Taking the fall? Iraqi Christians praying at Johannes Church in Sodertalje, Sweden

This report from the BBC’s ‘From our Own Correspondent’ series, looks at the Swedish Government’s recent deportation of Iraqis from Sweden. What seems unusual about the current wave of deportations is the the subjects are Assyrian Christians, possibly the most endangered Iraqis of all:

Although Sweden once led the way in welcoming Iraqi refugees, the authorities are now clamping down and Iraqi asylum seekers are increasingly faced with deportation.

Jakob’s family have been threatened with death in Iraq unless they convert.I have just spent a week meeting some very angry, very frightened people.

Lilian, for example, who cleans a house in Sodertalje. And George, who does odd jobs and shares a basement room in Gothenburg. And Jakob who is 20 and goes to high school in Gustavsberg outside Stockholm.

They did not want to tell me their real names for fear of being identified, both in Sweden and at home, because they are all Christians from Iraq who went to Sweden to seek asylum and they have all had their asylum requests turned down.

This they find hard to understand. I have seen the court judgement that confirmed Jakob’s refusal.
It cites several threats made against him and his family in Iraq, in which they are told to convert to Islam or be killed.

One of these threats was delivered by eight masked men armed with pistols who broke into their flat in Baghdad early one morning. They all tell similar stories of kidnap and ransom, of churches being bombed, of death threats.
Appeal.

In the last two years, Sweden has deported more than 500 Iraqis. And they are baffled by the attitude of the Swedish authorities. There are no human rights in Sweden, they say, even animals are treated better here. Unfair as that may be, it is a line I hear more than once.

I am taken to meet Lilian by Nuri Kino, a journalist who has devoted a lot of time to the plight of Iraqi asylum seekers in Sweden. On the motorway down to Sodertalje, he tells me he has been on the phone to Lilian’s lawyer that morning and she has just been told that Lilian’s appeal has been rejected. The lawyer, he says, does not dare tell her yet – and he is not going to either.

Both hands come off the steering wheel as he gesticulates furiously.

The town has a large community of Assyrian Christians. They have come from Turkey and Lebanon, Iraq and Syria.
Nuri himself is one. He was born in Turkey and came to Sweden during the Cyprus crisis of 1974.

‘Ducking and diving’
Sodertalje has been a magnet for asylum seekers from Iraq since the fall of Saddam. Nuri calls it Mesopotalje.
There are several reasons why people who fled from Iraq chose Sweden.

They include the country’s reputation for generosity (established in the 1970s when refugees from Chile were taken in after the fall of Allende), the existence of an Iraqi community where people would feel safe, and a well established smugglers’ network.

But Sweden is now tired of being a soft touch.

“We expected a higher degree of solidarity from our European Union neighbours,” Tobias Billstrom, the minister responsible for asylum, tells me.

In the last two years, Sweden has deported more than 500 Iraqis. Deportation is what Lilian is scared of.
She is not married and both her parents are dead. Her brothers have found refuge in Canada and Australia.

“If a person gets a negative response to their asylum claim, they must leave because otherwise we would have free immigration and that is not what the people of Sweden want” – Tobias Billstrom, Swedish migration minister

She does not give much for her chances in Baghdad without male protection. “I’ve got nowhere to go,” she says. “I’d just have to stay in the airport.”

In Sweden she ducks and dives to survive, living for a few days here, a few days there, sometimes in Sodertalje, sometimes in Stockholm. Her only regular income is the few hundred Swedish crowns she earns cleaning.

Nuri nags her about her smoking. “Have you eaten today?” he asks, “Or are you still living on coffee and cigarettes? You’re going to kill yourself.”

“I might as well just throw myself off a bridge anyway,” she says. She is joking, I think.

UN condemnation
We finish talking and Lilian looks at Nuri. “No,” he says. He knows she wants to ask about her appeal. “Nuri,” she pleads.

“No. I don’t know,” he says. “We need to go and talk to your lawyer.”

She says something in Arabic and he gives in. “You’re rejected,” he says.

Lilian is quiet at first, trying to take it in. “OK,” she says quietly. But then she gets angry and starts sobbing.
“Why?” she says. “Why?”

The week I am in Sweden there is news of a deportation flight.

Fifty-six Iraqis are put on the plane. The deportation is condemned by the United Nations, which insists it is not safe to send Iraqis back to Baghdad. “But if a person gets a negative response to their asylum claim, they must leave,” says Tobias Billstrom.

“Because otherwise we would have free immigration and that is not what the people of Sweden want. We aim to intensify our returns policy.”

That is not something Lilian wants to hear.

A couple of days later, Nuri picks her up in Stockholm and we eat ice-cream in a park. She is laughing and joking.
Her situation has not changed but the sun is out and she has come to terms with her latest setback.

She needs that kind of resilience to survive.

As we have reported in the past (and you will certainly hear little or nothing of this in much of the mainstream media), Eastern Christians living in Muslim-majority countries are among the world’s most oppressed peoples.

Muslims are safe in Iraq. Christians are not. But the difference is that Sweden is not afraid of Christians – and the public is largely unaware of the distinction when politicians claim (as they no doubt will), that they are ‘doing something’ about immigration from Muslim countries.

[Source: BBC - 'From Our Own Correspondent']

The congregation of the HKBP Filadelfia church in Bekasi, West Java, demanded justice from the National Police after a fifth attack by the Islamic Community Forum (FUI) left more than a dozen people injured on Sunday.

Members of Huria Kristen Batak Protestan in Jejalen Jaya subdistrict, home to around 1,500 congregation members, were about to begin their Sunday service at 8 a.m. on the street in front of their sealed church construction site.

However, the area had been barricaded by around 700 FUI members and local residents. Some people in the blockade had apparently claimed to be the members of the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), an affiliate of FUI.
Hundreds of officers from Bekasi Police were present, but were apparently “unable” to stop the mob from attacking the group, leaving around 20 people injured, mostly women.

“The police did not do anything when the mob started throwing stones and hitting and kicking us,” HKBP Filadelfia minister Pietersen Purba said. However, Bekasi Police chief Adj. Comr. chief Iman Sugianto blamed the victims.

“We have warned the congregation not to hold their services in the area, because residents do not want them to do so, but they did not follow our instructions,” Iman told The Jakarta Post.

HKBP Filadelfia has been in the area for nearly 10 years, with individuals holding services in each other’s homes. By 2007 the group had raised enough money to purchase a 1,000-square-meter plot of land in Jejalen Jaya subdistrict, on which they planned to build their church.

The congregation, however, never commenced construction of the church because their building permit requests to Bekasi Interfaith Communication Forum (FKUB) and the Bekasi regent remained unanswered for more than a year.
In October 2009, after securing permission from Jejalen Jaya subdistrict chief to hold services on their empty plot, the group built an 8-by-10-meter semipermanent structure to store items such as tables and chairs.

After their land was sealed early this year, the congregation continued to hold religious services on the street, under umbrellas and using newspapers to sit on.

The church’s legal counsel, Sahara Pangaribuan, said the police had been negligent during the attacks, and urged the National Police to investigate Bekasi Police for allowing the mob violence to go on. One church member who was beaten in the incident, Franky Tambunan, 26, said the congregation had attempted to build permanent church several times but the construction had always been destroyed by unknown people.

Franky, who had attempted to protect his father during one of the attacks, was hit in the face and kicked several times. Another victim, Berliana Sinaga, 22, who suffered bruises to her face, said more than one man had hit her head and face several times.

Another victim, Risma Silalahi, 45, said her head continued to hurt after the attack.

Risma said the public had no reason to prevent them from conducting their religious activities.

“They cannot accuse us of *trying to convert people*. We have services in *Batak* language, which nobody else would understand,” she said. Judianto Simanjuntak, another legal counsel for the church, said the group planned to hold their next Sunday service in front of the State Palace for want of somewhere to carry out their religious activities.

The theory always advanced by Muslims and liberal apologists is that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance which respects all beliefs, in particular those of other Abrahamic faiths. The truth rarely (if ever) corresponds to the rhetoric. In every Muslim majority country Christians and members of other non-Muslim faiths are abused, degraded and assaulted.

Despite what your local interfaith dialogue committee might try to tell you, the call to fight ‘unbelievers’ wherever they are encountered and for Islam to be supreme are built into the Muslim doctrine; as integral a part of Islam as the Lord’s Prayer is to Christianity. It is the very essence of Jihad.

[Source: Jakarta Post | Video: VoA]

Assyrian Winemaker Yuhanna-Aktaş - his business faces harrassment in anti-Christian Turkey

“They would not sell me iron and cement; the tractor driver did not come,” Yuhanna Aktaş wrote in a letter to daily Radikal. “I could not find a food engineer for months and could only find a chemist from Diyarbakır. Because [they say producing wine] is a sin.”

The Syriac Christian and Turkish citizen living in the Midyat district of the southeastern province of Mardin has built a wine factory but said he has been unable to secure a water supply and a road for the facility.

Syriac families living in the region commonly produce wines, but it is hard for consumers to find them since they are not usually sold in shops.

Aktaş, a former jewelry maker, said in his letter that he had prepared a proposal to build a factory to produce homemade Syriac wines, a practice significant for Christians both culturally and religiously. He submitted his proposal to the Agriculture Ministry and obtained permission from the Tobacco and Alcohol Market Regulatory Agency, or TAPDK, to build the facility two years ago. He was granted permission, but, he said, his troubles only began there.

A few days after he received permission, Aktaş said, his house was raided by the police at night. He claimed his home’s front door was broken and he was beaten by police officers in front of his children. His bedroom and all the drawers in the house were searched for wine, he said, adding that the public prosecutor came to his house after the incident.

“I filed a complaint against these police officers but the court only gave a symbolic fine to one of them,” Aktaş said, adding that he was tried on charges of illegally producing wine at home due to the wines found in the cellar of his house. He said he told the court that some of these wines belonged to his friends and the rest were produced for use in church ceremonies.

“But they did not take the testimony of these friends and they also did not take into consideration that these wines are produced for religious rituals,” Aktaş said, adding that the court fined him and his partner 180,000 Turkish Liras.

They appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Appeals, Aktaş said, noting that the homes of other Syriacs in the region are still being raided based on claims of illegal wine production.

Though he applied to many institutions, Aktaş said, he was unable to bring water, telephone lines and roads to his factory building. He said he paid 100,000 liras to build a temporary road to the factory and to hook up the electricity. The factory is completed, equipped with machines from Italy and built using traditional Syriac architectural styles, but cannot produce wine.

Aktaş said some local landowners have threatened to cut his electricity by removing electric poles carrying power to the factory that are located on their land.

Mardin Gov. Hasan Duruer said if Aktaş had built his factory within the borders of the Organized Industrial Zone, he would have been able to get the infrastructural work completed in time.

“Citizens build factories anywhere they want and then ask for infrastructure. This is not possible. They will have to do the electricity, water and road construction [themselves] as well,” said Duruer.

Responding to the governor’s claims, Aktaş said he built the factory in an area that was rented to him by the Finance Ministry for 49 years. “I did not build that factory arbitrarily,” he said.

Assyrian Christians have lived in Turkey and produced wine there for centuries before Islam existed

Wine is a tradition in Turkey. Indeed, winemaking is thought to have originated in the Caucasus region (where Turkey sits), predating the relatively recent arrival of Islam by thousands of years. Turkey is also in the world’s top five producers of grapes.

Behold the tolerance of Islam – and beware the weasel words of Islamists when they try to convince you that Islam is tolerant of the other Abrahamic faiths, when they wheel out their fallacious ‘There is no compulsion in Religion’ argument.

[Source: Hürriyet Daily News]

Syriac Christians face persecutio in Turkey - but the patter is repeated to one degree or another in all Muslim countries

LONDON – The Bishop of Chichester, the Rt. Rev. John Hind, says Christians in the Middle East are facing “extreme deprivation”.

He continued, “In Iraq, Christians have suffered extreme deprivation, sometimes due to sheer religious hatred, sometimes just caught in the cross-fire, sometimes because, amazingly and quite wrongly, they are regarded as representatives of a western faith.

“So we cannot disown our own particular responsibility and the pressure on Christians in some parts of the world.”

The bishop noted that not all forms of persecution were violent or even illegal.

“Just across the border from Iraq, in south-east Turkey, a part of the world that I know particularly well, court cases are alleging the theft of land from local villages by monasteries in Tur Abdin which have stood there since the late fourth century,” he said.

“There is a certain degree of ridiculousness about some of this, but that does actually affect the sufferings of those Syriac villagers and others who are suffering so greatly.”

Hind also commented on what some have dubbed “persecution” within the United Kingdom. He said he welcomed the reinstatement of Caroline Petrie, the Christian nurse who was suspended after offering to pray for a patient.

According to the bishop, a spokesman for a Muslim forum in his diocese described the decision to suspend her as “crazy.”

The bishop described it as “a welcome sign of how faith communities can hold together in the face of a growing hostility to faith.”

As the world leads a hypocritical chorus of opprobium toward Israel for its supposed mistreatment of the Palestinians, it has long ignored the appalling oppression, discrimination and violence suffered in Majority Muslim countries by the Christians of the Middle East.

From Turkey (yes, the country that is currently attempting to position itself as a Middle East leading champion of human rights), to Syria, Lebanon, ‘Palestine’ and just about any other Islamic country, minority Christians are regarded as fair game for robbery, random violence, sexual violence vandalism, police harassment, government discrimination and oppression.

The Bishop should be congratulated for speaking out and highlighting the perverse ’secondary’ discrimination taking place in developed countries due to the intolerant ideology of multiculturalism.

[Source: The Christian Post]

Our campaigning banner to help raise awareness of the appalling treatment of Christians in Egypt. Feel free to use on your own site with a backlink to us (re-sizing permitted).

 The appalling persecution of Egyptian Christians by Muslims, tolerated and facilitated by the Egyptian authorities, reached a new nadir this week:

 An Egyptian court in the southern city of Assuit acquitted this week four Muslims accused of killing 61-year-old Farouk Attallah on October 19, 2009. In broad daylight and in full view of witnesses, the killers fired 31 bullets to his head before beheading him, in the busy village market place of Attaleen, near Dairout, 313 kilometers south of Cairo. The dead body was then dragged in the street, accompanied by shouts of victory. Free Copts website published a video of the disfigured body (WARNING: extemely graphic and upsetting content).

The judge presiding over the court on February 22, said that he was not satisfied that the testimony of the witnesses established that the imprisoned men were the killers. After the acquittal of Mohamad, Ashraf, Osama and Ahmad Hassouna, there was jubilation in the court room, with shouts of ‘Allah is Great’ and congratulations from all Muslims, including members of the state security forces who were present.

Christians were enraged over the acquittal, since similar cases would result in life imprisonment or execution for a Copt if the victim was a Muslim.

The verdict came as another wake-up call to many Copts, according to Peter Sarwat, the plaintiff’s attorney. “It sends a clear message that Coptic blood is extremely cheap.” he told Mariam Ragy of Katiba Tibia Coptic site. “This acquittal will make permanent the present culture of impunity enjoyed by Muslim aggressors against Copts.”.

Sarwat said the ruling was inadequate, as it acquitted the accused but did not say who the perpetrators are. “If these men did not kill, so who killed? The ruling should have referred the case to the general prosecution to present the perpetrators.”

The Court based its ruling on quasi non existent proof, as well as the absence of “positive evidence” testimony versus the presence of “negative evidence” testimony. “The judge refused to take into consideration the testimonies of the dead man’s daughter who said she only saw one killer and not four, as well as the testimony of the Muslim man who was wounded in the shootings,” said Sarwat. According to media reports, most people who witnessed the shootings in the market place refused to come forward for fear of vengeance from the assailants’ family. There were false witnesses who confirmed that the killers were present at work.

“It is not enough to get a conviction based only on police reports which are full of legal loopholes and weak prosecution investigations,” said Sarwat. Legal observers have always claimed that the police purposely deliver to prosecution reports full of inadequacies and loopholes, thereby getting from the courts acquittals for Muslims.

What prompted the killing of Farouk Attallah was an alleged illicit sexual relationship between his son Romany and a local Muslim girl, Hagger Hassouna. A rumor that intimate photos of Hagger together with her lover Romany were circulating on cell phones in Dairout lead four members of the Hassona family to kill Romany’s father, after failing to locate his son, who had fled.

Besides the killing of Farouk Attallah, the arrest of the Hassouna perpetrators sparked on October 24, 2009, Muslim riots and collective punishment against all Copts in Dairout. Christian-owned shops, pharmacies, and homes were looted and burned (AINA 10-27-2009).

Although several hundreds Muslims participated in those riots, the police only detained 19, and these were acquitted on December 13, 2009 because of the lack of eyewitnesses and conflicting statements between the accused and the victims.

The majority of Copts believe the reason for the acquittal of Muslims is that although Egypt claims to be a secular state, in reality it applies the Sharia law which dictates .that a Muslim who kills a non-Muslim must not be killed, because it is not reasonable to equate a Muslim with a “polytheist” (a Christian).

Commenting on the acquittal, Dr. Naguib Gobraeel, President of the Egyptian Union of Human Rights, said: “What is the solution? The same happened with regards to Al-Kosheh Massacre [21 Copts were slaughtered in 2000 and not one Muslim was indicted], the attack on the Copts in Alexandria were blamed on a mentally unstable person; even the assailant who beheaded Abdo Goerge Younan in Menoufiah is now in a mental hospital [AINA 9-21-2009]. Heavenly Justice is our last resourt.” He stated that he will appeal this week’s verdict.

The victim’s family was greatly shocked and saddened by the acquittal. “In spite of the blood of their slain family head filling the street, the Muslim killers got away literally with murder,” Sarwat said “It just shows how cheap Coptic blood can be.”

Sarwat asserted that he will appeal the ruling. “We cannot remain silent over this verdict as it has very serious implications for all Copts in Egypt.” He added: “It is not safe for Copts now, as any Muslims who wants to get rid of a Copt, would kill him, knowing well that in the end he will be acquitted.”

The unremitting, systematic and brutally-violent persecution meted out to Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority (they form over 10% of the population) is nothing less than a cultural genocide – with the authorities, judiciary and police participating, encouraging and facilitating.