Lecture Archive
Religious Freedom and Global Conflict
by Paul Marshall, Sr. Fellow, The Center for Religious Freedom,
Freedom House, Washington DC
February 4, 2002 — University of Kentucky-Lexington
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1. Introduction
At the end of 1997, the former executive editor of the New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal confessed, "Early this year I realized that in decades of reporting, writing or assigning stories on human rights, I rarely touched on one of the most important. Political human rights, legal, civil and press rights, emphatically often; but the right to worship where and how God or conscience leads, almost never." While Rosenthal changed dramatically on this score, the pattern he describes is still widespread.
By religious freedom or persecution I do not mean human rights violations against "religious" persons. Since most people in the world claim some sort of religious identity, then most human rights violations of any kind are against religious believers. Rather, we are concerned with situations where a person's religion is a component of the persecution or discrimination they suffer. Of course, there are few cases where religion is the only factor: religion is usually intertwined with ethnic, political, territorial and economic concerns. Religious persecution occurs when some or all of the oppression and discrimination that people suffer would not occur if they or their oppressors were of a different religion.
Why should we focus on this? Is suffering or death on religious grounds inherently worse than other suffering or death on other grounds? Surely not. Rather, it needs attention because it has been especially neglected, even in a world where many human rights issues are neglected. Until very recently it has been the orphan child of the human rights movement, therefore it needs our political attention.
2. Global Patterns of Religious freedom
a. Current Trends
Worldwide, religious freedom is deteriorating. A world is difficult to summarize, but the trend shows in the largest population countries, such as China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria, as well as in the increasingly religious elements of modern wars.
China has always repressed religion, but it has cracked down even more harshly in the wake of Falun Gong's appearance in 1998. The government, mindful that religious groups have been a source of opposition throughout Chinese history, has also increased its attacks on unregistered Protestants and Catholics (the majority of Chinese Christians) as well as Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uighurs.
In India, violent attacks on religious minorities, especially Christians, have been increasing since the Hindu-nationalist BJP came to power. It portrays non-Hindus as "foreigners" and openly advocates a Chinese model of church control. In Pakistan, the military government has backed down from reigning in Islamic radicals intent on imposing Islamic sharia law. The country's blasphemy laws, which carry the death penalty, are used against religious minorities while the Amadhiya minority is treated as heretics deserving of death.
Indonesia's transition to democracy is accompanied by religious violence. There are separatist movements in Islamic Aceh province and in predominantly Christian Irian Jaya. 150,000 largely Catholic refugees from now independent East Timor languish in the western half of the island. In Ambon, Christian/Muslim communal violence has been transformed into the slaughter of Christians by the influx of heavily armed "jihad laskar" warriors from elsewhere in the country. The death toll is in the thousands, with over a hundred thousand refugees.
In Nigeria, most northern states have announced the institution of sharia law. Fears among the Christian population that they will become second-class citizens have erupted in violence leaving hundreds, if not thousands, dead during 2000.
Another important indicator is increasing religious elements in war. The fighting between Israel and the Palestinians has much more religious rhetoric and identification than in previous decades. The conflicts of the late 1980's and more so the 1960's and 1970's, were characterized by nationalist rhetoric. Now the theme is defense of Islam and its holy places. Mosques, synagogues and churches have been attacked.
The India-Pakistan struggle over Kashmir has always had religious elements: after all, India and Pakistan only came into separate existence because of their different dominant religions. But now Kashmir draws militants from around the world and is portrayed as a holy war. Both countries have named their nuclear weapons after Hindu and Muslim heroes. The conflict in Chechnya and the former Yugoslavia show the same religious radicalization.
Religion is also the hallmark of the world's most bloody, indeed genocidal, conflict. In Sudan a radical Islamic regime is forcing its version of Islam on the whole country, including the predominantly Christian and animist south. Its tactics include slavery, forced conversion and bombing schools, hospitals and relief centers. Politically induced mass starvation has killed 2 million people in the last 15 years and, at 5 million, has produced a quarter of the world's displaced people.
There is also good news. Latin America has become one of the most religiously free areas in the world. And, except for the former Yugoslavia, the countries of Eastern Europe have also become largely free. One great story of the last quarter century is the victory of freedom in the traditionally Catholic world. There are also many free countries in Africa, especially in the south, while several smaller Asian countries are also free. Nevertheless, the dominant pattern is the world is the increasing political influence of religion coupled with increasing religious repression.
b. The Range of Religious Freedom
Religious persecution, meaning violence in which the religion of the persecuted or the persecutor is a factor, affects all religious groups. Christians and animists in Sudan, Baha'is in Iran, Ahmadiyas in Pakistan, Buddhists in Tibet, and Falun Gong in China are the most intensely persecuted, while Christians are the most widely persecuted group. But there is no group in the world that does not suffer because of its beliefs. Religions, whether large, such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, or small, such as Baha'is, Jehovah's Witness, or Judaism, all suffer to some degree. In many cases these attacks come from the same religion. Thus Shiite Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan suffer persecution and even death from some dominant Sunni groups.
Religious freedom is also not confined to any one area or continent. There are relatively free countries in every continent and of every religious background. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, South Africa, Botswana, Mali and Namibia are freer than France and Belgium. There are now absolutely no grounds for thinking that religious freedom is an exclusively western desire or achievement.
Some third world tyrants and western apologists elevate "Asian values" and "economic rights" as paramount, and then denigrate rights such as religious freedom as elitist western priorities, as quasi-luxuries to be advanced, if at all, only when basic food and shelter have been achieved. But such tyrants do not speak for their population. Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, which have a background of grinding poverty, and Confucian traditions at least as strong as China and Vietnam, both value and successfully defend religious freedom, and desperately poor African countries do the same. Religious freedom is desired throughout the world.
c. Religious Backgrounds of Religious Freedom
Religious freedom also reflects religious background. This is complex, since current regimes may reflect comparatively little of a country's religious background. China, North Korea and Vietnam have a largely Buddhist background, but current religious repression comes from self-proclaimed atheistic materialists. Turkey has an Islamic background but the present secular government aggressively represses peaceful Muslim expression. 30 years ago many traditionally Christian countries were under communist repression. Nevertheless the overall patterns can be illuminating.
Christian background countries, with the notable exception of Cuba and Serbia, are now nearly all religiously free. Within Christianity, Protestantism tends to score higher than Catholicism and both higher than Orthodoxy. Other religiously free countries include Israel and countries of largely Buddhist background, including Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan. This suggests that a Buddhist tradition can be a good foundation for religious freedom.
The most striking recent change has been in traditionally Hindu countries, notably India. India has a strong history of religious freedom but, as in Nepal, the recent upsurge of an intolerant Hinduism has transformed the situation of nearly a fifth of the world's people.
The Islamic background countries form the large majority of the unfree regimes. There may soon be improvement since Indonesia, with the world's largest Muslim population, is in a painful transition to democracy while Nigeria, about half Muslim, may also establish itself as a democracy. However, both countries are in play, and their move to democracy is marked by large-scale regional religious violence.
3. A Secular Neglect of Religion
One of the principle reasons religious freedom and religious persecution has been neglected is that religion itself has been comparatively neglected as a factor in human affairs. The essential point here is not whether one is personally religious or likes "religion," but whether one realizes that, as an empirical fact, throughout the world, religion is a key element of politics and human rights.
One major cause of this comparative neglect is the prevalence in the western world of what may be called "secular myopia," which can be described as "an inability even to see, much less understand, the role of religion in human life." This myopia is widespread amongst "the chattering classes". As Edward Luttwak has written: "Policy makers, diplomats, journalists, and scholars who are ready to over interpret economic causality, who are apt to dissect social differentiations even more finely, and who will minutely categorize political affiliations, are still in the habit of disregarding the role of religion; in explaining politics and even in reporting their concrete modalities." ("The Missing Dimension" in D. Johnston and C. Sampson, eds., Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft).
This secular myopia can have painful consequences. One was U.S. ignorance of the views and power of the Ayatollah Khomeini's followers. Luttwak notes that there was only one proposal for the CIA to examine "the attitude and activities of the more prominent religious leaders" in Iran, and that even this proposal was vetoed as mere "sociology," intelligence speak for irrelevant academic verbiage. Consequently, as the Shah's regime was collapsing about them, U.S. political analysts kept insisting that everything was fine. Following their training they examined economic variables, class structure and the military, and concluded that since these groups supported the Shah, then he was safe. There were, of course, Mullahs arousing Islamic sentiment, but analysts had been taught that such religious drives drew only on folk memories, were destined to disappear with "modernization" and were irrelevant to the real structures of political power. Parallel, though less striking, tales can be told of Vietnam, Bosnia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Nicaragua, India, Israel and the Palestinians, Sudan, and Indonesia.
For example, one of the major stories from China in the latter part of 1999 was the sudden, organized appearance of thousands of members of the Falun Gong movement outside the compound of the Chinese leadership in Beijing, an event that has terrified the Chinese leadership and prompted a further government crackdown. Subsequently, it has been suggested that the group has tens of millions of members. But not only had the Chinese leadership apparently missed Falun Gong, so had the media. Generally the western media have slighted Chinese religion as an important factor in its political future.
This neglect often comes not by ignoring particular trends or events, but by redefining them. Americans, in particular, are prone to redefine religion through the nebulous catchall term "ethnic." For example, Chester Crocker gave an excellent lecture to the Foreign Policy Research Institute on the subject of "How to Think About Ethnic Conflict." (See Foreign Policy Research Institute's Wire, vol. 7, number 10, September 1999). However, even he described the Northern Ireland and India-Pakistan conflicts as "ethnic." But India and Pakistan are separate countries only because of their different religions; and Ireland is divided for the same reason.
Other recent example include the Economist's (September 25, 1999) description of the slaughter of fifty-four Buddhists in Sri Lanka as perhaps "the first sign of ethnic cleansing," and fights between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria as "cultural" (July 31, 1999). Similarly, the International Herald Tribune (July 14, 1999), expresses the fear that an Indian victory in Kashmir would lead to the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims; while The New Republic contrasts the Sudanese conflict between a "predominantly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south," with a Western dream of a "multiethnic democracy" (July 12, 1999). Many of these depictions seem to take their cue from descriptions of the former Yugoslavia, wherein "Bosnian Muslims" and war between Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims were routinely described as "ethnic." We have now used the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe the murder of Muslims.
Our press coverage and political analysis often also has an introverted focus on a type of Western Enlightenment culture, as though this constituted the common opinion of humankind, or the common opinion of reasonable humankind, or at least the common opinion of Americans. Consequently, movements overseas are assimilated to Western categories. Hence, Islamic or Hindu militants are often described as "right-wing," whatever that might mean. But what is a "right-wing" or "left-wing" view of plans to build a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, or a Jewish Third Temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem? Neither of these schemes has anything to do with categories of left and right; their meaning can only be grasped by understanding their deep-seated religious context. And such understanding is doubly urgent since either of these projects could precipitate war.
When the vocabulary of left and right has run its tired course, we are commonly left with that old standby, "fundamentalist", a word dredged from the American past and of dubious provenance and meaning even there. Using the term fundamentalist is currently a sign of intellectual laziness; a refusal to take seriously what people say they actually believe. "Fundamentalist" is now shorthand for "religious obsessive," therefore someone to be categorized rather than heard, observed rather than comprehended, dismissed rather than read.
When ethnicity and psychology fail to subsume religion, a common alternative is to treat it as the sublimation of drives which can really be explained by poverty, economic change, or the stresses of modernity. Of course, these factors play a role: no part of human life is sealed off from any other. But all too often what we encounter is a priori methodological commitment to treat religion as secondary, as an evanescent and derivative phenomenon that can be explained, but never be used to explain.
4. The Growing influence of Religion
One major reason for deteriorating religious freedom is the increasing political influence of overt religion. Many westerners wonder how this could possibly happen in our supposedly secular world. I will suggest some reasons below but, at one level, this fact needs no explanation. Human beings have fundamental beliefs about the world and these beliefs inevitably shape political life. As an empirical fact, religion is a key element of politics and human rights. Many westerners neglect this fact and, perversely, think it needs explanation when they are wrong.
Why does religion take this form now? One reason is that, however we might define "globalization," "westernization" or "capitalism," it is penetrating deeply into traditional cultures. Traditional believers in Japan or Java did not in the past wonder about who they were. But now, through new communications and commodities, local identity becomes only one option and, so, needs to be asserted.
Another factor is changing generations of leaders. Immediate post-colonial political elites were shaped by conflict with and education by the colonial power, and adopted many of its beliefs and ways. New leaders in India and Africa often adopted Fabian socialism, and similar patterns occurred in the Middle East. In the same way, new leaders in Korea adopted Japanese cultural standards. But succeeding generations, whether or not western-educated, have grown up within their country and profess less need to adopt western ways.
Both these trends are exacerbated by the collapse of communism, ending the only major alternative to globalization. Consequently those distressed by the dominant directions of the world now look to their own country's traditions, which of course are religious traditions.
One result of these trends is religious nationalism, whether heartfelt or contrived, wherein countries are defined increasingly by their religious inheritance. This typified conflict between Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. It is endemic in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal while, to acquire legitimacy, the Burmese junta masquerades as Buddhist. The Chinese government inveighs against "foreign" religions, while the clamor over so-called "Asian values" carries its faint echo.
Within the Islamic world, this religious nationalism interweaves with pan-Islamic or pan-Arab motifs. In Egypt, Afghanistan and Malaysia, the focus is more on the country, while for most terrorists loyalty is to the whole Islamic world. This pan-Islamicism is rapidly becoming major factor in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and underlies most of the terrorism in Indonesia.
Despite the claims of their proponents, these trends are not repristinations of previous religious patterns. In traditional societies there was little need to assert or defend a religious identity, which is one reason that some of the most religiously free Muslim societies are monarchies such as Jordan and Morocco. But, in the modern world, religious identities are challenged and, hence, protagonists must rally their supporters. The result is that belief becomes more like ideology and the faithful become more like a movement. Religious differences are heightened and mobilized.
5. Taking Religion Seriously
If we do take religion seriously in international affairs, then we may also learn about a wide range of things, including freedom of all kinds. It was pointed out by religion scholars long before Samuel Huntington's important work on the "Clash of Civilizations" that chronic armed conflict in the world is concentrated on the margins of the traditional religions. The Middle East, the southern Sahara, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and South Asia are where Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism intersect. They are also the sites of most wars in the last fifty years. The point is not why people fight, but where they fight. These are not explicitly religious wars. But, since religion shapes culture, people at these boundaries have different histories and different views of human life, and are more likely to oppose one another. Regardless of the varied reasons for conflict, these are the areas where conflict likely occurs. They are religious fault zones, and hence sites of political instability.
The Chinese government takes religion seriously; one reason it represses it. In 1992, the Chinese press noted that "the church played an important role in the change" in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and warned "if China does not want such a scene to be repeated in its land, it must strangle the baby while it is still in the manger." "Underground" or "house" church leaders consistently report that the current government crackdown is due to fears prompted by religious events in the former Soviet bloc. Even Chinese government documents actually implementing the crackdown have stated that one of their purposes is to prevent "the changes that occurred in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe" (From "Opinions Concerning the Implementation of the Special Class-Struggle Involving the Suppression of Catholic and Protestant Illegal Activities According to Law," Tong Xiang, Zhejiang province, February, 1997).
This also suggests that people interested in democracy should attend more to religion. For example, the attention to China's courageous pro-democracy activists is certainly deserved, but it must be remembered that their following is quite small. Yet there is little attention to China's dissident churches, which at a conservative estimate number some thirty five million, (apart from fifteen million in the official churches) and are growing rapidly. The Far East Economic Review, in a 1997 cover story entitled "God is Back", reported one Beijing official as saying "If God had the face of a seventy year old man, we wouldn't care if he was back. But he has the face of millions of twenty year olds, so we are worried." The rapid growth of the only nation-wide movements in China not under government control merits political attention.
Apart from the important examples of the Balkan conflicts, the rise of the Welfare and Virtue parties in Turkey, the BJP in India, and the growth or radical Islamicism, the following religious trends also merit political reflection and attention:
i) The rapid and alarming upsurge of intolerance (official and unofficial) of minority religions ("cults") in Eastern and Western Europe.
ii) The pattern of violence and warfare along the sub-Saharan boundary from Nigeria to Ethiopia. This traces a Christian/Muslim divide.
iii) The rapid growth of Christianity in Korea (now 25% of the population), China (a minimum of fifty million, up from one million in 1980), Taiwan and Indonesia.
iv) Nigeria's and Indonesia's transitions to democracy is accompanied by widespread religious violence which could spread far beyond the religious communities themselves.
v) The current exodus of Christians from the Middle East: over a million in the last five years. Currently some three percent of Palestinians are Christians compared to an estimated twenty five percent fifty years ago. Similar movements have taken place out of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq.
vi) The emergence of Orthodoxy as a unifying symbol in Russia, the Balkans and parts of the former Soviet Union.
vii) The increasing prominence of religion in the conflicts between India and Pakistan, now enhanced by nuclear weapons.
viii) The rapid growth of charismatic Protestantism in Latin America.
I am not making the absurd suggestion that religion, apart from other cultural, ethnic, economic, political, or strategic elements is the only or the key factor: societies are complex. But I am saying that it is equally absurd to examine a political order without attending to the role of religion. We need to deal consistently with religion as an important independent factor, and analyses that ignore religious dynamics should be inherently suspect. Similarly, discussions of human rights that neglect religious freedom and the role of religion in all human rights should be equally suspect.
6. The Future
These trends suggest that religious freedom, as well as human rights in general, will decrease in the coming years. But history is not determined and political action can, at the least, alleviate some of these consequences. But this will not happen unless we take religious freedom, and religion itself, seriously in the international world.
Some are rightly concerned that overt religious elements make conflicts intractable. Compromises over religion are much harder than deals over land or water. But this concern all too often leads to silence about religious conflict even among those who recognize its influence. It is not named for fear that its mere mention conjures its existence.
However, religious conflict and religious repression will not go away simply because our elites, and often our media, refuse to acknowledge or speak of it. We can only address such conflict if we clearly and unsentimentally acknowledge it. This is a vital matter. Religious freedom is historically the first freedom in the growth of human rights and often has more to do with the growth of democracy than does a direct focus on political activity itself. This is extremely difficult, of course. While all human rights pressures make realists nervous, religion carries the added burden of touching on very deep-seated commitments. But we are concerned with religious freedom, or with freedom of any kind, we cannot neglect the matter. |
