A minority religion is a religion held by a minority of the population of a country, state, or region. Minority religions may be subject to stigma or discrimination. An example of a stigma is using the term cult with its extremely negative connotations for certain new religious movements. People who belong to a minority religion may be subject to discrimination and prejudice, especially when the religious differences correlate with ethnic differences.

Laws are made in some countries to protect the rights of religious minorities, such as protecting the minorities’ culture and to promote harmony with the majority.

Genocide Designations Aren’t Enough to Stop Mass Atrocities

There is extensive evidence that the Chinese government is violating the human rights of ethnic Uyghurs, and that these violations include crimes against humanity and genocide. Satellite imagery, testimonials, demographic data and photographs substantiate the extensive allegations against China, which include the use of mass surveillance technologies throughout Xinjiang province, the arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, the separation of children from their parents, systematic sterilization, rape, forced labor and organ harvesting.

While survivors, relatives and diaspora communities have long sought to draw attention to the systematic and widespread violence in Xinjiang, states, multilateral organizations, corporations and many civil society groups have only recently begun considering their response to these grave violations. For more than a year, much of the public debate on China’s treatment of Uyghurs has focused not on what can be done in the face of such brutality, but how that brutality should be described: Is this a genocide or not? Concrete efforts to end the violence—or even meaningful debates on what those efforts should look like—have been harder to spot. 

For advocates like me who work on preventing and responding to genocide and crimes against humanity, this is a familiar state of affairs, and one that raises important questions. Ever since the Holocaust, advocates have invoked the world’s promise that genocide would happen “never again” to mobilize international attention and action. But does securing official determinations that a mass atrocity is a genocide actually lead to constructive policy responses? If not, at a time when political attention to foreign policy is in retreat all over the world, these campaigns may not be the most effective use of our finite resources. 

In the mid-2000s, the U.S.-based Save Darfur movement was successful in drawing attention to the Sudanese government’s killing of civilians in west Sudan, and its work prompted the U.S. to designate the violence as a genocide. But the campaign was too blunt to leverage its extraordinary platform to advance the comprehensive and necessarily complex policies the crisis warranted. That is not to say the advocacy movement is to blame for the failures in Darfur. But, as Rebecca Hamilton, a law professor at American University, put it in an interview with Slate, Save Darfur’s story is really “the story of mass movement advocacy” writ large. “It is second-to-none when it comes to sheer awareness-raising,” she explained, “but agility and nuance are rarely its strengths.”

Efforts to recognize atrocities as genocide have only rarely, and never in isolation, contributed to effective protective or preventative policy decisions.

Political genocide designations, like the ones on Xinjiang reached by former President Donald Trump’s administration in the U.S. and passed by the British Parliament earlier this year, do help to raise awareness and mobilize public engagement—but they also suck up political attention and civil society energy. There is only so much space a legislative calendar will ever give to individual foreign affairs issues, however pressing. And so far, efforts to recognize atrocities as genocide have only rarely, and never in isolation, contributed to effective protective or preventative policy decisions.

It is difficult to see what might be different for the populations currently suffering in Xinjiang. As Kate Cronin-Furman, a human rights expert at University College London, has argued, genocide determinations alone have never saved lives. To pretend anything else is disingenuous. 

A Diluted Concept of Genocide

The word “genocide” was coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 by bringing together the ancient Greek word genos, meaning “race” or “tribe,” and the Latin cide, or “killing.” It was, he explained, to “signify a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.” 

As a lawyer, Lemkin was committed to establishing genocide as a crime so that states could be held accountable. But the definition of it eventually codified in the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, better known as the Genocide Convention, is much narrower than Lemkin had envisioned. 

The convention’s definition outlaws actions carried out with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including but not limited to killing its members, sterilization and transferring children into the care of other groups. During the convention’s drafting, countries within the Soviet bloc and many in Latin America worked to remove “political groups” from the list of protected categories, while the U.K., France and the Netherlands vetoed the inclusion of “cultural genocide,” which includes efforts to eliminate a group’s language, values and cultural practices. 

These refinements left the world with a restricted legal framework as the primary definition of the multidimensional phenomenon Lemkin had sought to articulate. In addition to being a lawyer, Lemkin was also a historian and activist; he understood that atrocities are often the culmination of discriminatory policies. Having analyzed the early policies and decrees that preceded the Holocaust, he wrote that he could “read the intentions of the Nazi government” in them, noting in his autobiography that “Hitler was one of the few statesmen in history who proclaimed his intentions many years before he took power.” 

Many forget—or do not know—that Lemkin was inspired to create the new term not only by the Holocaust, but also by his study of the systematic persecution, cultural destruction and organized violence faced by Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1917 and by Ukrainians during the human-made Holodomor famine in 1932-1933, as well as by the atrocities committed by the Roman Empire across the ancient world.

“He was always indignant that genocide was associated solely with physical extermination, in whole or part, of a group,” Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of Canada’s Liberal party, wrote in a 2013 essay. “He always believed that genocide could take non-exterminatory forms, as in the determined attempt he had seen in his native Poland to crush Polish language, culture and faith and turn a people into slaves.”

“Genocide,” then, was simultaneously intended by Lemkin to be a new crime, a new concept of violence and a new call to action. It was meant to give name to the many forms of discrimination that target identity groups—including structural violence. It is a great shame that Lemkin’s vision did not prevail over the legal definition and the popular understanding of it, which connects the term so inextricably to the Holocaust’s concentration camps. In the end, as much as the creation of the word “genocide” has inspired and focused advocacy, it has also brought challenges that actually obstruct more holistic approaches to preventing identity-based mass violence. 

As much as the creation of the word “genocide” has inspired advocacy, it has also brought challenges that obstruct more holistic approaches to preventing mass violence. 

As the historian Dirk Moses has explained, the term “genocide” has “distort[ed] our criminal vocabulary with its paralyzingly monumental status as the ‘crime of crimes.’” From a legal perspective, there is no hierarchy between different forms of mass atrocity. In political culture, though, genocide is often assumed to be more severe, while crimes against humanity, as the lawyer Philippe Sands put it, “came to be seen as the lesser evil.”

And this fixation on “genocide” as the top tier in a hierarchy of suffering has had tangible consequences. Despite the fact that the Genocide Convention makes the dual commitment to both punish and prevent genocide, states usually employ a retrospective approach to the crime, in which they wait for the violence to demonstrably reach a certain, recognizable threshold before reaching for the language of genocide. Yet by the time an atrocity reaches the point where it is more easily identifiable as one crime or another, prevention efforts have evidently already failed.

Moving From Distraction to Prevention

When journalists from the British media company ITN reported on a string of concentration camps in Bosnia in 1992, at the height of the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosnian Muslims, it kicked-off a high-profile, intellectual debate over whether it was right to draw parallels between the atrocities in Bosnia and those of the Holocaust. Was “genocide” an appropriate word for what was happening? And, by the way, how could we be sure of the veracity of ITN’s images? It was a “debate” that only helped the perpetrators and did nothing for the victims. 

The same disingenuous arguments are made today by China, Myanmar, Syria and their supporters to counter condemnations of their own gross human rights violations. Perpetrators and their public relations auxiliaries have honed in on the genocide question, not because there is any merit to their arguments against mass atrocity designations, but because they have learned that doing so can tap into a pre-existing and protracted discourse around the use of the term. It is a tactic that also activates conspiracy theorists and violence deniers, diverts advocates and campaigners toward collecting more evidence, and ultimately helps foreign states reluctant to respond to avoid their international obligations to help protect populations from atrocity crimes. As the challenges of disinformation mount, getting outside governments to stand with victims will only become more challenging.

Naming mass violence is important. It is a means of acknowledging suffering, standing in solidarity and confronting denial. Contrary to popular belief, genocide and crimes against humanity are not rare aberrations but are relatively common. Of today’s major and emerging crises, the vast majority—including those in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Myanmar, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Venezuela, China and Afghanistan—are driven at least in part by the deliberate, violent targeting of civilian groups by political elites. Systematic or widespread discrimination against people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, political affiliation, age, disability or class remains a common phenomenon in our modern world. In fact, as the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and democratic backsliding set in, the risk factors for genocide and crimes against humanity are set to increase in the medium and long term. Far from being a holdover from the past, atrocity crimes are becoming more common. 

States and advocates, then, must move beyond the distracting conversations about genocide determinations toward prevention. Protecting populations from mass violence is a collective responsibility, as well as an individual one, and—73 years after the signing of the Genocide Convention—it must finally become an international priority. 

In 2017, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for member states to integrate atrocity prevention into national policy processes. States should have the ability to make internal determinations that a mass atrocity may be emerging or under way, which can then be used to guide their policies—whether or not these analyses are disclosed to the public. That process should include monitoring the risk factors for atrocities, making assessments and formulating policy responses long before the threshold of atrocity is reached. The U.N. has helpfully produced an imperfect but useful framework that sets out risk indicators for mass atrocities, such as the presence of an exclusionary ideology, the politicization of grievances, social fracture and disputes over resources or territory. This guide can inform national risk assessments. It’s worth noting, too, that the U.N. makes no distinction between risk factors for crimes against humanity versus genocide: They are the same. 

Actively choosing not to do this kind of analysis—whether out of a fear of what might be determined or because intelligence agencies lack the necessary capabilities or coordination—leaves states vulnerable to pursuing bad policies based on incomplete intelligence. States should then establish their own strategies for reducing the risks of atrocity crimes and create a playbook for responding when violence is already underway, whether via targeting illicit financial flows, evacuating those at risk or pressuring perpetrators through diplomatic channels. 

Governments should also create national coordinating authorities that can contribute to policy and maximize atrocity-prevention efforts across departments, from trade and development to diplomacy and refugee policy. States should similarly center the prevention of mass atrocities in their strategies for each foreign country, including by adopting more systematized ways to collect data on the dynamics of violence and risk factors. Better data allows states to identify opportunities for prevention, protection and punishment that they currently miss—or, at the very least, it would help them to avoid being complicit in international crimes.

States and advocates must move beyond the distracting conversations about genocide determinations toward prevention. 

The principles and practice of atrocity prevention should also be consciously integrated into job descriptions, job titles and staff trainings, so that a prevention-first way of thinking is fully institutionalized across government offices. Diplomats must be trained to recognize the distinguishing features and causes of mass atrocities. While the U.S. has mandated atrocity-prevention training for its diplomats, this is the exception, not the rule. Indeed, in the aftermath of the dramatic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, one wonders if implementing this program sooner could have led the U.S. to pursue a plan that would have left fewer people at such immediate and acute risk. In recent months, the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, too, has faced questions about why its staff in China, Ethiopia and elsewhere did not receive atrocity-prevention training. 

Relying on awareness-raising campaigns to mobilize political leadership, attention and will toward ending atrocities simply doesn’t work. It never has. Instead, our approach to these crimes should be results-oriented and should recognize that the challenge of making determinations cannot distract from our responsibility to help save lives. 

Thanks to the hard work of many advocates and policymakers, efforts to integrate prevention and protection into the working methods of national governments are already becoming more common. A number of “national mechanisms for atrocity crimes prevention” now exist across Latin America and the Great Lakes region of Africa. The U.S., too, has an interagency Atrocities Early Warning Task Force, founded as the Atrocities Prevention Board in 2011 by then-President Barack Obama. But even these structures fail to implement what Lemkin sought to teach us about recognizing early warning signs, raising alarms and assuming the responsibility to interrupt identity-based discrimination before it escalates to mass violence. We have a long way to go.

The threat of mass atrocities is not going anywhere. We need to urgently pivot to meet that challenge by building policy and processes that reduce complicity in mass violence, rather than spending so much time on definitions and determinations. The Uyghur community in Xinjiang, like other communities facing genocide and crimes against humanity around the world, urgently needs not just international attention, but creative, consistent and coordinated work to identify the measures that can reduce suffering and save lives.

The Rise of Right-Wing Parties Highlights the Precarious Status of Italy’s Muslims

In early February 2018, a month before Italy’s inconclusive elections, the leader of the far-right party the League, Matteo Salvini, called for the closure of all “illegal” Islamic centers, declaring that “Islam is incompatible” with Italian values. The rise of Islamophobia in Italy has coincided with an anti-immigrant backlash to the migrant crisis that saw just under 120,000 immigrants arrive in the country in 2017 alone, many of them Muslims from Africa and the Middle East. But the question of unregistered Islamic centers—a response to a shortage of mosques—highlights Muslims’ precarious situation in Italy, where a “pyramid” system stratifies the legal status of the country’s religious minorities. In an email interview, Alessandro Ferrari, professor at the University of Insubria in Como and Varese, Italy, discusses the social and legal status of Italy’s religious minorities, and the implications for religious minorities of the rise of right-wing nationalist parties like the League.

WPR: How would you characterize the experience of religious minorities in Italy today, especially in relation to the state and Catholic majority?

Alessandro Ferrari: The roughly 2 million people in Italy that are affiliated with non-Catholic religions experience general tolerance from Italian society and relative indifference from state institutions. The tolerance stems from the fact that because Italy considers itself a “Catholic country,” public space is not perceived as religion-free. Therefore public displays of religion don’t elicit a reflexively negative reaction. The indifference from state institutions is connected to the fact that there are relatively few non-Catholics, and most are identified with Islam, which has neither a political voice nor favorable media coverage.

As a result, unlike in France for example, Italy doesn’t exhibit forms of aggressive secularism with regard to the public practice of religion by minorities, such as wearing headscarves or observing dietary restrictions. Moreover, unlike some Northern European countries, Italy still ensures a certain primacy to the individual’s right to religious freedom, even when balanced with other important rights, such as children’s rights. For instance, the legitimacy of circumcision of minors is fully accepted.

On the other hand, although Italy has a Concordat with the Catholic Church and specific statutory agreements with 12 other religious denominations, it does not have an updated general law on religious freedom. Consequently, the collective status of any religious denominations that don’t have an agreement with the state can be very precarious. However, it is worth noting that Pope Francis has encouraged a more open attitude on the part of the Italian Catholic Church toward religious minorities, which could mean the church will be more favorable toward a general law on religious freedom.

WPR: Why do some religious minorities, including Muslims, have a different status than other religious minorities? What are the implications of this? Do religious minorities enjoy the same legal status as the Catholic Church?

Ferrari: In Italy, like in many other European countries, the legal status of religious denominations is the outcome of a long and complex history that has produced a stratified or pyramidal system of recognition ultimately dependent on the discretionary power of state authorities. The top level is occupied by the Catholic Church, which has a bilateral and near-equal relationship with the state through two international treaties: the “Trattato,” which recognizes the international sovereignty of the Holy See; and the “Concordato,” which regulates the functioning of the church within the country. The Concordat grants the Catholic Church several benefits, such as the inclusion on income tax returns of an option for earmarking up to 0.8 percent of an individual’s personal income taxes to the church; the guarantee of Catholic religious education in all public schools paid for by the state as an ordinary, although elective, part of the curriculum; and the legal recognition of Catholic marriages.

At the second level are the 12 religious groups—several non-Catholic Christian denominations, as well as national associations representing Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism—that have signed individual agreements, called an “intesa,” with the state. These are based on the model of the Catholic Concordat but with some limitations. For instance, the agreements include the option of earmarking 0.8 percent of personal income tax for a non-Catholic religion of the individual’s choice, but not state-funded religious education in public schools.

At the third level are religious minorities that do not have any formal agreement with the state, but are recognized as a “religious entity” by the Home Ministry, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Finally, the fourth level is occupied by religious groups that have neither an agreement nor formal recognition as a religious entity, and are organized as private associations under legal provisions that do not pertain to religious freedom. This is the situation of most Muslim communities.

Whether or not a religious minority climbs up the pyramid of legal status is up to the state’s discretion. Despite the fact that Muslims are the largest religious minority group in Italy, Muslim associations are at the fourth level and lack legal status, largely due to a lack of formal institutions or unified national representation. As a result, Muslims are heavily dependent on foreign states both for financial and religious needs, including funding to open places of worships and imams to preach, especially during Ramadan. They also face major difficulties at the local and regional levels in opening places of worship. The one exception is the “Great Mosque” in Rome, which enjoys formal recognition by the Home Ministry because of its links with Islamic countries whose ambassadors play an important role in its management.

WPR: What does the rise of nationalist right-wing parties in Italy mean for religious minorities today and going forward?

Ferrari: The rise of right-wing parties in Italy is often viewed by religious minorities with concern. As many reports indicate, varying degrees of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are widespread within Italian society and on social media. This could be a result of widespread “religious illiteracy” and secularization that has eroded the traditional Catholic notion of tolerance, substituting it with a more ethnocentric and parochial identity fearful of immigrants and immigration. Even if Italian right-wing parties do not have a specific or explicit religious agenda, their members’ sense of identity is grounded in Catholic tradition and they often perceive non-Catholic religions as foreign and strange—above all Islam and Judaism.

The rise of these groups could facilitate discrimination, hate speech and hate crimes, and make the path to an updated model for religious freedom in Italy more arduous. This could be particularly detrimental for Muslims, whose situation is especially delicate given their lack of formal religious legal status. At the same time, the strong role still played by the Catholic Church, not to mention the judiciary, and the significant variation in approaches to religious minorities between different regions and municipalities—even when led by these same right-wing political parties—are all reasons to avoid generalizations over how significant the threat from the rise of right-wing parties actually is.

The Ruling BJP Is Undermining India’s Commitment to Religious Pluralism

On April 13/2018, two lawmakers from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, resigned amid nationwide blowback over their public support for a group of Hindu men accused of the rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl. The party’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, broke his silence on the episode the same day, saying “no culprit will be spared.” The high-profile case has raised concerns about worsening intercommunal tensions in India under the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP. In January, Human Rights Watch said many of the BJP’s senior leaders publicly promote Hindu supremacy, and that authorities had “proven themselves unwilling to protect minority religious communities” from frequent attack. In an email interview, Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science who holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington, explains why India’s “well-being as a religiously and culturally pluralistic society is being undermined.”

WPR: How has the rise in Hindu nationalism and extremism affected religious minorities and religious pluralism in India?

Sumit Ganguly: Hindu nationalism and extremism have adversely affected India’s religious minorities. This is especially true of the country’s Muslims, who have been subjected to religiously motivated violence that has included numerous lynchings. Muslims have also been attacked for putatively being involved in the illegal cattle trade—cows are considered sacred in Hinduism and their consumption has become a major flashpoint. In 2017, slaughterhouses in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, were closed by the BJP-led government, ostensibly for their unsanitary conditions. Mostly poor, working-class Muslims ran and worked in these abattoirs, and consequently, they have borne the brunt of the adverse economic effects of their closure. Beyond these incidents and developments, charges of routine discrimination against Muslims in terms of access to educational opportunities, housing, employment and other aspects of everyday life have dramatically increased. Worse still, there is a palpable fear among poorer Muslims that they cannot readily obtain redress from the state when faced with discrimination.

In fairness, there have been few large-scale anti-Muslim riots since Modi took office in May 2014. However, this absence of mass violence may be deceptive. Large, prominent incidents, such as mass anti-Muslim riots, attract unwanted attention from the global community. A climate of discrimination and prejudice, on the other hand, is not easy to detect and pinpoint. Only those who are affected can feel the insecurities and anxieties that it engenders.

These misgivings are not confined to the Muslim community alone. India’s small Christian communities have also expressed concerns about their well-being in the current environment. Their fears rose in 2017 when Hindus were suspected of committing a number of attacks on churches in various parts of the country.

WPR: How has the government responded to the rise in interreligious tension? Have legal protections been enforced?

Ganguly: The national government has been mostly silent about these incidents and developments. This has most notably been the case for Modi, who is normally quite voluble on most issues. Another notable figure is Yogi Adityanath, a right-wing Hindu monk and the current chief minister in Uttar Pradesh. Prior to assuming office in September 2017, Adityanath had made a series of highly inflammatory and derogatory remarks about Muslims, but in office he has largely toned down his rhetoric.

This has not been the case for everyone, however. Some members of parliament belonging to the BJP have periodically made intemperate remarks about Muslims and other minorities. In possibly the most disturbing incident, two BJP legislators recently expressed support for the alleged rapists and murderers of an 8-year-old Muslim girl from the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Instead of condemning the depraved act, the two legislators actually showed up to attend a rally in Jammu and Kashmir, calling for the exoneration of the six men charged with the horrific crime.

While legal protections remain in place to safeguard minority groups in India, their enforcement is both uneven and anemic.

WPR: How do the current tensions fit into the larger context of intercommunal relations in India? What do they portend for the future?

Ganguly: If the present government either maintains its silence about these incidents or even chooses to tacitly condone them, the prospects for intercommunal tensions and violence will no doubt increase. India cannot alienate the 14 percent of its population that is Muslim and expect to see intercommunal harmony and peace prevail. As a consequence, we can say that India’s well-being as a religiously and culturally pluralistic society is being undermined.

Of course, India has never been wholly free from interreligious tension and occasional violence. Since the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, India has experienced periodic outbreaks of ethno-religious violence. However, for several decades, Indian governments have mostly sought to dampen and contain these incidents. Today, the situation is quite different. At best, the Modi regime is indifferent to the growth of ethno-religious tensions. At worst, it is not only tacitly complicit in fomenting tensions, but also willing to quietly condone acts of violence by majority Hindus against minorities. It is safe to say that India is probably going through a particularly disturbing phase in terms of the decline of its commitment to religious and cultural pluralism. These trends, if left unchecked, could bode ill for its future as a secular, democratic and liberal polity.

Church and Mosque Closures in Rwanda Show the Increasing Power of the State

Since early March, the government of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda has ordered the closing of thousands of churches and dozens of mosques, citing unsafe conditions for worshippers. It also banned mosques in the capital, Kigali, from using loudspeakers for the Muslim call to prayer. Kagame insists that there is no reason for so many places of worship in a small, developing country like Rwanda. The predominantly Catholic country has seen a proliferation of non-Catholic churches in the decades since the Rwandan genocide was carried out against the Tutsi ethnic minority in 1994. In an email interview, Timothy Longman, the director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University and the author of “Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda,” discusses the recent church and mosque closures and the role religion has played in Rwanda since the genocide.

WPR: What is driving the government’s recent decisions to close down churches and mosques?

Timothy Longman: The 1994 genocide inspired major transformations in Rwanda’s religious landscape. The implication of the country’s churches in the genocide drove many survivors to seek new spiritual homes. Tutsi refugees, who fled earlier waves of ethnic violence and lived in neighboring countries for decades, and Hutu refugees, who spent several years after the genocide in camps in neighboring Congo and Tanzania, both brought many new churches back to Rwanda from exile. The new government installed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, after militarily defeating the government responsible for the genocide in 1994, at first took a liberal approach to religion, eliminating existing regulations on religious organizations. As a result, new houses of worship proliferated. A substantial portion of the population left the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches to join new Pentecostal churches, many of them nondenominational congregations. Because it was believed that Muslims were less implicated in the genocide, Islam took on a more visible role in Rwandan society, and some Rwandans converted to Islam, though Muslims remain less than 5 percent of the population.

The RPF has maintained strict control over Rwandan social and political life since fighting its way to power in 1994. Over the past two decades, the RPF has gradually sought to eliminate all potential threats to its dominance by co-opting or, when necessary, crushing independent newspapers, political parties and civil society groups. In the years immediately after taking power, it pressured the established Christian denominations to name pro-RPF leaders. The recent move to close thousands of churches is an attempt to rein in the many nondenominational congregations that are harder to control because they don’t report to a central hierarchy. The official justification for their closure is safety violations, but everyone in Rwanda understands that this action is really about the RPF showing that they are in charge. Restrictions on the Muslim call to prayer and on noisy all-night Pentecostal worship services are similarly justified in the name of controlling public nuisances, but they serve to demonstrate the power of the state.

The impetus for closing the churches and mosques at this time remains unclear, but the effort to extend greater control over Rwanda’s religious groups seems likely to intensify. After initially closing 700 churches in Kigali and 800 in other parts of the country in early March, the government closed hundreds of additional churches and dozens of mosques in the following weeks. A number of pastors who sought to defy the orders by holding service after the closures were arrested. The government is now proposing stricter registration requirements for religious groups, including introducing requirements that clergy have a university education.

WPR: What role did religion play during the civil war and genocide?

Longman: The role of religion in Rwanda’s violent history differs from cases in many other countries, because sectarian differences were not a source of conflict. Over 90 percent of Rwanda’s population was Christian in 1994, and denominational affiliations cut across lines of ethnic difference. Nevertheless, as I have written about in my book, “Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda,” religion played an important role in providing moral support for the genocide. Rwanda’s churches had been close allies of the state since colonial times, and they had themselves practiced ethnic discrimination. The pro-democracy movement that rocked the single-party dictatorship in the early 1990s also challenged power structures within the churches. For church leaders, as for government leaders, the genocide provided an opportunity to reassert their authority. They called upon people to support the government even as that government was executing a campaign of genocide. Thus many Hutus killed others believing that their churches sanctioned their actions.

WPR: What role has religion played in Rwanda since the war and genocide?

Longman: Prior to 1994, Rwanda’s churches had considerable political influence. Claiming over two-thirds of the population as members, the Catholic Church in particular was a powerful institution. Since 1994, the state has clearly demonstrated that it is in control, and the influence of churches has diminished. The Catholic Church remains the largest religious body, but the RPF leadership mostly identify as Protestants. Having been tainted by their involvement in the genocide, churches of all denominations have changed their leadership. Pope Francis last year asked for forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s role in the genocide, and most Protestant groups have also apologized for the involvement of their churches in the violence.

But the new church leaders, like their predecessors, have sought close alliances with the government. Sadly, the church leaders have not learned the importance of maintaining a critical distance that could allow them to speak independently on issues of national importance. The recent move by the government to shut down churches and mosques will send a chilling message to remaining religious institutions, discouraging them from challenging the government. Unfortunately, Rwanda’s religious communities are unlikely to offer any challenge to Rwanda’s increasingly authoritarian state.

Religious groups have, however, played a role in promoting reconciliation in Rwanda. Churches and mosques have sponsored many programs to bring Rwandans together across lines of ethnic division, some explicitly focused on confronting the legacies of the genocide but many focused on economic development or education. Churches provided important support to the grassroots gacaca courts that tried most genocide cases by encouraging perpetrators to confess their crimes and seek forgiveness. A “born again” movement that swept through the prisons pushed many perpetrators to plead guilty and to implicate others, an essential element in the ability of gacaca courts to try over 1 million individuals on genocide charges. Yet Rwanda’s religious institutions are more ethnically segregated now than before the genocide, with many of the new churches attracting believers from only one ethnic group.

Why Is Russia Becoming Less Tolerant of Religious Minorities?

In its 2017 annual report, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom called out Russia for creating an increasingly repressive environment for religious minorities. While the report did not put Russia on the U.S. watchdog’s list of most egregious violators, it did recommend for the first time that Russia be designated a “country of particular concern.” In an email interview, Eugene Clay, head of the religious studies faculty at Arizona State University and a scholar on religion in Russia, discusses Russian attitudes toward religion since the collapse of the Soviet Union and why the country is becoming less tolerant of religious minorities.

WPR: How have attitudes toward religion in Russia evolved in the post-Soviet era, both in society and in government? How has this affected religious minorities in the country?

Eugene Clay: In 1990, under Mikhail Gorbachev, both the Soviet Union as a whole and the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic within it passed new laws guaranteeing freedom of conscience—a sharp departure from earlier Soviet laws and practice that placed heavy burdens on religious communities and believers. The new laws ushered in a religious renaissance, in which religious believers of all kinds were able to worship freely. The Russian Orthodox Church, which had been the predominant church of the Russian Empire prior to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, especially benefited from these new freedoms, but so did Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics and new religious movements.

Members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination that had been in the Soviet Union in significant numbers after the 1944 annexation of Moldova, were able to emerge from the underground, establish a legal headquarters in St. Petersburg and openly engage in proselytizing. Likewise, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints began sending missionaries to Russia in 1990 and succeeded in developing an extensive network of wards across the Russian Federation. Ole Nydahl, a Buddhist Lama in Denmark, also began traveling regularly to Russia in the 1990s, winning converts to the Diamond Way Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Claiming that he had received a series of revelations from the Virgin Mary, the Russian seer John Bereslavsky organized the “Mother-of-God Center,” which eventually became the Church of the Sovereign Mother of God. When the newly independent Russian Federation adopted a new constitution in 1993, it affirmed the equality of all religions before the law, as well as the secular nature of the state.

By 1997, however, the public attitude toward new religious movements and to foreign missionaries had become more critical. The growth of new religious movements and an influx of foreign missionaries convinced many Russians of the need for more restrictive laws. Between 1993 and 1997, dozens of Russia’s federal districts passed laws that favored “traditional” religions, as a series of scandals involving new religious movements active in the country were unfolding elsewhere. In November 1993, members of the Great White Brotherhood, a mystical New Age movement founded a few years earlier and active in Russia, assembled in Kiev to witness the end of the world. Mistakenly believing that they planned to commit mass suicide, Ukrainian police arrested hundreds of these believers, who clashed with police and damaged sacred icons in a prominent cathedral. In 1995, members of the Japanese movement Aum Shinrikyo, which had proselytized in Russia and successfully registered three communities there by 1994, launched a terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway, using sarin nerve gas they had obtained in Russia. In September 1997, Russia adopted the current Law on Freedom of Conscience and on Religious Associations, which sought to favor established, traditional religions that had contributed to the histories and cultures of Russia’s many ethnic groups. As a result of the law, minority religious communities, as well as new ones, faced greater difficulties when they sought legal registration.

WPR: How has legislation in Russia been used to protect or persecute religious communities, particularly religious minorities?

Clay: In its preamble, the 1997 law singled out four religious traditions that were especially noteworthy for their contributions to the history and culture of the peoples of Russia: Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. Each of these religions is connected to important ethnic communities. Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians have traditionally followed Orthodox Christianity; Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens and Ingush have been proponents of Islam; and Tuvans, Kalmyks and Buryats have embraced Buddhism. Significantly, Protestants and Catholics are excluded from this list, despite their long history in Russia. Although the law’s preamble had no legal force, many Russians began to identify these four religions as the “traditional religions of Russia.” Over time, new laws on education, counterterrorism, noncommercial organizations and extremism affirmed the special status of these four faiths. For example, in 2012, Russia introduced a new universal program of moral and spiritual education for elementary school children. Parents could choose to have their children study any one of the “four traditional religions of Russia,” or take a course on world religions or secular ethics. Because Catholicism is not considered a traditional religion of Russia, Catholic parents cannot request that their children study a module on Catholic civilization.

Laws against terrorism and extremism have increasingly been applied against certain religious minorities, as well. For example, beginning in 2009, Russian prosecutors launched a series of cases against the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the grounds that their literature, which affirmed the unique truth of their faith, promoted religious intolerance and extremism. As a result, the Ministry of Justice turned to the courts to strip several individual congregations of their legal registration. Most recently, Russia’s adoption of the “Yarovaya Laws” against terrorism and extremism in 2016 has significantly restricted religious freedom. Named for Irina Yarovaya, the conservative parliamentary deputy who introduced them, these laws have placed additional limits on missionary activity and laid the groundwork for the liquidation of the entire denomination of Jehovah’s Witnesses, which prosecutors accused of being an extremist organization. In July 2017, Jehovah’s Witnesses lost their final appeal in Russia’s Supreme Court, and the government seized all the denomination’s assets.

WPR: Have religious minorities in Russia mobilized to push for greater rights and freedoms? If so, how successful have these efforts been?

Clay: Religious minorities have used the courts to defend their rights and freedoms. In 1999, a Pentecostal congregation and a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses won a major victory in the Constitutional Court, which affirmed their right to be registered under the 1997 law. Likewise, the Catholic Society of Jesus was able to win the right to legal registration from the Constitutional Court in 2000. To gain its juridical personhood under the 1997 law, the Moscow branch of the Salvation Army had to turn to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in its favor in 2006. Three years later, the Ministry of Justice registered the branch.

The unprecedented ban in 2017 on the entire denomination of Jehovah’s Witnesses is evidence of increasing religious intolerance in Russia. At the same time, Russia has over 30,000 legally registered religious organizations, many of which represent minority religions. Although the legal framework of the Russian spiritual marketplace clearly favors “traditional” religions, members of minority religions continue to struggle for their right to observe and spread their faiths.

How Religious Marginalization Shapes Political Life in the Philippines

In late January 2018, the Department of Tourism in the Philippines announced plans to make the country a significant “religious pilgrimage destination,” especially for Catholic communities in Asia, by restoring old churches and historical shrines. Yet efforts to capitalize on its status as the largest Catholic-majority country in Asia and draw in more tourists could create problems in the Philippines, which has sizeable non-Catholic Christian communities and a Muslim population that has long felt marginalized by a state heavily linked to the Catholic faith. In an email interview, David T. Buckley, an assistant professor of political science and Paul Weber Endowed Chair in Politics, Science and Religion at the University of Louisville, discusses the historical experiences of religious minorities in the Philippines, how they have informed the country’s politics, and the state of religious freedom today.

WPR: What is the historical experience of religious minorities in the Philippines? Do religious minorities hold grievances against the state?

David T. Buckley: Grievances on the part of religious minorities against the state are rooted in the Spanish colonial period, which stretched from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Under Spanish rule, friars from Roman Catholic religious orders enjoyed significant political authority. Beginning in the mid-1800s, nationalist propaganda attacked this “friarocracy” while calling for church-state separation. The arrival of American colonialism at the turn of the 20th century complicated this dynamic, as American authorities limited the power of friars, and Protestant missionary organizations enjoyed expanded opportunities to “Christianize” the Philippines. In the later U.S. colonial period, and after independence from American rule in 1946, various non-Roman Catholic Christian communities expressed frustration at alleged state privileging of Catholicism, in spite of the lack of a legally established religion. For example, aspects of the civil legal code pertaining to family matters, such as divorce, draw explicitly on Catholic canon law.

The Philippines’ Muslim minority has a unique historical experience and set of grievances, largely because of its concentration in portions of the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu. This led to distinct patterns of colonialism under both Spanish and American rule. While American authorities promoted local and federal governance in partnership with Filipino elites in “civilized,” or Christian, provinces, military rule was the norm in Mindanao. In some ways, even after the U.S. recognized the Philippines’ independence in 1946, Muslims enjoyed unique legal autonomy, for instance over personal law, but this was always within a context of limited access to national-level politics and persistent regional poverty. This history of isolation and neglect fueled armed resistance to the central state from separatist groups like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front, which formed in the 1970s. A 2014 peace agreement that was meant to devolve centralized power to a newly recognized Bangsamoro Autonomous Region was hailed as a major step in resolving these grievances, but its implementation has stalled.

WPR: How do religious demographics and the experiences of religious minorities shape the country’s politics today?

Buckley: Demographically, commentators often observe that the Philippines is “Asia’s only Christian nation.” This actually says both too much, as East Timor has a higher share of Christians in the population, and too little, as there are significant minorities beyond the roughly 80 percent Catholic population. Christian minorities can be roughly divided among national non-Catholic Christian churches like the Iglesia ni Cristo, or Church of Christ, and the Philippine Independent Church; denominational Protestants that loosely correspond to American mainline Protestant churches like the United Church of Christ in the Philippines; and generally newer evangelical and Pentecostal Christian congregations. Of course, there is a significant Muslim minority that, while accounting for only 5 to 10 percent of the national population, is a majority on portions of the island of Mindanao. And many indigenous communities retain traditional beliefs and practices, at times alongside their own conversions to Abrahamic religions.

While Catholic elites are the most visible in the political space, many of these religious minorities play an active role in local and national politics, as well. Muslim leaders are obviously involved in efforts to bring lasting peace to troubled areas of Mindanao, but they also play a role in less dramatic policy areas like education reform. The Iglesia ni Cristo, in contrast, is noted for supposed “bloc voting” in elections, and thus is aggressively courted by politicians looking for an endorsement on the national stage. Denominational Protestants organized under the National Council of Churches in the Philippines are quite active in social justice advocacy, such as protecting indigenous communities and supporting environmental conservation. Evangelical leaders are internally diverse; several high-profile leaders supported controversial President Rodrigo Duterte on the campaign trail, but many have been vocal critics of the extrajudicial killings associated with Duterte’s “war on drugs.”

WPR: How does the Philippine state and society at large approach religious freedom and practice today? Are there opportunities to improve religious freedom and lessen interreligious conflict?

Buckley: The state generally respects religious freedom in formal legal institutions, including for religious minorities. Minorities even enjoy some unique accommodations intended to address historical exclusion—for instance, through the government-backed Sharia courts, which follow Islamic law. This is an important contrast with several of the Philippines’ neighbors in Southeast Asia that impose more restrictions on religious groups, such as Myanmar. In the Philippines, there is limited social violence on what I would consider “religious” grounds. It is true that the terrorists who took over the city of Marawi last year, from May to October 2017, made an effort to target Christians and churches. But reporting indicates that these acts of terrorism provoked several acts of Christian-Muslim solidarity in Marawi, with Muslims protecting Christian neighbors at risk to themselves. Terrorist networks could certainly succeed in future attacks on Christian festivals or houses of worship, but so far there is limited evidence that attacks like the one on Marawi are fanning broader interreligious violence.

While the Philippines experiences little formal legal discrimination and interreligious violence, there is a stubborn sense that, in spite of formal religious freedom guarantees, minorities, particularly Muslims, still face marginalization. In general, current and future governments could improve on this score by aiming for evenhandedness in engagement with religious groups, including symbolic matters like recognition of holidays and substantive areas like policy consultations on high-profile laws. Regarding the Muslim minority in particular, progress in peace negotiations leading to viable, devolved governance in Muslim-majority areas of the country remains both important and elusive.

Why Sri Lanka’s Government Is Turning a Blind Eye to Anti-Muslim Violence

On March 2018, Sri Lanka’s government declared a nationwide 10-day state of emergency as mob attacks targeted the country’s Muslim minorities. Tensions have been rising over the past year between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority, who are mainly Buddhist, and Muslims, leading to attacks on businesses, homes and places of worship. In an email interview, Neil DeVotta, a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and an expert on ethnic conflict in South Asia, explains what is behind the tensions and why the government has done more to fan the flames than put out the fire.

WPR: What is the historical relationship between Buddhists and Muslims in Sri Lanka, and what is driving recent tensions between them at this time?

Neil DeVotta: While riots between Sinhalese and Muslims first took place in 1915, and episodic local clashes between the groups ensued following independence in 1948, overall relations have been mainly peaceful. Muslims worked for military intelligence during the civil war between the predominantly Sinhalese Buddhist Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—a militant Tamil secessionist group based in the northeast. Muslim politicians also lobbied Muslim countries to support the island nation at international forums during the conflict. Muslims were also active within the two largest political parties, the Sinhalese-led United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, until the early 1980s, when Muslim-specific parties were formed. This, however, has not prevented Muslim politicians from continuing to be represented and play constructive roles within both parties.

That being noted, there has long been an eddy of anti-Muslim sentiment among all groups in Sri Lanka, which the civil war helped mask. The Muslims’ self-imposed seclusion and insistence on outsiders converting to the religion when marrying Muslims may play a role in promoting this feeling. Claims that Muslims prefer to trade with fellow Muslims, fleece non-Muslims and procreate to alter demographics also contribute to anti-Muslim sentiment.

Additionally, outside influences are contributing to anti-Muslim sentiment inside the country, including fears about Islamist terrorism around the world and the attendant Islamophobia trending globally. Moreover, the spread of the strict Wahhabi-Salafi interpretation of Islam predominant in the Arab societies of the Persian Gulf has manifested in the adoption of Arabic attire, such as the burqa and thobe instead of the traditional South Asian sari and shalwar kameez, and has also led to numerous mosques being built, which have caused Buddhists to feel the island’s cultural terrain is shifting. Opportunistic politicians and Buddhist businessmen seeking to eliminate their Muslim competitors have also played a role by manipulating insecurities and sponsoring Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist groups.

The overarching and most insidious influence, however, is a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist ideology that claims the island belongs to the majority community and minorities live there thanks to Sinhalese Buddhist sufferance. The military victory over the “Tamil Tigers” has only emboldened the advocates of this ideology, who see the Muslims as the new threat.

WPR: What role did sectarian tensions play in the civil war?

DeVotta: While mytho-histories associated with Buddhism and politicized monks played prominent roles promoting Sinhalese Buddhist majoritarianism, the ethnic conflict was not a religious war as such. The Tamils’ marginalization was a result of discriminatory language policies that affected their socio-economic upward mobility, which was the basis for disgruntled Tamil youth to rebel against a veritable ethnocracy. Sinhalese Christians and Muslims, for example, opposed the Tamil Tigers’ quest for separatism, even as many Tamil Christians—alongside the predominant Hindu Tamils—played a leading role supporting the Tigers.

While Muslims mainly speak the Tamil language, they are ethnically mixed and have long used their religion as their primary identity, so as to differentiate themselves from Tamils. Their opposition to “eelam,” a separate Tamil state, caused the Tigers to evict over 60,000 Muslims from the predominantly Tamil Northern Province. Around one-third of Muslims live in Eastern Province, which Tamil nationalists also envision as part of eelam, and the Tigers attacked and killed Muslims in the east as well. It is important to remember that the Tigers also murdered thousands of fellow Tamils opposed to the group’s agenda and terrorist tactics. So using a religious prism to explain the violence communities experienced during the civil war is misleading. Ultimately, Sri Lanka remains a multireligious and multiethnic country with class and caste identities all contributing to complex crosscutting cleavages. That being said, the recent violence against Muslims is communal, with Muslims targeted for being Muslims.

WPR: How has the government addressed sectarian tensions in the post-civil war era, and what more needs to be done?

DeVotta: The previous government, led by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, contributed to religious tensions by allowing Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists to set up religiously significant Bo—or Bodhi—trees, Buddha statues and Buddhist shrines in the northeast where no Buddhists lived. This was done to impose the notion among Tamils, in particular, that Sri Lanka was a unitary Buddhist state. The government also tolerated and apparently sponsored racist anti-Muslim groups that attacked mosques, Muslim businesses and homes. Rajapaksa seems to have believed that he could solidify his Sinhalese Buddhist credentials by marginalizing minorities and relying solely on Sinhalese Buddhist votes. But this strategy ultimately failed, and he lost the presidential election in January 2015. The current government may be serious about preventing communal clashes, but there are individuals within its ranks who seek to profit from the ongoing anti-Muslim mayhem. And the numerous attacks against Muslims—and also Christian evangelical groups—since the government came to power are evidence that the president and prime minister lack the spine to deal forcefully with Sinhalese Buddhist hooligans.

While rioters could easily be stopped with an aggressive police response, Sri Lanka’s police have operated nonchalantly and allowed rioters to run amuck. This is due to local politicians and Sinhalese businesspersons who stand to gain politically and financially from such violence, by eliminating competitors and pandering to nationalists. They have instructed the police not to intervene when nationalist thugs attack Muslims and other minorities. Being mainly from the larger Sinhalese Buddhist society, the police and the broader security forces also exhibit Islamophobia, which hardly makes them dispassionate actors. And lastly, racist Buddhist monks have supported and accompanied the rioters, and their presence in particular causes police and security personnel to become effete, because Buddhist societies do not tolerate mistreatment of even the most corrupt, wayward and thuggish monks. Ultimately, the government has been unable or unwilling to deal forcefully with the hooligans and their patrons. If it were Muslims rioting, the police and military would shoot to kill. That highlights the majoritarian ethnocracy that Sri Lanka is today.