Secretary Rice: Report Dovetails with War on Terror
On Friday the U.S. State Department released its Annual Report on International Religious Freedom. The global survey on religious freedom reports on conditions "as well as what the U.S. government is doing in each foreign country to promote religious freedom," according to Tad Stahnke, who is policy director of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
In this, its eighth annual report, the USCIRF has recommended that the State Department list 11 nations as the worst offenders -- referred to as "countries of particular concern" (CPCs) in the report. Eight were singled out last year: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Vietnam. The Commission, said Stahnke, has recommended that Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan be added to the list. Those countries, according to the report, "engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations" of religious freedom.
Four countries -- Burma, China, Iran, and Sudan -- have been designated as CPCs every year since 1999. The State Department notes little improvement in the religious freedom situation in China, for example, despite new regulations on religious affairs that took effect last year. Those regulations, says the report, "continued to define only government-approved practices as faiths as normal or legitimate."
In addition to "significant restrictions" imposed against Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist adherents, Chinese officials also cracked down on the Christian faith over the last year. "Repression of unregistered Protestant church networks and 'house' churches continued to be widely reported," notes the State Department report. "House church leaders sometimes faced detention, formal arrest and sentences of re-education or imprisonment." Examples cited include the seven-and-half-year prison sentence handed down to Christian pastor Zhang Rongliang and restrictions placed on church historian Zhang Yinan that prevent him from leaving the country.
In Iran, the actions and rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration has created a "threatening atmosphere" for practically all who do not practice Ja'fari Shi'a Islam, states the report. Religious minorities -- most notably the Baha'is, which the government in Iran considers a heretical Islamic group -- have been subjected to "intensified negative campaigns" by the government-controlled media since Ahmadinejad took office in June 2005.
The report notes "there were reports of imprisonment, harassment, intimidation, and discrimination" based on religious beliefs against even the legally recognized religious minorities in Iran -- Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. The State Department points out that the November 2005 murder of a man who had converted to Christianity ten years earlier was reportedly followed by "repression of and threats to other Christians, including arrests of ten Christians."
