A United States Congress-mandated commission called on the government to take “aggressive action” against Saudi Arabia for alleged religious-freedom violations and warned that religious rights were under threat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom also urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to maintain Saudi Arabia as well as China, North Korea, Sudan, Iran, Vietnam, Eritrea and Burma on the annual government blacklist of “severe religious-freedom violators”.
In addition, the commission proposed that Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan be included in the blacklist.
Those designated as “countries of particular concern” in the annual state department international religious-freedom report could face sanctions.
Afghanistan, where the former Taliban regime was once designated as a particularly severe violator, has been added to the commission’s “watch list” this year, joining Bangladesh, Belarus, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia and Nigeria.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US is directly engaged in political reforms, “the universal right to religious freedom is imperiled,” warned Michael Cromartie, the commission’s chairperson.
In Afghanistan, the courts and scholars last month angrily demanded that a Muslim who converted to Christianity be sentenced to death under Sharia law, enraging its Western allies. President George Bush had to personally intervene in convert Abdul Rahman’s case and he was spirited out of Afghanistan to asylum in Italy.
Although Rahman’s case was eventually dismissed, “concerns about his personal safety meant that he could no longer stay in Afghanistan”, Cromartie noted.
A few months before, an Afghan journalist, who is also a Muslim scholar, was imprisoned and threatened with death after being found guilty of blasphemy. His purported “crime” was to question the strict interpretation of some tenets of Islam, the majority religion in Afghanistan, the commission said.
It also warned that in Iraq, an escalation in the level of sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims threatened to halt political reforms.
Targets of religiously motivated attacks also include secular Muslims, non-Muslim minorities, and women, it said.
“The result is that many non-Muslim minorities are leaving Iraq, an exodus that may mean the end of the presence in Iraq of ancient Christian and other communities that have lived on those same lands for 2Â 000 years,” Cromartie said.
He also said that religious freedom conditions in Saudi Arabia had not substantially improved since it was blacklisted two years ago.
The US government, Cromartie said, “must not hesitate in taking aggressive action” against the country. — AFP