[The New York Times]<http://www.nytimes.com/>
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January 8, 2013
About 100 Million Christians Persecuted Around the World:
Report By REUTERS
PARIS (Reuters) - About 100 million Christians are
persecuted around the world, with conditions worsening for them most rapidly in
Syria and Ethiopia, according to an annual report by a group supporting
oppressed Christians worldwide.
Open Doors, a non-denominational Christian group, listed
North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan as the three toughest countries for
Christians last year. They topped the 50-country ranking for 2011 as well.
Syria jumped from 36th to 11th place on the list as its
Christian minority, first suspected by rebels of close ties to the Assad
government, has increasingly become a target for radical Islamist fighters, the
report said.
Ethiopia, which is two-thirds Christian, shot up from
38th to 15th place in the ranking due to a "complex mix of persecution
dynamics" including attacks by radical Islamists and reprisals by
traditional Christians against new Protestant movements.
Mali came from no listing for 2011 to 7th place because
the sharia<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/sharia_islamic_law/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
rule the Islamist Ansar Dine group imposed on the north of the country not only
brought harsh punishments for the Muslim majority but also drove the tiny
Christian minority, it said.
"There are over 65 countries where Christians are
persecuted," said the report released on Tuesday by Open Doors, which
began in the 1950s smuggling Bibles into communist states and now works in more
than 60 countries.
"An estimated 100 million Christians worldwide are
persecuted," the United States-based group said in the report. All but one
of the 50 countries in the list - Colombia, which ranked 46th - were in Africa,
Asia or the Middle East.
Christianity is the largest and most widely spread faith
in the world, with 2.2 billion followers or 32 percent of the world population,
according to a report by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public
Life.
It faces restrictions and hostility in 111 countries
around the world, ahead of the 90 countries limiting or harassing the
second-largest faith, Islam, another Pew report said.
"In recent years, we've been hearing that
Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world - that sounds right
to us," said Open Doors France director Michel Varton at a presentation of
the report in Strasbourg.
PERSECUTION
Leaders of various denominations - including Pope
Benedict, whose Roman Catholic followers account for more than half of all
Christians - increasingly make this accusation.
It may well be the case given Christianity's size and
global spread, but it is hard to produce enough reliable comparative statistics
to give it a solid empirical basis.
Some German politicians and human rights groups
criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel last November for saying this at a
Protestant Church conference there, saying it was pointless to try to rank
religions according to how persecuted they were.
Open Doors, which documents cases of persecution of
Christians, said its report was based on official studies, news reports and
field reports and questionnaires filled out by its staff workers around the
world.
Of the top 10 countries on the list - North Korea, Saudi
Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Maldives, Mali, Iran, Yemen and Eritrea -
eight are majority Muslim states threatened by what Open Doors called
"Islamic extremism".
North Korea has kept its number one ranking for the past
11 years because it is illegal simply to be a Christian there, it said. Open
Doors estimates that up to 70,000 North Koreans have been sent to labor camps
for their faith.
The report said second-placed Saudi Arabia, which bans
public practice of any faith but Islam, has a growing Christian population
because of its migrant workers and some converts it says converted after
watching Christian satellite television.
"Christians risk further persecution and oppression
in the future due to the rising number of converts and their boldness in
sharing their faith," it said.
(Additional reporting by Gilbert Reilhac in Strasbourg;
Editing by Alison Williams)
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