A manifesto for the persecuted church
by George Carey, Global Christian News:
As the persecuted church agency Barnabas Fund presses British politicians to include religious freedom in their election campaign pledges the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey makes a plea to the next UK government.
I recently saw images of the hauntingly empty Iraqi town of Qaraqosh, near Mosul, which was taken by ISIS in 2014. It had a population of 50,000 mostly Assyrian Christians, but is now totally abandoned. The militants have used every means to erase the town of its Christian identity defiling and destroying its beautiful church buildings.
In August 2014, the militants swept through towns around Mosul and forced thousands to flee. Qaraqosh’s Christians abandoned their homes and have still not returned, even though the town has now been liberated from IS.
I have always felt a particular connection with Iraq having spent my national service as a wireless operator in Basra and when I was there the Christian community was a sizeable proportion of the population – living happily and peacefully alongside Shia and Sunni Muslims. But successive waves of persecution and violence are threatening to ‘cleanse’ Christianity not just from its heartlands in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria but from the whole of the Middle East.
It is only just over 100 years since the often forgotten Armenian genocide by the Ottomans wiped out millions of Middle-Eastern Christians. The world has been standing by while it happens again at the hands of ISIS and other groups linked to Al-Qaeda. The situation is similarly parlous in Northern Nigeria where Boko Haram – notorious for abducting 296 Chibok schoolgirls – has been conducting a systematic reign of terror and killing of Christian communities.
The persecuted church charity, Barnabas Fund, is urging politicians to put policies in their manifestos which will halt the genocide and violence against Christians worldwide.
“There is a very real danger,” they point out that “Christian communities will have ceased to exist in large parts of the Middle East by the time of the next general election in 2022.”
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