Treatment of Christians

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

It is an honour to take part in the debate and I congratulate the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson). Although we are on opposite sides of the Chamber, I agreed with much of what he said on numerous policy areas. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry), who is an outstanding representative of the Church in the House of Commons and who has been of enormous help to me in my constituency over a Church issue. Equally, I congratulate the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on his excellent speech.

Wherever there is tyranny and oppression in the world, the persecution of religious groups is never far behind. That is why this debate is important. We are always focused on persecution, but because Christianity is a mainstream western religion, its members do not always get the same attention as other minorities, as the hon. Member for Upper Bann highlighted. Outside the western world, however, Christians face a constant barrage of murder, imprisonment and persecution.

I have heard the Secretary of State for Education say that we can judge a country by how it treats its Jews, and the more democratic a country, the more equally the Jewish people are treated. The same goes for Christians in the developing world. I am here, not as a Christian, but as a Jewish person. However, because of what happened to many members of the Jewish people, it is my duty as a politician to help other peoples who suffer genocide and persecution. It gives me enormous pleasure to be standing next to my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes), who is a former school friend. He attended many Friday nights at my house, just as I attended many Church services with him and learned about Christianity as we grew up.

We have talked a little about China. Six weeks ago, 100 peaceful members of the Shouwang Catholic church were arrested by the People’s Republic just for holding an outdoor service. In Uzbekistan, armed officers from the Government’s national security service raided the home of a Christian pastor and confiscated 250 Bibles. A few days later, he was convicted of illegally owning Bibles, organising Christian worship and preaching the gospel. He was fined more than 80 times the minimum monthly wage. We have also heard about Nigeria, where a church was burned to the ground. I could mention other nations, such as Sri Lanka, which has a particularly evil Government; indeed, I attended a memorial service for the Tamils last week in Trafalgar square. Sri Lanka has a tough anti-conversion law, and people there are not allowed to convert others to Christianity.

The tragedy of such stories is not how isolated they are, but how common they are. Nowhere is that truer than in the middle east. I am a senior officer of the all-party group on the Kurdistan region in Iraq. Earlier in the year, I went to Kurdistan, and I am going back there for three days next week. The all-party group’s latest report on Kurdistan, which I helped to publish in March, states:

“Iraq’s Christians once numbered about 1.5 million. There are now just 850,000. Many families have fled to Kurdistan from Baghdad, Mosul and other areas, according to the United Nations refugee agency. The Kurds know much themselves about being a persecuted minority and have opened Kurdistan to Christians fleeing from the rest of Iraq. For example, their universities have offered free places to Christians fleeing Mosul.”

I met many Christians in Kurdistan. It has become a progressive Muslim nation that has provided sanctuary for Christians in Iraq who are being treated brutally. That was confirmed to me by the Archbishop of Erbil and the other Christians I met, and I hope to meet some more next week.

Kurdistan is one of the beacons of hope in a troubled region, but it is doing what it can with limited resources. I urge the Government to do more to support Kurdistan because of how it has offered sanctuary to Christians from Iraq.

[Mr Burrowes]

I appreciate my hon. Friend’s contribution to this important debate. Is it not a tragedy that Christians are fleeing for sanctuary from an area where they have historically had a presence? They do not simply want an enclave to practise their religion, but want to express it freely, which has historically involved being part of a community, for example, in Pakistan where Christian schools have Jewish, Hindu and Muslim pupils. There are shafts of light, for example, in Baghdad, where fantastic vicars such as Andrew White do what they can to open their church to all communities and to support them, despite war, repression and fear.

[Robert Halfon]

My hon. Friend is right. Why should Christians have to flee from one part of Iraq to another for safe haven, when they should be able to practise their religion wherever they are?

In Gaza, there were lots of reports of Christians disappearing or being shot dead if they were caught trying to preach the gospel. Although Hamas officially condemns the attacks, it very rarely makes arrests. During the elections a few years ago, Hamas forces were linked with an attack on the Catholic Rosary Sisters’ school and church, which were assaulted with rocket-propelled grenades and then burnt down. The ancient seafront of Gaza once had a thriving Christian community, but that community has now shrunk to 2,500 people.

Britain has a stake not only in the economic wealth of our neighbours, but in their freedom and self-determination. The question before us is, what role will Britain play before this story unfolds? Psalm 102 encourages us to

“hear the groaning of the prisoner, and set free those who are condemned to death.”

I am sure that hon. Members present will not mind me quoting the Old Testament as opposed to the New. I accept that the Prime Minister confronted human rights issues with the Chinese authorities during the trade mission to China last year and I am glad that the Foreign Secretary has continued to uphold the export restrictions that prevent lethal weapons being sold to China, but the problem is not just about selling guns. Britain and its NATO allies have an array of soft powers that they could use to bargain with states that are dependent on western imports. One key factor in the fall of Soviet communism was not the atom bomb or the space race, but the fact that Ronald Reagan refused to export wheat to Russia. That is a lesson for us today, as we confront the persecution of Christians and religious minorities around the world.

Intolerance towards religious minorities does not happen by itself, but is propagated by vested interests and evil regimes. In the middle east, the worst examples of that are Iran and Saudi Arabia. In the face of rising commodity prices and recession, many despotic Governments have tried to deflect their country’s grievances. That lies behind much of the extremist propaganda against the Christian west and the antagonism towards Israel in Arab League countries, but we have an opportunity to demand change. Saudi Arabia is apparently our ally and it depends on western imports, but it is also a despotism in which honour killing is legal, homosexuality is punishable by death and Wahhabist textbooks in state schools preach hatred of Christians, Jews and other religious minorities. As was recently reported in the papers, women are not even allowed to drive cars.

From Ethiopia to Indonesia, Saudi Arabia’s oil money is fuelling the persecution of Christians and other minorities, and the destruction of their property. Only last Wednesday, Christians protested outside the US Saudi embassy, demanding that Saudi Arabia stop financing radical Islamists, including the Salafis, who have been largely responsible for attacks on Christians in Egypt. Surely we can do more to ask the Saudis to give their people the freedom and security for which they are crying out? In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia produced more than 4 megatonnes of wheat a year—more than enough to be self-sufficient—but now it has exhausted its water supply and by 2016 it could produce no wheat at all. Nearly 50% of all Saudi Arabia’s imports—primarily, machines, cars, textiles, chemicals and foodstuffs—now come from the US, the EU and close allies, such as Japan and South Korea. In short, it cannot live without us.

If we believe that ethics is as important as economics, we must demand a higher price for trade with the western world, and that price must be free speech, democratic reforms, property rights, freedom of association, freedom of movement, respect for women and, most importantly, religious tolerance. Those are the foundations of a free society on which our hopes for peace in the middle east depend.

In conclusion, intervention—and I am an interventionist—does not have to mean war. I accept that military action is sometimes unavoidable, but I urge the Government towards a policy of fair trade. If a regime kills its citizens for their faith, Britain should not do business with it. We already refuse to sell most of those countries guns, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, but we should not sell those countries butter either. If a state imprisons minority groups without charge or trial, it should become a pariah state and be excluded from the world economy.

In the middle east, 10,000 children are born every single day. Unless the Arab spring leads to lasting economic and social reforms and protection for minority groups—including minority Muslim groups, such as those in Kurdistan—then the 10,000 children born today are more likely than ever to grow up in a barren region, which has no jobs, no bread and no security. We have to act now with fair trade to pressure those countries into change. That would transform the treatment of Christians and religious minorities around the world and it would be in our national interest as well.