Garth George: Terrifying reminders of why we value religious freedom

An Iranian chef, Hossein Yadegary, who fled Iran and came to New Zealand 11 years ago, and who has since by all accounts lived a productive and blameless life, languishes in prison in Auckland, and has done so for nearly two years.

Mr Yadegary is an overstayer who has been denied refugee status.

Unlike, for instance, Ahmed Zaoui, who tried to destroy a false South African passport before he landed at Auckland Airport four years ago and who has cost the country millions since, Mr Yadegary appears to have made a useful contribution to this country in the time he has been here, been in no trouble, and along the way has become a Christian.

He sounds just the sort of immigrant this country needs - industrious, well-behaved and prepared to fit in with the culture of his new home.

It is his conversion in 1997 to Christianity that has made Mr Yadegary fear returning to Iran and decline to sign papers that would see him deported to his homeland. If his conversion is genuine - and there is no reason to believe that it is not - then it is no wonder he is scared stiff of being sent back to his homeland. He could well face death if he was.

The United States State Department's latest International Religious Freedom Report, issued just a month or so ago, says in its extensive remarks on Iran: "Conversion of a Muslim to a non-Muslim religion is considered apostasy under the law and is punishable by the death penalty, although it [is] unclear whether this punishment has been enforced in recent years."

The report says the Iranian Government vigilantly enforces its prohibition on proselytising activities by evangelical Christians by closely monitoring their activities, closing their churches and arresting Christian converts. Members of evangelical congregations are required to carry membership cards, photocopies of which must be provided to the authorities. Worshippers are subject to identity checks by authorities posted outside congregation centres.

The Government restricts meetings for evangelical services to Sundays and church officials are ordered to inform the Ministry of Information and Islamic Guidance before admitting new members to their congregations. Among its many instances of state-sanctioned persecution of Christians, the report records that in November last year a Muslim convert to Christianity, Ghorban Tori, was kidnapped from his home in the north-east and killed. Mr Tori was a pastor at an independent house church.

In the previous week, according to sources, the Iran Ministry of Intelligence and Security had arrested and tortured 10 Christians in several cities, the US report said.

But it's not just state sanctions that bedevil Christians in Iran and other Muslim and Muslim-dominated countries, some of which are, or would like to have us believe they are, aligned with the West - Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia, for instance. They are also faced with the threat of militant and radical Islamists - and, indeed, their own families and neighbours.

Week after week I receive from international Christian news agencies reports of brutality, murder and mayhem perpetrated against Christians in those countries and others by gangs of Muslims, or by the families and/or neighbours of men and women who have converted to Christianity.

In Indonesia just under a year ago unidentified assailants attacked a group of high school girls in the province of Central Sulawesi, beheading three and seriously wounding a fourth.

The students, from a private Christian high school, were ambushed while walking through a cocoa plantation in the Poso Kota sub-district, about 1600km north-east of Jakarta, on their way to class.

In Iraq just a couple of weeks ago, two people were killed - one a child - and at least 17 injured by two car bombs left outside a cathedral in Baghdad on a Sunday morning, and there were two gunfire attacks on a church in Mosul.

The Barnabas Fund, which works to support Christian communities around the world where they are facing poverty and persecution, says attacks on Christians in Iraq have been happening often and are largely unreported in the Western secular media. The fund's international director, Patrick Sookhdeo, said: "Iraqi Christians are facing hostility and violence and it's an ongoing situation."

That is confirmed by Carl Moeller, president of Open Doors, a ministry that serves the persecuted Church around the world. He says there has been a sharp increase in violence reported against Christians in Iraq and a number of believers have been abused and kidnapped.

And just this week from Muzaffarabad in northern Pakistan came a report that unidentified militants murdered two children of a Christian missionary couple working with an underground evangelism ministry.

The girls - named as Shalom, aged 15, and Sharon, 14 - were kidnapped with their missionary parents and two younger sisters 10 days before the murder. The militants insisted they convert to Islam but they refused.

In front of the parents, the elder girl was killed first, then the younger one was raped and suffered cuts to one of her breasts before she died. The assailants torched the dead bodies of the children and a motorcycle, and local police put the affair down as a road accident. At this stage the fate of the rest of the family is not known.

My only solace in all of this is that all those who have died in Christ will today be in heaven with their Lord; every tear will have been wiped away, every hurt healed, and every recollection of the way of their passing erased.

Let Hossein Yadegary stay.