Thank you for inviting us this morning to talk to you about persecution.
My experience with persecution began in the early 2000s. Up until the year 2000, I had no idea that it was really happening. I visited Bosnia at that time with a Christian from the west end of Ottawa. He started telling me about persecution in Sudan that he was familiar with. About a year later, I ended up in South Sudan. What I learned there was staggering.
We're talking primarily about Nigeria this morning. I visited Nigeria a number of times in the 1980s, when it was actually very peaceful and there was nothing bad going on in that country that I was aware of, at least not on the scale that it's happening now. The persecution in Nigeria of course comes from Boko Haram, which is a Muslim group.
The persecution in Sudan was coming from the Muslim government in Khartoum. Two million people, primarily Christians, had been killed by the time I made my first visit there. What I learned was absolutely staggering. One of the best things I learned, however, in relation to the persecution was that those Christians who suffer persecution forgive the people who persecute them. In that respect, they have a lot to teach us.
I subsequently went, after about seven visits into South Sudan, to Orissa state in India, where the Hindus had been violently persecuting Christians in an outbreak that really should not have been directed against Christians. It resulted from one of their leaders in Orissa state being murdered. He had been murdered, shot by a communist guerrilla group. They went public and said that they had shot the man, but the net result, the immediate result, was that the Hindus took that as an excuse to start persecuting Christians. They were burning Christians alive in that state.
It came as a very big shock to us, because we didn't think India was anything but a civilized country. Muslims tend to get most of the publicity for their persecution of Christians, but let's never forget that it is happening in other communities as well. It's coming from Hindus. In Korea it's coming from the government.
I think it's probably time now to turn it over to our other guests and to look at the video.