Burmese government forces attacked villages of the Karen and Karenni people, displacing 1,200 villagers, as part of a “slow genocide” against these predominantly Christian ethnic groups, a religious rights group said late Thursday, January 5.
Children of a United States missionary couple were spending their first Sunday worship service in freedom, November 6, after a turbulent week in which they were first snatched in a Haiti shanty town and later freed in a massive rescue operation.
Former Muslim residents in a remote village of the ex-Soviet union republic of Uzbekistan are being beaten, publicly humiliated and forced from their homes and jobs for converting to Christianity, a news agency investigation religious persecution said Friday, October 21.
The Israeli High Court on September 12 heard a petition by ultra-orthodox Jews to hold a 700-person demonstration in front of the house of a family of Messianic Jews. In the past, the group’s smaller protests consisted of shouting obscenities and slurs at the Christians.
His father sent him to Saudi Arabia from Nigeria when he was 3 years old to be trained as an Islamic cleric, but God had other plans for Ahmed Abdullahi.
Burma’s military government has closed down a major evangelical church and movement in the capital Rangoon as part of a fresh crackdown on Christian congregations across the Asian nation, a well informed advocacy group said Wednesday, September 7.
Persecuted Evangelical Christians and missionary workers in Kyrgyzstan were awaiting a new dawn late Thursday, March 24, as lawmakers of this former Soviet republic appointed a new interim president, news reports suggested.
Eritrea’s controversial President Isaias Afwerki ended a three day official visit to Pakistan Sunday, February 27, pledging to respect “democratic values” amid pressure at home to release hundreds of Christians, including children.
A brutal attack on a Christian book publisher in Ukraine has underscored the high stakes struggle over human rights and religious liberty in the former Soviet republic preparing for a re-run of a sharply contested presidential election.
Protestant ministers in the United States generally believe that religious persecution is a major problem in today’s world, and they believe the U.S. should impose sanctions against countries where this is occurring. These findings have just been released from a research study conducted among Protestant clergy in America.
In spite of monumental efforts by Vietnam to minimize and cover up their brutal repression of demonstration attempts by the Montagnard ethnic minority this past Easter, consistent information is emerging that confirms atrocities.
It was back in 1999 that the Turkmenistan government declared its intention to “strangle minority faiths. All foreign Christians were expelled and the persecution of national believers, especially ethnic Turkmen, intensified intolerably.
OKLAHOMA CITY (BP)–The Oklahoma House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill April 4 that includes an amendment requiring state-approved science textbooks to acknowledge “one God as the creator of human life in the universe.”
WASHINGTON (BP)–Threatened by fines, residents of a small town in Indiana say they were forced to remove a monument displaying the Ten Commandments from the lawn of the local courthouse after a federal judge ruled on behalf of the state’s civil liberties union.
The hearing in the case to liquidate the Love Baptist Church in the Azerbaijani capital Baku was postponed yesterday (23 January), the church’s pastor Sary Mirzoyev told Keston News Service from Baku. The Narimanov district court had been due to hear the suit, brought by Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, in the afternoon of 23 January (see KNS 18 January 2002) but the court agreed to the defendant’s request to postpone the hearing because of ill health. Yahya Mamedov, the church’s deacon and administrator, suffers from diabetes. No date has yet been set for a new hearing, but it is likely to be in about ten days’ time.
The Malawi Council of Churches – a mother body of prostestant churches in the country – has issued a statement asking the ruling party United Democratic Front (UDF) and the government at large, to curb acts of violence committed against the clergy.
LONDON (Compass) — A “second Ambon” is brewing in Indonesia according to Christian leaders as a 3,000-strong Muslim jihad force closes in on 28,000 Christians in Tentena, Central Sulawesi. Ambon refers to an area in eastern Indonesia where thousands have died in Muslim-Christian conflicts.
WASHINGTON (ABP) — Pressing forward despite criticism of President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers has unveiled the sweeping “Community Solutions Act.” The law would expand funding of religiously oriented social services and allow non-itemizers to deduct charitable giving from their taxable income.
Chinese police detained 130 members of a Protestant house church movement in central Henan province on Wednesday, according to a Hong Kong-based human rights group. Among the arrested were three American citizens, the Information Centre for Human Rights and the Democratic Movement in China said.
Reports of an “ethnic-cleaning” style religious war by Muslims against Christians on the Indonesian island of Ambon continue to be received from eyewitnesses on site.