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AUSTRALIA
Before the Federal election, ARPA was told that a community consultation would take place after the election to determine the scope of GST exemption for religious activities. The Treasury assured ARPA that "The Australasian Religious Press Association will certainly be given every opportunity to become involved in the consultation process." (28 September 1998)
In fact, no public submissions to the consultation were called for.
ARPA president, Lutheran Pastor Robert Wiebusch, said "Christian publications are not profit-making enterprises. Most run on a shoestring, often with volunteer support. They would be severely affected by a GST. Indeed, some may face closure.
"But the churches themselves have scarcely had enough time to calculate the possible impact of the GST on the range of their activities, let alone the Tax Consultative Committee.
"It is not fair to expect a committee to recommend and advise on the scope of church activities in some two weeks. Religious publications are only one aspect of the whole picture, and there could be serious anomalies as a result of rushing the consultation through."
ARPA would welcome a more complete Senate inquiry.
The Uniting, Catholic, Anglican and Baptist churches defended the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) in a letter to newspapers in September, saying negative comments were counter-productive.
"Where Aboriginal organizations and leaders are publicly vilified, the normal process of review and accountability is undermined," the church leaders wrote in the letter. "Such public attacks also sanction hostility and resentment towards all Aboriginal people at a community level."
Aboriginal groups said they were concerned the conservative government planned to abolish ATSIC after the October 3 national election to win voters from Hanson's far-right One Nation party.
Hanson criticized the churches for becoming involved in the dispute, saying there was no role for them in politics. Hanson, who became notorious in September 1996 when she said Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians and criticized Aboriginal welfare, repeated her call for ATSIC to be abolished.
"ATSIC is racist because it is based on racist policies alone," she said. "Everyone who supports these racist policies is racist themselves. If we have policies based purely on race alone, I call that racist in itself."
But opposition leader Kim Beazley defended the right of church leaders to express their concerns, saying they had every right to make a constructive contribution to the political debate.
CHINA
The detained Protestants were leaders of so-called "house churches"-groups that shun Communist Party-controlled state churches and worship underground. They were rounded up early this month in central Henan province, Human Rights in China said.
"While imprisoned, these church leaders have suffered a range of torture and abuse," the New York-based group said in a statement.
Among the church leaders detained after a national gathering of house-church leaders in Wugang city in central Henan on October 26 was a woman who had been knocked senseless during "relentless beatings" by police officers, the group said. Cheng Meiying, an underground church activist in northeastern China, was lashed with wet rope and beaten about the head with a police baton. She lost consciousness for three days and was released after she had recovered, it said.
Seeing this strong pressure on the non-registered church members, leading members of China's vibrant underground Protestant churches appealed to the government to stop persecuting their followers, a Hong Kong-based rights group reported on November 28, 1998. In a pair of open letters, leaders of four churches in central Henan and Anhui provinces demanded the government stop "beating, confronting, fining, detaining in labor camps and otherwise persecuting" underground Protestants, the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China reported.
The website had been replaced by a hacked version which included links to critics of China's communist regime such as human rights group Amnesty International.
Chinese authorities routinely block access to the websites of scores of foreign and Hong Kong-based human rights groups as well as those advocating Tibetan autonomy and Taiwan independence. China's cyber-police use a "firewall" to filter out websites which criticize Chinese politics or document human rights abuses by the Chinese government. Chinese authorities, alarmed by the growing number of computer crimes on the information highway, have urged its computer police to step up Internet security standards.
Chinese government on the other hand remains interested in being connected to the Internet, and on December 3, China Internet Information Center (CIIC), China's largest Internet-based news service, under the State Council Information Office, signed an agreement with a major telecommunications company of the United States for long-term cooperation in Internet-related services.
He noted that the differences are caused by the different historical, economic and cultural backgrounds in China and Western countries.
According to Meienberger, one of the main factors which hinder the development of human rights in China is the legacy of China's long feudal history that still haunts its present.
INDIA
But officials of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)-or World Hindu Council-said they were being wrongly maligned as a result of twisted media reports. The VHP often clashes with Christian groups in a campaign against what it dubs conversion of Hindus through allurement. "We don't want Hindus to be converted against their wishes. You can't allure them," VHP General Secretary Acharya Giriraj told Reuters. The controversy erupted at the weekend after Baikunth Lal Sharma, a senior official of the VHP, reportedly described the rape as the consequence of Hindu anger over conversions.
Kishore said that the VHP opposed conversions that resulted from incentives such as financial help, education and social work or as a result of inter-religious marriages. Christian priests said the Jhabua incident was not isolated and referred to incidents, including attacks on missionaries in the western state of Gujarat. Concessao said Hindu fundamentalists were campaigning in a manner that resulted in security threats to Christian missionaries.
The VHP is considered close to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the governing coalition..
Thousands of Christians gathered in cities across India on December 4, to protest against a mounting incidence of violence against their community. A crowd of nearly 15,000, mainly schoolchildren, walked through Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat, where human rights groups say most of the attacks on Christians have taken place.
In New Delhi, nearly 20,000 people gathered in front of the parliament building to hear religious leaders and politicians denounce the violence directed against their faith on the same day.
The United Christian Forum for Human Rights (UCFHR) says 90 cases of rape, Bible-burning and church demolishing have been reported so far in 1998, most of them in Gujarat. The figure is dramatically higher than the 38 cases reported between 1964 and 1996.
Around 2.3 percent of Indians are Christian, while Hindus make up 82.5 percent of the population.
INDONESIA
At this point police have arrested more than 100 suspects, but acknowledge there's no clear motive for the grisly slayings. Fear of sorcery has stirred up unrest and violence in superstitious communities. This new violence targets the Islamic majority.
It might be revenge for the slaughter of tens of thousands of communists in the mid-1960s when Suharto took power after an abortive coup attempt. Some historians accuse the Muslim clerics of helping the army carry out the carnage. Others believe the killings may be part of a bloody power play before general elections next year. A third possibility is that Muslim groups that want to stamp out mysticism are behind the slayings.
THE PHILIPPINES
Father Lucio Benedetti was abducted by 30 Moslem guerrillas last Tuesday from a farm near his parish on Mindanao island, about 860 km (535 miles) south of Manila, and was taken into nearby mountains. Benedetti, 56, is one of 10 people currently held by kidnap gangs on Mindanao, the scene of a decades-old Moslem separatist rebellion.
Former rebels who have turned bandit have formed kidnap-for-ransom gangs and are operating in the region. Moslem gunmen have abducted more than a dozen other people in the southern islands in the past two months. They have freed one, a local businessman, and killed another, also a businessman. Besides Benedetti, they are currently holding two Hong Kong men and a Malaysian, a Taiwanese grandmother and four members of her family and two Zamboanga businessmen.
Benedetti said his kidnappers were treating him well but moving him every night. Philippine President Joseph Estrada said last month the military had pinpointed the hideout of the kidnappers but were holding off an attack for fear they might kill the priest.
The government and the church have rejected the ransom demand.
VIETNAM
In a 10-day mission which took three years to arrange, UN Special Rapporteur for Religious Intolerance, Adelfattah Amor, visited Vietnam from October 19 to 28. Hopes were high as the trip started, boosted by Vietnamese promises of free and unfettered access to meet representatives of all religious groups in the nation. Le Quang Vinh, head of the powerful government committee on religion said, "I'd like to make clear that if the rapporteur asked for private meetings then we won't prevent it. We want the rapporteur to know the truth and we have no intention to restrict him."
Vietnam, however, with a remaining fear of, "hostile forces wanting to overthrow the Hanoi government," kept tight reigns on the UN official during his visit. Amor said that meetings were mostly limited to figures from state religious groups and that officials would not allow him to meet some people or to talk privately with others; that he had not been granted freedom of movement, was denied the right to meet who he wanted and was worried for the security of some of those people he did meet.
Vietnam's constitution enshrines freedom of religion but in reality the communist party and state retain tight controls over the organization and activities of religious groups. While the atmosphere for worship has eased in the last decade and analysts agree that there appears to be an outpouring of faith across the country, there are still strict limits on the numbers of new priests and monks, Catholic priests need permission to travel outside their parishes and non-state sanctioned religious groups are banned. The VBC, the state-sponsored Vietnam Buddhist Church (VBC) established in 1981, is the only legal Buddhist authority in the country. The government recently freed several dissident monks from the outlawed Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) as part of a mass prison amnesty, but human rights groups believe many more people are in jail for their political and religious beliefs, a charge denied by Hanoi.
Adelfattah Amor said while he met some religious figures, mostly from state-sanctioned groups, he had been unable to see a number of clergy from Catholic, Buddhist and other faiths. Vietnamese security police Amor from entering Ho Chi Minh City's Thanh Minh Zen Monastery to meet leading dissident monk Thich Quang Do, secretary general of the outlawed Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) who was released from prison in early September. Security police arrived at the monastery early on Monday in an attempt to force the Abbot, Thich Thanh Minh, to refuse entry to the delegation. The Abbot refused, but police prevented Amor from entering a Buddhist monastery. Other meetings, such as those with dissident UBCV monk Thich Nhat Ban and Cardinal Pham Dinh Tung, head of the Catholic church in Vietnam were plagued by repeated interference and a lack of privacy.
Hanoi affirms that, "Mr. Amor enjoyed freedom of movement during his time in Vietnam and freedom to meet people he was interested in," and that "During the trip in Vietnam Mr. Amor has witnessed activities under the freedom of religion of the Vietnamese people. At the same time he has had the chance to learn the consistent policy of the Party and the state of Vietnam on the issue of protecting the right to religious freedom and the freedom of beliefs of all Vietnamese people." Despite this, International human rights groups and some foreign governments continue to insist that Vietnam has imprisoned people for the peaceful expression of religious or political beliefs-a charge that Hanoi denies.
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