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PERSECU ION East Africa 2015:
God is Great for Us
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Feature Article
Sudan Overview
One of Africa’s worst persecutors continues his relentless campaign against Christians
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n July 24, 2014 Meriam Ibrahim, her 2-year-old son, Martin, and her infant daughter, born in a Sudanese prison, arrived in Italy, after being secreted out of Sudan, once the government finally dropped all charges against her. The world was shocked when the young
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By Todd Daniels
mother faced the death penalty due to charges of apostasy and adultery for having married a Christian man. Hundreds of thousands around the world campaigned for her release and hoped that Sudan noticed that the world was watching and would speak out against its persecution of Christians. Unfortunately, that was not the case. By December 2014, Pastor Paul* was arrested in Khartoum and then just three weeks later Pastor Silas* was also arrested. They too were charged with crimes carrying the death
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sentence, but were ultimately released after eight months and convicted of a lesser crime. These two cases, which briefly caught the attention of the world, are just one facet of persecution in Sudan.
War, Peace, and a Country Divided The country of Sudan and its new neighbor, South Sudan were brutally divided along religious and ethnic lines. A peace agreement signed in 2005 brought an end to a 22-year-old civil war, one that claimed more than two million lives and in which religious and ethnic identity played a crucial role. One of the central causes of the conflict was the campaign of President Omar al-Bashir and the Muslim majority in the North’s desire to impose Islamic Sharia law on the nonMuslim, and largely Christian, South. FEBRUARY 2016
Feature Article
Left: Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s contempt toward the Christian church is self-evident. Right: A map indicating the location of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan.
The Forgotten Genocide
S Nuba Mountains
While the formation of South Sudan in 2011 offered a place of refuge for the largely Christian South Sudanese population, the humanitarian situation is still one of desperate need and the Muslim North remains one of the worst persecutors of Christians in the world. From church destruction, apostasy laws, and bombing campaigns, the Church is under attack, but continues to grow.
Destruction and Death Penalties While these may seem like terms of exaggeration, they are the reality for Christians in Sudan. On October 27, 2015, government authorities bulldozed the Sudan Church of Christ building, claiming it was now on government land. Also, on October 22, 2015, government authorities bulldozed the Evangelical
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Lutheran Church in Omdurman, bringing an end to their more than 30 years of service to the community. Just five days earlier, on October 17, 2015, a Lutheran church in Gadaref was destroyed by arson. Three churches in just ten days, and the list could go on. In the last few years, at least 11 churches have been destroyed according to the 2015 United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Report. Sudan’s legal system is also a horrific tool of persecution. As previously mentioned, Meriam Ibrahim, Pastor Michael, and Pastor Peter have all faced death penalty cases in only the past two years. Since 2011, more than 170 individuals have been arrested and charged with apostasy for leaving Islam. Nearly all have faced the choice of having to recant their faith or else face a death penalty.
udan has been decimated by decades of conflict along religious and ethnic lines and no place better demonstrates that than the Nuba Mountains. Unlike the worldwide outrage that followed the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, the ethnic cleansing unfolding in the Nuba Mountains does not receive much global media coverage. But once you’ve witnessed it, says Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, it will haunt you. The Nuba Mountains region in Sudan’s South Kordofan state was one of three disputed areas following the 2005 peace treaty. When South Sudan claimed independence in 2011, the Nuba Mountains were kept by the Islamic North. The area has been described as, “an island of mostly Christian peoples in a sea of Islam,” according to Operation World. Sudan’s President, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, already wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has increased the bombing of the Nuba Mountains. The daily and indiscriminate bombings do not target military installations, but civilians. Schools, churches, and homes are all causalities to the brutal air assault. At least one-third of the state’s 1.3 million people have been forced to leave their homes because of the bombing campaigns. Many of the Christians have stopped meeting in churches because they are known targets. At least 12 churches have been destroyed by these air raids. The horrific impact of this campaign has only been magnified because humanitarian aid organizations have very little access to the region. Therefore, food and medical aid are not getting to these populations in need. Situated on a fault line between Islam and Christianity, the church in the Nuba Mountains is in desperate need of aid and prayer from its brothers and sisters worldwide. *Names changed
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In Sudan: From Saul to Paul
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t age 19, Wazir* joined the Mujahadeen fighters from northern Sudan to seek out Christians and attack them in the name of Allah to earn the love of his god. Today, he is an evangelist who has faced beatings, imprisonment, and rejection to share the Message of Peace, not to earn God’s love, but because of God’s love shown to him.
A Devout Follower of Islam, Persecutor of Christians
reaching people like himself. He carries scars from both his new and old life. As a preacher, he has been imprisoned five times, beaten, and tortured by guards, nearly to death. He also carries the scars from when he was the one beating others. “I was a very terrible person persecuting the Church,” Wazir said. “The pain is still there, though I am preaching the Good News.” This is the reality of what the Gospel can do. It takes persecutors and turns them into preachers. It takes those who kill to earn God’s love, and transforms them into people who would be killed to tell of God’s love.
Top: Sudanese women receive tubs, pots, pans, and other household supplies from ICC. Right: Timothy’s testimony mirrors the witnesses found in the Book of Acts who were beaten, stoned, and brought before judges for spreading the Gospel. Bottom: Yat Michael Ruot and Peter Yein Reith, two Christian Pastors from Sudan were released from a possible death sentence in Sudan.
Wazir grew up in a devout Islamic family. As a teenager, his faith led him to engage in jihad against the enemy, and Wazir joined the Mujahadeen (Arabic: those engaged in jihad) to take part in raids on Christian villages in southern Sudan. “My goal was to fight Christians to seek the love of Allah,” Wazir reflected. “I volunteered to do this.” Wazir, though, was also a thinker. In an effort to better understand the weaknesses of Christianity, he began to visit a Christian bookstore and talk with the owners. Though Wazir’s intent was to defame the name of Christ, the shopkeepers, talked with this Mujahadeen fighter and faithfully explained the Bible to him, despite great risks. “For them, their goal was to help me understand this was the Word of Truth,” Wazir said. “I never thought I would be a Christian.” However, the Word was working. “One day I said to myself, ‘If this is from God, let this happen today as it was yesterday.’ I needed to see that God’s Word was still true.” Shortly after, Wazir had a dream. He heard God speak John 3:16 to him, that God’s love was fulfilled by giving and sacrificing His Son Jesus Christ. This prompted a radical shift away from the aim to kill in order to earn God’s love.
Accepted by God, Rejected by Others In 1995, Wazir accepted God’s love for himself. His family, friends and tribe all rejected him. “Unfortunately, I have no relationship with my family and friends for the last 20 years.” Some of them called for him to be executed. His tribal chief spared his life, but exiled him from the community. Since this time Wazir has given his life to
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FEBRUARY 2016
A Modern Day Book of Acts Testimony from Sudan “I Know What It Means to Be TInimothy: a Christian.” a small village in South Sudan,
Timothy* was raised as a pagan, without a real religious influence, but he would soon learn what it really means to be a Christian. Timothy first remembers hearing that Christianity meant that he needed to do enough good works in order to please God. His “Christian” teacher even instructed him to put his confidence in his deeds. “I was really hurt by this,” Timothy said, “and I decided to leave Christianity.”
A Journey Towards Faith When war came to his village, he fled to the city of Malakal, Sudan and ended up in a neighborhood dominated by conservative Muslims. Timothy, still looking for answers, thought, “Maybe my answer will be met with Muslim worship.” He studied first at an Islamic Institute in
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Malakal, then moved to Khartoum to continue as a Muslim scholar. As he dove deeper into his studies of Islam, he began to see contradictions in Islamic teaching. “I was taught, ‘Don’t kill.’ But you can if you have the right from God.” Also, when it came to his eternal destiny, he realized that Islam was based on works, like the message he heard when he was younger. “This was why I ran away from Christianity, and in Islam, not even Muhammed can know for sure, so why would I go to paradise?”
“My Life is Bad, Can you Change it?” Still searching for answers, and knowing that his works were never enough, Timothy prayed. “God, I don’t know where you are, but my life is very bad. Can you change it?”
He was invited by a friend to a Christian conference and there he heard the Gospel message of what God did and Timothy realized that could trust Him, not his own works. “He confirmed to me I need eternal life. It felt like he was speaking to me directly,” Timothy said. God has radically changed Timothy’s life. Now he is a bold leader among the Sudanese Church. In stories that echo the book of Acts, Timothy and others have been stoned and imprisoned for sharing the Gospel. In Akbarra, Sudan, he and a co-worker were arrested for preaching, but continued to preach to the prisoners while locked up. Timothy heard the guard tell the warden, “They turned the jail to be worshipping their God Jesus.” The warden responded, “Let them go, or you also will convert.” When asked about his life following Jesus, Timothy said: “For me, I know what it means to be a Christian.”
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Paradise Lost “Despite its idyllic sunsets and posh resorts, [Zanzibar] conceals a rampant persecution problem.”
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By Troy Augustine and James Kake
rystal blue, soft waves lap the beach at my feet in the tiny set of islands known as Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania where I’m investigating persecution. The beaches glisten with warm, white sand and stretch out to the horizon ringed with brilliant green coconut palms as far as the eye can see while a comfortable sea breeze cools the air, keeping the weather between 75 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit year round. If you didn’t take a second look, you’d think Zanzibar was Eden restored. The beauty of Zanzibar, makes it easy to under-
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stand why tourism is one of the most important sectors of the economy for this semi-autonomous region that is unified with mainland Tanzania. Zanzibar is beautiful, luscious, and agriculturally productive, known for centuries for its exotic spices. However, Zanzibar hides a dark side. Despite its idyllic sunsets and posh resorts, it conceals a rampant persecution problem. As the minarets sound at dusk just before most Zanzibaris lay down to sleep each night, the Muslim call to prayer serves as a consistent reminder that Christians in Zanzibar are a religious minority. Muslim Arabs from the Middle East originally colonized Zanzibar and established a sultanate that predated European exploration and the arrival of the
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Zanzibari locals enjoy the warmth of an East African sunrise.
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Feature Article
ICC staff and local pastors pray for God’s protection on their ministry while inside a makeshift church
Portuguese in the late 15th century. After centuries of Muslim domination, Christians still represent less than one percent of the population of Zanzibar. Many of them are missionaries who came over from mainland Tanzania to preach the Gospel. When you live in a society that is dominated by one culture and you come from such a small minority, life carries its hardships. Zanzibari Christians are constantly caught between a rock and a hard place.
Persecuted By Their Neighbors Worshipping Christ openly and freely at a church draws constant unwanted attention from neighbors who hold no reservations about disrupting and destroying Christian services and churches, sometimes even violently. In 2012, a radicalized Muslim mob stormed and burned the largest Assemblies of God church in Zanzibar, setting the building ablaze. The congregation is still rebuilding more than three years later. Government authorities even destroyed part of Pastor *Micah’s church in a different part of the island, making it the second time his building was demolished. In his case,
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Muslim neighbors constantly complained to local authorities about the noise coming from the church on Sunday mornings. Today, he is embroiled in a seemingly endless court case that his neighbors have brought against him, trying to restrict his freedom to worship. They have falsely charged that he is not the rightful owner of the property where the church sits. “This is the eighth year that we have been paying a lawyer an amount of $100 dollars every month whenever we have the court hearing, despite the church having legal ownership documents,” Pastor Micah told ICC. Story after story, pastor after pastor, congregation after congregation can testify to constant pressure from the increasingly radicalized Muslim population that surrounds them. The roof of Pastor *Jonathan’s church is perforated with holes from stones his neighbors throw throughout Sunday services because they hate the Christian presence in their neighborhood. “Those who are surrounded by the islanders – the problems are very terrible,” he told ICC. “You need to have Jesus in you, or you will fight with the people,” he added. Christian churches in Zanzibar face these
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constant threats from all sides.
A Persecution Catch-22 You might think that the easy solution might be to start a house church movement like ones in China or Eritrea. However, any earnest attempt at this feels impossible. That’s because Muslim landlords make up the vast majority of property owners, and Christian pastors report that they become immediately evicted if they are found worshipping Jesus in their homes. “It is not possible to own a church plot where one can put up a permanent house of worship. Even in a rented room, Muslims would stone the roofs and cause a lot of distraction during church services. There are no laws to protect the church because the semiautonomous government here in Zanzibar is dominated by Muslims,” lamented Pastor Moses.* During ICC’s October 2015 trip to Zanzibar, ten pastors we met with told us similar persecution stories. Almost all of them have faced all of the following: evictions, land disputes, legal challenges from Muslim neighbors, government discrimination, and church destrucFEBRUARY 2016
tion. Such challenges don’t only complicate Sunday worship, but they make evangelism exceedingly difficult. “When we try to share the Gospel with them, they don’t want to hear the Name of Jesus,” Pastor Jonathan told ICC. What explains this opposition in a place of the world that otherwise draws Westerners by the droves to this Indian Ocean paradise?
“This is where we worship the Lord,” Nathaniel says as he steps inside the stuffy, narrow orange tent-lke structure....
Tyranny of the Majority
– PASTOR NATHANIEL
The religious dynamics in Zanzibar are complex. The Muslim majority’s persecution of Christians should not be understood through the genocidal lens of jihad that the West has come to associate with Islamist terror groups in Africa such as Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and the Islamic State (IS). Instead, Christians live as a 1% mintoriy and suffer under the soft persecution of dhimmitude; the system that slowly strangles other faiths through the death of a thousand cuts. Saudi Arabia’s Wahabbi evangelists have been at work here radicalizing the population and marginalizing modertate Muslims. The overwhelming majority of Muslims here now think it a matter of obedience to persecute Christians by any means possible. The main group practicing and spreading the Wahabbi (fundamentalist) brand of Islam is a group called the Awakening, or “Uamsho,” in Swahili, according to the pastors with whom we spoke. The group has also infiltrated the political scene and it has been calling for independence of Zanzibar from mainland Tanzania. “Their goal is to chase all of the Christians
A Tanzanian pastor leads a man to Christ.
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from Zanzibar,” Pastor Moses told ICC. Despite opposition from all sides, the Christian Church in Zanzibar perseveres in obedience to the Great Commission.
Faithfulness to the Call Pastor *Nathaniel told ICC that he has survived three assassination attempts for preaching the Gospel. “I’m in the danger area,” he said. Nathaniel has avoided being shot and has narrowly dodged an acid attack. Like several other pastors, radical Muslims burned his church, setting fire to the roof made of dried coconut fronds. He’s been left with nothing, but he still preaches faithfully. “This is where we worship the Lord,” Nathaniel says as he steps inside the stuffy, narrow, orange tent-like structure where he ministers to a congregation of 72 Christians every Sunday with an additional 50 children. Inside the “church,” the air is steamy with humidity and noticeably warmer than outside. The culprit? The tarp that forms the roof and walls that keeps out the rain but also the air flow.
The flimsy plastic draped over a wooden skeleton of course offers no security if, or rather when, the church is attacked next. And yet, just like the other believers, Nathaniel perseveres. Others are currently facing bigger concerns. Pastor Cephas’* daughter was raped, Pastor Moses faces eviction, and Pastor Peter* has been arrested and some of his congregants beaten by Muslim mobs often with the police participating. This is the ongoing experience of ministers of the Gospel in Zanzibar, God’s faithful army of servants equipped with the Gospel of grace. The task is laborious, but the workers joyful, the workers persecuted, but steadfast, just as the Apostle Paul testified: “We labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things,” 1 Corinthians 4:12-13 (ESV). In God’s economy, this faithfulness marks the measure of ministry success, even in places like Zanzibar where the Christian community is so small. These brothers and sisters continue to live out the stewardship that God has gifted them. Their reward will not be found in this era other than enjoying the privilege of preaching the Gospel free of charge. Why would Christians be willing to endure such endless persecution? “My heart is moved (by God) to continue the work,” Pastor Micah declared. With God’s help, this is the steely resolve of Christians in Zanzibar. *Name of pastors changed for security
Tanzanian children enjoy the warm East African beach.
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