The First Country to Officially Defend Christians Persecuted by ISIS
Hungary has drawn criticism for favoring Christian over Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq.
World Watch Monitor 
[ posted 9/16/2016 01:20PM ]
Parliament in Budapest
This week, Hungary, which has during the past year
come under pressure for its handling of Europe’s mass migration crisis,
has become the first government to open an office specifically to
address the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Europe.
“Today, Christianity has become the most persecuted
religion, where out of five people killed [for] religious reasons, four
of them are Christians,” Catholic News Agency (CNA) quoted Hungary’s
Minister for Human Resources, Zoltan Balog, as saying. “In 81 countries
around the world, Christians are persecuted, and 200 million Christians
live in areas where they are discriminated against. Millions of
Christian lives are threatened by followers of radical religious
ideologies.”
[Editor’s note: Canada’s attempt at an office of international religious freedom, modeled on the American version, shut down after only three years.]
The move sets a precedent on the international stage. It
comes after Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, Victor Orban, drew
criticism in the EU by saying Europe should focus on helping Christians
before helping millions of Muslims coming into Europe.
“If we really want to help, we should help where the
real problem is. … We should first help the Christian people before
Islamic people,” Orban said.
Orban’s government has campaigned against an EU plan to
spread some of the burden of the influx of migrants and refugees by
requiring member states to accept quotas. Orban has called for a
referendum on October 2 at which voters are expected to back the
government and reject any future quotas.
He said that Europe is divided between an “EU elite” and those, like him, who want to hold on to Europe’s Christian roots.
“The political war based on the topic of migration is a
great opportunity for both parties,” Orban said. “[The elite] know that
Muslims will never vote for a party with Christian roots, so with the
huge volume of Muslims, the conservative parties will be crowded out of
power. But this war is also a great opportunity for the supporters of
the nation-states with Christian roots.”
Many of the 1.5 million refugees who have fled to
Germany since the country announced its “open door” policy in 2015
traveled through “the Balkan route,” though Hungary has now erected a
fence on its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia.
Hungary’s new office will have a starting budget of
$3.35 million with which to help persecuted Christians, to raise
international awareness of their “untenable situation,” and to
coordinate humanitarian efforts, Balog said. (Canada’s office had $5
million.)
In Iraq, a Christian population estimated at more than a
million before the 2003 war—and considerably more prior to that—today
stands at less than 300,000. Many displaced from Iraq’s Nineveh Plains
after the 2014 ISIS offensive currently seek a permanent home in the
West.
In Syria, a similar situation has developed since the
country’s civil war started five years ago. Other countries in the
region have seen a hemorrhaging of indigenous Christianity with the
resurgence of Islam as a political ideology since the last century.
Iraq ranks second and Syria is fifth on Open Doors’ 2016 World Watch List,
a list of 50 countries where Christians come under the most pressure.
Almost 40 of the 50 countries are majority Muslim or have Islamist
non-state actors (e.g. militias) at work.
The Hungarian government will spend the coming weeks
working out the exact duties of the new department, though it will have a
primarily humanitarian focus, said Eduard von Habsburg, the Hungarian
ambassador to the Holy See.
The decision to launch the new department came after
Orban and Balog traveled to Rome in August to meet Pope Francis. Orban
and Balog, respectively a Protestant layman and a Calvinist pastor, were
the only non-Catholic members of the group whom Pope Francis received
in a private audience in August.
Von Habsburg said that government officials’
interactions with leading European churchmen and with the patriarchs of
the Middle East contributed to the decision to form the agency.
Part of the reason for going public with the initiative now is to set an example for other European nations.
"Somehow the idea of defending Christians has acquired a
bad taste in Europe, as if it means excluding other people," von
Habsburg said. The Hungarian initiative is intended to show it doesn’t
have to be that way, Catholic news sources reported.
"Our interest not only lies in the Middle East but in
forms of discrimination and persecution of Christians all over the
world," Balog said. "It is therefore to be expected that we will keep a
vigilant eye on the more subtle forms of persecutions within European
borders."
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