suspect in last week’s Bali bombings which killed 23 people, but condemned the government for "ignoring" other violence against Christians in the world’s largest Muslim nation.
In a statement monitored by BosNewsLife Saturday, October 8, Washington-DC based International Christian Concern (ICC) said it learned that Indonesian authorities "narrowly missed" detaining 35-year old Noordin M. Top, one of the two key suspects in the October 1 Bali bombings.
He and another suspect, Azahari Husin, are members of the regional al-Qaida-linked group, Jemaah Islamiyah which claimed responsibility for several attacks in recent years, ICC said.
However the religious rights group stressed that "while [the actions of Indonesian government forces are] commendable," it find "the Indonesian government’s response" to threats "from fundamentalist Islam" against Christians "not so encouraging," amid reports of widespread bloodshed.
LETHAL RADICALIZATION
ICC, which claims to have close contacts with persecuted Christians in the region, noted that since the 1990s, "Indonesia’s brand of peaceful, tolerant Islam began to be infiltrated by Saudi-funded Wahabbi style Islam via the likes of Jemaah Islamiyah" which it stressed "ed to a "lethal radicalization" of the Muslim population.
The group said from 1998 to 2002 about "10,000 Christians were murdered, 80,000 Christian homes destroyed and 1,000 Churches burned down," in Indonesia, figures which have been mentioned by other human rights activists as well.
In one of the latest violent incidents, a member of a Pentecostal church in Indonesia’s tense province of Central Sulawesi was killed Monday, October 3, reported the Voice Of the Martyrs (VOM), another human rights watchdog, earlier this week.
53-year old Pamilton Tadoa of the Tabernakel Pentecostal Church was allegedly shot in the head and killed in the area of Poso while "he rode his motorbike to a school where he served as treasurer."
JAILED "HOUSEWIFES"
ICC also expressed concern about "the arrest and conviction of three Indonesian Christian housewives for teaching Sunday school to Muslim children with the parent’s consent [and] the closure of 60 Christian Churches in just the last two months."
The figure of 60 closed churches over that period was nearly twice as many as previous estimates. In total about 200 churches were closed down since 1996, several sources said.
ICC said it had urged its supporters throughout the United States to sign a "petition to the Indonesian government protesting these closings" and Islamic extremism against Christians. Just about 8 percent of the Muslim country’s roughly 240 million people are Christians, according to several estimates. ICC can be reached on the Internet via website: http://www.persecution.org (With Stefan J. Bos, BosNewsLife Research and reports from Indonesia).
