Amid fears that Hindu extremists are persecuting Christians in greater numbers, Nepali church leaders launched the Forum for Human Concern in Nepal in January to safeguard religious freedom and garner international support for the release of four Christians jailed since October 29 on charges of proselytizing.
A growing body of evidence confirms reports that Christians in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands have been forced to convert to Islam under threat of death, although Muslim clerics deny the claims.
A sizeable Christian community is among the Karen people group in Myanmar (formerly Burma) facing abuse at the hands of the country’s military regime, according to Newsroom-Online, an Internet news service based in London.
Members of the radical Hindu group the Bajrang Dal beat two Christian workers, David Massey and Simon Sakria, for more than two hours on January 4 for showing a “Jesus” film in Jehra, a remote village on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border in western India. Church leaders said the two Christians had gone to visit the house of a local pastor when they were attacked.
A prominent Indian church leader is warning of a possible bloodbath against Christians by Hindu fundamentalists.
Indonesia’s Christian and political leaders are convinced that the widespread Christmas Eve church bombings were meant to provoke all-out war between the Muslim and Christian communities in the country.
Turkmenistan’s political police evicted a Protestant Christian pastor with his wife and two children from their home near Ashgabad on December 9, confiscating their personal deed of ownership and sealing the gate to prevent their return.
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.
“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.
Dr. Paul Tran-Dinh-Ai, also known as Paul Ai, a leader of the Underground Church in Vietnam, has won some 30 Vietnamese to Christ is his new hometown of Hampton, Virginia. The much-persecuted leader has now urged American Christians to “wake up and see the mission field in their own back yard” and has shared lessons he has learned under persecution.
Dr. Benjamin Munthe, an Indonesian pastor who was involved in a September 17 brutal attempt on his life in which his driver Caleb was killed, has spoken about that fateful day.
If you become an evangelical Christian in Laos, the communist neighbor of Vietnam and Cambodia, you likely will be “asked” to sign a fill-in-the-blank form.
banner at the airstrip on Ambon, a tiny dot in Indonesia’s Maluku island chain, quotes passages from both the Christian Bible and the Muslim Koran calling for peace.
Dozens of Christians have been killed in renewed attacks by extremist Muslim warriors in Indonesia’s eastern province of Maluku. At least 32 people died in an attack on the Ambon island village of Hative Besar, according to news reports.
Authorities in Vietnam are jamming Christian radio broadcasts in a desperate attempt to curb the rapid spread of Protestant Christianity among the Hmong minority in the country’s northwest provinces along the China border.
Religious leaders sign “Commitment to Global Peace”The statement includes 11 promises to work for global peace, education and the abolition of nuclear weapons, among other things.
A Christian leader in western Uzbekistan’s autonomous Karakalpakstan region has been jailed since July 25, accused by local police of illegal drug possession.
INDIA, 10 May 2000 (Newsroom) – More than 60 Christians attending a two-day religious convention were beaten by a mob of suspected Hindu nationalists in a village about 100 miles northeast of Bombay. None of the injured were hospitalized.
VIENTIANE, Laos (BP)–If you become an evangelical Christian in Laos, the communist neighbor of Vietnam and Cambodia, you likely will be “asked” to sign a fill-in-the-blank form.
28 September 2000 (Newsroom) — Dozens of Christians have been killed in renewed attacks by extremist Muslim warriors in Indonesia’s eastern province of Maluku. At least 32 people died in an attack on the Ambon island village of Hative Besar, according to news reports.