Christians are the most persecuted people in the world https://www.conservativewoman. co.uk/karen-harradine-church- leaders-are-a-front-for- islamists-persecuting- christians/. Between 2000 and 2010 around one million Christians worldwide were killed for their faith. The Centre for the Study of Global Christianity monitors Christian demographic trends and has estimated that between 2006 and 2015 almost 900,000 Christians were slaughtered. This is an annual average of 90,000. Open Doors, a charity which monitors persecution of Christians, says that 215million Christians are being subjected to immense persecution levels. Churches are attacked and Christians are at great risk of being murdered, raped or kidnapped.
So why is our government funding some of the worst regimes which torment and murder Christians? I have written before on how the Department for International Development (DfID) wastes taxpayers’ money on vanity projects and shores up the finances of terrorist regimes. Our money, courtesy of DfID, inevitably finds its way to dictators and despots who shirk their responsibilities of taking care of their citizens because gullible Westerners do this for them. They also enrich themselves with financial resources intended to help the most vulnerable of humanity. Warlords, mercenaries and government soldiers often control the distribution of humanitarian aid, withholding it from their perceived enemies even if they are in dire need. DfID has admitted that it can’t always track its expenditure.
This dysfunctional department with little accountability has also acquired a nasty habit of financing regimes that maltreat Christians. In her recent speech praising DfID’s foreign budget, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt seemed blissfully unaware of this fact. She said DfID should have ‘British values at its heart’. But surely spending billions on regimes that persecute Christians is not part of our value system? Perhaps the public world have more faith in DfID if it stipulated moral terms for countries on the receiving end of British aid and refused to finance those regimes which contradict British values.
I fear Mordaunt’s lofty ideals will remain just that – inspiring words while DfID continues its associations with some of the world’s most repugnant tyrants who persecute Christians. Open Doors keeps a watch list of the fifty worst offenders. The places that hold the dubious honour of being the top five are North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Pakistan. Shockingly, DfID sends billions of pounds to these infamous regimes.
There are 300,000 Christians in North Korea. Many are imprisoned in brutal labour camps and some are assassinated by Kim Jong-un’s death squads simply because they are Christians. Despite this DfID has sent more than £6million to North Korea under the guise of promoting Western values. Are the mandarins that run DfID so naïve that they think the money will be used for this sole purpose? So far there is no evidence that North Korea is doing any such thing. Instead it prefers to build more missiles with which it could attack the West.
In Afghanistan, Christian converts are often accused of apostasy and forced to worship in secret, or risk losing their properties. Some are declared insane and committed to psychiatric institutions. Their families and communities will beat or even kill them if they are found to have converted to Christianity. Yet DfID spends millions in Afghanistan, including almost £500million on the ‘Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund’, which claims to develop reform programmes under the remit of the Afghan government. Surely it would be better spent on directly giving aid to the thousands of Christians subjected to appalling conditions by the government that DfID indirectly props up.
Christians in Somalia face persecution on two fronts, from the insurgent Al-Shabaab fundamentalist group and the clan structure of the Islamist government which demands absolute adherence to Islam. Christian converts from Islam are marked as targets for assassination. They also face extreme abuse and murder by families and tribes. Yet in a feat of absolute stupidity DfID is spending billions on this failed state, including £23million on a project ‘to improve government accountability from the local level up by building the capacity of citizens to better understand, articulate, and call for their needs to be met’. What this bureaucratic twaddle means is anyone’s guess. All it achieves is the strengthening of a regime which persecutes its tiny Christian minority.
There are almost two million Christians in Sudan being subjected to such heinous persecution that it amounts to ethnic cleansing. The Sudanese government regularly closes churches and arrests Christian leaders. Christians in the Nuba region have been denied access to humanitarian aid and are being starved out of existence by their own government. Persecution and oppression of Christians by various factions in the Sudan, including the Islamist government, is endemic. Yet DfID is giving millions to the Sudanese government.
DfID is also spending billions in Pakistan despite the fact that it is wealthy enough to have its own nuclear development programme. This obscenity is made worse when considering Pakistan’s dreadful persecution of its four million Christians. The Pakistani government supports Islamist groups which teach children in madrassas to persecute Christians. Churches are regularly bombed, Christian girls and women are kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam, and Christians are murdered for blasphemy against Islam. So why is DfID giving £283million to Pakistani schools?
If DfID wants to practise financial colonialism, surely it would far more principled to assist those whose values align with our own and who are being viciously persecuted by the West’s enemies? The UK cannot escape its Christian heritage and culture, nor should it. Its Judeo-Christian ethos informs our constitution and societal structures.
Instead of obsessing about transgenderism and cotton buds, the government should turn its attention to the DfID civil servants who seem to have no idea of what they are doing. They are financing hostile regimes which persecute the one faith that the foundations of the UK are built on – Christianity. DfID must be held to account for its funding of tyrants who terrorise and murder their Christian minorities. https://www.conservativewoman. co.uk/karen-harradine- persecuted-people-world- christians/ For a moral and just world, it is vital that we speak up for these voiceless Christians.
