Christians say they are getting threats of suicide bombs

By Anto Akkara, June 16, 2009

[Ecumenical News International, New Delhi] Christians in Pakistan say they are being threatened with violence by extremist groups claiming to represent Islam and they hope that a government offensive against militants in the Muslim nation will succeed.

Christian groups say extremists in a number of instances had given them a choice -- embrace Islam or ready themselves for attacks by suicide bombers.

Two masked young men riding motorbikes without registration numbers in the Pakistan city of Lahore on June 10 threatened to blow up the Rabita Manzil, a complex that houses several Roman Catholic groups, including the church's communications office.

The militants told a Catholic teacher living next to the complex that his family had to give up their Christian faith and pay a 1.5 million Pakistan rupee (US$18,500) fine or "be ready to be blown up in a suicide bomb attack.""We are really worried. The situation here is such that anything can happen anywhere," the Rev. Nadeem John Shakir, the director of the Catholic center, told Ecumenical News International.Shakir issued a press statement after the threat and police have stationed two guards at the entrance to the center.

More than three million civilians have fled the mountainous North West Frontier Province since early May, according to emergency aid groups, after the Pakistan government decided to break a pact it had struck with some Taliban groups. Government forces began to storm the strongholds of extremist militia.In February, in a bid to halt hostilities in the troubled regions around the Swat Valley and other districts, the Pakistan government had succumbed to a Taliban demand for the introduction of Sharia, an Islamic legal system, in the region, thereby rendering the constitution and the judicial system redundant.

Residents gave accounts of Islamic militants enforcing their writ ruthlessly, closing hundreds of schools educating girls, including Christian educational establishments. They forced many of those in the tiny Christian minority there to embrace Islam under threat of death, or quit the region. They also introduced jazia, a religious tax imposed only on minorities in other areas.The Pentecostal Bible school in Quetta was closed indefinitely in May, a month after Taliban militants threatened a suicide bomb attack.

On June 12, Allama Sarfaraz Ahmed Naeemi, an eminent Muslim religious scholar, was killed in a suicide attack at his seminary in Lahore. Reports said he had been targeted by extremists claiming to represent Islam after he had declared suicide bombing as un-Islamic. He had also supported the crackdown on Taliban groups in the region bordering Afghanistan.Following the killing of the cleric, church groups decided to scale down a major ecumenical march they had planned for the day to protest against "increasing attacks on minorities by fundamentalists.""We had only a token program and around 250 Christians took part in it," Victor Azariah, general secretary of the National Council of Churches in Pakistan, told ENI. "We are keeping a low profile these days. The situation is not a very happy one."

(Episcopal Life Online)