Pakistan's Christians fear for their lives

By Dean Nelson

Pakistan's Christians now fear for their lives after a bomb ripped through the All Saints' Church in the biggest ever suicide attack on their community. Dean Nelson reports.

It was at 11.44am that time stood still at All Saints' Church. The clock on the wall is frozen at the very minute seven-year-old Shyam Emmanuel lost his parents. In that same moment, seven children were sent to their deaths along with 78 adults who had congregated outside the gleaming white walls of Peshawar's main Christian place of worship. The carnage inflicted here was dealt by two young men, dressed in security uniforms, who, under instruction from the Taliban, detonated suicide vests and turned a warm community celebration into the biggest massacre of Christians in Pakistan's history. Six days after the devastating bombing in this North Western city of three and a half million people, the paediatric ward of Peshawar's Lady Reading hospital is still full. Shyam is one of more than a dozen bandaged, maimed and burnt children being treated all of whom had lost parents, brothers, sisters, cousins and friends.Looking forlorn in thick spectacles, with a bandaged nose and arm, he said he could not remember much of the blast. What he does know is that he was one of about 50 children singing The Good Shepherd in the Sunday school opposite the colonial church when their teacher told them to run out and get rice and sweets being offered in memory of a popular parishioner who had died. As he rushed down the steps with his two brothers and friends into the common courtyard, the two uniformed bombers in their mid twenties struck and the clock on the wall of All Saints' stopped.Arif Latif, a male nurse at a local clinic, heard the blast, saw the destruction and immediately thought that his 12-year-old son Norman was dead. He and his wife had been inside the church. "We were confused. We have two children. I went looking for them," recalls Mr Latif. "He was under a dead body, unconscious. I thought he was dead. I picked him up and he shouted about his leg. It was broken, he was crying in pain, but I was happy because my child was alive." Although Norman and his sister survived, burns on one side of the young boy's face have turned his skin white, the ball bearings from the suicide vests had punctured his chest and some of the shrapnel remains stuck inside. His arm is seriously burnt and there is a tube in his chest to ease his breathing. Doctors are worried about his liver. Like the rest of his fearful minority community, Mr Latif believes Christians face a bleak future. "We are not safe in Pakistan. This was the first time we suffered, but it was huge," he said from his son's bedside. "I just can't explain how I feel. We have lost many friends, I've lost cousins, uncles, aunties. We're confused and we just don't know what to do." According to their bishop, Humphrey Peters, who visited the hospital ward on Thursday, Peshawar's Christians are right to be fearful. "This has shaken the whole community," he told The Daily Telegraph as he relayed a shocking story of one little girl's ordeal. "There was one little girl in big trauma and one of our people was trying to make the sign of the cross on her forehead. She said, 'Don't do it, because they will come and kill me'. She is nine or ten years old." Bishop Peters points out the realities of Christian life in this corner of Pakistan. All of the children in Lady Reading hospital's wards, if they retain their faith, will at some point lose out on jobs because of their religion. They may be accused under Pakistan's discriminatory blasphemy laws under which Christians can be jailed, or like Aasiya Bibi, a farm worker, sentenced to death after co-workers said she had insulted the Prophet Mohammad. Punjab's governor, Salman Taseer, and minorities minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, believed she had been falsely accused and were later murdered for supporting her. Much of the discrimination they face is rooted in an old Hindu caste system that lingers in Pakistan several centuries after most of its people converted to Islam, Bishop Peters explained. Christians do Pakistan's lowest status and lowest paid jobs. Shyam Emmanuel's father was a janitor at an air force base and many Christians work as cleaners, sweepers and domestic servants – jobs done by so-called "untouchables". "Christian children in government schools are not treated well. They call them sweepers and tell them they can't eat with them or drink with them. Because we are marginalised and the poorest of the poor, the old Hindu caste system prevails," Bishop Peters said. "Many of our people were once low caste [Hindus] so they're treated as nothing at all. There is a psychological problem with the Christians, they become so timid and scared. They're supposed to be very brave. But we are refugees in our own country ... like flies on the wall." In 2009, nine Christians were burnt alive in Gojra in Punjab after claims that a Koran had been desecrated. Muslim mobs rioted and attacked Christians in Lahore earlier this year as police looked on, while one of Bishop Peters's own churches, in Mardan, was set on fire in September last year amid national protests against a film that defamed the Prophet. "They burnt the church, the Christian library, the priest's house, almost the entire community. The police tried to stop them but there were 10,000 people. They were about to throw the priest's son on to the fire but somehow he was rescued. They said they were throwing Obama into the fire. He was 16 or 17." At All Saints' Church, where the relatives were praying for those they had lost, priests voiced their anger at the impunity those who attack them. One, who asked not to be named, said Pakistan's political leaders, including Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, had voiced dismay and support after the massacre, but attackers were never brought to justice. "All the people are coming to say sorry but something should be done. . something more than that. No one has ever been prosecuted for attacking Christians in Pakistan," he said. Gazing up at the shrapnel-pocked walls of the church in which she and her family had grown up, Sunita Iqbal, 25, a teacher, said she had come to pray for her two older sisters who had died in explosions and cry for the one new life created from the tragedy. Her youngest sister had been six months pregnant and doctors safely delivered her baby three hours before she died. "The baby was born alive during her treatment and I've not stopped crying since," she said.