One of the biggest challenges facing humanity today is freedom of worship and religious belief. In many parts of the world, people are being persecuted for their belief. Many of my readers, I am sure, felt the pain and outrage last year when, a madman opened fire on worshippers at a mosque in Christ Church, New Zealand, killing 50 and injuring many more. It was not too long before another madman went into a Catholic cathedral in Colombo, Sri Lanka, massacring hundreds.
There is a lot of Islamophobia around the world these days. Islamists have also not helped matters. The downing of the Twin Towers in New York by Al-Qaida in September 2001 was a turning point. It encouraged neo-Nazis and fascists all over Europe and the Americas to attack their law-abiding Muslim neighbours. Over the past decade, Christians in Nigeria have come increasingly under persecution. In many parts of the Sharia north there is intolerance against Christians.
Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains, so argued the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 states, “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have a religion or whatever belief of his [her] choice.”
Similar provisions can be found in Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966, which states that, “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.”
The 1999 constitution of Nigeria (section 38) adopts the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights verbatim. And as a signatory to the UN and its various treaties and instruments, we are deemed to have subscribed to the Universal Declaration and subsequent human rights conventions, including freedom of faith, religion and worship.
During July 16-18 these issues came under scrutiny at the International Ministerial Summit on Religious Freedom which was held in Washington DC. The summit brought together more than 1,000 civil-society organisations and some 106 delegations from across the world.
In his welcome address, Vice-President Mike Pence declared: “We’ve gathered here, 106 nations strong, because we believe in the freedom of conscience, the right of all people to live out their lives according to their deeply held religious beliefs”. In his own opening remarks, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo declared that, “The protection of religious freedom is central to the Trump administration’s foreign policy…Religious freedom is a foundational American value… a universal and inalienable right that should be afforded to all, not just a privileged few ”.
The focus of the summit was on exploring the various trends in religious freedom, ranging from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia and persecution of Christians. The meeting also sought to advance the necessary building blocks for effectively combating religious intolerance and ideological extremism while ensuring religious freedom and human rights across the world. The presentations ranged from persecuted Yezidi Christians in Iraq to Uighur Muslims in China. Nigeria was well represented at the summit.
The Trump administration has named Sam Brownback as its Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom. The summit was appraised of the fact that 80 percent of the world’s peoples live in “religiously restricted” environments. The International Religious Freedom Fund, established during last year’s ministerial summit, provides some emergency financing to support victims of religious persecution and abuse across the world. Under Pompeo’s Potomac Plan of Action unveiled last year, the UN was persuaded to set aside 22 August as the international day of remembrance for victims of religious persecution.
Five exceptional leaders were given the much-coveted International Religious Freedom Award: Mohamed Yusaif Abdalrahan of Sudan, for working tirelessly to protect the rights of religious minorities in his strife-torn country; Imam Abubakar Abdullahi of Nigeria, for risking his life to protect Christians in his mosque when they were in dire risk of being killed in Jos, Plateau State; Ivanir dos Santos of Brazil, for arduous sacrifices in working to promote interfaith dialogue, combating discrimination and protecting vulnerable groups; William and Pascale Warda of Iraq, for devoting their lives to promotion human rights and religious freedom in Iraq; and Salpy Eskidjian Weiderud of Cyprus for her leadership in spearheading the Religious Track of the Cyprus Peace Process and for tireless work in peace-building and interfaith dialogue in Cyprus.
Our country Nigeria scores very low in the ranking for religious freedom. For decades, an atmosphere is being created that makes it difficult for Christians to practise their own religion with absolute of freedom and good conscience. Leah Sharibu, the teenager who rejected the offer to renounce her faith in exchange for freedom is the iconic symbol of religious persecution in Nigeria.
In most parts of the north no land is ever allowed to build churches for the teeming number of worshippers. In federal universities in the north, churches are not allowed. They have to use lecture halls for Sunday worship. It was in these circumstances that in Bayero University Kano, on Sunday 30 April 2012, faceless gunmen went into a Sunday service and gunned down indiscriminately professors, students, women and children. Some 16 people were killed and dozens sustained varying levels of injury.
What former President Olusegun Obasanjo alleges as a project of “Fulanisation and Islamisation” may be more real than we imagine. The Ruga fiasco and the new bill aimed at appropriating rivers and waterways appears looks like a sinister plan to handover choice pasturelands to murderous killer herdsmen, many of them foreigners. We are beginning to look like a government of foreigners, run by foreigners, in the interest of foreigners.
Obadiah Mailafia
