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Finding God in the Graveyard of Hope ICC Journeys to India’s Notorious Orissa State
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The Smile: Finding God in the Graveyard of Hope By William Stark
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A woman from Kandhamal goes about her daily routine (Photo: ICC)
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A Feature Article
fter eight hours in the 4x4 on rural India’s small dirt roads, I began to feel every bump and jolt. Truthfully, the ride with all its roughness was a welcome diversion as I was heading to India’s Kandhamal. You may not be familiar with that name but for Indian Christians it is associated with great sadness and national shame as it was the scene of a seemingly never-ending period of murder and attacks against Christians that unfolded in 2008. These were the Orissa riots. This notorious attack stands apart as India’s worst attack against Christians. I am familiar with many of the individual stories that made up the whole of the incident and was feeling a great sense of dread and sadness as we bounced along; moving ever closer to a place where Satan was unleashed and had his way with the India’s tribal Christians. As we came closer, I steeled my emotions knowing I would hear many stories of suffering, fear, despair, and destruction. While I did find these stories in abundance, I also found a story I never expected: a story of light in the midst of darkness and of hope through suffering. The trigger for this unprecedented violence took place on August 24, 2008 when a high profile radical Hindu priest was murdered and the Christians were blamed for his death. This took place in spite of the fact that a communist group claimed responsibility for his murder. Located in a village called Tumidiband, it was surreal for me to stand in front of the priest’s infamous ashram (Hindu religious retreat), knowing that the actions that took place there had such dramatic consequences for thousands of Christians. Somewhere between 100 and 300 Christians were killed, 5,600 homes were destroyed, 350 churches were destroyed or desecrated, and 56,000 were displaced. After visiting the ashram, we drove deeper into Kandhamal. We drove through K. Nuagoam, a small town in Kandhamal, and one of the local pastors pointed out a Catholic center called Jan Vikas Kendra. Immediately, I recalled the name of the center and the inhuman persecution suffered by one of the nuns working there. When the riots reached the center, a mob of enraged Hindu radicals ransacked the center’s facilities, set the center’s vehicles on fire, and gang-raped a nun captured by the mob. Further still, the mob then forced the nun to march around naked to shame her and the religion she
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The grieving faces of the people of Kandhamal testify to the pain that remains from the devastating attacks on Christians. Bottom Left Photo Credit: Aid To Christians In Need (ACN) represented. As I looked out of the window at the Jan Vikas Kendra center, I could still remember the anger I felt when I read the headlines about this incident that had taken place over 600 miles away. Now, sitting meters away from the spot where it happened, I felt emotionally drained. As we moved on, I turned to another local “In the middle of one of the burned homes, pastor traveling with me who was in Kandhamal I saw a dead body that had been left out in the in 2008. I asked this pastor whether there were open for days,” the pastor continued. “This any particular incidents that have stuck with broke me because I realized the body had been him from the riots. left because of fear.” “It was the third day of the riots,” the We finally arrived at our destination. Deep local pastor recalled. “With much difficulty, in the forests of Kandhamal are seven Christian I [reached] a Christian village in Kandhamal families that were perhaps most affected by the that was totally destroyed. The houses were 2008 riots. Following the killing of the Hindu completely burned. As I looked at the destroyed priest, seven Christian men were rounded up, homes, I saw something that shattered me.” falsely accused of his murder, and finally sen-
“In the graveyard of hope, I encountered the God who redeems time and life lost. . .”
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JULY 2016
tenced to life in prison. During our visit with the families, each of them shared heartbreaking stories of extreme poverty as they have tried to survive without their sole breadwinner. For the last eight years, survival has become their main focus as their loved ones remain unjustly imprisoned. As the years go by, the hope that justice will prevail in this case is slowly fading. “I was admitted in the hospital due to depression,” Gomili Sonamachi, the wife of one of the seven imprisoned, told me. “I lost my hair and my health deteriorated, thinking of my husband. Ever since my husband went to jail, I have had to conduct two weddings for my sons. We did not have money for the wedding feast. Due to our culture, it was a huge embarrassment not having wedding feasts.”
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Leelandhri Nayak, the wife of another prisoner, told ICC how the imprisonment of her husband has affected the future of her children. “When my husband [was] jailed in 2008, my children were small,” Leelandhri said. “Now, they are grown up and their education is affected as we are not able to [cope] with the fees.” Seeing the suffering of these families firsthand was difficult for me. It wasn’t difficult to connect with the injustice these seven families have endured for the past eight years because of our mutual Christian faith. It felt as though the weight of suffering inflicted upon the Christian community of Kandhamal would never be lifted. Then I saw the smile. Gurunath is one of the seven prisoners falsely imprisoned for life and it just so happened that
he was temporarily released from jail for one month because his father is dying. His reprieve happened to coincide with my visit, allowing me to get an exclusive interview a few days before this prisoner would be forced to return to his prison cell for the rest of his life. Expecting to hear another tragic story of suffering, I was stunned to discover God at work in a very special way in the life of this uneducated, rural, persecuted Christian who I assumed had been languishing in prison for the past eight years. As I sat down for our interview, I was shocked to see a smile on his face. Instead of delving into the questions I had prepared for the interview, I asked Gurunath why he was smiling. His response was surprising, but it revealed to me how God is still at work in Kandhamal in spite of all of the atrocities that have happened against His people there. “I have been given bail because of my ailing father,” Gurunath said. “I am overjoyed though because my [time in prison] has forever changed my parents. During these past days while I have been home, my parents have professed their faith in Jesus.” As my conversation with Gurunath continued, he revealed that not only is God working in the lives of his parents, but also in the lives of other inmates that he and the other falsely accused Christians live with. “We have daily devotions and Bible study in prison,” Gurunath shared. “We are jailed with many men accused of taking part in the riots. At first they were resistant to us, but over time, six of them have [heard] the Gospel and converted to Christianity. They also attend our daily devotions.” “In spite of the challenges I have faced, I thank God for turning my mourning into dancing,” Gurunath said. “I will go back to the jail putting my trust in His hands. I do believe God will help and all seven of us will be proven innocent and released from prison.” It was beautiful to see how God was at work in the middle of India’s worst incident of persecution. Not only was God actively comforting these prisoners, He was also at work through the prisoners by reaching out to those who had actively defied Him in 2008. As we got back into the 4x4 and departed Kandhamal, the heaviness was gone. I was stunned and left with the wonder of God and a deeper trust that in my life and yours, He can truly work all things together for good. In the graveyard of hope, I personally encountered the God who redeems time and life lost, the God that brings life from death. I found living proof of the verse that God works all things together for good.
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REMNANTS OF A MASSACRE ICC interviews victims of the Fulani attacks in Benue State. By Troy Augustine
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he expression on Laraba’s face mirrors those of countless Christians displaced from their farmlands in Benue State, Nigeria. Her eyes reveal her grief. Her hollow stares give away the time she spends deep in thought, reliving her nightmare and furiously contemplating the way ahead after losing so much. I watch her eyelids slowly sink, weighed down
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by emotional and physical exhaustion. Laraba’s persecution experience is just one of thousands from Nigerian Christians crying out in pain and for justice. She is a new widow, trying to adjust to the painful reality of providing for her six children, without her husband or extended family. “My husband was killed at Ayila. I lost everything,” she told International Christian Concern. “I have no clothes to wear. I have nothing and no one to help me. All my brothers were killed too. I am left all alone,” she lamented.
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“They totally razed our home at Ayila. Everything was destroyed. What I’m wearing is all I [was] left with. They attacked us unexpectedly and we ran for our dear lives. My husband was killed because he hesitated, looking out for one of our children who was sick,” Laraba explained. Another victim we spoke to, James, escaped Oju village, but sustained crippling gunshot wounds to his knees. He would have died, if not for the help of a neighbor. “Thank God someone I knew who was also on the run passed by. I beckoned him to JULY 2016
A young Nigerian Christian boy from Agatu is one of the many left shaken and homeless by the recent attack. help me but he was afraid and complained he couldn’t carry me. But after begging desperately, he eventually obliged and carried me on his back. Still they were chasing after us,” James told ICC. Laraba and James are survivors of a string of deadly attacks on dozens of Christian villages in Benue State. The attacks happened one after another during the final two weeks of February 2016. Radical Islamist Fulani militias rampaged through a swath of Benue state, attacking 40
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different communities, leaving the ground littered with 500 corpses. The Fulanis, a tribe of nomadic herders that have been armed (probably by Boko Haram); attack and chase Christian famers from their land and so that they can use it for cattle grazing. Observers refer to the ongoing tragedy that rages on since 2001 as the “Fulani militia” or “Fulani herders” crisis.
Ongoing Bloodshed
I wish I could tell you the Benue massacre was a one-off violent event. However, the existence of Christians in central Nigeria is precarious. Attacks are geographically widespread and continuous. In Benue State alone, Christian residents count 37 such attacks from April 2013 to the present. The government is inept (or worse) and does not protect them. While the recent Benue attacks with 500 victims had the highest body count since 2010, Christian farming communities across at least an eight-state patch of central Nigeria
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The men of Makurdi gather in protest after recent Fulani attacks. continually face the threat of similar annihilation. A typical assault produces a far smaller death toll than Benue but the attacks are strikingly similar. Radical Islamist gangs roving the agrarian countryside from Zamfara State in the far North all the way to Enugu State in Nigeria’s Southeast, attack with machetes, assault rifles, and heavy weapons, torching everything in all homes and crops in their path. The result is that huge swathes of indigenous Christian villages and lands have been cleared and taken by the Fulani Islamists. A cursory scan of Nigerian news since the beginning of 2016 shows multiple smallerscale Fulani attacks in Nigeria: nine in Taraba State on February 27 and 44 on April 13; 12 in Benue State on February 27, 40 on March 8, two on March 25, and 25 villages reported sacked on March 17; at least 57 murdered in Enugu State in April, and 15 suspected killed on May 15 in Bukuru, LGA, Benue State, just to name a handful of attacks. The provided list represents just a miniscule sampling of repeated raids occurring on a near weekly basis across Nigeria in the past decade and a half. The scale and ferocity of the violence is leading analysts to start using the term genocide. Meanwhile, the Global Terrorism Index ranked the Fulani militias of Nigeria as the world’s fourth deadliest terror threat in 2014, and called the group responsible for 81 percent of violent deaths in the “Middle-Belt” in 2015.
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Sadly, the crisis rages on unabated and yet only a few people have ever heard of it. If terrorists inflicted this scale of death and destruction across the American Midwest instead of the Nigerian “Middle-Belt,” the entire world would be informed and outraged.
A Chorus of Wailing Voices Screaming to Deaf Ears Recently, ICC attended a massive protest of hundreds of mourners in Makurdi (Benue State) after the recent massacre. The Christian protestors chanted: “We represent our ancestors who are too dead to speak.” “We represent our fathers who are too weak in the IDP camps to come.” “We represent our mothers who are grieving
“We came representing our fathers who are too weak in the IDP camps to come. We also represent our mothers who are grieving”
the loss of their loved ones killed by Fulani herdsmen.” As you can imagine, Nigeria’s Middle-Belt Christians have grown weary of the endless bloodshed. What adds to the pain is the shocking fact that the Nigerian government, at all levels, has done little to protect them or to arrest and imprison perpetrators. Furthermore, Fulani attacks are typically described as land disputes or tribal conflicts by the press. This completely obscures the real nature of what is taking place. This same dynamic is seen around the world where the Western press is confused by the myriad of names and flavors of Islamist groups. The correct way to view all of these attacks is that they all come from radical Islamists that use different tactics and methods but all have the same source book (The Quran and Hadiths) and goal: to bring land under submission to Allah and Islam. Meanwhile, Laraba, and thousands like her, are left destitute and alone, trying to figure out how to feed her six children and live life without a breadwinner and without the emotional space to properly grieve the loss of her husband.
– MEN OF MAKURDI
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Forced Conversion in Nigeria
A mother and her son carry on after the destruction.
Remains of a burned down home in Agatu.
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Abduction, forced conversion, and rape. These words typically are part and parcel of the persecution testimonies of young Christian girls throughout the fundamentalist Muslim world. One such case in Nigeria involved Ese Oruru whose story captured headlines in Nigeria through the spring of 2016 in a country split between Christians and Muslims where the majority of cases go unreported. Ese Oruru, a 13-year-old Christian girl from southern Nigeria, was discovered pregnant and “married” to an adult Muslim man, now living in the north and being forced to worship the god of Islam. Police found her in February in the northern city of Kano and soon discovered that Yinusa Dahiru abducted her, forcibly converted her to Islam, married her, and then repeatedly raped her. This all happened under the blessing of the Emir (Muslim leader) of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, in whose palace the wedding took place. On March 8, a court arraigned Dahiru on criminal counts related to abduction and sex crimes against a minor after the Kano State Sharia Council called for the release of the girl to the Nigerian police after seeing the mounting negative publicity surrounding her kidnapping. The United National Convention on the Rights of a Child prohibits marriage to a child under 18 in Nigeria. This exists to protect the freedom of thought and religion of vulnerable children. However, countless cases of abduction, forced conversion and marriage of Christian girls is a common and widespread operation among extremists in Nigeria, which Sharia law commonly permits. Fundamentalist Islam allows marriage to girls as young as nine since Muhammad married (and consummated the marriage with) one of his wives when she was nine years old. He had originally attempted to marry her when she was six years old. Since he is seen as having lived the perfect moral life, marrying young girls is recommended. Knowing this background gives you insight into the infamous case of the kidnapped Chibok girls who were taken and sold as sex slaves or forcibly married by Boko Haram. Ese’s case brings to light this under-reported abuse that transcends the Boko Haram insurgency. Her story made national headlines only because she is from the far south, a predominately Christian area. But, how many Christian parents from the oft-forgotten “Middle-Belt” and northern states similarly grieve their lost daughters? These victims and stories are typical and therefore not reported, leaving hundreds or thousands of girls lost to their loved ones forever.
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