Pakistan must fight militant groups that threaten Afghan, Indian and US interests, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday as he offered sympathy for the victims of last month’s massacre of children at a Pakistani school.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan has long been suspected by the West of playing a double game, fighting some militants while supporting those its generals have regarded as strategic assets to be used against rivals and neighbours, India and Afghanistan.

Visiting Pakistan after going to India over the weekend, Kerry said all militant groups should be targeted to bring security to the region.

“Terror groups like the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other groups continue to pose a threat to Pakistan, to its neighbours and to the United States,” Kerry told a news conference in Islamabad, listing some of the most feared groups.

“And all of us have a responsibility to ensure that these groups do not gain a foothold but rather are pushed back into the recesses of (Pakistan’s) memory … Make no mistake. The task is a difficult one and it is not done.”

Most US-led forces in neighbouring Afghanistan officially completed their combat mission last month, prompting concern about the stability of the region where insurgents have been increasingly aggressive in past months.

Following last month’s attack on the school in which 134 children were killed, Pakistan has promised to stop differentiating between “good” and “bad” militants and to step up operations against their hideouts on the Afghan border.

Speaking at a news conference with Kerry, Pakistani foreign adviser Sartaj Aziz reassured his counterpart that “action will be taken without discrimination against all groups”.

But, although observers have noted some progress, most agree that Pakistan has yet to show it is seriously committed to go after all groups equally, including the powerful Haqqani network which attacks targets in Afghanistan from its bases in Pakistan.

“Obviously, the proof is going to be in the pudding,” Kerry said. “It will be seen over the next days, weeks, months, how extensive and how successful this effort is going to be.”

Aziz said, however, that the Haqqani group’s infrastructure had been “totally destroyed” as a result of the Pakistani army’s operation in a tribal region that has long been regarded as a safe haven for militants.

“Their ability to operate from here across to Afghanistan has virtually disappeared,” Aziz said.

FURTHER AID

The United States identified Pakistan as a key partner in its war against terror following the September 11, 2001, attacks and has spent billions of dollars on military aid to help the country fight insurgents.

But there is growing consternation in Washington about continuing with the same level of assistance unless Pakistan provided evidence it was using the funds effectively to eliminate militants holed up on its soil.

Kerry said however Washington would provide an additional $250 million in food, shelter and other assistance to help people displaced by conflict in tribal areas.

Aziz made a plea for the United States to keep giving Pakistan money to help rebuild the regions where the Pakistani military has been fighting militant groups.

“We expect our defence forces to remain engaged in counterterrorism operations for some time in the foreseeable future,” Aziz said. “Continuation of coalition support fund reimbursements are therefore a valuable support that must continue in the interests of both countries.”

Pakistan was deeply scarred by the December attack when gunmen killed the children at the military-run high school in the northwestern city of Peshawar in revenge for an army operation against Taliban hideouts.

Some analysts believe the national revulsion over brutal attack could convince hawks in the military to withdraw support for militants like the Haqqanis.

For its part, the government has reassured the West and its own sceptical public that it is doing everything to eliminate insurgent violence, reinstating the death penalty and expanding military operations in the tribal North Waziristan region.

Source: Christian Today

A record 25,000 anti-Islamist protesters marched through the east German city of Dresden on Monday, many holding banners with anti-immigrant slogans, and held a minute’s silence for the victims of last week’s attacks in France.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior German politicians have called for people to stay away from rallies organised by PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West – people who Merkel has said have “hatred in their hearts”.

On Tuesday she will take part in a vigil in Berlin organised by a Muslim group to remember the 17 people killed in Islamist attacks at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

About 7,000 more protesters than last week turned out for the march, a police spokesman said.

Leader Lutz Bachmann set out PEGIDA’s demands for the government including drawing up a new immigration law, forcing immigrants to integrate and making sure that Islamists who leave Germany to fight are not allowed back into the country.

“We are getting more support each week,” co-founder Kathrin Oertel told Reuters.

“We are against all violence that is religiously motivated whether Muslim or Christian … People have been confronted by it now and are thinking about it more.”

Protesters, many dressed in black, waved the black, red and gold German flag. One carried a banner saying: “With our deepest sympathies for the families of the Paris terror victims.”

Mostly men over 50, many chanting of “Wir sind das Volk” or “We are the people”, they said they were more concerned about increasing immigration than the events in France.

Their banners read “Stop multiculturalism”, “I’m not a Nazi but everyone who enjoys our hospitality must integrate and respect our culture” and “Stop asylum fraud – every one is too many, go home!”

One carried a Christian cross illuminated with fairylights.

Eugen Peuke, 61, was at his second protest.

“It (multiculturalism) doesn’t work. Immigration is a problem. They steal. I just don’t want them here. The government isn’t listening,” he said.

Counter-demonstrators shouted “PEGIDA, you’re racist” and “Germany is ashamed of you”, and in Berlin and the western city of Duesseldorf the rallies were dwarfed by counter-protesters.

Germany has some of the world’s most liberal asylum rules, partly due to its Nazi past, and last year the number of asylum seekers, mainly from the Middle East, doubled to about 200,000 from 2013.

Source: Christian Today

For the 13^th time the annual World Watch List published each January by Open Doors, the organisation that campaigns for persecuted Christians, has North Korea at its head. It is once again judged to be the most dangerous country in the world to be a Christian.

Given the horrific images and stories we have become used to from Nigeria and the appalling events unfolding in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, that’s quite a claim. However, to anyone involved in monitoring human rights, it is uncontroversial. North Korea is not just the worst place in the world to be a Christian, it is arguably the worst country in the world to live, full stop.

This is in spite of the fact that to the uninitiated, North Korea can seem like a bit of a joke. It hits the headlines for the most bizarre of reasons. Last year, for instance, male university students were ordered to get their hair cut in the style of the “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong Un. (It is a sort of extreme pudding-basin cut, unflattering on anyone.) There were, quite rightly, howls of derision – but rather less reflection on what the decree said about the leader’s personality cult and his ability to impose it on an entire nation.

More recently, North Korea has been accused of being behind the hacking of Sony Pictures emails in retaliation for The Interview, a spoof film about Kim Jong Un’s fictional assassination. We all enjoyed the candid emails about Angelina Jolie, but it demonstrates the country’s fearsome reach in cyber-warfare.

It is also a nuclear power with conventional forces which include an army that is the largest military organisation on earth. It has 9,495,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel, representing 40 per cent of the entire population.

This wholesale militarisation of the country has been achieved through levels of state control and oppression which are unparalleled anywhere else. According to Amnesty International, “North Korea is in a category of its own when it comes to human rights violations. It is a totalitarian state where tens of thousands of people are enslaved and tortured. All forms of freedom of expression are repressed and anyone attempting to assert their rights is crushed. In North Korea, where failing to show sufficient reverence for the country’s leaders is a serious offence, no one is safe from arrest and imprisonment.”

The control exercised by the state has ensured the subjection of its people in the face of appalling hardships. A famine from 1994-98 killed hundreds of thousands of people: accurate data is impossible to come by and some estimates are as high as 3,500,000 out of a population of 22 million, though recent research suggests the range may be between 500,000 and 600,000.

A drought last year brought fresh suffering, with the United Nations estimating that around two-thirds of the population suffer chronic food shortages. Generations of North Koreans are growing up malnourished, stunted and prone to diseases for which a healthcare system which is non-existent outside the main cities is unable to provide remedies. Punitive sanctions imposed by most of the world out of justifiable outrage at the excesses of the regime have failed to moderate the behaviour of its leaders and arguably contributed to the suffering of ordinary North Koreans, while they are circumvented by China, which is terrified of the instability that might result from the collapse of its armed and dangerous neighbour.

TWISTED IDEOLOGY

But what lies behind the regime’s behaviour, and why does it target Christians?

Central to understanding the paranoia and secrecy of North Korea are the concepts of ‘Juche’, developed by the country’s founding father Kim Il Sung, and the related ‘Kimisungism’ named after him. Juche’s three key principles are political independence, economic self-sufficiency and self-reliance in defence. However, in practice these have morphed into an ideology of obsessive secrecy, ultra-nationalism and an extraordinary cult of personality focused on the country’s leader – Kim Il Sung and his successors. Such is the extent of this that a leader’s death, for instance, can be the focus of intense emotion – and anyone who doesn’t feel it or can’t fake it is in trouble.

In her book Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick wrote, referring to Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994: “The histrionics of grief took on a competitive quality. Who could weep the loudest?”

She noted that one young student in Pyongyang felt nothing as all around him were wailing. However: “His entire future depended on his ability to cry. Not just his career and his membership in the Workers’ Party, his very survival was at stake. It was a matter of life and death.”

She wrote that he was saved by holding his eyelids open and his eyeballs exposed until they burned and began to tear up. Once they started, he began sobbing like everyone else.

Absolutely nothing can be allowed to challenge this cult – and certainly not Christianity, seen both as a foreign ideology and as a threat to the regime’s absolutism. Total social control has been achieved through the ‘Songbun’ system in which people are divided into three main classes: the loyal, the wavering and the hostile. These are further divided into 51 subclasses. Christians are part of the ‘hostile’ class, with Protestant Christians being ranked at 37 and Catholic Christians at 39 – a long way down the pecking order.

Open Doors estimates that there are around 300,000 Christians in the country, though hard evidence is difficult to come by because of the regime’s obsessive secrecy and total control of information – all newspapers are censored and only a tiny minority of trusted individuals have access to the internet. Believers meet largely in secret. The few churches allowed to operate are fronts put on for foreigners to able to demonstrate North Korea’s ‘freedoms’ – though bizarrely, in 1992, Billy Graham visited the country at the invitation of the ‘Eternal President’ Kim Il-Sung and was allowed to give a speech in Pyongyang. He made a second trip in 1994.

PRISON CAMPS

Evangelism is absolutely prohibited and carried out at the risk of death or imprisonment in one of the country’s fearsome labour camps. Last year it was reported in the South Korean press that 33 North Korean Christians faced execution after being charged with attempting to overthrow the regime – they had worked with South Korean Baptist missionary Kim Jung Wook and received money to set up 500 underground churches. While the story has been questioned, it is perfectly credible. And would-be Christian missionaries from outside the country such as Kenneth Bae and Jeffrey Fowle have found to their cost that North Korea does not tolerate religious interference.

Amnesty quotes one former inmate, Kim Young, who spent nine years in one of the prison camps. “It is a place that would make your hair stand on end,” she said. “From sunrise to sunset, you work. You get up at 3.30 to report for work at 4.30.” She also recollects pregnancy tests, forced abortions and deliberately induced miscarriages: “Pregnant women get sent to labour camps to carry loads up and down the hills which causes miscarriages.”

A former prison official says: “You would need to walk 12-14 miles to get to the field where you plough. You would be expected to walk the distance and then plough the field. You would have to stay awake until midnight as well. There are meetings going until midnight.”

Another woman Jihun Park, recalls: “Four women had to plough with an oxcart, two in front and two at the back, carrying a ton of soil in the cart. We couldn’t do this at a walking pace either, we had to run.”

According to a former military captain. “Starvation is the biggest problem. I saw piles of bodies who have died from starvation in public places.”

Torture, executions – including the execution of children, especially after they have tried to run away – and sexual abuse are common. A former prison guard says: “After a night of ‘servicing’ the officials, the women had to die because the secret could not get out. This happens at most of the political prison camps.

A peculiar refinement of the system is the “guilt by association” principle, in which several generations of a family in which one person has transgressed are executed or sent to labour camps as well – ensuring that every member of a family is made responsible for keeping the others in line. (Current president Kim Jong Un is reported to have ordered the execution both of his uncle and his uncle’s family in a purge last year.)

Around 100,000 people are thought to be held in these conditions.

CHRISTIAN WITNESS

Yet even so, the North Korean Church survives – even in the labour camps themselves. Open Doors tells the story of a woman called Chun, who was sent to one of North Korea’s horrific labour camps after she tried to escape to China as punishment for ‘defecting’ (refugees who do reach China are often sent back). “I was beaten and tortured so badly that I could barely stand up,” she says. However, in her dirty, overcrowded prison cell, she says: “There was one lady who was really kind to me. When I was in so much pain she invited me to lay my head in her lap. She stroked my hair.

“This lady came to faith when she was in China. She was put behind bars, just like me. It did not stop her from doing Christ’s work.” Some time later Chun herself became a believer. She says: “Despite all my suffering I love God with my whole heart. I am so grateful for Him.”

Like many of the world’s darkest places in the late 20^th and 21^st century, North Korea was a product of the rivalry between the USSR and the West. The mind of its founder Kim Il Sung was formed by the Marxism of his Soviet and Chinese mentors. However, the division of the Korean peninsula after the Korean War (1950-53) has allowed the North to calcify in a brutally oppressive oppression in which the minds, bodies and spirits of its citizens have been warped by a paranoid dictatorship which maintains its control through terror and indoctrination, uniting its people through fear of a common – imaginary – enemy.

Many of the old Cold War conflicts have been resolved. North Korea, where human suffering has nowhere been as great for so long, has not – and humanly speaking, there seems very little chance of change any time soon. UN Security Council resolutions, sanctions and even mass starvation have failed to shift the regime one iota.

It is always easier to pray for people when we know their stories and their faces. One of the problems faced by North Korean Christians is that they are usually anonymous. They have no internet; there are no pictures; there are no names. It is easier to concentrate on causes that are more media-friendly. But Jesus cared for the faceless and voiceless, too. In a world awash with information, the hidden horrors of North Korea need our prayers more than ever.

Source: Christian Today

An Iraqi Christian who has been on the run from Islamic State (IS) since June says that she and the hundreds of other refugees in Ankawa, Kurdistan, are not angry at God.

Speaking to Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, Suheila, an elderly Christian woman forced by IS to flee Mosul, said: “We’ve lost everything. The worst thing is that we don’t know when or whether we will be able to return to our homeland.

“But none of us is angry at God. Fortunately we are all still alive.”

Last summer Suheila had to run for her life, along with tens of thousands of other Christians. She first sought shelter in Qaraqosh, but in August was forced to flee again when IS advanced. Now she lives in a sports club in Ankawa. “This is a really big improvement,” she says, “I am grateful for it. But in general, of course, this is no life.”

When Suheila and the other refugees arrived in Ankawa, a suburb of the Kurdish capital Erbil, four months ago, there was nowhere for them to go. Many of them had to sleep on the pavement and under bushes. The local church has been doing what it can to help them.

Father Daniel Alkhari, a young Chaldean priest who works in a refugee camp in Ankawa where more than 800 Christians are living, spoke to Aid to the Church in Need about their refugee crisis. “When the people arrived here they were totally traumatised,” he said. “It wasn’t easy for the people to cope with the fact that they suddenly had nothing and had to live in tents.

“The children in particular were suffering under the situation,” Father Daniel continued. “They saw their mothers crying and their fathers yelling. Then we began to structure the everyday routine to give the children something different to think about.”

The first school for Christian refugee children in Ankawa welcomed students to its classes in December, and seven other schools spread throughout Iraqi Kurdistan are due to open soon. This will enable more than 7,000 children to start going to school again.

Suheila’s words to a group of European visitors in Ankawa were, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. May God make things easy for you in your lives.”

Source: Christian Today

The British nurse being treated for Ebola in London is no longer in a critical condition, the hospital has confirmed.

In a statement released today, the Royal Free Hospital says it is “pleased to announce that Pauline Cafferkey is showing signs of improvement and is no longer critically ill. She remains in isolation as she receives specialist care for the Ebola virus.”

Cafferkey was diagnosed with Ebola on December 29 after returning to Britain from Sierra Leone, where she had been working for the charity Save the Children at a treatment centre outside the capital, Freetown.

Cafferkey is the first person to have been diagnosed with Ebola on British soil.

The Royal Free, Britain’s main centre for Ebola cases, successfully treated British aid worker William Pooley with the experimental drug ZMapp after he was flown back to Britain in August.

Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids, and the hospital said it was treating Cafferkey inside a specially designed tent around her bed with controlled ventilation to reduce the risk of further infections.

In late December, when Cafferkey first arrived in hospital, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby showed his appreciation for those working to combat the virus, writing: “we owe them thanks and respect”, and asked for continued prayers.

The West African Ebola outbreak was first identified in Guinea’s remote southeast in early 2014. Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have borne the brunt of the 20,000 infections and nearly 8,000 dead.

In December Sierra Leone’s government announced it was banning public celebrations over Christmas and New Year to try and prevent its spread.

Source: Christian Today