wfn.org | Inability to Place Blame in Death of Iranian Christian Frustrates

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Iranians in Diaspora 31-October-1996 
 
 
96435     Inability to Place Blame in Death of Iranian  
           Christian Frustrates Iranians in Diaspora  
 
                          by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.--Deep sadness and long-held frustration surround the 
denominationally mixed U.S.  Iranian Christian community's inability to 
pinpoint blame for the suspected murder of the seventh Christian leader in 
Iran since that country's 1979 Islamic revolution. 
 
     Though precise information is hard to obtain, 35-year-old Mohammed 
Bagher Yousefi was reportedly lynched sometime in late September, and his 
body was found hanging from a tree in a forest near Ghaem-Shahr in the 
north of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Most blame his death on Yousefi's 
conversion to Christianity from Islam 11 years ago or to his work as an 
Assemblies of God pastor whose ministry may have led to other conversions. 
 
     But while most Iranian Christians here feel certain about the cause of 
Yousefi's death -- and quickly dismiss questions of suicide -- there is no 
real consensus as to who killed him and there is absolutely no evidence to 
prove any allegations that might be leveled. 
 
     "There's absolutely no way for us to determine who ordered  the 
murder," according to the Rev.  Ashton "Tat" Stewart, pastor to a 60-member 
Iranian Christian congregation in Washington, D.C.,  who grew up as a 
Presbyterian missionary kid in Iran in the 1940s and '50s.  "A few crazies? 
That can happen in any society. ... 
 
     "Or whether the murder was the decision of higher-ups ... to pursue a 
policy?" he said, describing a strategy of fear that is designed to squelch 
conversion in Iran and to intimidate those who leave into silence by 
retaliations against family or other church members who are left behind.   
 
     "This death of this last person," said Stewart, who stresses how hard 
it is to get solid information out of Iran, "caused a wave of fear and 
apprehension ... in what's left of the church." 
 
     But who exactly authorizes murder or harassment is so unclear that 
even international human rights organizations stay unusually mum. 
 
       That is because no one can prove whether suspected lynchings like 
the one in late September are done by paramilitary groups with ties to high 
government officials to eliminate those who are considered dangerous to the 
Islamic revolution or whether these kinds of deaths are vigilante justice 
against accused dissenters and are organized by local hardliners that 
Iran's central government is either unwilling or unable to rein in.  The 
victims include wide categories of people, from evangelical Protestants to 
the more liberal Shi'a (Shiite) Muslims. 
 
     Some credibility is given to the suspicion that deaths like Yousefi's 
are the work of externally organized opposition groups that are attempting 
to discredit and embarrass the Rafsanjani government, just as shutdowns and 
strikes were used to publicly destablize the regime of the former Shah, and 
that want to even further Islamize Iran and further isolate it from Western 
influence. 
 
     "People are so much afraid," said one Iranian woman who now lives in 
the U.S. but who still has ties to Iran.  "It does not look like the church 
I had [there] when I left.  The women wear veils. Women and men sit 
separately. ... There was a fear [on one visit] that an [unknown] man 
sitting in the back [of the church] was a spy.  It's hard, really hard, 
being a Christian in that country." 
 
     In the Islamic Republic of Iran, conversion from Islam is a crime -- 
"akin to defection from the State" is how the London-based Institute for 
the Study of Islam and Christianity puts it in its 1994 profile of Iran. 
What practically all sources agree on is that there is precedent for both 
official and unofficial harassment -- ranging from job discrimination to 
death threats -- to deter Muslims who might consider conversion and to halt 
other religious groups from proselytizing.  But evangelical Protestant 
churches feel that they experience the most serious threats within Iran's 
Christian circles, since the republic's historic churches -- such as the 
Roman Catholic and the Armenian Orthodox -- do little evangelizing, are 
often ethnically distinct from the Persian population and have obvious ties 
to international church and political bodies. 
 
     But who chooses to engage in harassment?  It depends on who answers 
the question, but most allude to fundamentalist religious courts that 
operate locally and whose ties to other entities are unclear. 
 
     "A lot of these events happen without the knowledge of the central 
government," said one Iranian Christian in the U.S., who asked that his 
name not be used and who adamantly believes that it is not the policy of 
the Rafsanjani government to persecute evangelical Christians.   
 
     "There are too many problems in the political and economic arena in 
Iran ... [for the government] to bother with small churches here and 
there," he said, arguing that squabbles in Iran's outlying provinces are 
not likely to be settled in Tehran, but more arbitrarily, by self-styled 
vigilantes.  
 
     "If one member of a family becomes Christian, other members might get 
angry and they might take care of the pastor who is responsible for that," 
he said, cautioning Christians against angry reactions that might only 
prompt a backlash. 
 
     While others do not dispute that local clerics are free to interpret 
and administer justice -- and do so -- they maintain that a more 
coordinated strategy is orchestrated by high-placed clerics within the 
central government to squeeze evangelical Christians out of Iran, either by 
quiet killing or by making their lives so difficult that leaving the 
country becomes the only reasonable survival option.  "People don't dare go 
to such lengths," said one woman about the violence, "without the backing 
of the government." 
 
     But who she means when she blames the government, she says, is 
"fanatical groups" who are part of a complex and deeply enmeshed 
religio-political structure. 
 
     The lines of authority in the republic's government are the hardest 
part of Iran's political structure for Westerners to grasp, according to 
the Rev. Dale Bishop, the New York City-based Middle East area executive 
for the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ. 
 
     "There's a diffusion of power and authority within the society," said 
Bishop.  Multiple power centers are harder to bring under some kind of 
centralized control, said Bishop -- and therein lies the problem.  Local 
clerics and self-proclaimed charismatic leaders can wield authority that is 
free of government control.   
 
     "The Iranians don't know how to deal with that," Bishop told the 
Presbyterian News Service, "because it touches on one of the issues that 
lie behind the revolution itself:  the role of religious leaders in 
governing the country." 
 
     Amnesty International, the international human rights group, says 
little about the internal political structure within Iran.  But it does say 
that it holds the central government "responsible for all actions happening 
in the country" and holds it accountable to "take good measures to stop and 
put an end" to human rights violations. Amnesty's London-based press 
spokesperson, Mark Saghie, told the Presbyterian News Service that the 
"state of human rights" in Iran in general is "not really good" and that 
"many citizens" suffer harassment for holding differing beliefs or 
opinions, even in the Shi'a Muslim majority.   
 
     Even though Amnesty's 1996 report states that political trials fall 
far short of international standards in Iran and that there are continuing 
reports of torture or ill-treatment of prisoners and detainees in Iran, 
Saghie said he could not confirm that there is a policy of ill-treatment 
for minorities -- such as evangelical Christians -- who are imprisoned. 
 
     Saghie said Amnesty is not, however, getting "serious results" from 
its human rights conversation with the Iranian government. 
 
     In the meantime, Iranians in diaspora wait. 
 
     "Nobody knows. ... That's the point," is how one Iranian Christian man 
now living in the U.S.  described his community's dilemma to the 
Presbyterian News Service, speaking about the violence, the lack of 
concrete information and the community's uneasy silence.  "We are safe 
here.  All of us here. The people [Christians remaining in Iran] are 
suffering there.  We don't want to put them in jeopardy.  ... People [here] 
are very saddened," he said. 
 
      Pointing out that it has been two years since the deaths of three 
other Christian leaders were reported in Iran, the most recent until 
Yousefi's, he said, "We thought they were not going to do any more 
persecution. But now, again, here is another one."  

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