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NEW YORK — Despite progress in recent years, freedom of religion remains tenuous in Iraq and Afghanistan, says a U.S. federal commission that monitors religious persecution internationally.
In its annual report, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom added six nations — Eritrea, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam — to a list of countries “of particular concern” as it says they are violating religious freedom. Other nations already on the list are Burma, China, North Korea, Iran and Sudan.
The 2004 report, covering the May 2003 to April 2004 period, noted progress in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, but warned of a “crucial — and potentially fatal — flaw” in Afghanistan’s new constitution.
“It does not contain explicit protections for the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion that would extend to every individual — particularly to individual Muslims in Afghanistan, the overwhelming majority of the country’s population,” the commission said in the report, released on May 12. The flaw was compounded, the commission added, by a clause that stated that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of Islam.”
The commission said it was concerned that the lack of individual guarantees of religious freedom, such as in Afghanistan, may eventually also be enshrined in Iraq. Iraq’s majority Shi’a population was now enjoying a degree of religious freedom in the wake of the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s government, the report noted.
But, the report continued, “some segments of the Shi’a community have demanded the implementation of Islamic law (Sharia) in a manner that reportedly threatens to preclude respect for freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief for others, in contravention of Iraq’s international commitments to protect human rights and individual freedoms.”
Among the concerns raised about India were attacks on Christians and other religious minorities, and similar worries were raised by the commission about India’s Islamic neighbor, Pakistan.
Of China, the commission said: “repression of religious freedom continues to be a deliberate policy of the Chinese government,” with Chinese authorities having “intensified their violent campaign” against evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and other groups, such as the Falun Gong.
The commission also criticized Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, saying “religious freedom does not exist” in the country. The report noted the Saudis had banned all forms of public religious expression other than that of the government’s interpretation of a single school of Sunni Islam.
The commission was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1998. The body provides independent policy recommendations to the federal government.
The complete report is available at: http://www.uscirf.gov.
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