Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 24, 2017
Christianity could be outlawed in Ethiopia for smaller congregations and house churches where worshipers meet for less formal prayer or smaller services.
Tigray State, in the north of Ethiopia, is considering changing its laws to ban Christian activities outside official church compounds, reports World Watch Monitor.
Evangelical Christians and other non-Orthodox groups would be the worst hit by the new law, which will set a minimum number of 6,000 members for any church wanted to authorized as official. Proselytism outside the new official compounds will be outlawed.
A similar law has already been enacted in a neighboring state.
Ethiopia, Africa’s oldest independent country, is believed by some to have been the first nation in the world to accept Christianity as its religion. Like many countries in Africa, the religious landscape is being changed by fast-growing Pentecostal churches.
It is currently at number 22 on the World Watch List of Christian persecution.
Christian believers are increasingly threatened by Islamist extremists.
WWM tells the story of Tutu, a widow, and her son who live in a mainly Muslim area and have faced difficulties since her husband died.
‘After his burial, local Muslims dug up his body and dumped it by the side of the road. In January, Biruk was assaulted and told that he and his mother would continue to face trouble until they converted to Islam. On March 4, their house was burned down,’ reports WWM.
My Note: I would be more than glad if those “evangelical Christians” were converting Muslims to Christianity. But, no!– though there may be individual Protestants who really love Our Lord and engage in this sort of conversion activity – the vast majority of them attempts to proselytize among Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo faithful, who are already Christians that practice the oldest of all Christian rites. (Converting these ancient Christians to any other faith/ideology is a HUGE SIN). Imagine these Protestants, who have discovered Jesus 500 years ago, telling Ethiopian Christians who know Their Lord for two Millennia to accept the new Jesus. Is there a new Lord?
In fact, in some Muslim majority regions like Jimma, some Protestant groups had joined Muslims to persecute indigenous Orthodox Christians.
I believe it’s is irresponsible, biased and dangerous that a protestant organization like OpenDoors“ placed Christian Ethiopia at number 22 on the World Watch List of Christian persecution – mind you, higher than notorious Christian persecutor states like Turkey, Palestinian Territories, Algeria, Kuwait, UAE, Indonesia, Bangladesh etc. Either they are ignorant and wicked or they have joined the luciferian forces to wage war against Orthodox Christians. It must be tempting for Satan to challenge the first Christian nation!
How primitive and boaring it has become that OpenDoors always puts North Korea (a Buddhist nation that doesn’t belong to Christians) at number 1 to appease the number one persecutors of Christians: Islamic countries. where Christians are indigenous.
Islam making major inroads in the east African nation. China pumping millions into infrastructure and industry. An Italian reporter gauges changes in the former colony.
Other Ethiopians claim they have never seen so many imams and people wearing the Islamic veil as they do now.
While China focuses on business interests, the Arab states seek to indoctrinate ordinary Ethiopians
The fear now is that protesters and farmers will see radical Islam as a source of hope against the Orthodox Christian elite that rules the capital
On the flight from Rome to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, flight attendants hand out Chinese-language magazines. And in the city’s Bole International Airport, the only cigarettes available are of the made-in-Chinese variety. Marlboros aren’t an option.
Outside the airport, at the first traffic light, my taxi jockeys for position with a economy car driven by a man who appears to be Chinese. “Since they began arriving a few years ago I see them everywhere,” my Ethiopian taxi driver complains. “We used to call white people ferenji, which means foreigner, but now we mainly use it for the Chinese. They built everything here: the African Union (AU) headquarters, the new light rail system, the Modjo-Hawassa highway, even the railway to Djibouti.”
Here in Ethiopia, where the Italian Empire went to ruin in the ashes of World War II, China is building a new empire of its own.
Heading out from the capital of one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, another feature of the landscape catches the eye. A minaret soars over every urban center, community, or village that appears in the distance — many have even more than one. “Those are all financed by oil money,” the driver explains. “For the last 20 years Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait have been building mosques here.
Money And Influence
It doesn’t take long upon arriving in Ethiopia to understand the forces at play. While China builds roads and highways in exchange for access to the country’s lucrative natural resources, the monarchies of the Arabian Gulf establish their influence in rural areas by building mosques and spreading Sunni Islam.
Journalist and Africa expert Howard W. French says that Chinese “neocolonialism” began in Ethiopia about two decades ago, in 1996. That year, in a visit to Addis Ababa, then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin proposed the establishment of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). Upon his return to China, Zemin urged industrialists to invest in Africa. Since then the Chinese presence on the continent has grown and become ever more visible, with Chinese-built roads, railroads, and industrial hubs popping up across Africa.
Buckling under the pressure of a food crisis and an influx of refugees escaping long-running instability in the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian government sold the country’s best land to Chinese investors, who used it to produce grain for export.
The new railway linking Addis Ababa to the port of Djibouti, 750 km away, grants the landlocked nation access to the sea and was built by the China Railway Group (CREC) and the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, a subsidiary of the China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC). The three-lane Modjo-Hawassa highway, at a cost of $700 million, is also being built by the Chinese, as was the $500 million light rail system that cuts through Addis Ababa’s traffic. The two-line system is the first to be built in sub-Saharan Africa.
But Beijing isn’t solely interested in business investments on the world’s second-largest continent. China is building its first overseas military base in neighboring Djibouti, which will include an air force base, lodging for thousands of soldiers, and a deep-water port that can host large warships.
Investing In The Future
The expropriation of land for these projects has run into intense opposition from local tribes in Ethiopia. Last summer, protests erupted across Oromia, the country’s largest and most populous region, spurring a brutal crackdown that killed thousands and forced the regime to declare a state of emergency.
“The fear now is that protesters and farmers will see radical Islam as a source of hope against the Orthodox Christian elite that rules the capital,” says a youth who asks to remain anonymous.
Other Ethiopians claim they have never seen so many imams and people wearing the Islamic veil as they do now. Ethiopia has ancient ties to Islam and was the site of the first ever hijra — the journey undertaken by the prophet Muhammad’s earliest followers to escape persecution in Mecca. It is also home to Negash, the oldest Muslim settlement in Africa.
Experts claim that despite this long history, the Gulf monarchies embarked upon a targeted “Islamization” of the country after the fall of the Soviet Union and Ethiopia’s communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991. This was done by building mosques in Muslim-majority areas and spreading their version of the Sunni faith in Islamic schools.
“In 1991 Riyadh took 2,000 young Ethiopians to study the Koran in Saudi Arabia, sending them back as imams two years later,” says an anonymous source. “That’s when burqas and minarets began to appear everywhere, and the Gulf monarchies want to build two mosques for every community.”
While China focuses on business interests, the Arab states seek to indoctrinate ordinary Ethiopians. Ethiopia has one of the highest population growth rates in Africa and is projected to reach 210 million people in 2060, up from the current 99 million. Their goals and tactics vary. But Beijing and the Arabian Gulf both see Ethiopia, whose global importance will only continue to grow, as an area full of promise.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 24, 2017
„I was a 6-year-old child when my mother entrusted me to the American orphanage and promised to take me back. There was an Armenian church outside the orphanage fence where Turks often appeared and tormented Armenian women and children. When those people looked inside our windows, we tremulously ran away. One of the orphans, Sako, once called us to watch what was going on beyond the fence. It was awful…
Turks tore the pregnant woman’s womb, took off the baby and put it on her breast. I fainted…When I opened my eyes, the orphans had surrounded me telling terrible stories with frightened looks. I closed my ears and screamed.” Her mother found her after the massacres, and they moved together to the village of Basargechar where she married Yeghishe Markosian and gave birth to 11 children. She died in 1990. „
Denial is The Final Stage of Genocide
Within in a 2-year period 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were massacred by the Turkish. To this day it is illegal to talk about the Armenian Genocide in Turkey.
On April 25, 1915 through a series of brutal events, the Turkish government began their execution of the Armenians. The Turks burned, drowned, starved, crucified and slaughtered in the pursuit to eliminate christian Armenians.
There had always been trouble between the Christian Armenians and the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians were taxed more for being Christian, and often not treated fairly. They turned to Russia for freedom and independence. It was during World War I, that the Armenians sided with Russia against Turkey, in response came the Genocide.
Today, April 24th marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Still a century later people refuse to acknowledge the massacres as a genocide including the Turks. Many spoke out, showing their support as the anniversary approached including Germany, the European Parliament, Pope Francis, François Hollande the French president and Vladimir Putin.
Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan spoke the following statement: “Recognition of the genocide is a triumph of human conscience and justice over intolerance and hatred.”
What happened to the Armenians during World War I inspired Hitler during World War II in his genocide of the Jewish people. Hitler spoke to the commanding generals at Obersalzberg on August 22, 1939 and declared:
“I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
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