The head
of a Muslim village last week ordered 250 Christian families to leave their
homes in Khanewal district, Punjab Province, local residents said.
Abdul Sattar Khan, head of village No. 123/10R, Katcha Khoh, and other area
Muslim residents ordered the expulsions after Christian residents objected too
strenuously to sexual assaults by Muslims on Christian girls and women, said Emmanuel Masih, a
locally elected Christian official.
Most of the village’s Christian men work in the fields of Muslim land
owners, while most of the Christian women and girls work as servants in the
homes of Muslim families, said Rasheed Masih, a Christian in the village who
added that the impoverished Christians were living in appalling conditions.
The Muslim employers have used their positions of power to routinely
sexually assault the Christian women and girls, whose complaints grew so shrill
that four Christian men—Emmanuel Masih, Rasheed Masih, his younger brother
Shehzad Anjum and Yousaf Masih Khokhar—sternly confronted the Muslims, only to
be told that all Christians were to leave the village at once.
“The Muslim villagers came to us with the expulsion order only after
Christian women and girls raised a hue and cry when they became totally
exasperated because they were sexually attacked or forced to commit adultery by
Muslims on a daily basis,” said Khokhar, a Christian political leader.
Khokhar said the unanimous decision to compel the Christians to leave their
homes and relocate them was possible because the Christians were completely
subject to the Muslims’ power.
“The Muslims had been telling the Christian women and girls that if they
denied them sex, they would kick them out of their native village,” Emmanuel
Masih added.
Christians created the colony when they began settling in the area in about
1950, said Anjum. Since then the migration of Muslims to the area has left the
Christians a minority among the 6,000 residents of the village, said Emmanuel
Masih.
“There is no church building or any worship place for Christians, and
neither is there any burial place for Christians,” Emmanuel Masih said.
He said that the Rev. Pervez Qaiser of village No. 231, the Rev. Frank
Masih of village No. 133 and the Rev. Sharif Masih of village No. 36, Mian
Channu, have been visiting the village on Sundays to lead services at the houses
of the Christian villagers, who open their homes by turns.
Asked why they didn’t contact local Katcha Khoh police for help, Emmanuel
Masih and Khokhar said that filing a complaint against Muslim village head Khan
and other Muslims would only result in police registering false charges against
them under Pakistan’s notorious “blasphemy” statutes.
“They might arrest us,” Khokhar said, “and the situation would be worse for
the Christian villagers who are already living a deplorably pathetic life under
the shadow of fear and death, as they [the Muslims] would not be in police
lock-up or would be out on bail, due to their riches and influence, very soon.”
That very fate befell two Christian couples in Gulshan-e-Iqbal town,
Karachi, who had approached police with complaints against Muslims for falsely
accusing them of blasphemy.
On May 28, a judge directed Peer Ilahi Bakhsh (PIB) police to file charges
of desecrating the Quran against Atiq Joseph and Qaiser William after a mob of
armed Islamists went through their home’s garbage looking for pages of the
Islamic scripture among clean-up debris.
Additional District and Sessions Judge (east) Sadiq
Hussein directed the PIB police station in Gulshan-e-Iqbal to file a case
against Joseph and William, newlyweds who along with their wives had shared a
rented home and are now in hiding. The judge acted on the application of Muslim
Munir Ahmed.
Saleem Khurshid Khokhar, a Christian provincial legislator in Sindh, and
Khalid Gill, head of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance in Punjab, said that
police were threatening and harassing relatives and close friends of Joseph and
William to reveal their whereabouts.
Islamists armed with pistols and rifles had waited for the two Christian
couples to return to their rented home on May 21, seeking to kill them after the
couples complained to police that the radical Muslims had falsely accused them
of desecrating the Quran.
The blasphemy laws include Section 295-A for injuring religious feelings,
295-B for defiling the Quran and 295-C for blaspheming Muhammad, the prophet of
Islam—all of which have often been misused by fanatical Muslims to settle
personal scores against Christians.
Maximum punishment for violation of Section 295-A, as well as for Section
295-B (defiling the Quran), is life imprisonment; for violating Section 295-C
the maximum punishment is death, though life imprisonment is also possible.
In village 123/10R in Khanewal district, Anjum noted that it is only 14 miles from Shanti Nagar, where Muslims launched an attack on
Christians in 1997 that burned hundreds of homes and 13 church buildings.
Yousaf Masih added, “Muslim villagers have made the life a hell for
Christians at village 123/10R.”
