The letter pinned overnight to the wall of the mosque in Kandahar was succinct. Girls going to school need to be careful for their safety. If we put acid on their faces or they are murdered then the blame will be on their parents.

May 2008 from Compass Direct

An Algerian public prosecutor has demanded a three-year sentence for a convert to Christianity in western Algeria for practicing her faith “without license.”

Habiba Kouider was plucked off an inter-city bus outside of her home town of Tiaret on March 29 when police found several Bibles and books on Christianity in her hand bag. Held for 24 hours and interrogated by police regarding her conversion, Kouider was eventually brought before a state prosecutor.

You reinstate Islam and I will [drop the case]; if you persist in sin you will undergo the lightning of justice, the prosecutor told her.

It’s as if they are saying that if someone becomes a Christian they have to get permission, said one Christian from Tiaret.

Passed in February 2006, a law governing non-Muslim worship has been cited in a number of arrests and trials of Algerian Christians this year. The law, known as Ordinance 06-03, outlaws proselytism of Muslims, as well as the distribution, production and storing of material used for this purpose.

A total of 10 Christians visiting or residing in Tiaret have been detained or tried on religious grounds since January. More than half of the country’s 50 Protestant churches, many of which meet in homes, have been ordered to close down.

In addition, a barrage of news articles has warned of sinister plans by Christians to evangelize Algeria.

Update: Sentenced

6th June 2008

Four Algerian Christians received suspended jail terms and fines on Tuesday for seeking to convert Muslims in the latest in a series of cases to have provoked accusations in the West of religious repression.

June 2008 from www.forum18.org

TheIlya Zenchenko, head of Azerbaijan's Baptist Union, has condemned the arrest of Baptist pastor Hamid Shabanov after police claim to have found an illegal weapon in his home.

We're in shock, Zenchenko told Forum 18 News Service. This was a provocation by the police, a deliberately targeted action.

The pastor's brother told Forum 18 the police's aim is to halt Baptist activity.  Pastor Shabanov is the second Baptist pastor in the remote village of Aliabad to face imprisonment on what local Baptists insist are trumped-up charges.

  Jovies Beaten and threatened

June 2008 from www.forum18.org

The local police chief whose forces raided a Jehovah's Witness meeting in the capital Baku on 3 June insisted to Forum 18 News Service that the meeting had been "illegal" and that they should not meet in a private house. They collect people together and teach them, Colonel Sahib Babaev complained to Forum 18.

The Jehovah's Witnesses told Forum 18 that nine men who had been present were taken to the police station, beaten, threatened with rape and pressured to renounce their faith.

Colonel Babaev denied this. But he said a Spanish Jehovah's Witness present at the meeting will "probably" be expelled from Azerbaijan. Muslim and Protestant communities have also seen intermittent police and secret police raids on their meetings in recent years.

June 2008 see full article from Compass Direct

Muslim fundamentalists in a village north of the capital have threatened to kill a pastor as part of an effort to keep his church from constructing a church building.

The church planned to erect a worship building on the land, which the denomination purchased in January.

Muslims came to know that there would be a church inside the enclosure, so they demolished the boundary wall.

Upon learning of the damage, that same day pastor Rezaul Karim went to the site, where local Muslims and supporters of the country’s largest Islamic political party, Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, beat him and threatened to kill him if he pursued plans to build a church in the village.

Pastor Karim filed a case over the assault at the local police station: where he mentioned that he had been threatened to be killed if he built a church on that land in the area. One month later, we withdrew the case by mutual understanding with the local Muslim leaders.

July 2008 from www.forum18.org

Belarus officials have tried to stop three different Protestant communities in Grodno Region, north-western Belarus, from conducting peaceful religious activity, Forum 18 news Service has learnt.

In the small town of Svisloch, a planned open-air baptism has been banned, despite the attempts of Pentecostals to negotiate with the authorities. Bishop Fyodor Tsvor told Forum 18 that they just don't want to allow it.

In the nearby town of Mosty, a Pentecostal pastor was fined nine months' minimum wages for leading a small unregistered church. The court verdict notes as evidence of wrongdoing that at meetings they read the Gospel, discuss questions of religious faith, sing songs and conduct religious rites.

In Grodno itself, Baptist pastor Yuri Kravchuk was summoned by the senior state regional religious affairs official, Igor Popov, who told him that his leadership of a worship service in a private home violated the Administrative Code. His case has now been sent to the city's Oktyabr District Court.

All three communities point out that the state's actions violate the Belarusian Constitution.

June 2008 from www.forum18.org

Belarus has imposed a fine of more than two months' average wages on a Baptist who organised choir singing and conducted conversations on religious topics outside Ushachi public market, Forum 18 News Service has learnt.

After a plain clothes policeman told a group of Baptists from outside the area to stop, Vladimir Burshtyn replied that they were not disturbing public order and cited religious freedom guarantees in Belarus' Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The fine is, to Forum 18's knowledge, the highest yet imposed on Baptists for unregistered religious activity.

February 2008 from www.forum18.org

In 2002, a new religion law came into effect. Despite constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, the law lumps many religious activities as illegal. Under it, all unregistered religious activity, communities with fewer than 20 members, and any religious activity in private homes go against the law.

Religious organizations were required to be re-registered by November, 2004. However, registration is often a difficult process, and many organizations, including some with thousands of members, have been unable to register. Officials frequently use the media to insult religious minorities, insulting their beliefs, and attempting to incite hostility against them.

Few nations so systematically brutalize so many of their citizens. Observes the State Department: The government continued to engage in particularly severe violations of religious freedom. Probably the worst religious horrors are visited as part of the barbaric war practiced against ethnic groups, such as the Karen and Karenni, which have been struggling for autonomy for decades. More than 100,000 refugees have fled into neighboring Thailand and millions more people have been displaced within their own country.

July 2008. See full article from The Star (Malaysia)

The exiled World Uyghur Congress, which advocates Xinjiang independence, said last month that authorities there demolished a mosque in Kalpin county near Aksu city for refusing to put up signs in support of this August's Beijing Olympics.

The group's spokesman Dilxat Raxit said the mosque was also accused of illegal religious activities and illegally storing copies of the Muslim holy book, the Koran.

  Crackdown on House Churches

June 2008 from Christian Today

House churches across China have been hit by a wave of arrests and detentions, says China Aid Association (CAA), the leading support group for China’s persecuted Christians.

CAA said that the sudden increase in incidents throughout May involving the Religious Affairs Bureau and the Public Security Bureau is indicative of a crackdown.

House church meetings have been disbanded and a number of Christians have been arrested, including two Christians in Xinjiang province who were charged with being “separatists”. Throughout the province, officials have posted signs asking citizens to report any “evil cult activity”, a label which encompasses house churches.

In Hebei province, officials closed down a Bible school on May 13, while on May 15 Public Security Bureau officials broke up a prayer meeting held by more than 20 Christians for victims of the earthquake and for the Olympics.

Although the plight of religious believers in China is better today than it was 20 years ago, the situation remains bleak for many people of faith. The Beijing government has been particular unforgiving in dealing with beliefs that it perceives to be a political threat, such as the Falun Gong and Tibetan Buddhism.

Antagonism towards Christianity is deeply embedded in China's history. Many church leaders are in prison and the authorities target home churches. Observes the State Department: In some areas, security officials used threats, demolition of unregistered property, extortion, interrogation, detention, and at times beatings and torture to harass leaders of unauthorized groups and their followers.

Cuba is a traditional communist dictatorship which registers religious organizations, harasses congregants, prevents churches from building or repairing worship facilities, forbids the distribution of religious materials, and bars church provision of social welfare services.

The Egyptian government discriminates in the provision of public services and benefits, arrests those who proselytize, and often ignores violent attacks on members of other faiths, especially members of the Coptic Church. Private discrimination and violence are common.

See full article from Compass Direct

Eritrean security police cracked down on more Christians again last week, arresting 34 evangelicals gathered for prayer and fellowship in a local home in Keren.

The police raid on Wednesday (May 28) targeted members of the Berhane Hiwet (Light of Life) Church in Keren, Eritrea’s third largest city.

The Keren raid was the second round of arrests last week in Eritrea, where the oppressive regime has outlawed all independent Protestant churches since 2002, closing their buildings and banning gatherings in private homes. Worshippers caught disobeying the blanket restrictions are arrested and tortured for weeks, months or even years. They are never allowed legal counsel or brought to trial.

Eyewitnesses in Adi-Kuala confirmed that security police officials were beating the prisoners as they loaded them on a truck to be transported to Wi’a.

At least 2,000 Eritrean Christians are incarcerated in local jails, police stations and military camps for their religious beliefs and practices. Some are held in underground cells or metal shipping containers in an effort to pressure them to recant their faith and join one of the nation’s “historic” Christian churches.

The government recognizes only the Eritrean Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran churches as legal religions, in addition to the traditional Islam practiced by half of the population.

See full article from Compass Direct

During the Sunday morning attack on March 2 2008, muslim men wielding knives and machetes simultaneously broke into two churches, half an hour’s walk apart from each other, and began hacking worshippers. One man died instantly from a machete blow to his neck while two others lost hands, and another 15 people sustained wounds on their necks, legs, arms, shoulders and backs.

In a snap ruling that surprised local Christians, an Ethiopian court has sentenced three Muslim men to life imprisonment for the attack

June 2008. See full article from Earth Times

Two young neo-Nazis wielding baseball bats attacked a group of Muslims on their way to a mosque in the eastern German state of Thuringia, police said Sunday. A 23-year-old required medical treatment for injuries to his arm after the attack on Saturday evening in Nordhausen, some 250 kilometres southwest of Berlin. The assailants fled after hurling verbal abuse at their victims from Morocco, Russia and Pakistan, a police spokesman said.

July 2008. See full article from Christian Today

While Christians in Orissa are still recovering from the aftermath of Kandhamal Christmas onslaught, reports are emerging of fresh violence.

Hindu activists reportedly blocked roads and attacked Christian institutions in the state. A Jesuit residence was also apparently destroyed in the assault, sources said.

Sources added the attack was caused by angry Hindu mobs that objected to Christians eating meat.

Sectarian violence is endemic, particularly among Hindus and Muslims. But Christians, constituting a much smaller minority, also are a common target. Attacks on Christians have been on the rise this year, yet the authorities often do little. Many states penalize religious minorities; some enforce anti- conversion laws, which even inhibit Christian social services.

From Compass Direct, June 2008

Members of the Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) in Tangerang, Banten province, confronted and threatened to kill church leader Bedali Hulu.

For the past 18 months Hulu’s Jakarta Baptist Christian Church (GKJB) in Pisangan village, Sepatan district has wrestled for the right to hold church services in the village. Members will soon take the matter to court in hopes of finding a permanent solution to the dispute.

Yesterday’s confrontation by the Muslim extremist FPI was the latest in a series of threats. Last week as the congregation held a simple meeting in a church member’s home – sharing a meal and singing a few hymns – FPI members arrived and repeated threats first issued in November to raid the homes of church members if meetings continued.

A Joint Ministerial Decree promulgated in 1969 and revised in 2006 requires a congregation of at least 90 adult members, the permission of at least 60 neighbors and a permit from local authorities to establish a place of worship. Church leaders say it is virtually impossible to obtain a permit under these terms.

 Not So Moderate

From the Washington Times, August 2006:

Approximately 216 million out of Indonesia's approximately 246 million inhabitants, or nearly nine-tenths of the population, are Muslims. And while Indonesia's religious and cultural climate is justifiably regarded as moderate in comparison to much of the rest of the Muslim world, the numbers still leave plenty of room for concern.

More than two-thirds of Indonesians favor the country's current secular system of law, according to a privately funded nationwide survey. If that seems like good news, read it this way: This means there are about 82 million Indonesians who favor Shariah.

Just over two-thirds of respondents disapprove of the death penalty for those who renounce Islam. More than 75% of Indonesians disapprove of mandatory head scarves. Nearly 66% oppose stoning for adultery. More than 75% are against severing the hands of thieves.

When the aggregate numbers of people are factored in, the study looks considerably more disturbing. 60 million Indonesians favor cutting off the hands of thieves, and 80 million favor stoning for adultery.

June 2008 from BozNewsLife

Iranian security police in Tehran have detained and tortured a married couple who recently converted from Islam to Christianity and threatened to put their 4-year-old daughter in an institution.

Well-informed Compass Direct News, which investigates reports of persecution, said Tina Rad, 28, and her husband Makan Arya, 31, were arrested June 3 after holding Bible studies and attending a house church. A relative apparently informed Iran's security police about their activities.

Rad was reportedly charged with activities against the holy religion of Islam for reading the Bible with Muslims in her home in east Tehran and trying to convert them, while officials accused Arya of activities against national security. The couple was allegedly also forced to leave their 4-year-old ill daughter unattended. In addition, police confiscated their personal computer, satellite dish and television set, as well as all books, videos, CDs, DVDs and even a photo album.

  Harassment of Christians

May 2008 from Compass Direct

Police in the southern Iran city of Shiraz this month cracked down against known Muslim converts to Christianity, arresting members of three Christian families and confiscating their books and computers.

The arrests began at 5 a.m. on May 11, when two couples were taken into custody before boarding their flights at the Shiraz International Airport and sent directly to jail. All four were subjected to hours of interrogation, questioning them solely just about their faith and house church activities, an Iranian source told Compass.

Although the two wives were released the same day of their arrest, Anari was detained until May 14, and Gholamzadeh remains jailed.

Two days later, local police picked up two more former Muslims involved in a separate house church in Shiraz as the Christian converts were talking together in a city park. Both men, Mahmood Matin and a second man identified only as Arash, are still jailed.

Still another arrest incident was reported last month in the northern city of Amol, in Mazandaran province near the Caspian Sea. Two of the arrested converts to Christianity, one a pregnant woman, are still imprisoned, with no news of their whereabouts.

Over the past two years, Iran’s harsh Shiite Muslim regime has continued to arrest, harass and intimidate dozens of citizens involved in the nation’s mushrooming house church movements. One such movement confirmed last month that its indigenous groups of Iranian converts to Christianity are doubling in size every six months.

Converts from Islam are routinely subjected to both physical and psychological mistreatment while being held for days or weeks, usually in solitary confinement. Huge bail amounts are demanded for their release, under the threat of further detention or formal criminal prosecution if caught worshipping or spreading their faith.

In January of this year, the Iranian parliament drafted a proposed criminal code that would make the death penalty mandatory for “apostates” who leave Islam for another religion.

Under the existing law, apostasy is one of several “crimes” which can be punished with execution, although Islamic court judges are not required to hand down a death sentence.

The communist government seeks to control anyone independent of the government. Religious groups are expected to register (and be controlled). Believers are subject to arrest and, notes the State Department, Persons arrested for their religious activities were sometimes charged with exaggerated security or other criminal offenses.

Outright persecution tends to be most common at the local level. Believers have been arrested, evicted from their homes and villages, and pressured to recant.

The US government has cautioned the Maldives over new wording in the constitution in progress which means non-Muslims could lose their Maldivian citizenship, US ambassador Robert Blake said.

A group from the US House Foreign Relations Committee who visited Maldives in February were also rumoured to have spoken to government on the issue, whilst a 2005 international religious freedom report by the committee said that freedom of religion remains severely restricted in Maldives.

However as the new constitution was developed, the Special Majlis (constitutional assembly) voted to amend wording on citizenship from the current constitution, to add the words: A non-Muslim may not become a citizen of the Maldives.

Information minister Mohamed Nasheed said on his personal blog that this wording will operate to take away the citizenship from citizens of Maldives who may have a faith different from Islam.

The existing constitution stipulates individuals must be Muslim in order to vote in elections, but not in order to be a citizen.

Nasheed said on his blog, It will be very difficult for Maldives mentality to accept Maldives citizens may belong to a different faith. It will be seen as an offense to the state of Maldives and an insult to being Maldivian, thus demanding serious reprisal.

Therefore, he added, No Maldives leader would want to rock the boat by advocating a change to the wording.

See full article from Compass Direct

More than 1,000 people, including Hindus and Muslims, gathered in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal state in India, on Friday (July 4) for the burial of a Catholic priest murdered last week by Hindu extremists in Nepal.

Father Johnson Prakash Moyalan, who belonged to the religious order of Salesians of Don Bosco, was from India’s Kerala state. He was shot in the chest and stomach by a group of masked men on July 1.

Salesian provincial secretary in Kolkata, Father Antony Earathara, told Compass that the 60-year-old Fr. Moyalan was Nepal’s first martyr for Christ.

The Salesian was killed by Hindu extremists belonging to an obscure group, the Nepal Defense Army, which left some pamphlets saying Nepal should be made a Hindu state again and that it was training Hindu suicide squads to achieve its mission, Fr. Earathara said. He added that nothing was missing from the priest’s room and therefore robbery was not a motive.

July 2008 see full article from Compass Direct

In a crucial development for religious organisations, Russia's Supreme Court on 10 June ruled that a Smolensk Regional Court decision dissolving a local Methodist church was unlawful and without foundation.

The Regional Court had dissolved the church for running a Sunday school without an education licence. Had the Supreme Court not overturned the earlier decision, every religious organisation in Russia would have to be shut down for operating such schools, the church's lawyer, Vladimir Ryakhovsky told Forum 18 News Service.

22nd May 2008 from www.forum18.org

Tajikistan's only synagogue could be bulldozed in days, its Rabbi, Mikhail Abdurakhmanov. The synagogue has long been under threat, supposedly because of reconstruction in the capital Dushanbe, and in February 2006 the authorities began bulldozing it.

A court has now ruled that the 350-strong Jewish community must leave their synagogue by Sunday 18 May, when demolition is threatened to resume. The court refused to accept evidence that the synagogue belongs to the Jewish community, and after the case officials told Rabbi Abdurakhmanov that the community could demolish the synagogue itself if it wanted to save the materials.

Officials have repeatedly refused to discuss the case with Forum 18, including whether compensation will be given.

Update: Bulldozed

June 2008 from www.forum18.org

Faced with the authorities' determination to destroy the synagogue, the community requested that they be allowed to dismantle the building themselves. Rabbi Abdurakhmov
commented to Forum 18 that every part of the building is sacred.

However, the Chief Engineer came to the site and showed his dissatisfaction with the speed of our work and had the remaining wall bulldozed.

16th June 2008 from Christian Today

A legally recognised church in Turkey is fighting to stay open after police last week delivered a letter from the government stating that it will be closed within days.

The letter said Batikent Protestant Church in the capital city Ankara would be closed because it is meeting in a building that is not approved as a place of worship, according to International Christian Concern on Tuesday.

But the church argues that it had won a court case last year against the local government over zoning code violations, and was essentially fighting a legal battle over a case it had already won.

It is very obvious that what is happening to our church is a pre-meditated, continuous and jointly orchestrated direct attack against the Church as a whole in Turkey by the right-wing Islamic government (AK Party) that is currently in control in Turkey, said the church’s founding pastor Daniel Wickwire, according to ICC.

The government registers religious groups and harasses believers, arresting and mistreating some. In Uzbekistan the authorities repress Islamic groups in the name of fighting terrorism and harass Christian churches through registration requirements and police repression.

  Eg April 2008

Some ten officials from the local Religious Affairs Department, the police, secret police, Justice Ministry and Tax Ministry raided a Bible class held by the Greater Grace Protestant church in a private flat in the capital Ashgabad on 11 April. Asked the reason for the check-up, Murad Aksakov of the local administration told Forum 18 News Service they wanted to find out how many people attended the classes, who those people were, and whether everything was in order with the church's documents. Pastor Vladimir Tolmachev told Forum 18 he was warned that the church was not allowed to teach its own members without permission from the government's Religious Affairs Committee, even though its officially-recognised Charter allows this. Officials told Tolmachev he would receive an official warning. Further such warnings could lead to the church's registration being stripped from it, rendering all its activities illegal.

  22nd May 2008 from www.forum18.org Impossible Registration

One of the biggest problems faced by religious believers in Turkmenistan is not being able to freely maintain public places of worship.

A Turkmen Protestant from a region far from the capital argues: You cannot build, buy, or securely rent such property, let alone put up a notice outside saying 'This is a place of worship'. All kinds of obstructions are imposed, whether through rules or just in practice. Whenever officials raid our meetings the first thing they ask is: 'Where's your registration certificate?' The government likes to be able to say to outsiders 'We have registration' and show them communities in Ashgabad. But people don't look at what we experience in places away from the capital, where we have no hope of registration. Without freedom to meet for worship it is impossible to claim that we have freedom of religion or belief.

News from Forum 18 July 2008

The import and production of religious literature in Uzbekistan remains under tight state control, even for texts such as the Koran and the Bible, Forum 18 News Service has found.

Defending the practice of not importing Islamic texts, a student at the state-controlled Islamic University told Forum 18 that I don't think scholars from other countries are better than ours. We have no need to import from abroad.

Exiled Imam Obidkhon Nazarov said people have a right to know. If there are good books on Islam and the Koran published abroad, why should people be deprived of opportunities to read them.

On 8 July Uzbekistan's Bible Society finally learnt that the government's Religious Affairs Committee - which implements the system of compulsory prior censorship of all religious literature - had refused permission for a Bible shipment to clear through Customs, Forum 18 News Service has learnt. This represents a ban on the import of Bibles into Uzbekistan, the Bible Society told Forum 18. The shipment of 11,000 Bibles and Bible-related books in Uzbek, Karakalpak and Russian has been held in Customs in the capital Tashkent since 19 May

  Inciting Intolerance of Religion

News from Forum 18 May 2008

Raids, fines and literature confiscations against religious minorities across Uzbekistan are continuing, Forum 18 News Service has found.

One church raid was justified by a court as "anti-terrorist activity," although the police officer concerned was unable to specify to Forum 18 what threat the raid was supposed to stop.

There are also reports of Protestant services in Uzbek - a state language - being barred and of a Protestant higher-education student being threatened with expulsion, unless he either renounces his faith or spies on his church for the NSS secret police.

Police and a schoolteacher have also directly threatened the children of Baptists at a school, telling them that if they attended churches they would be put into prison. The children were also interrogated about what their parents taught them, what books they read, what films they watched, what music they listened to and what songs they sang, and whether they liked this.

News from Forum 18 May 2008

Uzbekistan continues to use state-run mass media to incite intolerance of religious minorities and freedom of thought, conscience and belief, Forum 18 News Service has found.

In the latest national TV attack, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, Presbyterians and Methodists were all described as conducting unspecified illegal missionary activities.

This was described as a global problem along with religious dogmatism, fundamentalism, terrorism and drug addiction.