BAMAKO, Mali (Compass) — For some time, Muslim city authorities in Magnambougou planned for a beautiful new mosque in this new suburb of Bamako, the Malian capital. They acquired land in the middle of the urban dwellings and began to build a mosque that would dominate the area and accommodate more than 2,000 Muslims for prayers, much to the distress and dismay of local Christians.
The crackdown on Christians opposed to the Syrian stranglehold over Lebanon continues, as plain-clothes Syrian agents infiltrated a peaceful rally late last week and beat up protesters, cameramen and even local police.
Dr. Joseph D’Souza, president of the All India Christian Council, is calling for urgent prayer for India’s millions of dalits, since over a million of them are getting ready to change their religion.
As numbers of lower caste Indians embrace Christ, and in the face of the increasingly violence against Christians in India at the hands of Hindu militants, Dr. Joseph D’Souza, President of the All India Christian Council, is asking for Christians from around the world to pray for his nation during the month of July. God is mightily at work in India and so it should not surprise us that persecution should be on the rise as well.
(CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.)-Responding to urgent pleas for help, Christian Aid has joined a campaign to raise $1.2 million to rescue Christians feared targeted for conversion or extermination by Muslim jihad warriors in Indonesia.
Work is underway to resettle Indonesian Christians rescued from violence that continues in this country’s Molucca Islands, while thousands more remain to be rescued.
In a new twist to the violence against Christians in eastern Indonesia’s Maluku Islands, Muslim Jihad fighters dressed like Japanese “ninjas” have begun targeting individuals under cover of darkness.
JAKARTA, Indonesia (BP)–Twenty-three Christians were massacred in Indonesia as they fled from their village in late July and early August, The Hindustan Times of India has reported. The report from Indonesia was relayed to U.S. media via Crosswalk.com, an Internet news and information site.
MANADO, Indonesia (Compass) — “There are no Christians left in Ternate,” said George Saselah, who had left his farm there to join his wife and newborn daughter in a refugee camp in Manado, on Indonesia’s North Sulawesi island.
LONDON (Compass) — Maluku’s head of police admitted that authorities cannot dislodge the hundreds of Muslim jihad fighters scattered throughout eastern Indonesia’s Maluku province and who have escalated the inter-religious conflict as Christmas approaches. More than 100 Christians were reported killed in November fighting.
AMBON CITY, Indonesia (BP)–The mournful horn echoes in the still air at 4 a.m. The call to prayer resounds off bullet-pocked walls and empty buildings. The Christian remnant in this Indonesian village awakens to cry out to God for peace.
SPICE ISLANDS, INDONESIA (March 21, 2000) — An urgent plea for prayer for the Christians of Indonesia has come out of that nation from a recent visitor who has just returned from the Spice Islands.
INDONESIA – (Open Doors, July 9, 2001) – Christian leaders in Tentena, in Indonesia’s central Sulawesi province, pleaded with Open Doors to “be our voice†in the face of increased atrocities being perpetrated against them in Poso district, known as a “second Ambon.â€
JAYAPURA, Irian Jaya, November 30 (Compass) — A smouldering civil unrest that has troubled the eastern Indonesian province of Irian Jaya for years threatens once again to harm Christians and others caught in the war between a growing independence movement and the Jakarta government.
AMBON, Indonesia (Compass) — “It is disappointing that the suffering of the Christians due to the conflict in the Malukus has been insufficiently exposed in various reports on a national and international level,” stated the U.S. Consul General Robert Pollard.
NEW DELHI, India (BP)–Another day, another bombing.
That’s the impression being created, at least, by a mounting wave of attacks on Christians and churches in India.
Vandals recently broke into the office of a Bible school in India, tied up the schools’ cook, and destroyed the office.
The vandals seem to have thoroughly planned their attack. The school is housed in two buildings, and both buildings were ransacked at the same time. About thirty-five people live at the training center.
In the first spot on an otherwise squeaky clean record, US Secretary of State-designate Colin Powell has run into a flap for recently accepting a large sum of money for delivering a university lecture subsidized by a senior Lebanese official with ties to Syrian intelligence.
HONG KONG (Compass) — Christians in Laos continue to suffer persecution from a government crackdown on believers, and they cannot visit friends or travel freely because the secret police follow them every everywhere. Some have been forced to recant their faith.
MORE CHURCHES DESTROYED IN NORTHERN NIGERIA Sharia-related Tension Continues to Breed Violence by Obed Minchakpu GUSAU, Nigeria (Compass) — At least five churches were destroyed during February in northern Nigeria as the controversial implementation of Islamic law continued in several states. St. Dominic’s Catholic Church was demolished on February 14 in Dashi, a village located 12 kilometers from Gusau, the state capital of Zamfara state. Zamfara Governor Alhaji Ahmed Sani had forcefully converted the church into an Islamic school in January. Christian Leaders told Compass that some of the persons who attacked the church have been arrested and that it … Read more