear that it was from a Muslim, even though he did not drink alcohol, as a sign of reaching across lines — presented me with one of the finest bottles of Scotch it has ever been my pleasure to savor. You have never heard "Happy Birthday" until you have heard it sung partly in Arabic, partly in African, accents. Never was it so joyously received, for being all unexpected.

My colleague from the Becket Fund, Anthony Picarello (a graduate of our Summer Institute in Krakow four years ago), lectured on religion and the law, and performed heroically through record setting, marathon Q&A sessions, from which others had to pull him, so he could eat dinner. The delegates could not get enough about religion, law, and the state. The lecturers on economics and trade also get interested attention, but there was no doubt where the passionate concern of the 21st-century lies.

One delegate pointed out that the Taliban were vastly unpopular in Afghanistan, and that the ayatollahs in Iran have more than worn out their welcome, are already witnessing protest marches by hundreds of thousands of the young, and will not be much grieved when they sometime soon are removed from the scene. These do not speak for Islam, he said, and nearly all the heads in the room nodded emphatically.

The Dinkas from southern Sudan average six-foot-eight in height, and at least two in our group had had a stint playing basketball in the USA. One said most of his university and pro practice sessions concerned "fundamentals," and for him "fundamentals" is much too good a word to waste on those who violate the fundamentals of religion. I proposed that we insist on calling such groups "extremists," and asked how many agreed. There was no dissent, but only vigorous approval.

This is a very important terminological point. The press and pundits of all sorts should stop speaking of politicizers and abusers of Islam as "fundamentalists." Why approve of their own false propagandistic claims? They are "extremists," not fundamentalists. They contradict the fundamentals of Islam. What they are proposing is a flagrant abuse of Islam.

One of the ideological architects of political Islam in Sudan is a man named Turabi, who quite frankly admitted that his teaching was modeled on a careful study of Stalin and the Fascists of the early 20th century. Any and every means possible should be used, he learned, in the effort to organize cadres to build up a utopian, perfect, totalistic regime.

In other words, so-called "radical Islam" or "Islamic fundamentalism" of the new political type is in fact a bastard modernization of authentic Islam, corrupting Islam by the worst of all modern impulses. As one of our professor-guerrillas put it, If they were going to modernize Islam, why didn't they choose the best features of modernity to bring into Islam, like the Universal Declaration, and democracy, and human rights? Why the worst features — Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler? He expressed the last sentence with exquisite disdain, to vigorous agreement from others.

Sudan is the single largest country in Africa (though sparsely populated, at perhaps 50 million), and it may be the most pluralistic by habit, containing some 520 languages according to one delegate, and scores of different tribal religions along with large bodies of Muslims and Christians. It is crosshatched by two different majorities. Religiously, there are more Muslims than followers of any one other religion, and yet emphatically not all of the Muslims are Arab. Looked at the other way, a majority of the country is African, not Arab, but a significant number of Africans are Muslim, and some Arabs are secular or Christian or other.

Since its Independence in 1956 the people of Sudan have struggled to maintain the nation's pluralism, and to hold its extremists in check and under social control. But the new regime has tried to install a 20th-century totalitarian regime under the banner of Islamic "fundamentalism," installing a literal version of the sharia law of medieval origin, without any attempt to humanize it through reflection on historical experience and philosophical learning. The extremists lack any gifts for hermeneutics, critical thinking, or even simple common sense in the interpretation of religion in human experience; they have no awareness of a formal principle for the "development of doctrine," whereby a revealed religion remains through critical adaptation and according to sound principles, a living tradition faithful to its purest origins and deepest inspirations, whatever the turbulence of changing times.

Given the great love and respect shown by the Resistance for the United States and, in general, for the traditions of human rights and democracy (not to mention economic dynamism and prosperity) throughout the West, I came away feeling that their struggle is our struggle, and that their struggle has extremely great spiritual consequence for the world. If they can pioneer in a new form of Muslim-Christian-and-Other pluralism, living together fruitfully in a prosperous and democratic state, their example might show the way to other struggling states in Africa and the Middle East.

The Sudanese may have suffered more than any other people in the world during the last two decades from torture, enslavement, the carrying away both of women and young men for sex slavery, the enforced starvation of scores of thousands at a time, imprisonments, beatings, amputations, lashes, the forced migration of millions, indiscriminate shelling and mining of civilians from armies in the field, and high-altitude bombing of field hospitals and food centers and refugee camps, in an effort to prevent peoples from settling in one place. Yet they remain, if their resistance leaders are any example, capable of an extraordinary warmth, comradeship, and mutual acceptance of differences, showing a delicacy of feeling and courtesy that are, as the world goes, striking. One can see how Peace Corps veterans have brought glowing stories of their special fondness for the Sudanese. (The record shows that the Resistance, too, has committed a share of atrocities and cruelties, so I would not wish to falsify the fact that the "better angels of our nature" normally compete with "worser angels," there as elsewhere.)

At one point, an Episcopal priest, an African stationed in Nairobi but assigned most of the time to visiting parishes in Sudan, rose to say that he had seen in this meeting and for the first time, "the true face of Islam, and its capacity to accept others as they are, and to treat them in kindly and brotherly fashion," and he thanked his "brothers" in the gathering for their witness to one another, and pledged to spread the word of it. His sentiment was widely shared, and reciprocated by the Muslims.

At least in one small group, over five days, one saw an image of a future Sudan that, if it could come to be, would give a lift of hope to those who despair of a genuine conversation among civilizations and religions in our time. I certainly did come away with this much: Something deep and important is stirring in the bosom of Islam, among warriors who are willing to lose their lives in an effort to realize a modern democratic, religiously peaceable, fraternal state. They want to build a new kind of state, one that is secular in the sense that no one religion is privileged or given higher status or power, but not "secularized," in the sense that the religious sense of life and its meaningfulness under the relentless desert sky is never lost from public sensibility. Not exactly the American model of the present.

The delegates were well aware that in the public square the politicized Islamicists, the extremists, were more adept at making religious arguments than they. That was their frustration. That was the reason for their eagerness to learn. Does the Koran, one asked, accept the equality of all humans by nature, the right of each to liberty, the inherent dignity of every human being? Someone else put it thus: Can it be that for the Koran everyone else in the world may have been born equal by nature, have a right to personal liberty and responsibility, and enjoy an inherent dignity as an individual human being, but not Muslims? Are these fundamental ideas not fundamental to, implicit, in the spiritual attractiveness that Islam has always exercised upon generations of believers? These are the questions that ought to be put to the mullahs and the imams and the political abusers of Islam.

If Islam is now being modernized by Turabi and Bin Laden and the hated regime in Khartoum, through taking the worst of the 20th century, I asked the group, picking up a point dropped by the preceding speaker, could it not be modernized, instead, according to the best inspirations of the 21st century, as these harmonize with the deepest and most spiritually ennobling aspects of Islamic religious thought and feeling?

I can scarcely remember conversations of such inherent excitement, mutual resonance, and pioneering spirit as we all experienced in those five days in Asmara. I promised my new friends I would ask my fellow Americans to support them in their struggle, as we bear with them the almost unimaginable sufferings they have already endured. I promised, in particular, to mention two concrete things. The resistance fighters now have a ten-kilowatt radio station. They deeply wish they had enough power to reach their whole nation with their vision by radio. They believe that many, the vast majority, would share it.

They also wish they had a weapon that could prevent the new Antonov helicopters in the regime's arsenal from hovering over their troops for hours, pinning them down in withering circles of leaden fire. (One field commander told me his men had spotted a white face — Ukrainian or Russian, he wondered — through the Plexiglas cockpit of one of them.)

Finally, they had some fears that the new American administration, busy with fighting terrorists elsewhere, might make a pact with the devil, seeking help from the Khartoum regime against the terrorists (Bin Laden has had long ties in Sudan), in exchange for allowing the Resistance to wither for want of aid. So much is wrong with that proposition only an un-realpoliticker could be tempted by it.

This Resistance is so promising, so thoughtful, and of so much revolutionary potential on the world stage, I hope its cause prospers in the light of day.

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