Lausanne World Pulse – World Pulse Archives – World Pulse Archives

BRAZIL: Economically, Brazil’s outlook is among Latin America’s brightest, but that’s not stopping 100,000 of its citizens from leaving each year in search of better lives. The numbers are increasing. Even though compared to other countries in the region the situation is rosy, Brazil has stagnated for a decade. Its job market is bad, its standard of living is falling, wages are low and opportunities are limited for many. Brazilians living abroad send home more money than the country’s biggest export, soy, brings into the country. Meanwhile, landowners are forming militias to protect their property from landless farmers. Some are bracing for a bloodbath as more peasants are staking claims to ranches. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s first leftist president, promised a new deal for Brazil’s poor through agrarian reform, but that’s not stopped land takeovers. Brazil’s 103 land invasions to date in 2003 are as many as for the whole of 2002. In the world’s fifth-largest country, 90 percent of land is owned by 20 percent of the people. The poorest 40 percent holds one percent of land. Said one invader, “Once I have my own piece of land, my family and I will be able to survive with some dignity.”

CHINA: Police told Yunnan province church leaders that their group could get long-sought-after registration and legal sanction. When 12 leaders arrived to sign the documents, officials from the prosecutor’s and court marshal’s offices and the public security bureau arrested them without warrants or proper documentation. Eight of the leaders received “re-education through labor” sentences of three years. The remaining four could face harsher sentences. Eight of these leaders had been sent to a labor camp in 1997.

COLOMBIA: In a surprising reversal of an emigration wave out of the hemisphere’s most turbulent country, Colombian nationals are going back to their homeland. For many, returning to the war-torn land with its violence, unemployment, displaced people and myriad other problems is better than struggling to build a new life in the United States. Of those who leave Colombia for the US, half of them will return to Colombia, but a quarter of those will move back to the States a second time. Two years ago, 1,000 Colombians moved to Florida each week. That number has plummeted to 100 to 150. The reasons for the reversal are the better economic forecast and the hard-line presidency of Alvaro Uribe, which has confronted illegal armed groups.

INDIA: Gujarat state’s high court has thrown out petitions by the All India Christian Council and a Buddhist group challenging Gujarat’s Freedom of Religion Act of 2003 because the act has not gone into effect and thus poses no threat. The two religious groups say the act is unconstitutional because it violates fundamental rights. A section of the act requires those wanting to change religions to first get permission from a district magistrate.

PAKISTAN: Authorities have arrested alleged Muslim militant Abdul Jabbar as the organizer of March 12, 2002, attack on the Protestant International Church in Islama-bad, the attack on Murree Christian School August 5 and the Taxila Christian Hospital August 9 attack. More than 70 Christians were wounded and 15 died in the attacks, Christianity Today’s Weblog reports. Jabbar is believed to head a faction of the illegal group Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is active in the Indian Kashmir, the region that has been the subject of two Indian-Pakistani wars since the countries’ 1947 independence. Members of the group allegedly attacked India’s parliament in December 2001.

PHILIPPINES: Rampaging Islamic rebels on the southern islands are forcing the displacement of villagers, who fear being killed in the crossfire between the rebels and government forces. Even in peace, these villagers fear violence will break out again at any minute. Armed conflict has forced many families from their homes, placing them among at least 1.5 million in Southeast Asian countries who live as refugees. But because they remain in their home countries rather than across a border in another land, they are considered “internally displaced people” and don’t qualify for protections from the UN High Commission for Refugees. Said one displaced Indonesian who was forced to flee his four-room house and 100-acre orchard with his wife and five children to a stall in an old warehouse, “I’m afraid of the jihad fighters. They say that they have gone home, but I know that they are still there.”

STUDENT EVANGELISM: The World Assembly of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) took place in the small town of De Bron, Holland, from July 4-11. Delegates hailed from 150 countries, where the IFES ministry reaches some 300,000 students. About one-third of IFES students today are from English and Portuguese-speaking Africa. African IFES leaders aim to pioneer student work in Botswana, Cape Verde Island, Sao Tome, Principe and Somalia.

UGANDA: Security forces in this Western Africa country are searching for schoolgirls abducted by the brutal guerrilla force called the Lord’s Resistance Army. Some 5,000 girls have been snatched in the past year. If those recently taken aren’t found soon, they’ll likely face the fate that other girls have endured in the 17-year conflict—forced domestic work and sex slavery. Rebels often abduct children at night during village raids for food and supplies, especially in northern Uganda. They take boys and forcibly recruit them to take part in atrocities against the local population. To protect themselves, children often flee to cities at night and sleep in shelters or on the streets, then return to their villages at dawn. In the town of Gulu, religious leaders have turned to the UN Security Council for help.

VIETNAM: The leader of the Mnong tribal church in the country’s southern Dak Lak province has written a communique to alert the international Christian community to local authorities’ persecution of this church of 45,000. This leader confirmed the suicide of another church leader forced to recant his faith. Since Christmas of 2002, officials in Dak Rlap district of this province have destroyed five chapels belonging to Mnong congregations and ordered all Mnong churches there to disband. In April Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing the persecution of Mnong believers.