FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 11, 2008 ,

Contact: Judith Ingram
Communications Director
(202) 523-3240,ext. 127
[email protected]

WASHINGTON-The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom is seriously concerned over the recent outbreak of violence in the contested Abyei region of Sudan, which serves as an urgent reminder of the fragility of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and the need for the international community to ensure its implementation in full. The agreement, signed in 2005, ended a North-South civil war that killed more than 2 million people and drove more than 4 million from their homes. Most of the victims in the 22-year war were Christians, followers of traditional African religions, or Muslims disfavored by those in power in Khartoum. While the agreement ended the war, it cannot be said that it brought peace.

Beginning in mid-May in Abyei, units of the Northern-controlled Sudan Armed Forces and associated tribal militia brutally attacked local residents and destroyed private property, laying waste to the region"s main town, also called Abyei, and driving 90,000 civilians from their homes. "The violence against civilians was reminiscent of the tactics employed by Northern forces both during the North-South civil war and in the Darfur conflict, which the U.S. government has repeatedly termed genocide,” said Michael Cromartie, Chair of the Commission. "The outbreak of fighting underlined that the prospects for a lasting peace in Sudan are in peril.”

Northern and Southern leaders signed an agreement late Sunday to end the violence. It provides for the return of the civilians who were forced to flee the fighting, the establishment of a joint civilian administration to run the region, and international arbitration to resolve the dispute over Abyei. While the Commission welcomes that agreement, both sides must be pressed forcefully to follow up with concrete actions. The outbreak of fighting in May resulted in part from the international failure, including by the U.S. government, to ensure that each and every vital provision of the CPA be enacted.

The Abyei region, with its history as a crossroads between North and South, was one of the sticking points in the protracted negotiations leading to the CPA. Abyei has been particularly problematic because not only is it home to a volatile mix of rival ethnic groups with ties to North and South, but it also provided a disproportionate number of fighters for the Southern-dominated Sudan People"s Liberation Army. The deposits of oil in the region, and the economic competition they engendered, exacerbated the dispute.

A special U.S.-drafted protocol, later incorporated into the CPA, called for an interim administration in Abyei, the establishment of the Abyei Boundaries Commission to determine the region"s boundaries, and a local referendum in 2011 so that the residents of Abyei could choose between a special administrative status in the North or incorporation into Southern Sudan (which will also be choosing in 2011 between independence and remaining part of Sudan with regional autonomy). According to the Agreement, the decision of the Boundaries Commission was to be "final and binding”-yet President Omar Bashir has rejected the Boundaries Commission's findings, establishing the dangerous precedent that one of the parties to the CPA can, with impunity, unilaterally refuse to implement its provisions.

The Commission calls on the United States and other members of the international community to ensure that President Bashir, after failing to abide by the decision of the Boundaries Commission, accepts the decision of those called to arbitrate the conflict. "Khartoum"s refusal to comply with the CPA up to now in regard to the sensitive border area of Abyei, and the assault by Khartoum"s armed forces that left the town of Abyei in ruins, have threatened a downward spiral toward renewed civil war,” Cromartie said.

The Commission remains seriously concerned about severe human rights violations being committed by the Sudanese government in many regions of the country, including against both non-Muslims and Muslims who dissent from the government"s interpretation of Islam, as well as in Darfur. It fully supports the Secretary of State"s continued designation of Sudan as a "country of particular concern” for its systematic and egregious violations of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief.

"Now is the time for the United States to tell President Bashir that nothing less than full implementation of the CPA, including provisions relating to Abyei and other contested areas, is acceptable,” Cromartie said. "The international community should no longer accept delaying tactics by Khartoum. That approach has been shown repeatedly to provide nothing but an avenue for abysmal abuses.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 15, 2008

"The arrests of six Baha'i leaders yesterday, following the arrest of another leader in March, is the latest sign of the rapidly deteriorating status of religious freedom and other human rights in Iran," said Michael Cromartie, the Commission Chair. "This development signals a return to the darkest days of repression in Iran in the 1980s when Baha'is were routinely arrested, imprisoned, and executed."

The Baha'i community, Iran's largest non-Muslim minority, has long suffered especially severe religious freedom violations in Iran. The Iranian authorities view them as apostates; since 1979, Iranian authorities have killed more than 200 Baha'i leaders, thousands have been arrested and imprisoned, and more than 10,000 have been dismissed from government and university jobs.

The last time the Iranian government systematically arrested the Baha'i leadership in Iran in the early 1980s, 17 Baha'i leaders on two successive national governing bodies were either summarily executed or were abducted and disappeared. They are presumed dead.

Over the past several years, and particularly since President Ahmadinejad came to power, members of the Baha'i community have been harassed, physically attacked, arrested, and imprisoned. During the past year, young Baha'i schoolchildren in primary and secondary schools increasingly have been attacked, vilified, pressured to convert to Islam, and in some cases, expelled on account of their religion.In November 2007, three Baha'is were sentenced to four years in prison for allegedly spreading propaganda against the regime; 51 others received suspended sentences. Their alleged crime was setting up a program to educate poor Iranian children.

The seven Baha'i leaders arrested are members of an informal Baha'i national coordinating group, known to the Iranian government, which was established to help meet the needs of the 300,000-350,000-member Baha'i community after the Iranian government banned all formal Baha'i activity in 1983. In the early morning hours on May 14, officers of the Intelligence Ministry in Tehran reportedly entered the homes of six of the seven members of the informal national coordinating group and conducted extensive searches, following which the six-Fariba Kamalabadi, Jamaloddin Khanjani, Afif Naeimi, Saeid Rezaie, Behrouz Tavakkoli, and Vahid Tizfahm-were arrested and brought to the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. The other member, Mahvash Sabet, was arrested two months earlier in Mashhad.

The Commission held a public hearing on the state of religious freedom and related human rights in Iran in February. In addition to the plight of the Baha'is, the hearing focused on the problems faced by other religious minority communities and dissenting Muslims in Iran:

• Sufis face growing government repression of their communities and religious practices, including increased intimidation and harassment, and the detention of prominent Sufi leaders by the intelligence and security services in the past year;
• President Ahmadinejad's denials of the Holocaust and statements calling for Israel to be "wiped of the map" have created a climate of fear among Iran's 30,000-member Jewish community;
• Christians, in particular Evangelicals and other Protestants, in Iran continue to be subject to harassment, arrests, close surveillance, and imprisonment; many are reported to have fled the country; and

• dissidents and political reformers continue to be imprisoned on criminal charges of blasphemy and for criticizing the Islamic regime. A number of senior Shi'a religious leaders who have opposed various Iranian government policies on political or religious grounds have also been targets of state repression, including house arrest, detention without charge, trial without due process, torture, and other forms of ill-treatment.

"The international community must send a strong, united signal that such violations of religious freedom will not be tolerated," Cromartie said. "U.S. and foreign leaders should call at the highest levels for the release of all religious prisoners in Iran and draw attention to the need to hold Iranian authorities accountable in specific cases where severe violations have occurred."