In November, Secretary of State Antony Blinken removed Nigeria from the State Department’s list of countries hostile to religious freedom. The move flabbergasted religious freedom advocates, including members of the U.S. government’s own Commission on International Religious Freedom. That commission had urged Blinken in April to keep Nigeria on the list, pointing to “violence by militant Islamists and other non-state armed actors, as well as discrimination, arbitrary detentions, and capital blasphemy sentences by state authorities” in the country.
In 2020, the Trump administration designated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) on religious freedom. In a letter, the Family Research Council and host of other organizations committed to religious freedom have asked Biden: “How can it be, less than a year after that significant designation, that Nigeria’s CPC designation has been dropped without a public explanation?”
The groups note in the letter that anti-Christian persecution in the country has grown even more intense since 2020: “The ongoing violence, killing, and displacement against Christians and others have only increased. In fact, during 2021, massacres happen almost nightly, while by day, young boys are killed in the fields. Pregnant women are brutally dismembered, their babies mutilated before their eyes. And now, an entire church congregation has been abducted and held captive.”
Armed Islamic terrorists and radicals “have become even more brazen, torching entire villages and farms, ambushing, and killing innocent people in gory, unspeakable ways,” they write. “Mass killings—the kind that used to be sporadic—are now a national emergency. Catholic News Agency reported in July, ‘an estimated 3,462 Christians have been killed in Nigeria in the first 200 days of 2021, according to a new study. This equates to 17 Christians being murdered every day in Africa’s most populous country.” (READ MORE: The Media Scoffs at the Massacre of Christians)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment