FOR YOUR INFORMATION

February 3, 2014 | By  M. Zuhdi Jasser and Sam Gejdenson

The following op-ed appeared in World Affairs Journal on January 31, 2014.

After months of sectarian strife between Muslims and Christians, the Central African Republic (CAR) has a small, precious window of opportunity during which action can be taken to protect the lives and liberties of its people. Parliament’s election on January 20th of Catherine Samba-Panza as interim president ten days after the resignation of Michel Djotodia could mark a new beginning. As mayor of Bangui, CAR’s capital, Samba-Panza was reported to favor reconciliation. While the existing presence of French and African Union peacekeeping forces is a good foundation for such progress, a real breakthrough is possible only if the international community and neighboring states act strongly to support those who wish to stop the violence and bring justice to the perpetrators, advance democratic rule, ensure equal treatment of CAR’s Muslim minority in the north, and heal their land.

Djotodia’s seizure of power last March unleashed a violent civil war claiming thousands of lives, leaving one million displaced, and countless others victimized by religious and other rights abuses. Besides the horrific suffering, the chaotic situation in CAR made it an ideal safe haven or operating base for terrorists from elsewhere in Africa.

The fighting began in December 2012, when the Seleka, an alliance of Djotodia-led Muslims from the northeast and foreign fighters from bordering Chad and Sudan, took up arms against the government. In January 2013, Chad and the Economic Community of Central African States helped secure a peace agreement. After President Françoise Bozizé failed to implement the agreement, the Seleka resumed the war, capturing Bangui last March. Djotodia deposed Bozizé, dissolved the government, and later declared himself president.

Since March, CAR has slid into anarchy while its people endure a human rights nightmare of killings, torture, arbitrary detention, and forced disappearances. With the government weak and largely absent, the resulting power vacuum allowed the Seleka to roam freely, killing civilians, engaging in sexual violence, destroying property, and looting property and food from civilians, churches, NGOs, and UN agencies.

The Seleka also targeted their attacks specifically against the majority Christian population, leading many Christians to view the conflict as a religious war. Churches and their leaders were attacked while mosques and Muslim citizens were largely spared. Further fueling Christian fears were the large numbers of Seleka soldiers among the foreign fighters from Chad and Sudan as well as a letter that Djotodia allegedly wrote to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in April 2012 promising to impose Islamic law if the conference offered him material support.

While Djotodia later denied writing the letter and promised that CAR would remain a secular country, by that time, Muslim-Christian tensions were on the rise.

In September 2013, the fighting entered its most deadly phase when the residents of Christian neighborhoods and regions formed anti-balaka (meaning “anti-machete”) militias.

What followed were waves of brutal attacks and reprisals by both sides. Fighters also targeted civilian populations. While the Seleka set hundreds of Christian-owned homes ablaze, the anti-balaka did likewise to homes belonging to Muslims.

The fighting escalated as 2013 came to a close. While the first series of attacks in September left about 150 dead, an estimated 1,000 perished in December alone.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Djotodia’s departure and Samba-Panza’s ascension signal an opportunity for the international community, including the United States, to help turn the tide. It’s a chance to help bring peace and render humanitarian assistance, giving religious and civic leaders the space to heal sectarian fissures and bring the country together again. The latest targeted attacks on Muslims in Bangui, following Djotodia’s resignation, and the newly deepened mistrust between Christians and Muslims underscore the urgency of the task and how difficult it will be.

Thankfully, sectarian strife is a recent phenomenon that most Muslim and Christian leaders find truly horrifying. Therein might lie the key to peace. These leaders are working tirelessly for reconciliation, but they need the help of a more robust international force that can stop the bloodshed. Moreover, such reconciliation must be based on respect for all religious communities, including an end to discrimination and the full establishment of rule of law and democratic governance. Once the fighting ceases, religious freedom must be upheld for all Muslims and Christians, Seleka and anti-balaka perpetrators alike must answer for their crimes, and the government must move ahead toward new elections and a new constitution.

For the sake of CAR, its people, and its neighbors, the opportunity at hand must be embraced today.

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

The following op-ed appeared in  The Hill  on January 27, 2014.

I testified before the Congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC)’s hearing on the Defending Freedoms Project on January 16.  The TLHRC, co-chaired by Reps. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), launched this initiative to spotlight the dire plight of prisoners of conscience abroad.  The Hill highlighted the project in a January 18 article,  Lawmakers ‘adopt’ prisoners in human rights push .

Through the project, members of Congress select individual prisoners to draw attention to their cases and the repressive laws and policies of the governments holding them in order to call these governments to account and ultimately help set these prisoners free. While quiet diplomacy has a key role to play, public inattention can lead to more persecution, not more freedom and, at its worst, private diplomacy can be viewed as a license to oppress.

These prisoners of conscience have been unjustly barred from enjoying the most basic human rights enshrined in the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and other international instruments and standards.

Among these precious rights is freedom of religion or belief.  As it often is the first right taken away, religious freedom serves as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, warning us that denial of other liberties almost surely will follow.

The United States signaled its intent to strengthen its championing of religious freedom overseas by enacting the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), which created USCIRF as well as an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom within the Department of State, and the “country-of-particular-concern” status for the world’s worst abusers of this fundamental liberty.

IRFA also mandated that the State Department compile a list of prisoners.  While the Department has advocated for individual prisoners, we are unaware that it ever created a comprehensive prisoner list.  We urge the Department to do so now.

The hearing highlighted several prisoners included on an ever-changing list the project has compiled:

Nabeel Rajab, whom McGovern has adopted, remains jailed along with fellow prisoners of conscience by the Bahraini government, which responded in 2011 to citizen protests against abuses, including those against the Shi’a Muslim community, with a crackdown leading to a human rights crisis.

Gao Zhisheng, whom Wolf has adopted, is a lawyer whom the government of China has disbarred, tortured, and imprisoned for his defense of activists and religious minorities.   China commits widespread human rights violations, detaining hundreds of thousands without charges or trials.  Religious freedom conditions for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims remain especially poor.

Pastor Saeed Abedini, whom Reps. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and Raul Labrador (R-Ida.) have adopted, is a U.S. citizen who has been serving an eight-year prison sentence since January 2012 for participating in Iran’s house church movement.  Iran arbitrarily and unlawfully arrests, imprisons, tortures and kills those who it deems a threat to its reigning theology.

Aasia Bibi, whom Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) has adopted, is one of 40 individuals the Pakistani government has jailed for blasphemy.  Along with perpetrating and tolerating severe violations of freedom of religion or belief, the government enforces notorious blasphemy laws and other religiously discriminatory legislation, such as anti-Ahmadi laws, which have created an atmosphere of violent extremism and vigilantism, including extrajudicial and targeted killings and forced disappearances.

Sultan Hamid Marzooq al-Enezi and Saud Falih Awad al-Enezi have been imprisoned since May 2012 by the government of Saudi Arabia for the capital crime of apostasy for joining the Ahmadiyya Muslim community.  The Kingdom continues to ban nearly all public religious expression other than that of the government’s own interpretation of Sunni Islam, bans all non-Muslim places of public worship, sporadically detains Shi’a Muslims, and prosecutes, convicts, and imprisons individuals charged with apostasy, blasphemy, and sorcery.

Do Thi Minh Hanh, whom Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has adopted, is an imprisoned Vietnamese labor activist who is serving a seven-year sentence for organizing workers at a shoe factory.  Father Ly, whom Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) has adopted, has spent more than 15 years in prison in Vietnam for advocating democracy and human rights including religious freedom.  The government of Vietnam commits significant human rights violations including severely limiting the freedoms of speech, press, and association, arbitrarily arresting and detaining people and mistreating them during arrest and detention, and denying them the right to a fair and expeditious trial.

There are countless other prisoners of conscience, named and unnamed, languishing in jail cells in these and other nations.  Given the upcoming Sochi Olympic Games, we would be remiss by not mentioning Russia.  While Moscow recently released some prisoners of conscience, it did so only because President Putin, not an independent judiciary, so decreed, thereby signaling not a change in Russia’s human rights policies, which have deteriorated dramatically under Putin, but a quest for positive publicity prior to the games.

Unfortunately, the world has no shortage of prisoners of conscience.  We at USCIRF commend those members of Congress who have adopted prisoners, and urge others to join this campaign.

George is chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

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