The pressures and violence exerted on Christians have spread in recent months, affecting 360 million of them, or one in seven in the world, all denominations of Churches combined. This is what emerges from the annual evaluation of the Protestant NGO Portes Ouvertes, which presented in Paris, on Wednesday January 19, its “World Index of the Persecution of Christians”, taking into account the facts recorded between October 2020 and September 2021.
According to the organization, which has published such a report since 1997, this “persecution” has been on the rise for nine years. “Persecution is at an all-time high amid a global health crisis, the Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan and the horror of Christian victims of jihadists in sub-Saharan Africa”, affirmed Patrick Victor, the director of Portes Ouvertes France and Belgium.
According to the NGO, seventy countries are experiencing attacks against people and places of worship or different forms of discrimination and deprivation of rights. Portes Ouvertes collects its information, which does not claim to be exhaustive but is verified, from field correspondents. It identifies physical attacks committed because of faith against people (murders, rapes, assaults, kidnappings, arbitrary detentions, etc.) or churches, as well as the pressures exerted on a daily basis by restrictions in the practice of one’s worship, in the access to education, to work.
Afghanistan tops the charts
According to her, in one year, at least 5,898 Christians would have been killed because of their religion (+24%), most of them in Africa (86%), including 79% in Nigeria. The number of churches closed, attacked or destroyed (59% in China) increased by 14% and the number of Christians detained (6,175, more than half of them in India, Pakistan and China) by 44%. During periods of confinement, the pandemic would have “used as a pretext” to the permanent closure of places of worship in certain countries, such as in Algeria, where “house churches” had to close. Finally, 3,829 Christians were kidnapped, according to “the most conservative estimates” of the NGO.
After the Taliban came to power in August 2021, Afghanistan rose to the top of the list of countries where Christians suffer the most pressure or repression, passing ahead of North Korea, in first place for twenty years. year. In the category of countries where Christians suffer “extreme persecution” Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Eritrea, Pakistan, Iran, India and Saudi Arabia follow.
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