FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 27, 2015

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) strongly condemns the abduction of more than 200 Assyrian Christians by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in northeastern Syria and calls for the international community to work for their immediate release.

“The lives of these Assyrian Christians – including women, children and the elderly – hang in the balance: they were abducted solely because of their Christian faith,” said USCIRF Chair Katrina Lantos Swett.  “Let us be clear: these individuals are facing death.  They face the same fate as their Coptic Christian brothers who were brutally slaughtered by ISIL last month.”

"The United States and like-minded nations must redouble efforts to protect religious minorities, such as these Assyrian Christians, as well as others such as Yazidis, Shi’a Muslims, Sunnis who disagree with ISIL’s ideology and others targeted by this barbaric group.  The U.S. and the international community should work together to secure their release and provide humanitarian assistance to those who have been displaced,” continued Lantos Swett.

Last year, for the first time ever, USCIRF recommended that Syria be designated a “country of particular concern” (CPC) under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act.

Click here for USCIRF’s work on ISIL and here for USCIRF’s 2014 Annual Report.

To interview a USCIRF Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at [email protected] or 202-786-0613.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

February 26, 2015 | By Katrina Lantos Swett & Robert P. George

By all accounts, the past year in China was a punishing one for freedom of religion or belief.

In the name of fighting terrorism, officials increased their persecution of the Uighur Muslim community in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. In the name of fighting cults, they continued their assault on Falun Gong, unregistered Christian organizations, Buddhist groups and others. These examples of flagrant violations of religious freedom and fundamental human rights stand in sharp contrast to China’s preferred narrative of a modern, forward-looking superpower. Instead it reveals a one-party dictatorship fearful of diversity and hostile to freedom and faith.

Late last year, a Chinese court sentenced Ilham Tohti, a respected Uighur Muslim scholar, to life in prison for separatism. Known for peacefully advocating Uighur rights, Tohti was an economics professor in Beijing until his arrest in January of last year. Prior to this draconian sentence, China restricted Uighur rights to fast and carry out other religious observances during the month of Ramadan. This assault on religious freedom follows years of Chinese authorities’ raiding schools, seizing literature, shuttering religious sites, clamping down on the study of the Quran, monitoring imams’ sermons, restricting Muslim dress and religious expression and banning children from mosques.

China has also trained its sights on so-called cults, an arbitrary term that potentially includes any group operating outside the government’s orbit of strict regulation and control. Government officials stepped up the anti-cult campaign after a woman was beaten to death last May by six members of a group called Almighty God. Days later, the government published a list of 20 cults, and Chinese media warned repeatedly about their evil dangers.

Heading the list was Falun Gong, which has been in Beijing’s crosshairs for more than 15 years. Near the end of last year, Wang Zhiwen, a Falun Gong practitioner, finished a 15-year prison sentence, during which he was tortured, and then he was detained in a brainwashing center. He has been stripped of all political rights for four years and has not been getting needed medical care. Falun Gong practitioners Li Chang, Yu Changxin and Ji Liewu remain imprisoned. Over the years, human rights groups have reported deaths in custody, the use of psychiatric experiments and the harvesting of organs of Falun Gong members.

China’s anti-cult campaign also threatens unregistered, or underground, Christian churches. An article last year in a government newspaper warned that “underground churches and evil cults are spreading like mushrooms.” Even before this, China’s government issued a directive to “eradicate” unregistered Protestant churches over the next decade. Catholic and Protestant groups refusing to register have long faced arrests, fines and church closures. Pastor Yang Rongli has been serving a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence since 2009 for leading the 50,000-member Linfen Church in Shaanxi Province.

Such government hostility has gone beyond alleged cults. Starting in early 2014, Chinese Christians were faced with a new threat: assaults on registered churches. In Zhejiang province, the government targeted hundreds of churches, tearing down or removing crosses and even bulldozing a number of them, including Sanjiang Church, which had thousands of members. In Henan province, Pastor Zhang Shaojie of the Nanle County Christian Church was convicted on July 4 on groundless charges of fraud and gathering a crowd to disturb public order and was handed a 12-year prison sentence.

Besides Falun Gong and Christianity, Chinese anti-cult efforts also harass movements within Buddhism. Late last year, China arrested Wu Zeheng — also known as Zen master Shi Xingwu, a renowned leader with millions of followers worldwide — along with more than a dozen of his followers in China. They were charged under China’s anti-cult law barring people from forming or using “superstitious sects or … societies … to undermine the implementation of the laws and … rules and regulations of the state.” If convicted, each could serve from seven years to life in prison.

These actions are on top of China’s continued suppression of Tibetan Buddhism, which has been led to an alarming number of self-immolations. In recent years, more than 130 Buddhists, including monks and nuns, have set themselves ablaze.

Through its conduct, China is denying its people the internationally guaranteed right to believe or not believe according to conscience. Why? Perhaps its leaders fear that allegiance to organizations beyond the Chinese state threaten their control. For example, Ye Xiaowen, a former head of China’s Religious Affairs Bureau, voiced what many Chinese officials fear: that Christians’ role in bringing down communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s could be repeated in China.

But ironically, repression can exacerbate the extremism it aims to eradicate. Furthermore, targeting peaceful religious communities deeply undermines the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of all its citizens.

Above all else, the Chinese government seeks stability. It will find this an elusive goal as long as it continues to violate the basic rights of millions of its citizens.

To interview a USCIRF Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at [email protected] or 202-786-0613.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

February 24, 2015 | By Eric P. Schwartz & M. Zuhdi Jasser

The following op-ed appeared in USA Today on February 24, 2015.

Given the record numbers of people from Syria, Iraq, Burma and elsewhere who fled their homes, 2014 could well be called the Year of the Refugee. Throughout the year, heartbreaking numbers were on the move, trapped in war zones or languishing in refugee camps. The obvious questions are what is driving the dramatic surge and how can the United States and the world respond in 2015.

As early as June of 2014, the scope of the problem became tragically evident. During that month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that, for the first time since World War II, there were more than 50 million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the world, half of them children under 18 years old. The UNHCR also estimates that at least 10 million people are stateless, more than one-third of them children, with a child born stateless every 10 minutes.

And early in December, the World Food Program was forced for a few days to suspend aid, mostly in Lebanon, to nearly two million Syrian refugees. The UN food agency couldn't cover the sheer number of crises convulsing the world.

It is not difficult to discern the source of this misery. Political tyranny and religious intolerance and persecution — two sides of a deadly coin — have created massive suffering. In Syria, for example, the regime's suppression of a democratic movement devolved into a struggle between the Assad government and anti-Assad rebels, which in turn has become a calamitous sectarian war. To maintain its grip on power, the government has closed ranks among his Alawite-Baathist networks and targeted opponents, largely from the country's Sunni Muslim majority. The government's indiscriminate shelling alone has cost tens of thousands of civilian lives. Meanwhile, terrorist groups, from ISIL to al Qaeda, seek to destroy religious minority communities, including Christians and Alawites, due to their faith. As a result, 3.2 million Syrians, mostly Sunnis, are now refugees.

In Iraq, ISIL has subjected the country's Yazidi and Christian minorities in the north to terrifying abuses, from slavery to murder, threatening their existence. As a result of ISIL's depredations against these and other communities, including dissenting Sunnis who refuse to adopt their interpretations of Islam, more than two million Iraqis are now refugees.

In Burma, mounting discrimination, including continued denial of citizenship and violence against Rohingya Muslims has worsened their already-bleak predicament. Today, more than 800,000 Rohingya remain stateless, a larger number than any other religious or ethnic group in the world, and thousands have fled the country in recent months.

In dealing with the humanitarian imperatives that result from refugee flight, the United States and other governments must respond effectively and generously.

To be sure, Washington has continued to play a leadership role. The administration is now providing about $6 billion annually in international humanitarian assistance, and the United States is by far the largest funder of refugee assistance worldwide.

But the United States can and should do more. While refugee numbers have increased substantially worldwide, the U.S. annual refugee resettlement ceiling — a critical life-line for refugees who will never return home — has not. The administration should increase our annual ceiling from 70,000 to at least 125,000, which would help alleviate suffering of the most vulnerable refugees from places like Syria. Washington should also provide the Department of Homeland Security and other relevant federal agencies the funding and staff to help conduct background checks, process applications in a timely manner and eliminate long delays. And the administration should ask Congress for additional support to the Department of Health and Human Services, which helps states provide social services to new arrivals. Finally, the administration should be encouraging other governments around the world to do more.

These actions reflect our values, and our proud tradition of protecting of the most vulnerable. They will also demonstrate U.S. worldwide humanitarian leadership, and communicate to people worldwide our solidarity with victims of persecution and other human rights violations.

But ultimately, the tragedy of forced displacement will end only with the rejection and defeat of perspectives that promote intolerance and create refugees in the first place.

The risks of inaction are clear. If countries fail to prioritize political tolerance, human rights and religious freedom, the result will be more deadly conflict, failed states and millions suffering and on the move.

When political leaders fully embrace the idea that freedom and tolerance are antidotes to perpetual instability and strife, the end to the refugee nightmare will be closer at hand.

To interview a USCIRF Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at [email protected] or 202-786-0613.