August 21, 2007

Christians remain fearful after deadline passes for converting to Islam.

ISTANBUL – Christians and Hindus in northern Pakistan have received dozens of letters threatening them with death if they refuse to become Muslims, church sources and a police official said yesterday.

Police continued to provide security around churches and temples this week, even as Christians received new deadlines for converting to Islam.

Though the original August 10 deadline for conversion has passed, Peshawar’s minorities continue to live in fear, canceling church activities and skipping services, a Catholic priest said.

“Embrace Islam and become Muslims … otherwise, after next Friday, August 10, your colony will be ruined,” read more than a dozen identical letters collected by the Church of Pakistan (COP) in Peshawar, 150 kilometers (93 miles) west of Islamabad.

A spokesman for COP, Pakistan’s largest Protestant body, said that on August 7 some of the threatening letters had been thrown into the courtyards of Christian and Hindu homes in Peshawar’s Kohati, Interior City and Cantonment districts. Different letters were mailed to Peshawar’s Catholic and Protestant churches.

“All in all, we were able to collect only 15 of the letters from the community,” said Ashar Dean, assistant director of communications for COP’s Peshawar diocese.

Explaining that they were delivered to neighborhoods heavily populated by minority families living in small houses around a common courtyard, Dean said that the letters probably reached more than 100 Christians and Hindus.

A separate letter mailed to COP diocesan priest Joseph John threatened suicide attacks against churches.

“Our mosques and children are being martyred at American orders,” read the letter. “Therefore the churches will also be wiped out from the face of the earth.”

Christian leaders immediately informed local police about the threats, prompting a meeting with City Police Chief Abdul Majeed Marwat on August 10.

“The security in their areas has been beefed up around churches and other places of worship,” Marwat told Compass yesterday, reiterating promises made to minority leaders last week.

A Christian politician also brought the letter to the national government’s attention on Friday (August 10), English-language daily Dawn reported. Pervaiz Masih, a member of the National Assembly of Pakistan, read a copy of the threat letter to the assembly and called on the government to take note of insecurity it had created among Peshawar’s Christians.

But Christians remain uncertain how seriously authorities have taken the threat.

“The speaker [of the house] took the matter very lightly and asked [Pervaiz Masih] to remind him about it in the presence of the interior minister,” Dawn reported on August 11.