July, Friday 25, 1997

On My Mind

A.M. ROSENTHAL

The position of Worship

Every year the State Department, acting under a congressional order of 1961, issues a report on human rights around the world, country by country.

This week, responding to a new Congressional directive, the State Department made public a separate human rights report concentrating entirely on the violation of the right of free worship. It focused mostly on Christians, now the most widely persecuted believers in the world.

The report was largely taken from the previous yearly reports on all human rights and was without any proposal for how to deal with religious persecutors except perhaps to scold them from time to time Yet the report had unintended values and will have unintended consequences.

More and more Americans and their organizations are demanding action against religious persecution. More important than numbers is the variety.

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. has traditionally, supported human rights action in Congress. Now the new president of the Christian Coalition, Don Hodel, writes a letter to members of Congress, saying ignoring persecution of Christians, simply emboldens the perpetrating dictatorships. He says the votes of, the legislators will be noted in the Coalition's Congressional scorecard, and passed on to voters.

"The latest form of torture imposed on those arrested for practicing their belief in God mocks the very position of worship," Mr. Hodel writes. "Chinese officials ... force Christians to kneel as if in prayer. Then they stomp on the backs of the heels until the ankles are broken. Other reported acts of religious persecution and torture include beatings, bindings or hangings of detainees by their -limbs, torments with cattle prods, electric drills and other implements, and crushing of finger tips with pliers."

Few Americans now awake to persecution of Christians are likely to be comfortable with passively accepting a scissors-and-paste report innocent of any action plan. The unintended consequence of the report will be increase pressure for Congressional action against persecution, a thought that arouses the dour in the Administration.

The unintended values of the report were two. First, it showed that in-the countries where religious persecution is most atrocious - China and up to a dozen Islamic nations - the Administration's claims that it was "promoting religious freedom" amounted to nothing more fearsome diplomatic, head-shaking.

The persecutors managed to remain unterrified, unmoved, unchanged.

Second: By drawing so heavily on previous reports, the accounting of religious persecution shows that the information on the abuse, arrests, tortures and murders of Christians and Tibetan Buddhists has been fully available to all nations for decades. They - we - knew.

Members of Congress with a taste for religious liberty and the courage to, fight for it have reacted to the report with scorn. America had China's reaction days before the report was even published.

Officials of the Religious Affairs Bureau, the official Communist religious regulators and enforcers in China, have been touring America.

They announced that there was no such thing as an underground church in China, that only offenders of the regulatory law, criminal types obviously, were arrested and therefore there was no religious persecution in their country, so there.

At least a dozen bills calling for sanctions or political penalties against religious persecution are in the Congressional hopper.

At the minimum, legislation should cut off all trade with the military and police arms of dictatorships - like the People's Liberation Army. The P.L.A. owns thousands of plants and businesses. The profit goes to the police and military forces - the power behind all China's varied persecutions.

"The time will come, again, when U.S.-China lobby will throw its money against effective action for religious freedom. It may win again.

But before members of Congress vote, they should reread that paragraph from Mr. Hodel's letter. Hum rights organizations can supply corroboration of this treatment of China's human rights prisoners.

Then, senators and representatives visited by the U.S.-China lobbyists might give the lobbyists copies of the paragraph and tack one to their door.