Category Archives: Human Rights

Twice the number dead in Jos as in Mumbai

December 5th, 2008

By Ruth Gledhill, Timesonline

Horrific stories of ruthless killings on the streets of Jos in northern Nigeria are emerging. At least one church pastor was shot dead, along with three members of his household and an Augustinian monastery attacked, the abbot narrowly escaping death after a molotov cocktail was thrown into his room. The Church Times and The Economist have reports, with the latter reporting that mosques were also burned down. On Thursday I spoke to the Bishop of Jos, Dr Benjamin Kwashi. According to his eyewitness report, the violence was directed solely against Christians, with some Muslims shot by armed forces only when they broke curfew. Estimates vary, but it seems about 400 people might have been killed. While not lessening the horror of that atrocity, this is about twice the number killed in Mumbai.

Some pictures on the Jos diocesan website give an idea of the bleak conditions there now.

Dr Kwashi insisted the whole thing had been long in the planning and was not a spontaneous response to the elections, as is claimed.

‘I was woken up at about two in the morning last Friday morning. The roads coming into Jos and going out of Jos had been blocked by Muslim youths chanting Allahu Akbar. Other Muslim youths inside the town were by now burning churches and killing Christians. We have not had the exact figure of those killed.’

Those shot dead included the pastor of Cocin church in Nawarawa, along with three members of his household.

The Bishop said it was worse than similar riots in 2001, because then the attacks were with stones and knives and people could run away. This time, there was no running away. People who tried to flee were gunned down.

‘It seems to have a dimension that is beyond local,’ he said.

A number of those arrested were in military and police uniforms, he said, adding to his view that this was a carefully planned attack. Some of those arrested are said to be ‘aliens’, he said, although no-one seems to know for sure from which country.

A woman friend of the bishops had three young men living in her home on ‘national service’, Nigeria’s tradition of a duty of public service peformed by all students as they leave university. They were shot and their bodies set fire to in her house.

The Bishop said the killing has stopped but the way some of it has been reported, implying it was Christian riots against Muslims, meant that tensions are still running high.

One unfortunate thing that seems to have happened, he said, is that in the middle of the riots the Government imposed a curfew for 5pm instructing troops to ‘fire at view’. Some Muslim youths who went out after 5pm were subsequently shot and killed, and the church was blamed for this.

‘But we know nothing about this,’ said Bishop Kwashi, who is launching an appeal for funds to rebuild his community’s burned homes and churches and shattered lives.

‘You just do not get this kind of crisis over an election,’ said Bishop Kwashi. ‘The gun shots, the military uniforms and police uniforms, the amount of deaths and killings and destruction, whole groups of Christians shot down, Christian quarters completely burned down, razed to the ground. All the burnings took place at the same time. The same time. People killed. Women and children shot dead.’

All kinds of funerals are now taking place. We spoke on Thursday, the day the pastor was buried. ‘I am trying to give you accurate figures. I am trying not to exaggerate. No matter how much time it takes, I want to be honest and tell the truth. So even if it does appear Christians should take the blame, we will take the blame.’

So is it possible, as the Bishop suggests, that this was indeed more than simply election-provoked riots?

I hope not, because if so, the implications for us all are too awful.

A well-placed source has in this context referred me to LET – the Army of the Righteous – a Deobandi movement linked to Al-Qaeda that has emerged from the fundamentalist battlegrounds of Pakistan and is thought by many to be behind the attacks in Mumbai.

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism have written an analysis of the LET, Lashkar-e-Taiba, in this week’s Spectator.

They don’t link it to Jos however and I do pray my source is wrong. Don’t read their article if you want an untroubled weekend.

The Church and the BNP

With the leaking, last month, of the names, addresses and occupations of the 12,000 members of the British National Party (BNP), media attention, such as the BBC and Guardian, has focussed on the handful of police officers, teachers and soldiers so identified. While membership of the political party is entirely legal, certain occupations are banned from being members of the BNP.

While I deplore the threats and attacks that ensued, I am encouraged by two aspects of the incident.

1. Membership of such parties is still perceived to be an embarrassment to the majority of people in Britain.

2. Given legitimate concerns over evidence of institutional racism and anti-semitism within the Church, I am relieved that so few Christian leaders were listed. Ekklesia claims five were identified.

“Further investigation has shown that one of the “Revs” appears to have gained his title through Universal Ministries, an online service which “will ordain anyone, at no charge, for life.” Another had previoulsy said he had joined the BNP by mistake and left the party – although blogs on the internet elsewhere suggest he changed his mind and joined the party again.

It has been previously suggested that the BNP is seeking to gain ground by playing on false fears about race and immigration, and by seeking to exploit the mythology of a white ‘Christian Britain’.

The BNP has also attempted to exploit hard-line Christian conservatism by seeking to set up a body claiming to be a ‘Christian Council of Britain’, by scaremongering about Muslims, and by getting in on anti-Jerry Springer opera protests promoted by the controversial group Christian Voice – which has since distanced itself from them.”

According to Haroon Siddique, writing in the Guardian,

“Ben Wilson, a spokesman for the Church of England, which is not a public body under the Race Relations Amendment Act, said it had seen “no evidence” that any serving vicars were on the list, despite media reports.

“The church’s General Synod passed a motion in 2004 stating that any political movement that seeks to divide our communities on the basis of ethnicity is an affront to the nature of God revealed in creation and scripture and is a grave danger to harmonious community relationships; consequently voting for and/or supporting a political party that offers racist policies is incompatible with Christian discipleship.

He said: “It would be difficult to take any formal action against a vicar on the basis of their alleged membership of the BNP, as membership of any lawful political party is excluded from the grounds for complaint under the clergy discipline measure.”

The best piece of reporting on the relationship between the BNP and the Church has been written by Richard Bartholomew. He identifies three ministers and records the comments of one thus:

“I’m furious. I used to be on the mailing list but I have never been a member. I don’t know why my name has gone out on the list and I’m now considering the action I am going to take.”

There may indeed be others who were ‘relieved’ that they too were not outed. Nevertheless the tally of church leaders associated with the BNP, while just a handful, is, in my opinion, one handful too many.

The Men in the Shadows

Why can’t I get this song by Jackson Browne out of my mind? Maybe its the hope rising within me that with the election of Barak Obama, we will see a change in US policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. Maybe there will be a renewed commitment on the part of the US administration to cooperate with the United Nations and achieve a multilateral solution as envisaged in the Road-Map to Peace. Just maybe.

Or maybe it reminds me of those lovely people who feel they need to hide behind their anonymous blogs to express their warped and cowardly views. Or maybe its because of the words of Jesus who said:

“Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. All those who do evil hate the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But those who live by the truth come into the light so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” (John 3:19-21).

One day everything will be exposed to the light of Christ and I can’t wait for that day. What ever the reason, just check out the videos that follow the lyrics and lets not be intimidated by those men in the shadows.

“I’ve been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that youve seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war

And there’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs

On the radio talk shows and the TV
You hear one thing again and again
How the USA stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends–
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally cant take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

There’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we cant even say the names

They sell us the president the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire.”

Jackson Browne (1986)

YouTube Lives in the Balance (1986), here (live in 2007) and here (live in 2005) and here also.

Suicide Bombers: A Palestinian Christian Perspective

What is Theologically and Morally Wrong with Suicide Bombings? A Palestinian Christian Perspective

The following is taken from an article by Canon Naim Ateek published in the Sabeel journal Cornerstone, and subsequently expanded into a 35 page booklet. It is the best critique of suicide bombing I have read.

“The issue of Palestinian suicide bombings has become a familiar topic to many people throughout the world. It is easy for people to either quickly and forthrightly condemn it as a primitive and barbaric form of terrorism against civilians, or condone and support it as a legitimate method of resisting an oppressive Israeli occupation that has trampled Palestinian dignity and brutalized their very existence.

As a Christian, I know that the way of Christ is the way of nonviolence and, therefore, I condemn all forms of violence and terrorism, whether coming from the government of Israel or from militant Palestinian groups. Having said that clearly, it is still important to understand the phenomenon of suicide bombings that tragically arises from the deep misery and torment of many Palestinians. For how else can one explain it? When healthy, beautiful and intelligent young men and women set out to kill and be killed, something is basically wrong in a world that has not heard their anguished cry for justice.

The Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip took a very important turn since the early 1990s. Young Palestinian men, and more lately women, started to strap themselves with explosives, make their way to Israeli Jewish areas and blow themselves up, killing and injuring dozens of people around them. Between the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000 and February 22, 2003, Palestinian militants carried out 69 suicide bombings in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including Jerusalem, as well as inside Israel, killing, according to Israeli statistics, 341 Israelis including soldiers, men, women, and children. In the same period, the Israeli army killed 2,106 Palestinians including police, men, women and children.

For the last 35 years, the Palestinians have been engaged in resisting the occupation of their country. For many years they have worked through the international community to bring an end to the Israeli occupation, but they have been unsuccessful.

Continue reading →

Iranian Judicial Authorities Order the Release of Ramtin Soodmand

According to news received by FCNN, the judicial authorities have ordered the release of our brother Ramtin Soodmand.

In this report received, Ramtin’s lawyer, who had been in telephone contact with the judicial court of Mashhad and the office of Mr. Mottaghi, the local prosecutor, announced that subsequent to negotiations conducted between the Ministry of Information central offices in Tehran and the Christian representative of Iranian Christian community, Mr. Forootan who is the assistant to the judge, ordered the release of Ramtin Soodmand subject to the posting of a bail and other legal restrictions. He was to be released on Thursday October 16, 2008, but due to the weekend holidays the date has been postponed.

It is important to remember that Ramtin Soodmand, who is the official minister of the Evangelical Church of Iran in Mashhad, was arrested and detained by the officers of the ministry of information on August 21, 2008.

His lawyer, in filing papers with the court regarding the illegality of his client’s arrest and the violation of his rights, under the current law, to be formally charged and bail hearing to be conducted within 10 days of his arrest, strongly protested that actions of the government.

Finally, Ramtin was formally charged with the crime of anti-government activities, a charge which his lawyer strongly denied and demanded the release of his client. So far, there has been no date set for Ramtin’s trail by the judge.

FCNN reiterates that these charges are unfounded and false. The real reason for his arrest is the fact that he is a Muslim convert who is involved in Christian ministry. Also, it must be mentioned that another Christian minister, Shroder Ashur, an Assyrian minister, who was also charged with the crime of propagation of Christianity, was recently released in the city of Urumieh on October 5, 2008.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper recently carried a moving article about Ramtin Soodmand, a 35-year-old Iranian Christian who was arrested on the 20th August and is presently in prison awaiting charges. Amnesty International have identified Ramtin as a prisoner of conscience. They state, “He is at risk of torture or other ill-treatment and is being held in an unknown location. He is a prisoner of conscience and should be released immediately as he has been detained solely for his religious beliefs.”

Continue reading →

Stowe School Tackles Arab-Israeli Conflict


It was worth making the 151 mile round trip this evening, through the driving rain, to dialogue with between 80-100 of the most intelligent and articulate Sixth Formers you will find anywhere in Britain.

Stowe is one of the UK’s leading public schools with a wide range of nationalities represented. Members of the faculty invited me to address the historical and political context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, from an Israeli and Palestinian perspective, and summarise the position of the United Nations and rulings of the International Court of Justice.

The Faculty and Stoics engaged in a stimulating discussion, raising questions that centred on why Israel has been able to act with impunity and why the occupation, settlements and separation barrier are largely funded through US loan guarantees. The frustration expressed at the failure of British diplomacy to achieve the implementation of UN Resolutions was most encouraging. As with similar school presentations, I explained to the Stoics their homework – to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and succeed where their parents generation has failed. If some of the world’s brightest and best young minds cannot bring about a diplomatic solution based on justice and the rule of international law, then God help our world.

Serve Afghanistan: Gayle Williams



At 0800 on Monday 20 October in Kabul Afghanistan, Gayle Williams, 34 years old, one of the women workers of the SERVE Afghanistan team, a joint South African UK national, was walking to work. Gayle was shot and killed shortly before she was due to arrive at the office. Reports say that two men on a motorcycle shot her and then fled the scene. She died
almost immediately. She was a person who always loved the Afghans and was dedicated to serving those who are disabled

Gayle was not a woman who thought of herself. Her time and energy were always spent on behalf of others. She spent many years caring one to one for severely special needs students, but in the last few years she made the brave decision to offer her skills and time to care for the many disabled and disadvantaged in Afghanistan as a volunteer. Gayle worked for nearly two years in Kandahar and Kabul directing projects to integrate the disabled into mainstream education and provide them with opportunities for a better life. She never spoke of the rigours and privations of aid work in Kandahar, one of the most difficult places for a young woman to work in the world, but she kept a smile on her face and always had a good humoured chuckle at the difficulties she must have endured.

As a British South African Gayle had the plucky adventurous spirit of the country she loved so much. Accustomed to the risks of South Africa today, the dangers of the Afghan warzone did not phase her, but she pressed on. A highly trained fitness instructor, Gayle was never happier than climbing a mountain, playing sports or going for a run.

Gayle was a loving daughter and sister and a devoted friend to many. She was always so fun to be with and laughter and jokes came easily as we would sit having coffee. People were so important to Gayle; she cared deeply for her friends and family and would always go out of her way to help and support her loved ones.

Gayle will be remembered as one of the inspiring people of the world who truly put others before herself. She was killed violently while caring for the most forgotten people in the world; the poor and the disabled. She herself would not regret taking the risk of working in Afghanistan. She was where she wanted to be – holding out a helping hand to those in need.

For more information Serve Afghanistan