Persecution: UN should be forced to act

Sydney
1 Dec 2002

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Persecution: UN should be forced to act

Worldwide persecution of Christians needs to be taken on politically to force Western governments and the United Nations to take action, says Robert Balzola, of the NSW Knights of the Southern Cross.

Mr Balzola was responding to an article in The Catholic Weekly (Christians ‘world’s most persecuted’, CW 17/11) which reported statistics showing that more than 164,000 Christians will be killed for their religion this year and claimed that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world.

He plans to take a recommendation to the NSW branch of the Knights, of which he is vice-chairman, that it push for the UN to set up a fact-finding mission to expose just how widespread this persecution is so that action can be taken against it.

“Western governments and the UN are turning a blind eye to this persecution because combating it is too difficult and might affect trade with such countries as China,” he says.

The Knights of the Southern Cross is a non-political lay organisation of the Catholic Church formed in 1918.

As well as being involved in intellectual and spiritual aspects of the Church, it raises funds for charities and builds and runs retirement villages and nursing homes through the Catholic Aged Care organisation.

Mr Balzola says he wasn’t aware of the statistics until they were published in The Catholic Weekly, although he was well aware of the persecution of Christians around the world through his position as chief of staff in the office of the Federal MP for Lowe, John Murphy.

He said one of the reasons that the persecution of Christians around the world had reached such a massive scale was that no Christian organisations appeared to be doing anything about it on a diplomatic scale.

“Many refugees who come to Australia claim asylum because they say they were persecuted in their own countries because they were Christians, but at government level there is systematic denial of the problem,” he says.

“There are people in Australia who are refugees but still hold views that it is all right to kill other people in the name of God.”

Mr Balzola said in places like Nigeria, where in some areas of the country the Muslim, or Sharia law which allowed stoning to death was not technically supposed to apply to Christians, the local Christian population still lived in fear.

“One of the key problems is that many Western governments, including the British, have thought that it is only a matter of time before ‘they’ start to think like ‘us’, to accept liberal, democratic values,” he said.

Mr Balzola said there was continuing persecution of Christians in other countries of Africa such as the Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sudan.

“In Sudan Christians are taken into slavery with the tacit approval of the government.”

“And there are 10 million Christians in China who also face persecution. But now China is in the World trade Organisation and there are increased opportunities for trade, the Australian government doesn’t want to raise it.”