Religious zealots ignore calls for moderation
AP (19.11.2002) HRWF Int (22.11.2002) Website: www.hrwf.net/ Email: info@hrwf.net - A child comes home from school in tears because of a teacher's prophecy of her horrifying death if she does not recite Islam's five daily prayers.
At a cafe, a man is berated because his wife's abaya, the black cloak that women must wear in public, too daringly outlines the shape of her upper body.
A researcher at the Education Ministry who raised questions about religious extremism expressed in some texbooks finds himself suddenly out of a job.
These scenes persist in Saudi Arabia even though the kingdom's leaders worried at complaints their country is nourishing Islamic radicalism have urged officials, the clergy and educators to preach moderation and promote tolerance of Western values.
Saudi leaders understand the dangers facing their nation following the Sept. 11 attacks, which were blamed on Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and carried out mostly by Saudis 15 of the 19 hijackers were from the kingdom.
Crown Prince Abdullah, the most powerful figure after the king, has urged his people to cling to Islam as "a religion of moderation and wisdom."
"Beware of extremism," he said, "because the annihilation of nations that came before you was caused by religious extremism."
This month, Minister of Religious Affairs Sheik Saleh bin Abdulaziz Al Shiek, told mosque preachers they should not "use Friday sermons to villify people, villify countries ... Villification is not lawful."
The minister warned that preachers should not allow just any worshipper to speak out in the mosque after prayers because they may "say words that incite people. ... Some have called for jihad (holy war)."
Still, a small yet powerful minority of fanatics persists in spreading a radical interpretation of the Quran, Islam's holy book, in their quest to make the kingdom more Islamic.
They are in government, schools, mosques and among the muttawa, the religious police who enforce Islamic social codes.
These radicals create an atmosphere that breeds hatred of the West. They reject any behavior they feel is Western or could lead to what they view as Western-style decadence mixing of the sexes, drinking, women's emancipation. They try to rule every aspect of people's lives.
Take the Saudi woman who was out shopping. A muttawa agent stopped her because her feet were not fully covered and asked a policeman to make sure she didn't escape while he got her a pair of dark socks from a nearby shop.
Or the mother who angrily recounts what her 6-year-old daughter learned in school when she dies, her face will turn black and worms and blood will come out of her mouth as punishment for not praying five times a day.
Or a recent, full-page article in a Saudi daily on the sins of men and women mixing, signed by a member of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which runs the muttawa. Its headline: "It has been medically proven that repeatedly staring at the opposite sex with lust causes sexual weakness."
Then there's the story told by Khaled Nasser, who was having a quiet coffee with his wife at a mall when a muttawa agent barged in, ordering women to cover their faces and hands. "Protect your religion, Muslim women. The Christians and Jews are trying to tempt you away from it," he screeched.
The agent berated Nasser for 10 minutes and threatened to drag him to jail because his wife's face was uncovered and her black cloak was of a type rejected by radicals as un-Islamic because it gives a hint of a woman's bust.
"Extremists like him know nothing about Islam," Nasser said later. "They're racists who are biased against anyone who's not as radical as they are."
While these incidents may seem mainly to infringe on the daily life of Saudis, they also help create a religious environment in which militants can find justification for urging murderous actions against the West and, in particular, the United States.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, little attention was paid to fanatic elements in Saudi schools, mosques and the government's religious establishment. Now, the hijackings have focused the spotlight on what influence fundamentalist Islam may have had on the hijackers.
Some in the West have blamed the hijackers' militancy on the austere form of Islam the kingdom has adopted, based on the strict teachings of an 18th century cleric named Muhammad bin Abdel-Wahhab.
"Before 9/11 we lived in a world where we accepted the peculiarities of the political system in Saudi Arabia," a Western diplomat said on customary condition of anonymity.
"But that has changed, and the Saudis have to wake up to the fact that the rest of the world is concerned about the religious environment in this country," the diplomat added.
As the birthplace of Islam and as the custodian of the faith's two holiest shrines, Saudi Arabia has always been careful that its Islamic credentials not be questioned.
The ruling Saud family is bound by an 18th century pact between its ancestor, Muhammad bin Saud, and Abdel-Wahhab that allowed the Saud clan to consolidate its control over Arabia in the early 1900s.
Key religious positions are still held by Abdel-Wahhab's descendants, giving them sway over legal and social policy in return for helping maintain the royal family's legitimacy.
But the pact has meant the ruling family finds itself constantly in a balancing act between the quest for modernity and the need not to upset the religious leadership.
That has not always been easy.
When the late King Faisal introduced girls' education in the early 1960s, delegation after delegation of radicals protested at the monarch's court. Today, almost as many girls as boys go to school.
The same extremists fought the introduction of radio, television and even cars, which they thought were driven by the devil.
When satellite dishes began sprouting on balconies in the early 1990s, religious zealots enraged at the amount of flesh on TV often shot at the dishes. Today, many homes have dishes though they still are not legal and Saudi Arabia is one of the most high-tech Arab countries.
A woman who is a Western-educated member of the royal family, and who spoke on condition of anonymity, said introducing change slowly has always been important because most Saudis are conservatives who worry about the West encroaching on their society.
"If you react quickly, the alternative may be worse," the princess said.
"There's been a huge change in Saudi Arabia in the past three decades," she said. "People were unequipped to deal with it. The one constant they hold onto is Islam."
After the Sept. 11 attacks, however, even gentle critics of the kingdom say the Saudis must speed up the pace of change.
"They can no longer afford to take their time," said the Western diplomat. "But the problem is how to effect change in a society that's extremely sensitive to outside pressure."
That pressure, many Saudis say, is not helping. At a time when most Arabs view Washington as indirectly helping Israelis kill Palestinians and directly threatening Iraq, extremists see even minor changes in the kingdom as bows to American wishes.
"Even people who want change are now saying, 'I don't want anybody to tell me I have to do this,' especially when it comes from people whose agenda is not only to change the Saudi curriculum but also to separate state from religion," said the princess.
That is the main reason, several Saudis said, why there has been almost no change in the Saudi school syllabus, which has been attacked in the West for promoting anti-Christian and anti-Jewish views.
Hasan al-Malki, the Education Ministry employee who was fired, had prepared a study on extremism in texbooks that contained an unprecedented questioning of the ideas of Wahabism's founder.
"The religious curriculum is based on (the teachings of) scholars such as Sheik Muhammad bin Abdel-Wahhab and the scholars who followed him, who, at the end of the day, are human beings who are sometimes right and sometimes wrong," the report said.
Fired five months ago, Al-Malki said absenteeism was given as the officials reason. But privately he was told the radicals pressured the ministry into doing it. Education Ministry officials would not comment.
In private gatherings and in the occasional editorial, many Saudis complain about the strictures imposed by the radicals. They insist they can be pious, observant Muslims without adopting the extremist, anti-Western version of Islam espoused by bin Laden.
In a recent column in the respected pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, Saudi journalist Dawood al-Shirian said there should be a public dialogue about school curriculums, religious programs and the role of mosques.
"Since the terrorist attacks ... quite a number of writers, journalists and preachers have defended the kingdom by categorically denying (there's a problem)," al-Shirian wrote.
However, he addded, "defending our image does not come by ignoring (the problem) or by surrender but by acknowledging the problem and commencing a national dialogue about it."
Activists say Saudis oppress Muslim splinter sects
by Barbara Slavin
USA Today (13.06.2002)/ HRWF International Secretariat (17.06.2002) - Website http://www.hrwf.net - E-mail info@hrwf.net - Rabea Dahlan, a descendent of the prophet Mohammed, was deputy governor of the Muslim holy city of Mecca until three years ago, when he was jailed. Dahlan's crime, according to supporters: He belongs to a Muslim sect that doesn't conform to Saudi Arabia's state religion.
Christians and Jews routinely complain that they are not allowed to practice their faiths in Saudi Arabia. But human rights activists say the worst repression is reserved for the half-dozen Muslim sects that depart from the Wahhabi form of Islam of the ruling family.
Last week, Gwenn Okruhlik, a Saudi expert at the University of Arkansas, told a U.S. congressional hearing that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah ''should incorporate diversity of Islam into social practice to send a message of tolerance.''
Saudis say discrimination falls upon Muslims in the western Saudi region known as the Hijaz for the waves of Hajis -- Muslim pilgrims -- who come here from other nations. Several Hijazi Muslims interviewed recently say they practice their faith secretly.
The most oppressed, rights activists say, are 1 million Saudi Shi'ites, a sect that is a majority in several other Muslim nations.
''There is institutionalized discrimination against adherents of the Shi'a branch of Islam,'' says the State Department's human rights report. But the department has not sanctioned the country, despite a recommendation two years running from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that Saudi Arabia be branded a ''country of particular concern.''
Ali Ahmed, a Saudi Shi'ite who lives in Virginia and researches Saudi human rights abuses, says there are about 200 political prisoners in his homeland, including 105 members of a Shi'ite Muslim sect called Ismailis.
Ahmed Turki al-Saab, 42, an Ismaili in the southern province of Najran, was arrested in January after he was quoted in a U.S. newspaper criticizing discrimination and remains jailed, Ahmed says.
Last year, Ahmed says, authorities imprisoned a 94-year-old Shi'ite cleric from the western city of Medina for two weeks for the ''crime'' of praying with Lebanese visitors at his farm.
''The Shi'ites have saint cults and visit tombs,'' says Brian Evans of Amnesty International. ''The Wahhabis see this as idol worship and consider it to be almost apostasy.''
Non-Wahhabis lost out when the al-Saud tribe from the central Nejd region unified the country a century ago in alliance with the descendants of Mohammed Abdul Ibn Wahhab, an 18th-century Islamic puritan. The al-Saud gained political power; the Wahhabis got control of the mosques.
Critics say religious intolerance helped create the fanaticism of 15 Saudi hijackers in the attacks on Sept. 11. Saudi defenders say their religion is peaceful and the terrorists were ''deviants.''
But Ahmed says teachers of religion instruct impressionable young Saudis that ''all Muslims will go to hell except the Wahhabis.''
What is missing in Saudi society, says Sami Angawi, an architect in Jeddah, is ''balance. In architecture, you cannot build on two supports, you need at least three, and four is better. But our society relies on a single school of thought.''
The Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, said in an interview that the government would soon set up an ''independent'' human rights body. Ahmed says the Saudis have talked about creating such an organization for two years. The government has declined repeated requests by foreign rights groups to send their own monitors.
Supporters say harassment of Dahlan, 52, began when he was named deputy governor of Mecca. He was educated in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the USA, where he was awarded graduate degrees in management at the University of Colorado and Pepperdine University. Dahlan built schools that taught vocational skills urgently needed by the growing young Saudi population. But in 1999, a Saudi who had been sent to a mental hospital after making threats against Dahlan and his family sued for damages. Religious courts jailed Dahlan for four months in what supporters say was a case of religious discrimination.
Dahlan now lives in Lebanon. The governor who appointed him, Prince Majed, resigned and left for Vienna.
A protest letter circulating in Jeddah recently accused Saudi authorities of discrimination for prosecuting Dahlan while giving amnesty to an official of the Saudi water and sewage authority who had embezzled $80 million. That official, from the Wahhabi heartland of the Nejd, was a brother of the private secretary of King Fahd.
Wahhabi favoritism is also distorting Islam abroad, critics say. A non-Wahhabi Saudi academic who lives in Jeddah visited the USA recently and met a Pakistani Muslim who told him in tears that the local Saudi-paid cleric had issued a ruling against American Muslims celebrating Thanksgiving.
Wahhabis recognize only two holidays: The end of the fasting month of Ramadan, and the end of the month of pilgrimage to Mecca. They fall on different days each year depending on the Muslim lunar calendar
Ali Alyami, a Saudi-born Shi'ite, told Congress last week that the Bush administration should take a tougher stance with the Saudis if it hopes to defeat terrorism: ''Our myopic policies are producing anti-American hatred because of our support for a brutal regime.''
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Saudi Arabia still holding two foreign Christians
Ethiopian, Filipino both jailed at Jeddah deportation center
by Barbara G. Baker
Compass (11.03.2002)/HRWF International Secretariat (13.03.2002) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Two expatriate Christians jailed since last August by Saudi Arabia's religious police still remain in custody, their deportation orders stalled by the inaction of either their employer or their respective consulate.
Both Filipino Dennis Moreno and Ethiopian Worku Aweke (Ismail Abubakr) remain incarcerated at Jeddah's Bremen deportation center, rated by a fellow Christian released last month as "the very worst prison among all the prisons we had seen."
Since Tinsaie Gizachew left for Ethiopia February 14, Moreno had been the last foreign Christian detained at Bremen awaiting formal deportation by Saudi authorities. But on March 7, he was rejoined by Aweke, an Ethiopian isolated for the past six weeks in a jail near Mecca.
"Worku is together with my husband now at Bremen," Moreno's wife confirmed today from Jeddah. "Dennis has seen him and talked with him."
Moreno and Aweke were among 14 foreign Christians arrested and jailed without charges in Jeddah since last summer. All were active members of expatriate house churches meeting privately for worship in the port city. After holding them five months without consular access, Saudi Arabia began to deport them during January and February.
Speaking by telephone today from Jeddah, a vice consul of the Ethiopian Consulate confirmed that Aweke's deportation details had been completed with his employer in Mecca, clearing the way for his transfer back to Jeddah last Thursday.
"Our liaison officer met with him and is processing his travel documents," the official said. "When this is finished, he will be going back to Ethiopia, maybe this coming Thursday, March 14."
Members of Jeddah's Ethiopian Christian community became alarmed last week, after six weeks passed with no direct communication from Aweke. The unmarried Ethiopian had been isolated shortly after he was sent to Mecca's Matta Jail in January, reportedly to facilitate the completion of his discharge papers from his employer residing there.
An Ethiopian of Christian descent, Aweke began working in Saudi Arabia six years ago. But at some point, either he or his employer changed the name on his passport and Saudi identity card to Ismail Abubakr, perhaps hoping the Muslim name would facilitate job openings in the strict Islamic nation. Just two months before his arrest, he had professed personal faith in Christ and become involved in an Ethiopian house church in Jeddah.
Last week, the Washington, D.C.-based International Christian Concern had expressed fears that Saudi authorities might target Aweke because of his Muslim name, concluding that he was an apostate from Islam who should be executed for becoming a Christian.
Moreno's departure appears to be stalled by unresolved issues with his Saudi employer, including one last set of car registration papers. After working in Saudi Arabia for 16 years, the Filipino driver and car mechanic has accrued considerable work benefits that his employer is apparently reluctant to honor. A foreigner's official Saudi sponsor must sign his exit visa before the employee is allowed to leave the country.
"Our consulate is doing nothing," his wife Yolly Moreno said today. "They even ask information from me! So I'm the only one who is going around." She said she would go to the consulate tomorrow to get a power-of-attorney form for her husband to sign, and then take it to be filed at the Labor Office, so that he would get his contractual benefits.
"But in Saudi Arabia, it is very hard for a female," she sighed. "So I have to press more, to push more." While her husband has been jailed the past six months, Yolly Moreno has continued her daily shifts as a full-time nurse in Jeddah, while caring for their two school-age children and seven-month-old baby.
Meanwhile, Moreno and Aweke remain jailed in the Bremen deportation center, described last week by a former prisoner as "a shed for sheep or pigs." "It was like hell for me," Indian national Prabhu Isaac told Compass by telephone from Madras, India. "It can only accommodate 400 people, but when we came, there were 1,200 people there. There was no place to stand or sit or sleep, and only three toilets."
"I never thought that in this 21st century, in the so-called number-one Islamic country, they would do something like this," Isaac said. "It was full of hardened criminals, with people who were infected by skin diseases, tuberculosis, and also AIDS patients. They supplied water for just two hours a day, one hour in the afternoon and again once in the evening. It was very horrible."
But his worst experience there, Isaac said, was being forced to watch the lashing of three of his fellow Christians from Ethiopia, in front of 500 other prisoners. The three Ethiopians -- Tinsaie Gizachew, Bahru Mengistu and Gebeyehu Tefera -- were given 80 lashes each with a steel cable on January 28, after an Ethiopian Muslim cooperating with local jail authorities accused them of "preaching against Islam and the prophet Mohammed" among the other prisoners.
According to the U.S. State Department report released last week on human rights in Saudi Arabia for 2001, "Non-Muslim worshippers risk arrest, lashing and deportation for engaging in overt religious activity that attracts official attention."
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For outsiders, worship is risk in Saudi Arabia
by Elaine Sciolino
NY Times (12.02.2002) / HRWF International Secretariat (20.02.2002) C Website http://www.hrwf.net C Email info@hrwf.net - At a secret location every Sunday evening, a young Catholic priest does a dangerous thing. He says Mass.
He arrives in street clothes and retrieves his vestments, liturgies, hymnals, Bibles, crucifix and chalice from a locked cupboard. Discretion is crucial, he says, because the Mutawwain, the street-patrolling morality police employed by the kingdom, has threatened to hunt him down.
Bearing witness to the faith takes on special meaning in this royal theocracy. Here, Islam is the only official religion and all citizens must be Muslims. The Constitution consists of the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Proselytizing is punishable by a prison sentence.
Conversion by a Muslim to another religion is considered apostasy, punishable by death if the accused does not recant. Non-Muslim worshipers who engage in overt religious activity that attracts official attention risk arrest, lashing and deportation.
In describing Saudi Arabia in its 2001 report on religious freedom, the State Department was unusually blunt: "Freedom of religion," it stated, "does not exist."
The situation is particularly painful for American troops. They are offered a range of religious services, with the help of military chaplains.
But they must worship in private, even though many of them are protecting the kingdom from outside threats. And soldiers who wear a cross or a Star of David must keep the symbols hidden.
"We have all these fine young American men and women over here," one chaplain said. "They're great Americans. They're great soldiers. Yet they're expected to surrender their religious practices when they arrive."
President Bush has called Islam a great religion and described the American people as both religious and tolerant. When he addressed a joint session of Congress shortly after Sept. 11, he said that the "barbarians" who attacked the United States "hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."
But neither Mr. Bush nor any of his national security advisers have criticized the refusal of Saudi Arabia to allow Americans and other foreigners to worship freely. The United States, like other governments, has agreed to a compact dictated by the Saudis: if you have to practice your religion, do it in secret.
On one recent Sunday evening, about 200 Catholics from at least two dozen countries gathered to worship. Among them were diplomats, corporate employees, drivers, domestic help, spouses and children.
One of the organizers checked names against a master list before allowing them into a reception room. There, a makeshift altar was set with a crucifix, candles and baskets of flowers. Outside, regular Saudi police officers stood watch, apparently to protect the service from being disrupted by the less disciplined morals police, but also perhaps to note the identity of worshipers.
The worshipers recited the liturgy, sang hymns and received Communion. Someone had taken away the chairs that day, so they stood through the hour-long service and knelt on the wooden floor.
"Tonight, you are truly standing up for the faith," the priest told his flock. Quoting the words of Jesus Christ in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, he added, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am in the midst of them."
The kingdom bans non-Muslim clergy from entering the country to conduct religious services, although some are allowed in for other reasons. There are few resident priests and ministers, and worshipers often conduct their own services. Protestant, Mormon and Jewish services are also held in secret.
Non-Muslim services are risky enough that worshipers never talk about them on the telephone. The State Department freedom of religion report states that there is no clear definition of "private worship" and cites instances of "arbitrary enforcement" of the Islam-only rule.
"I call it the `catacomb church,' " said one senior diplomat, a Catholic.
"When there are inquiries about what we are doing," he added, "we say, `The ambassador is organizing a meeting for nationals.' "
The uncertainty over what is private was underscored in Jidda last summer, when an Indian businessman who was leaving the country rented a hall and threw a going-away party, according to foreign diplomats there. When the 800 or so guests arrived, a church service began.
The Saudi authorities ignored it. But when he did it a second time, they arrested him and 15 others. At least half of those arrested were deported. "It was the biggest church service Jidda had ever seen," one diplomat said.
"The rule is that if it's discreet and small it's O.K. But 800 was way off the scale."
Islam was founded in the seventh century by the Prophet Muhammad, who, Muslims believe, received God's revelations through the archangel Gabriel and recorded them in what became the Koran. Moses and Jesus are among the prophets who are particularly honored in the Koran, which also recognizes the Torah, the Psalms of David and the Gospels as God's revelation.
Although the practice of Christianity and Judaism is allowed in many Arab and Muslim countries, that has not been the case in the Saudi kingdom, which is home to Mecca and Medina, the two holiest shrines in Islam.
For years, the Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden has vowed to purge the kingdom of the "infidel" American military presence from the country of the two holy shrines. Those threats have made American military commanders particularly uneasy about discussing religious services for their troops.
But not the soldiers themselves. "I have three Bibles," said one young M.P. at an American military installation, who said he was able to attend Protestant services. "Just let someone try to take them away."
In an interview two weeks ago, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, was asked by an American reporter whether his kingdom had an image problem among Americans.
Americans did not understand the absence of elections, limitations on women's rights and the lack of tolerance for other religions, the reporter said, adding that during a maiden visit to Saudi Arabia on Easter Sunday nearly two decades ago, she had been unable to attend Mass.
Crown Prince Abdullah replied that the presence of the two holy shrines on Saudi soil were the "primary restrictions" in making changes in the kingdom.
"Our faith and our culture are what drive the country," he said.
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Jeddah Authorities Give Ethiopians 80 Lashes
by Barbara G. Baker
Compass Direct (11.02.02) / HRWF (12.02.2002) C Website http://www.hrwf.net C Email info@hrwf.net-- Five more jailed Christians caught in deportation wrangles in Jeddah since December have been released to their home countries during the past two weeks, leaving one Filipino and two Ethiopians still under detention by Saudi authorities.
Of the 14 foreign Christians arrested since last summer in Saudi Arabia's leading port city, 11 have now been forcibly deported. Although no formal charges were ever filed against the expatriates, all have lost their jobs and are banned from returning to the kingdom.
The most recent deportees included Ethiopian Gebeyehu Tefera and Indian national Prabhu Isaac, who left Jeddah on February 7 for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Madras, India, respectively. Isaac had made seven trips to the airport since January 17 before gaining final clearance to leave. Ethiopian Bahru Mengistu and his wife were allowed to leave on February 2, while Eritrean Yusuf Girmaye and Ethiopian Beferdu Fikri were deported on January 26.
After unsuccessful attempts on January 21 and 23, the wife and two small children of Nigerian Afobunor Okey Buliamin were finally permitted to fly back to Nigeria with their belongings on January 28, ten days after
Buliamin had been deported. As of today, exit permits for the deportations of Filipino Dennis Moreno and two Ethiopians remain stalled. Although four of the five cars registered by Moreno's employer in his name have been transferred, the expired license of the fifth car still has to be renewed. Once that process is completed, a date can be set by the Philippines Consulate for his departure.
With exit documents for Tinsaie Gizachew still in process, the Ethiopian Consulate has told the Christian advocacy group Middle East Concern (MEC) that it is expected everything will be completed in time for him to board the next flight to Ethiopia this Thursday, February 14. A source "close to the Ethiopian church in Jeddah" confirmed a week ago that the paperwork had been completed to release Ismail Abubakr (Worku), the only Ethiopian transferred to a jail near Mecca. Last week his consulate reported he had been transferred from the jail to a local deportation center. Meanwhile, a flogging scandal in Jeddah's Bremen deportation center in the last week of January left three other Ethiopian Christians bleeding and seriously injured, apparently on the orders of the detention center commander, Major Bender Sultan Shabani.
According to the flogged Christians -- Tinsaie Gizachew, Bahru Mengistu and Gebeyehu Tefera -- their punishment was prompted by a petition they had smuggled out a few days earlier to Ethiopian diplomatic sources, media and human rights organizations. The petition reportedly detailed their imprisonment over the previous six months "with no hearing, trial or process of law," solely because of their Christian faith. The three wrote and signed a second letter in the Amharic language that they managed to get out of the Bremen deportation center the day after their flogging, declaring they had been kicked, beaten and then suspended with chains and lashed 80 times each with a flexible metal cable on January 28.
"Our bodies are wounded, swollen, terribly bruised and with great pain," their letter said, according to an English translation released on January 30 by the Washington, D.C.-based International Christian Concern. "When we reported to the prison hospital for treatment, we were slapped and told to come back after we were dead."
Both the Ethiopian Consulate and an Ethiopian church leader in Jeddah confirmed to MEC that the three detained Christians had been lashed and suffered injuries, as they claimed in their letter.
Despite the serious condition of Mengistu, who was reportedly passing blood in his urine from the beatings, the three were denied medical treatment for two days, until representatives from the Ethiopian Consulate intervened. When the Ethiopian Vice Consul eventually arranged with Saudi officials for Mengistu to be treated in a local hospital, the ailing Ethiopian refused to go, fearing it could be "a convenient place to finish him off," a local source commented.Mengistu was admitted to a hospital upon his arrival in Addis Ababa on February 2.
The 14 Christians, all members of expatriate house churches meeting privately in Jeddah, were arrested from July through September last year. Non-Muslim worship is prohibited under the kingdom's strict version of Islamic law. Jeddah's religious police reportedly suspected the Christians had connections with Saudi nationals secretly participating in Christian gatherings in the kingdom, where apostasy from Islam is a capital offense.
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