c. 1996 Religion News Service

Red Cross suspending work in Burundi after three workers killed

(RNS)-The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Wednesday (June 5) it is suspending its operations in strife-torn Burundi because of the slaying of three Swiss Red Cross workers from Switzerland.

The workers were ambushed Tuesday (June 4) after delivering water and medical supplies in northwestern Burundi.

Unidentified gunmen killed the three, who were in the lead vehicle of a two-car ICRC convoy equipped with flags and marked with emblems noting the group’s neutral status, Reuters reported.”Unhappily, for the moment, we are obliged to suspend all our operations in the country and return to the capital before we decide what to do,”said Patrick Berner, ICRC chief delegate in Burundi. The Red Cross, which has 35 expatriate staff in the area, is the largest aid organization in Burundi.

Since the democratically elected Hutu president was assassinated in a failed coup by the Tutsi-dominated military in 1989, Burundi has been plagued by ethnic violence. At least 15,000 people-including many civilians-died last year in the fighting between the Zaire-based Hutu rebels and the military, the Associated Press reported.

Interior Minister Sylvestre Banzubaze said the government will set up a panel to investigate the killings. He said the panel will include himself, as well as the ministers of defense and justice.”It is typical of a rebel attack, where they kill men, women, children and animals,”Banzubaze told Reuters.”The ICRC is an organization which does nothing but good in this country but they too are completely randomly targeted by these cowards.” The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is also suspending activities in Burundi, Reuters said. Belgian-based Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF-Doctors Without Borders) said it will bar its staff from working outside of Bujumbura, the nation’s capital. The French group Action Contre La Faim (Action Against Hunger) said the incident would not affect its activities.

Senate committee begins consideration of child pornography bill

(RNS)-The Senate Judiciary Committee began consideration Tuesday (June 4) of legislation designed to combat computer-aided child pornography.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, would establish a federal legal definition of child pornography that includes computer-generated material not using real children as models. It would also protect federal, state and local governments and law enforcement officials from civil lawsuits resulting from searches and seizures in child pornography cases.

President Clinton said he would sign the bill.”Child pornography plays a major role in the sexual molestation of children,”said Dee Jepsen, president of Enough is Enough, a Washington-based nonprofit women’s organization that combats illegal pornography.

She said the proposed legislation merely updates child pornography laws,”making them current and relevant to contemporary technological advances.”Current computerized electronics make it possible to create images that are substantially indistinguishable from actual photographs of human beings,”she said.

But Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said her organization is concerned about the potential scope of the bill.

She said that libraries”offer a broad range of visual materials”such as art reproductions”that might be affected”by enforcement of the bill.

Evangelical leaders urge Clinton to appoint commission on persecution

(RNS)-Evangelical leaders including National Association of Evangelicals President Don Argue and Southern Baptist Convention President Jim Henry have written President Clinton criticizing an expected White House plan to address the overseas persecution of Christians as”manifestly inadequate”and seeking a presidential commission with more authority to deal with the problem.”We believe that only a presidential commission can ensure serious attention to existing government policies that affect the gulags of faith in which millions now live,”they wrote May 17.

The writers were concerned that a proposed”advisory committee”might be a unit of the State Department rather than a White House committee, a move they believe might exclude consideration of the work of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which some evangelicals have criticized for its treatment of religious asylum cases.

The National Association of Evangelicals released a”Statement of Conscience”in January that called on the U.S. government to adopt policies limiting religious persecution. The statement included a request that Clinton appoint a special adviser on religious liberty.

The writers reminded Clinton of their previous statement.”In sum, we believe that what is now contemplated to deal with the concerns of the Statement of Conscience will almost certainly deflect and defer action rather than spur and cause it,”they wrote.

The White House had no immediate comment Wednesday (June 5) on the matter.

The letter marks another juncture in increased attention to the persecution issue this year. At a U.S. House subcommittee hearing in February, a variety of church leaders and human rights advocates challenged the U.S. government to combat the persecution of Christians across the globe. Three House Republican members wrote Clinton in April voicing similar concerns to those raised by the evangelical leaders in their more recent letter.

Other signatories of the May letter were Bill Bright, president, Campus Crusade for Christ; Charles Colson, founder, Prison Fellowship International; D. James Kennedy, senior minister, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Richard Land, president, Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission; Diane Knippers, president, Institute on Religion and Democracy; and Dwight Gibson, North American director, World Evangelical Fellowship.

Church of Scotland says lesbians should be denied in vitro fertilization

(RNS)-Lesbian couples should not receive access to in vitro fertilization or other means of”assisted reproduction,”according to the Church of Scotland.”We do not deny the capacity of people of homosexual orientation or single parents to rear children with loving concern, but we believe it is important for children to have role models of both genders,”the country’s Presbyterian denomination said in adopting a report by its Human Fertilization and Embryology Study Group.

The report said that assisted reproduction should be used only to overcome obstacles to pregnancy in relationships where childbearing would otherwise be the natural outcome, according to Ecumenical News International (ENI), the Geneva-based religious news agency.

The assembly also reiterated its support of in vitro fertilization when both sperm and egg are from the couple involved and its opposition to donor insemination and surrogate motherhood. It said that in surrogate motherhood,”the dignity of the child is violated through its becoming an object of barter,”the report said.

In another action, the denomination said it will continue to refuse to accept money from Britain’s National Lottery, ENI reported.

Bill Wallace, convener of the church’s Board of Social Responsibility, welcomed the decision. Though some claimed it is”madness to adopt such a high moral stance”by refusing the gambling money, Wallace said the lottery is”an appeal to greed, an exploitation of the downside of human nature.” Islamic leader asks Iran to lift death edict on writer Salman Rushdie

(RNS)-Mohammed T. Mehdi, secretary-general of the New York-based National Council on Islamic Affairs, has asked Iran to lift the death sentence Iranian religious authorities have placed on Muslim writer Salman Rushdie.

In a letter to Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani released Wednesday (June 5), Mehdi said the fatwa, a Muslim religious edict, to kill Rushdie was contrary to Islam because”the Koran is opposed to censorship.” On Feb. 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in June of that year, issued the fatwa declaring that Rushdie, in his novel”The Satanic Verses,”had blasphemed Islam and should die for it. Rushdie, a Muslim from Bombay, India, whose family immigrated to Great Britain, has been in hiding since the edict was issued, fearing followers of the Ayatollah would seek to carry out the death sentence.

The sentence has been reaffirmed several times by Iranian authorities since Khomeini’s death.

In his letter to Rafsanjani, Mehdi argued that the fatwa against Rushdie was not only against Islamic teaching but was also counter-productive.

He reminded Rafsanjani that the Arabs of Mecca had attacked the prophet Mohammed with language worse than that used by Rushdie and that such language can be found in the Koran.”God did not use His big red pencil to censor … on the ground that such ugly words … should not intrude in the good Book,”Mehdi wrote.”Censorship is self-defeating, Allah taught.” Mehdi, calling Rushdie”a B-grade story-teller,”said the attention given the novelist because of the fatwa had helped his reputation rather than harmed it.”As Muslims we should ignore and neglect Salman Rushdie and his second-rate obscene book,”Mehdi wrote.”The best that can be said about his `The Satanic Verses’ is that it is dull and unreadable.”If it were not for the fatwa against him, at best one or two thousand copies of the book might have been sold and no one would have known who this Salman Rushdie was.”

Canada moves to limit church control of schools in Newfoundland

(RNS)-When Newfoundland became part of Canada in 1949 it did so with the agreement that its schools, although funded by the government, would be run along denominational lines.

But on Monday (June 3), the Canadian House of Commons, citing the cost of maintaining 27 separate school boards in the impoverished province, voted to ratify a constitutional amendment limiting the power churches maintain over schools.

The vote was in response to a referendum adopted by Newfoundland voters to reform the school system.

If approved by Canada’s Senate, the amendment would allow the Newfoundland government to merge schools of different religions, eliminate school boards, and bus students to the nearest school rather than to a school of the student’s religious affiliation.

Opponents of the reform argued that it would create a domino effect in Canada’s nine other provinces, Reuters reported.

According to Reuters, most of the votes against ratification of the constitutional amendment in the House of Commons came from politicians who were concerned about the possibility of Roman Catholic schools in other provinces losing their funding.

Quote of the day: Judge Lee Sarokin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on the politicization of judicial rulings.

(RNS)-Judge H. Lee Sarokin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, based in Philadelphia, has become the center of a controversy between Republicans and Democrats over judicial rulings that Republicans charge are soft on crime. On Tuesday (June 4) Sarokin resigned from the judiciary because of the attacks. In a letter to President Clinton, who appointed him to the bench, Sarokin criticized the use of judicial ruling for political purposes:”In the current political campaign, enforcement of constitutional rights is equated with being soft on crime and, indeed, even causing it. To hold judges responsible for crime is like blaming doctors for disease.”

MJP END RNS