Religious freedom retreats in many countries, but not all

Oct 16th 2015, 18:07
by ERASMUS

SEVENTEEN years ago, when American officialdom started performing annual investigations of global religious freedom, most of the world was still living in a climate of liberal optimism. It was assumed that religous persecution, as practised by certain nasty governments, was an unpleasant holdover from the dark practices of yesteryear; with the passage of time, and with appropriate diplomatic pressure on rogue regimes from the leading Western democracies, freedom of belief should eventually be enjoyed just about everywhere.

In the latest encyclopedic survey of religious freedom by the State Department, issued this week, there is little trace of that utopian spirit. It documents terrible and in many cases worsening violations of basic freedoms in dozens of countries, and acknowledges that cruel governments are no longer the sole or even the most pressing problem. The "principal persecutors and preventers of religious tolerance and [free] practice", according to John Kerry, the secretary of state, are the kinds of forces which step into a vacuum when legitimate authority collapses: warlords, racketeers and terrorist groups which have sunk to new levels of nihilistic cruelty.

The example cited first in his report is the group variously known as Daesh, Islamic State (IS) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). It has "forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of people, conducted mass executions, and kidnapped, sold, enslaved, raped and/or forcibly converted thousands of women and children, all on grounds that these people stand in opposition to ISIL's religious dogma." While IS straddles the Syrian-Iraqi border, a similarly brutal transnational force, Boko Haram, has wreaked havoc in four West African countries. Not only Nigeria, its home base, but also parts of Niger, Chad and Cameroon are "subject to terror and destruction as a result of Boko Haram's quest to impose its religious and political beliefs throughout the region."

These are not new assertions. But they are given grim authority by their inclusion in a reference work used by the world's human-rights campaigners, as well as judges and bureaucrats adjudicating asylum cases. The report rightly stresses that in the war zones of the Middle East, no group has a monopoly of religiously inspired cruelty. Apart from Islamic State, the al-Nusra Front, representing another strand of militant Sunni Islam, is guilty of "targeted executions of religious leaders", including seven Druze clerics and a Dutch Jesuit priest, Frans van der Lugt. The group also kidnapped many other Christian priests and nuns. And in Iraq, Shia militias have committed terrible atrocities against Sunnis, including abductions, execution-style killings and torture.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2015/10/america-and-religious-liberty

http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/religiousfreedom/index.htm#wrapper