Canada to be New Home for Asia Bibi, Pakistani Christian Acquitted of Blasphemy

Asia Bibi—the Pakistani Christian who was acquitted of blasphemy—is coming to Canada.

The date of her arrival is unknown. But when she arrives she and her husband, Ashiq Masih, will be reunited with their two daughters already in the country.

It will bring to an end a case going back to 2009, when the young Catholic woman was accused by her Muslim neighbours of insulting the prophet Muhammad.

Laws against offences related to religion go back to the colonial period in Pakistan, but were expanded in the 1980s to include desecration of the Quran and blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad—with a recommended penalty of death.

According to critics, the laws often are used to settle personal scores against members of minority religious groups—as happened to Bibi.

She maintained her innocence, but was sentenced to death in 2010.

Bibi languished in prison for eight years until fall, last year, when Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction.

Following her acquittal, Bibi was set free. But death threats from radical religious hardliners forced her and her family into hiding.

In December, her daughters, ages 18 and 19, quietly slipped out of Pakistan and made their way to Canada.

In January Pakistan’s Supreme Court re-affirmed their decision to acquit her, clearing the way Bibi to leave.

According to family friend Nadeem Bhatti, a Canadian who is helping Bibi’s daughters adjust to a new life in this country, the girls are “excited” to see their mother again.

“They are trusting God she will be released soon,” says Bhatti, a Christian from Pakistan who fled that country 12 years ago to escape persecution.

The girls’ location is being kept secret out of concern for their safety, he says, noting that outside of a small group of supporters “nobody knows where they are.”

A Roman Catholic Church bishop emphasized that point in an interview with the Catholic Register, the oldest English Catholic publication in Canada.

According to the bishop, who wants to be anonymous so would-be assassins can’t find Bibi's family in his diocese, “it's real life and death stuff.”

Richard Walker, a spokesperson for Global Affairs, declined to make any comments on the case, but confirmed the Canadian government is working with other groups to bring Bibi to Canada.

For Bhatti, the challenges facing Bibi and her family are personal.

He is related to Shahbaz Bhatti, a Pakistani Christian politician and member of Pakistan’s National Assembly who was assassinated in 2011 by an extremist because of his support for persecuted Christians in that country.

Bibi’s family is not the first he has helped leave that country; Bhatti has helped several other Christian families escape Pakistan for a new life in Canada.

When he thinks about Bibi, he is filled with admiration and is glad her ordeal is almost over. “She is a very brave woman,” he states.

He also hopes her case will be a wake-up call for North American Christians about the plight of other persecuted Christians in Pakistan.

Until Bibi, “nobody talked about the persecution in the media,” he says of challenges facing Christians who are just 1.5% of the population in the Muslim-majority country.

Canadians, he says, “take for granted the liberty of free speech and the freedom of worship.

These types of freedoms “are not protected and enshrined in other countries,” he adds.

Bhatti is grateful that Bibi and her family will find refuge in this country.

At the same time, he is very concerned about the plight of thousands of other Pakistani Christians languishing in Thailand.

 “They are begging for help to get out,” Bhatti says of Christians who fled to that country in hopes of being resettled in the west.  

But proving religious persecution is hard when it is episodic and personal, not state-sponsored; they are having trouble getting their cases heard.

Now, Bhatti says, they are in limbo, unable to work in Thailand and afraid to go home, their only hope laying in intervention by western countries.

Bhatti hopes the Canadian government will help, that it will have the same “soft heart” for them that it had for Syrian refugees—and that it has for Asia Bibi and her family.

From the Feb. 16, 2019 Winnipeg Free Press. Photo from the Associated Press, via the Free Press..

Mennonite Suffering in Former Soviet Union a “Story Rooted in Faith”

Letters from people trapped in that country in 1929-30 featured in new book

They were arrested at night, men with guns herding mothers, fathers and children to the train station where they were loaded into cattle cars, 40 persons to car.

Then “the doors were immediately sealed and that's how we travelled for a week: we weren't let out into fresh air for even a minute, just like cattle.”

So begins a letter sent to Canada in 1930 by an anonymous Mennonite in the former Soviet Union.

Along their way north into their exile, hundreds of children died, the writer noted.

When the 2,000 or so people remaining on the train arrived at their new home in an abandoned monastery, “our despair was huge,” the letter went on to say.

“Oh, dear friends, it is beyond description, outrageous. We've been dragged out here as a sacrifice and we are innocent people . . . if help doesn't come, we will be lost.”

That letter was one of thousands sent after 1929 to the Mennonitsche Rundschau, a German-language newspaper published in Winnipeg.

Written at time when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s first five-year collectivization plan for the farm economy was just beginning to take hold, the letters—most of them anonymous or just with initials, to prevent being identified by authorities—detail the arrests, hunger, exile and execution faced by Mennonites unable to flee that country in that time period.

Now that letter, and may others, are being published in English for the first time by Winnipeg author Harold Jantz in his new book, Flight: Mennonites facing the Soviet Empire in 1929/30.

“It was the Google and Facebook of its day,” says Jantz , 81, of how the Rundschau enabled Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. to connect with their co-religionists in the former Soviet Union.

For Jantz, the 735-page book is a six-year labour of love—with a personal connection.

His father managed to escape to Canada, along with about 20,000 other Mennonites, before the doors for emigration were closed by the Soviets in 1929.

He came with his fiancée, leaving behind his widowed mother, five brothers and a sister.

He hoped to bring them to Canada once he became established, but it never happened. All five of his brothers who were left behind were imprisoned or exiled. Four were executed.

At first, Jantz set out to only tell his father’s story. But then he decided he needed more information about the situation facing his relatives, and other Mennonites, who were left behind in the former Soviet Union.

For that, he turned to the letters in the Rundschau.

While reading them, “I was struck by what I was reading . . . the more I read, the more it drew me in.”

He set aside his father’s story, and Flight is the result.

Translating the letters “moved me so much and impacted me deeply,” Jantz says. “I could sense how desperate some people’s situations were, how they needed to know if someone cared about them.”

They were “hanging on for some glimmer of hope in a tragic situation.”

He hopes his book will remind Mennonites in Canada today of what their ancestors went through, and make those experiences “accessible to more people, especially younger people.”

With its copious index, it will also help researchers and people searching for long-lost relatives, he says.

While the letters detail the terror and hardship experienced by so many back then, Jantz says he was also impressed by “the many affirmations of faith.”

One letter, written around Easter by a church leader who was arrested and exiled, says that “many people say that there is no way that there can be a ‘happy Easter,’ but I'm inclined to affirm the opposite, because if we are in the right relationship to our Lord and Saviour, then it will be a happy Easter . . . even if the eyes are crying and the heart bleeding.”

At the same time, there are letters asking if “God has abandoned us,” Jantz says. But most of affirm that “God is still on the throne and will take care of things in the end.”

For Jantz, a former editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald and founder of ChristianWeek, the book is about a terrible tragedy, but also “a story rooted in faith.”

Through it, readers today can “discover just what Mennonites here in North America were learning about what was happening to their friends and relatives in Russia in their own words.”

Flight is available from the Common Word Bookstore at Canadian Mennonite University.

Paying Back Old Debts, and Christian Persecution Today

George Weidenfeld died on January 20. 

I’m embarrassed to say that, until my friend Belle Jarniewski of the Freeman Family Foundation Holocaust Education Centre drew my attention to his passing at age 96, I had no idea who he was—or what this Jewish Holocaust survivor had done to help Christians in danger from the Islamic State.

Born in Austria in 1919, Weidenfeld escaped to Britain in 1938 before the Nazis invaded Europe and launched their “final solution” against Jews.

In those early years in a new country, he credited British Christians—especially the Plymouth Brethren—for helping him escape and for providing food and clothing.

Weidenfeld went on to become a successful publisher, building Weidenfeld & Nicolson into one Britain's most influential publishing houses. He was also a passionate supporter of Israel and Jewish causes.

What caught my attention was the Weidenfeld Safe Havens Fund, an initiative he created last year to rescue Syrian Christians from the war in that country. In launching the fund, he said he had “a debt to repay” to Christians who had helped him.

That debt, he added, also “applies to so many of the young people who were on the Kindertransports. Quakers and other Christian denominations brought those children to England. 

"It was a very high-minded operation and we Jews should also be thankful and do something for the endangered Christians.”

Last summer, the Fund helped the first group of 150 Syrian Christians escape to Poland, where they will receive up to 18 months of support.

They are the lucky ones. The same week that Weidenfeld died, Open Doors USA, which tracks Christian persecution around the world, released its annual report of the top 50 countries where it is dangerous to be a Christian.

The organization, which defines persecution as imprisonment, torture, death, the loss of home and assets, loss of a job or rejection from a community, said that 2015 was the most violent for Christians in modern history, rising to "a level akin to ethnic cleansing."

In total, more than 7,000 Christians were killed in 2015 for "faith-related reasons," up from 4,000 in 2014. 

At the same time, about 2,400 churches were attacked or damaged, a figure double the number of churches attacked in 2014.

"The levels of exclusion, discrimination and violence against Christians is unprecedented, spreading and intensifying," said David Curry, president and CEO of Open Doors USA.

For the 14th consecutive year, North Korea ranked as the most dangerous place to be a Christian. Open Doors USA estimates that between 50,000 to 70,000 Christians are imprisoned in labour camps in that country.

But most of the persecution faced by Christians today occurs in predominantly Muslim nations, the organization said.  Rounding out the top ten are Iraq, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, and Libya.

But it’s not only radical Islamic groups like ISIS, Boko Haram and al-Shabaab that are victimizing Christians.

"Less well known are the tens of thousands of Christians leaving the 12 sharia states of northern Nigeria, where 27 million Christians remain second-class citizens," the organization stated.

"In Kenya, many Christians are fleeing from the Muslim-majority areas. Tens of thousands continue to brave desert and trafficking gangs to leave Eritrea.”

By releasing the report, Open Doors USA hopes Christians in the West will be reminded to not only pray for fellow believers worldwide, but also call on Western governments to put pressure on countries like Saudi Arabia and India—both in the top 50 of the organization’s list of countries where Christians are persecuted.

"We believe in religious freedom for all," Curry said, "and that does not happen in countries that we do business with every day."

A report like this reminds those of us who are Christians in Canada that, compared to the experience of Christians in many other nations, things are very good in this country.

And while we might not be able to emulate George Weidenfeld’s example by peronally rescuing people who are endangered because of their beliefs, we can be like him by praying for everyone who is being persecuted and suffering because of their religion.

From the Jan. 30, 2015 Winnipeg Free Press.