The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-15)

A18 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022

The World

ISRAEL

Police investigate

officers at funeral

Israeli police are investigating
the conduct of officers who
attacked the funeral procession
of a slain Al Jazeera journalist
Friday, causing mourners to
briefly drop the casket during
the ceremony in Jerusalem.
Police b eat pallbearers with
batons at the start of the funeral
procession of Shireen Abu Akleh,
who witnesses say was killed by
Israeli troops Wednesday during
a raid in the occupied West Bank.
The scenes at the funeral, and
the death of the 51-year-old
Palestinian American journalist,
drew worldwide condemnation
and calls for investigation.
In a statement Saturday, the
Israeli police said their
commissioner has instructed an
investigation that would be
concluded in the coming days.

The police said they used force as

hundreds of “rioters tried to

sabotage the ceremony and harm

the police.”

Ahead of the burial, a large

crowd gathered to escort Abu

Akleh’s casket from an East

Jerusalem hospital to a Catholic

church nearby. Many held

Palestinian flags, and the crowd

began shouting: “We sacrifice

our soul and blood for you,

Shireen!” Shortly after, Israel

police moved in.

— Associated Press

NORTH KOREA

More covid-related

deaths reported

North Korea on Saturday

reported 21 new covid-related

deaths and 174,440 more people

with fever symptoms as the

country scrambles to slow the

spread of the coronavirus across

its unvaccinated population. The

new deaths and cases, which

were from Friday, increased total

numbers to 27 deaths and

524,440 illnesses amid a rapid

spread of the virus s ince late

April.

The country imposed what it

described as maximum

preventive measures Thursday

after confirming its first covid- 19

cases since the start of the

pandemic two years ago. North

Korea on Saturday said 243,

people had recovered and

280,810 remained in quarantine.

State media didn’t specify how

many of the fever cases and

deaths were confirmed as

coronavirus infections.

Officials during a ruling party

Politburo meeting Saturday

discussed ways to swiftly

distribute medical supplies the

country has released from its

emergency reserves, Pyongyang’s

official Korean Central News

Agency said.

— Associated Press

Police charge two in fire that

killed 27 in New Delhi: Police

arrested two owners of a

company that manufactures and

sells security cameras a fter a

deadly fire reportedly started in

their office in a four-story

commercial building in the

Indian capital. At least 27 people

were killed and 12 injured in the

Friday evening blaze in New

Delhi. The police registered a

case of culpable homicide not

amounting to murder and a

criminal conspiracy that is

punishable with life

imprisonment or 10 years in jail.

The building had no clearance

from the fire department and d id

not have f ire safety equipment

such as extinguishers, said Atul

Garg, director of Delhi Fire

Services.

ISIS claims responsibility for

deadly Sinai attack: The Islamic

State on its Telegram channel

has claimed responsibility for a

deadly attack that killed five

Egyptian soldiers Wednesday in

the Sinai Peninsula. Four others

were wounded when armed men

opened fire early t hat day at a

security post on the coast of

northeastern Sinai a few m iles

away from the border with the

Gaza Strip, two security sources

said. The deaths followed a May

7 ambush at a checkpoint in

Sinai that killed 11 Egyptian

soldiers t hat was also claimed by

the Islamic State.

Afghanistan faces $501 million

budget deficit: Afghanistan

faces a budget deficit of

44 billion Afghanis

($501 million) this financial year,

the country’s Taliban authorities

said Saturday without clarifying

how the gap between expected

revenue and planned spending

will be met. Announcing the

annual national budget since the

Taliban took over the war-torn

country in August last year,

Deputy Prime Minister Abdul

Salam Hanafi said the

government foresaw spending of

231.4 billion Afghanis and

domestic revenue of 186.7 billion.

United Arab Emirates rulers

pick new president: Rulers in

the United Arab Emirates

unanimously appointed Sheikh

Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan

as the president of this

hereditarily ruled nation on the

Arabian Peninsula. The state-run

WAM news agency said the

rulers of the country’s seven

sheikhdoms made the decision

at a meeting held in Al-Mushrif

Palace in Abu Dhabi. It comes

after the late President Khalifa

bin Zayed al-Nahyan died Friday

at age 73. The transition of power

marks only the third time this

U.S.-allied nation of seven

sheikhdoms has selected a

president since becoming an

independent nation in 1971.

— From news services

DIGEST

BY THEODORA YU

hong kong — On a drizzly Sun-
day evening in May at the Hong
Kong government headquarters,
a small group gathered under a
footbridge around an altar made
with portable lights and a folding
chair.
In a gray sweater and a purple
stole, Father Franco Mella held
Mass, as he has every Sunday for
the past seven years, to pray for
the activists and protesters ar-
rested in the city’s widening
crackdown on dissent. “Sing Hal-
lelujah to the Lord,” the group
sang, nearly drowned out by the
traffic.
Moments later, a woman ap-
proached the group, took video
and recorded the identity num-
bers of several participants before
leaving in a police car. “We are
mentally prepared to be arrested
someday,” said Winnie Wong, one
of the organizers.
Mella, an Italian priest who at
73 has been advocating for human
rights for the past five decades, is
unruffled by the attention. “If you
can accept uncertainty, you won’t
fear.”
Hong Kong’s wide-ranging
crackdown on all forms of social
protest is now being felt by its
churches, a backbone of the city’s
once vibrant activism, and its reli-
gious spaces are now being
brought under state control much
the way they are in the rest of
China.
L ast Wednesday, the Hong
Kong national security police ar-
rested 90-year-old Cardinal Jo-
seph Zen, the most outspoken
senior Roman Catholic cleric in
Hong Kong and the city’s former
bishop, for involvement in a hu-
manitarian relief fund that sup-
ported jailed activists. The Hong
Kong government has said the
arrests have “absolutely nothing
to do” with religion and are just a
matter of laws being violated.
After pro-democracy protests
began in 2019, Beijing instituted a
wide-ranging national security
law in 2020 that has crushed
dissent on the island territory.
Just as educators, journalists and
artists have been silenced, Hong
Kong’s churches, once spaces for
discussing social issues, have in-
creasingly come under pressure.
According to 18 pastors and
religious experts interviewed by
The Washington Post, churches
have been pushed into censoring
themselves and avoiding appoint-
ing pastors deemed to have politi-
cal views, and at least one major
church is restructuring itself in
case the government freezes its
assets.
A study by the Hong Kong
Church Renewal Movement last
year revealed that more than a
third of churches were now more
inclined to adjust the content of
their preaching in light of the
political situation in the city.
One pastor said the nervous
church leaders couldn’t order you
to leave if they see you as a prob-
lem, but “they will ‘remind’ you,
pressure you, so that you will have
to leave on your own.” Like many
of those interviewed, he spoke on
the condition of anonymity be-
cause of the tense political situa-
tion.
Christianity has long had an
outsize role in this former British

colony, with both opposition ac-

tivists and leaders at the highest

levels of power drawing inspira-

tion from their faith. Hong Kong’s

current and incoming chief exec-

utives, Carrie Lam and John Lee,

are self-described Catholics edu-

cated in century-old Catholic

schools.

Pro-democracy advocates such

as Joshua Wong and media mogul

Jimmy Lai have cited their faith

as the moral compass for their

activism. Wong, raised as a Lu-

theran, led the pro-democracy

Umbrella Movement in 2014 and

has said his faith strengthened his

determination to fight for justice.

During the 2019 pro-democra-

cy protests, pastors would lead

their adherents in sit-ins, prayers

and singing of “Hallelujah to the

Lord,” imploring the government

to meet protesters’ demands for

accountability and universal suf-

frage. The hymn became a symbol

of peaceful protests and the free-

dom of assembly once allowed in

the semiautonomous city that op-

erated under the “one country,

two systems” policy, which once

gave it so much more freedom

than the rest of China.

In the new environment, reli-

gious institutions are leaning on

their members to censor them-

selves to avoid trouble with the

authorities.

“Many people avoid the pitfalls

on their own,” said the Rev. Hung

Kwok-him, a pastor who left

Hong Kong for Taiwan in 2021.

As part of Beijing’s efforts to

rein in what it saw as increasingly

unacceptable behavior in the city,

it appointed in February 2020 a

new head of Hong Kong and Ma-

cao affairs, Xi Baolong, who

gained prominence for his earlier

crackdown on illegal churches in

Zhejiang, China, by removing

their crosses.

Five months later, after the

new security law was passed, a

pro-Beijing state media outlet

posted a list of 20 pastors, accus-

ing some of them of being “riot

supporters.”

Fearful of arrest, at least five

outspoken pastors subsequently

left for Britain and Taiwan. In

April, a pastor was charged with

sedition, for disrupting court pro-

ceedings and vilifying the judici-

ary after he commented on the

ongoing trials on his YouTube

channel.

Churches have always been

subjected to tight control in the

mainland, which many fear will

be the future for Hong Kong’s

religious institutions. In October,

China’s state-backed bishops

briefed several senior Hong Kong

clergymen on President Xi Jin-

ping’s views on religion, under

the supervision of Beijing’s Hong

Kong Liaison Office and China’s

religious bureau.

The man who may well be cen-

tral to the integration of Hong

Kong’s churches into China’s sys-

tem is the Rev. Peter Koon, an

Anglican cleric who is the first

member of a religious institution

to be elected to Hong Kong’s pro-

Beijing legislature.

Pastors have said Koon cleaves

closely to Beijing’s model for a

clergyman: patriotism before

faith.

Koon has backed the establish-

ment of a government religious

committee, which some worry

could come to resemble China’s

overbearing religious bureau.

Koon said the committee would

help institutions “complete tasks”

such as identifying sites for con-

struction of religious facilities

“more smoothly.” But pastors ex-

pressed worries that the new

committee will be a tool to tighten

the state’s grip on churches.

“Setting up a religious commit-

tee could be a convenient way to

control the churches,” said Hung,

one of the pastors who fled the

country. “The authorities could

strip away their status as a regis-

tered church if they disobey.”

Koon told The Washington

Post there is still space to talk

about social issues within church-

es, such as the poverty gap and

housing policies, and pastors

need not overly self-censor. There

is no conflict between faith and

patriotism because loving the

country is a “basic requirement”

and religious freedom is “guaran-

teed in the Basic Law,” he said.

“Some may ask whether criti-

cizing the government will be

treated as subversion of a country,

I don’t think that is the case. It

will be terrible if so,” he said.

But with harsh strictures on

mainland churches as a reference

point, pastors and churches in

Hong Kong are bracing for the

worst, and many are being careful

about what they say and discuss

in sermons.

“If you want to stay in this

space, you need to be ‘wise as

serpents and harmless as doves,’ ”

said Nelson Leung, general secre-

tary of the Hong Kong Church

Renewal Movement, citing scrip-

ture. “We need to tap into our

wisdom.”

John Chan, assistant professor

at the Alliance Bible Seminary,

noted that pastors have ceased to

address politics in their sermons,

whether online or in person. He

said churches are devising alter-

native plans to operate, changing

“the whole ecosystem,” so that

“the eggs will not all topple at

once.”

In late 2021, the Christian and

Missionary Alliance, one of Hong

Kong’s three largest Christian or-

ganizations, passed a motion in

its annual general meeting to

split its churches from one um-

brella company into separate en-

tities, according to a document

seen by The Post. The move was a

way to prevent the whole organi-

zation from toppling if the gov-

ernment decides to freeze assets,

according to two people familiar

with the matter.

Hong Kong’s Evangelical Lu-

theran Church, meanwhile, has in

the past year issued an internal

memo about qualifying only pas-

tors who won’t make problems

with the government. The memo,

which was seen by The Post, stip-

ulated that because pastors could

eventually become bishops, who

have a huge influence on the

“political stance” and “relation-

ship with the government” and

with church members and work-

ers, examiners would need to fac-

tor this into account when mak-

ing hiring decisions.

Hong Kong’s clergy members

are now rethinking ways of carry-

ing out their preaching to balance

between speaking out on social

justice issues and the safety of

their churches and families.

Pastor Shou King-kong, who

has been running sermons with

10 people at a time since January

last year, said “mosquito-sized

churches,” independent from reg-

istered church or charity organi-

zations — and the new strictures

of the state — will be the norm in

the future.

“To continue to speak the truth

and call out for social justice, to

tell people what the Bible teaches

and how the Christ taught us,

shall be the greatest challenge we

endeavor in this era,” Shou said.

Hong Kong churches no longer off-limits

as Beijing tightens reins against dissent

Mainland’s control is extending to city’s religious institutions, some of which played a key role in the fight for democracy

PHOTOS BY ANTHONY KWAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

FROM TOP: Father Franco Mella leads a Mass in front of a makeshift altar, shown in close-up above left, outside Hong Kong’s

Central Government Complex on May 1. Mella, an Italian priest, has been advocating for human rights for the past five decades.

Above right, Pastor Shou King-kong conducts Communion at his church in a Hong Kong industrial building.