DUBLIN, December 30  – Officials this week forced Christians in a Lao village to give up their faith in order to bury a family member in the village graveyard, according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch for Lao Religious Freedom (HRWLRF).

In Huey, Ad-Sapangthong district of Savannakhet Province, where immediate burial is essential in the hot tropical climate, the village’s eight Christian families quickly began to arrange a funeral for the deceased, a woman who died on Christmas Day who went by the single name of Wang. On Monday (Dec. 26), however, village officials ordered that her body be buried according to Buddhist funeral rites or be taken to a burial ground in Savannakhet city, HRWLRF reported.

Lacking the resources for a city burial, the 40 Christians reluctantly agreed. But the village monk then refused to carry out the ceremony because Wang was a Christian.

On Tuesday (Dec. 27), district officials summoned representatives of the Christian community in Huey to their headquarters in Ad-Sapangthong. HRWLRF reported that one of them told the Christians, “Don’t do anything with the dead body; let the body rot if you insist on clinging to the Christian faith.”

With Wang’s body already decomposing, the Christians verbally agreed to cease practicing their faith in order to bury her in the village cemetery, according to HRWLRF.

Once the funeral was over, five of the families told church leaders in another city that they regretted their decision and that they would continue to worship God.

On Wednesday (Dec. 28), sources close to district officials told HRWLRF that they suspected two people were directly responsible for the refusal of a Christian burial in Huey village as well as the Dec. 16 arrests of eight Christian leaders for gathering some 200 church members for a Christmas celebration in Boukham village (See “Lao Officials Arrest Eight Christian Leaders,”). They identified the two as Major Gad, a former military officer now serving as deputy district chief of Ad-Sapangthong and also as head of religious affairs in the district; and the district commissioner, identified by the single name Pornsai.

Still in Stocks
Following the release of one of the Christian leaders, Boukham village authorities have moved six of the detained Christians to an animal pen, blocked visits from family members and banned direct delivery of food, local sources told HRWLRF.

Another detainee had been released temporarily to attend a government training session, but he is now being held with the others. The seven Christians are being held in wooden stocks.

When last seen, the health of one of the detained leaders, identified as Puphet, had clearly deteriorated; Puphet suffers from a kidney ailment. The legs of six of the detainees, but particularly those of Puphet, Wanta and Oun, were swollen and infected, according to HRWLRF.

“This is because their legs, being fastened in wooden stocks, are raised higher than their bottoms, obstructing blood flow,” a spokesman from HRWLRF told Compass. “The stocks are also causing excruciating physical pain and bruises.”

Family members fear that authorities may employ starvation tactics in order to force the six to give up their faith, the spokesman added.

In neighboring Natoo village, 47 Christians threatened with expulsion on Dec. 21 were able to worship on Christmas day without interruption, the spokesman said. Officials have yet to carry out the threatened expulsion. (See “Give Up Your Faith or Face Eviction“)

A crude bomb went off Tuesday afternoon (Nov. 22) in front of a leading Christian charitable organization’s office in this capital city, sowing fresh fear and insecurity among Christians ahead of a critical constitutional deadline. On the same day in the northeastern district of Sindhupalchowk, local residents of the predominantly Buddhist village of Danchhe assaulted two brothers for leading worship services at their home, leaving one unconscious.

Police said they were investigating the explosion in front of the office of the United Mission to Nepal (UMN). While the crude bomb claimed no casualties or damage to the UMN office, it shocked area Christians. The UMN, a Christian international non-governmental organization founded in 1954 by Christian groups from almost 60 countries, has built hospitals, schools, hydropower plants and industrial development and training institutions in Nepal.

At the site police found leaflets signed by someone calling himself a senior member of the Nepal Defense Army (NDA), a militant armed group that has terrorized Christians and Muslims, demanding that they leave Nepal. The leaflets asserted that the majority population in Nepal was Hindu and that therefore it should be a Hindu state. The leaflets also accused the UMN of converting Hindus to Christianity.

Though there was no immediate reaction from the UMN, Nepal’s Christian community expressed shock.

“It is ironic that the blast occurred on the eve of the International Day against Impunity,” said Chirendra Satyal, spokesman of the Assumption Church, where a bomb placed by the NDA in 2009 killed two women and a schoolgirl. “The government of Nepal is treating the lives of Nepalis as expendable by planning to grant amnesty to leaders of the NDA.”

The mastermind of the church attack, NDA chief Ram Prasad Mainali, was arrested within four months and put behind bars, but he retained his criminal links. Earlier this year, police said they arrested six people who admitted they were under Mainali’s instructions to set off fresh explosions in public places.

Despite the revelation, Nepal’s new government has begun negotiations with the NDA, offering amnesty for Mainali and other jailed leaders of the group if it agrees to lay down arms.

“With Christmas coming closer, we are afraid of further attacks,” said Satyal. “There will be larger prayer and festive gatherings, and our churches don’t have the resources to ensure their security.”

The National Christian Federation of Nepal, an umbrella of Protestant organizations, has met Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai, urging him to ensure security for religious minorities and form a special team to investigate the blast.

“This is a highly sensitive issue,” said C.B. Gahatraj, general secretary of the federation. “There are growing attacks on religious minorities.”

In its memorandum to the prime minister, the federation detailed other recent attacks on Christians. On Tuesday (Nov. 22), two brothers who are Christian preachers came under assault in their village. Panchman Tamang, a 45-year-old school teacher in Sindhupalchowk, a district in the northeast, and his elder brother Buddhiman, a farmer in his 50s, were attacked by local residents of their predominantly Buddhist Danchhe village for leading worship services at their home.

Gahatraj said the mob attacked the brothers’ house armed with daggers and wooden batons. When the pair tried to flee, they were pelted with stones. Though Panchman managed to escape, Buddhiman was knocked unconscious. As he was bleeding profusely, the attackers left him for dead.

Later that night, Panchman came back and managed to take his brother to another town for medical care, Gahatraj said. Suffering from a serious head injury, Buddhiman was referred to hospitals in Kathmandu.

Gahatraj said the brothers had taken refuge in another town, unable to return to their village for fear of further attacks.

Sindhupalhowk is one of the poorest districts in Nepal, and the primarily Buddhist, ethnic Tamang community residents have a low literacy level.

“Though Nepal was declared secular five year ago, there is growing persecution of Christians today,” said Chandra Shrestha, pastor at the Nepali Evangelical Church in Bhaktapur, a temple town close to Kathmandu.

A building of a branch of Shrestha’s church in central Nepal’s Kavre district was demolished by villagers last month, and neither police nor the district administration came to the aid of the Christian community, the pastor said.

In October, when Nepal celebrated its biggest Hindu festival (Dashain), during which the country shuts down for almost a month, local Hindus tore down the little one-storey church building constructed by the Christians four years ago because the Christians declined to participate in Hindu celebrations, preferring instead to hold a two-day fellowship event.

The attackers also beat six worshippers, including women and the preacher, who was recovering from a serious operation.

“It’s a poor village that has no hospital or even health post, and people fall sick regularly,” Shrestha said. “There is also a high incidence of drinking.”

Several people became Christians when they were cured through prayers and gave up drinking, Shrestha said.

“There was a perceptible change,” the pastor said. “But it was not liked by the liquor mafia, so the attack could have been instigated by them. Both the government and the administration remain oblivious to Christians’ plight. This neglect has been encouraging the attackers. The government has been treating us like second-class citizens.”

Once the only Hindu kingdom in the world, Nepal became secular in 2006 and a federal republic after an election in 2008.

The electorate was promised that parliament would draft a new constitution within two years to uphold the secular nature of the nascent republic, but a succession of governments has failed to meet the challenge.

As the fourth deadline to put forth a constitution dawns on Wednesday (Nov. 30), a document is still far from ready. Instead, yesterday (Nov. 24), the government once again began the process of extending the deadline, asking for six months more.

The delay and the mounting lawlessness during the transition have left Christians increasingly frustrated.

“We Christians had been praying devoutly that the new constitution be ready in time,” Shrestha said. “So it’s natural that we will feel frustrated by the delay. We are not certain, though, that the new constitution will give us what we want.”

A draft of the document says that though people would have the freedom to follow whichever religion they want, conversions would be prohibited.

“With conversions still deemed a crime in the suggested constitution, we feel that the draft retains the bias towards Christians,” Shrestha said. “This is a direct violation of our fundamental right to practice whatever religion we want.”

NEW DELHI (Compass Direct News) – A recent attack on Christians and church buildings by Burmese soldiers in Kachin state showed that Christian civilians are targeted in the military offensive against insurgents.

“Targeting of Christians is not unusual in Burma’s conflict zones,” Nawdin Lahpai, editor-in-chief of the Kachin News Group, told Compass by phone, referring to the Oct. 16 military firing at a church, detention of a priest and four parishioners, and burning of church property in Kachin state. “The incident reflects the long-time policy of the Buddhist-Burman-majority Burmese government, which discriminates against the ethnic Christian minority.”

About 90 percent of the roughly 56 million people in Burma (also known as Myanmar) are Buddhist, mostly from the Burman ethnic group. Ethnic Kachins – like six other ethnic minorities who live along the country’s borders with China, Thailand and India – have had armed and unarmed groups fighting for independence or autonomy from successive military-led regimes for decades.

Intense fighting between the Burma army and the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) began in June. But it’s not just the armed groups that are the target of Burmese troops, said the editor, a Kachin Christian.

In the Oct. 16 attack, about 150 soldiers from Light Infantry Battalion 438 stormed Nam San Yang village in the Daw Phung Yang area of Bhamo District in Kachin state, which borders China, reported Mizzima, a Delhi-based news organization run by Burmese journalists. Members of a Catholic church who were preparing for Sunday mass heard gunfire and saw soldiers approaching them. They lay on the ground as the army men opened fire at them. No one was hurt.

The soldiers caught Catholic priest Jan Ma Aung Li and four other men.

“They said that all males in the village were people’s militiamen and KIO staff,” Mizzima quoted Aung Li as saying.

The soldiers asked the Christians where the insurgents had stored guns and bombs. When the five detainees said they were not from the KIO, the soldiers kicked them and hit them with gun butts. They ransacked the whole church, apparently to look for weapons and bombs.

“Then they tied our hands with wire and took us away,” the priest told Mizzima. On the way, about 150 more soldiers from Light Infantry Battalion 121 joined them. The Christians were forced to carry heavy rucksacks as they walked with the 300 army men. After walking for three hours, they rested at Lawkathama Monastery, where the soldiers and the KIO’s armed wing, the Kachin Independence Army, had a brief exchange of fire.

Later, they arrived at a Baptist church, where some soldiers burned the house of the priest, Aung San. The soldiers asked the detainees to tell the KIO that the army was preparing to attack their headquarters in Laiza before releasing them.

When the Christians reached their village, they found their houses burning.

The Kachin editor said religion was a key factor in the Kachin conflict, which dates back to the country’s independence in 1948.

Burma’s seven ethnic states, where most Christians and ethnic minorities live, were administered separately by the British. But ethnic leaders agreed to be incorporated into Burma after the Panglong Agreement was signed in 1947 providing for full autonomy, a share of the national wealth and the right to secession to ethnic states.

But Gen. Aung San – democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi’s father who was the head of the then interim government and who led the signing of the agreement – was assassinated months later. Subsequent governments refused to honor the agreement, but they presumed ethnic states to be part of the new country.

“The government’s policy of Burman-Buddhist domination over minorities started with the country’s first prime minister, U Nu,” the Kachin editor said. The U Nu-led government made Buddhism the state religion in 1961, and that’s when the KIO was formed.

In 1994, the KIO signed a ceasefire agreement with the government. But months before Burma’s first democratic election in two decades in September 2010, the then military-led government asked all armed insurgents to join the border security force. The KIO refused to do so, and the military deemed the ceasefire as void. The army’s offensive followed in June 2011, which has displaced over 30,000 Kachins.

While the majority of Kachins are Christian, Burmese authorities do not allow them to construct new church buildings as non-Burman Buddhist cultural expressions are seen as signs of insurgency.

In a report entitled, “Army Committing Abuses in Kachin State,” released this month, Human Rights Watch (HRW)) quoted a 65-year-old Kachin villager from Sang Gang as saying that when the fighting started in June 2011, the Burmese army uprooted a large Christian cross from a hilltop regarded by the villagers as sacred and used it as a stand for their weapons. The villagers had planned to eventually construct a church building on the site.

A 58-year-old Baptist Christian farmer from Maisakba told HRW how on three occasions. From 2000 to 2009, Burmese authorities forbade his community from constructing a new Christian church, in part because the proposed structure was in the shape of a cross.

The editor said he was worried as the army was increasing military presence also in other ethnic states such as Karen. Burma’s neighbors China, Thailand and India have invested huge sums of money in power generation projects in ethnic states and the Burmese government now wants to end the decades-long insurgency.

“The Kachin conflict might soon expand to the whole ethnic region,” he said.

And when that happens, he added, the suffering of civilians, including Christians, will mount manifold.

DHAKA, BANGLADESH (ANS) — Compass Direct News (CDN) is reporting that Buddhist members of an armed rebel group and their sympathizers are holding three tribal Christians captive in a pagoda in southeastern Bangladesh after severely beating them in an attempt to force them to return to Buddhism, Christian sources said.

The report says that those held captive since Friday, April 16, 2010, are Pastor Shushil Jibon Talukder, 55; Bimol Kanti Chakma, 50; and Laksmi Bilas Chakma, 40, of Maddha Lemuchari Baptist Church in Lemuchari village, in Mohalchari sub-district of the mountainous Khagrachari district, some 300 kilometers (186 miles) southeast of Dhaka.

They are to be kept in the pagoda for 15 to 20 days as punishment for having left the Buddhist religion, the sources told Compass Direct News. Local Buddhists are considered powerful as they have ties with the United Peoples Democratic Front (UPDF), an armed group in the hill districts.

“After taking the Christians captive on April 16, the sources said, the next day the armed Buddhist extremists forced other Christians of Maddha Lemuchari Baptist Church to demolish their church building by their own hands,” the CDN story continued. “The sources said Pastor Talukder was bludgeoned nearly to death and had to be taken by wooden stretcher to the pagoda.”

Regional Sub-district Chairman Sona Ratan Chakma told Compass that the “three renegade Buddhists” are being kept in the pagoda for religious indoctrination. “They became Christian, and they were breaking the rules and customs of the Buddhist society, so elders of the society were angry with them,” Chakma said.

“That is why they were sent to a pagoda for 15 to 20 days for their spiritual enlightenment, so that they can come back to their previous place [Buddhism].”

Buddhist villagers in southeastern Bangladesh forced Christians to participate in a Buddhist cremation rite for a deceased family member last weekend and demanded money for a post-funeral ceremony.

Uttam Lal Chakma, 55, died last Friday May 15 after a long illness in Dighinala sub-district of Khagrachari hill district, some 400 kilometers 250 miles southeast of Dhaka. A member of Mynasukhnachari Baptist Church in the Babuchara neighborhood, Chakma had converted from Buddhism to Christianity two years ago.

Pastor Vubon Chakma and Christian villagers sought to give him a Christian burial the next day, but a hostile group of local Buddhists forcibly stopped them from doing so, according to a local Christian source.

The source told Compass that a member of the Buddhist group told family members, “He was born as a Buddhist, and he will be buried as a Buddhist.”

Read the full story at Compass Direct News.

Buddhist mobs attacked several churches in Sri Lanka last week, threatening to kill a pastor in the southern province of Hambanthota and ransacking a 150-year-old Methodist church building in the capital.

On April 8, four Buddhist extremists approached the home of pastor Pradeep Kumara in Weeraketiya, Hambanthota district, calling for him to come out and threatening to kill him. The pastor said his wife, at home alone with their two children, phoned him immediately but by the time he returned, the men had left.

Half an hour later, Kumar said, the leader of the group phoned him and again threatened to kill him if he did not leave the village by the following morning. Later that night the group leader returned to the house and ordered the pastor to come out, shouting, “I didn’t bring my gun tonight because if I had it with me, I would use it”

Read the full story at Compass Direct News .

DHAKA, Bangladesh – Buddhist villagers in southeastern Bangladesh’s Rangamati district last week beat a young father and drove him from his house for converting to Christianity.

The Buddhists in Asambosti, in the Tabalchari area some 300 kilometers (186 miles) southeast of Dhaka, warned Sujan Chakma, 27, not to return to his home after beating him on Dec. 18. Chakma, who converted to Christianity about four months ago, has come back to his home but some nights the likelihood of attacks forces him to remain outside.

He is often unable to provide for his 26-year-old wife, Shefali Chakma, and their 6-year-old son, as area residents opposed to his faith refuse to give him work as a day laborer. Chakma, his wife and son do not eat on days he does not work, he said.

Full story at Compass Direct News.

DHAKA, Bangladesh – Buddhist clerics and local council officials are holding 13 newly converted Christians captive in a pagoda in a southeastern mountainous district of Bangladesh in an attempt to forcibly return them to Buddhism.

A spokesman for the Parbatta Adivasi (Hill Tract) Christian Church told Compass on condition of anonymity that “the plight of the Christians is horrifying.”

Local government council officials in Jorachuri sub-district in Rangamati district, some 300 kilometers (186 miles) southeast of Dhaka, are helping the Buddhist monks to hold the Christians against their will, he said.

“The 13 tribal Christians were taken forcefully to a pagoda on Dec. 10 to accept Buddhism against their will,” he said. “They will be kept in a pagoda for 10 days to perform the rituals to be Buddhists – their heads were shaved, and they were given yellow saffron robes to dress in.”

Compass Direct News

Amil was summoned to the office of the local political leader. The man asked him to write a statement saying, “I will never preach about Jesus Christ and will never show the film on the life of Jesus Christ in this area.”

Since Amil refused to turn his back on Christ, the officials have threatened to send his case to a higher authority.

Amil and his ministry have been the target of anti-Christian extremists for several months. In June, local officials interrupted a worship service that Amil was leading. They were delivering a warrant calling for each of the Christians in the service to appear before the local government body and answer questions.

On June 30, Amil and his congregation appeared before the authorities, at which time each believer was questioned individually about how they became a Christian.

“We received Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior by our own decision and conviction,” one believer told officials. The other Christians echoed this testimony. Amil answered each of the questions they asked about the ministry.

They authorities declined to arrest Amil or the Christians, but they tried to force them to sign a statement saying they would not tell others about Jesus.

When these Bhutanese Christians refused to sign the statement, the officials let them go under the condition that they would not have any meetings or worship services and that they would come back and clean the government office and grounds every 15 days.

Amil and his church members are making the most of their unusual “punishment” by continuing to be examples of Christ’s love and humility as they serve these local officials.

Bhutan is a difficult place to minister the Gospel. In the past, elected officials have banned Christianity and denied citizenship to anyone who refused to practice the state religion of Buddhism. It is illegal for Christians to even meet in homes for worship in Bhutan.

Amil asks for continued prayer that God will continue to use him effectively, in spite of the circumstances. He also seeks prayer for those who oppose the ministry. He would like to see them turn to Christ.

Amil also asks for prayer for the Christians in his congregation, that God would continue to give them courage and help them stand firm in their faith.