Tag Archives: lives

Delta is tempting us to trade lives for freedoms — a choice it had looked like we wouldn’t have to make

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Peter Martin, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National UniversityLast year COVID-19 seemed simple. It was horrific, but the arguments about what to do were fairly straightforward.

On one side were people rightly horrified by its rapid spread who wanted us to stay at home and stay away from school and work and socialising in order to save lives.

On the other side were people concerned about the costs of those measures — to jobs, to education, to freedom, to mental health, and to other lives (because if we used too much of our health system fighting COVID-19, other lives might fall through the cracks).

And through it all came a kind of consensus.

The concern about non-COVID deaths turned out to be overblown. Last year Australia recorded fewer than normal doctor-certified deaths, in part because the COVID restrictions stopped deaths from influenza, and in part because they snuffed out COVID-19 early, ensuring hospitals weren’t overwhelmed.

Last year, we didn’t have to choose

Concern about jobs also turned out to be overblown. By locking down hard and early, and paying employers to keep on staff (through JobKeeper) we ensured the lockdowns would be short-lived, with light at the end of the tunnel.

In none of the states for which there is data was there an increase in suicides.

The insurance company ClearView told a parliamentary committee this June its research found things were better than expected in part because of the universal nature of the pandemic. Everyone knew “everyone was in this together”.

Another reason was telehealth. It was easier to get help than before.



Read more:
7 lessons for Australia’s health system from the coronavirus upheaval

And students returned to school sooner than they would have had the lockdowns had been weaker or started later, leaving much of their education intact.

The consensus was that by locking down hard and early we got the best of both worlds — near-elimination of COVID-19 and a quick return to normal life. Anyone who remembers Christmas last year remembers how normal it felt.

Economics is called the dismal science in part because it is about hard choices — situations where we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Last year it seemed as if COVID wasn’t one of them. Starving the virus early gave us both one of the world’s lowest death tolls and one of its shortest recessions.

Hard choices are back in sight

And then came Delta.

Far more contagious than the original, and with fewer immediate symptoms (making it harder to trace) the Delta variant became almost impossible to get on top of in the two big states where it took hold.

And without very high vaccination rates — in the view of the Grattan Institute significantly higher than either the NSW, Victorian or Commonwealth governments are targeting — it became all but impossible to reopen without condemning Australians to COVID deaths.

The new reality is plunging us back toward the territory economists call their own — the world of hard choices.

If the lockdowns don’t end (and there is no sign they can end any time soon without costing lives) education and mental health and jobs will indeed suffer.

Businesses can’t hang on indefinitely.
JakeOwenPowell/Shutterstock

There’s only so long businesses can hang on without pulling the pin.

We are getting closer to having to trade off lives against freedoms; getting closer to having to decide how many COVID deaths and how much COVID illness we are prepared to live with in order to return to something more like normal living.

Last week’s NSW “roadmap to freedom” implicitly made those tradeoffs.

Calculations prepared by the Treasury and the Grattan Institute make them more explicit.

There are few important things to note. One is that we might yet be able to get the best of both worlds.

We might yet be able to effectively eliminate the delta strand, restoring both health and freedoms (as we did with the earlier strand).

It won’t happen if we ease restrictions before transmission has stopped, as some states are planning to.

Lockdowns without end are unsustainable

Another is that unending lockdowns are untenable. While last year’s lockdowns didn’t do the psychological and health and educational damage that was feared, lockdowns without end would.

One type of damage clearly evident in the comprehensive report on last year’s lockdowns from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is family and domestic violence. The longer lockdowns continue, the longer elevated violence is likely to continue.

And another thing to note is that in a world where we have to make tradeoffs there are no particularly good options. Allowing the disease to spread in order to restore freedom of movement would itself curtail freedom of movement.



Read more:
Economists back social distancing 34-9 in new poll

An analysis across US states suggests 90% of last year’s collapse in face-to-face shopping was due to fear of COVID rather than formal COVID restrictions. That fear will grow if we lift restrictions and COVID spreads.

The Grattan Institute would lift lockdowns only when 80% of the entire population has been double vaccinated (not 70-80% of people aged 16+ as the NSW and national plans envisage, which amounts to 56-64% of the population).

Grattan believes its plan would cost 2,000-3,000 lives per year; a cost it believes the public would accept because it is similar to the normal toll from flu.

The NSW and national plans (Victoria’s isn’t spelled out) would cost much more.

No option is particularly good

The Commonwealth Treasury finds, perhaps counter-intuitively, that an aggressive lockdown strategy that saved more lives would impose lower economic costs (about A$1 billion per week lower) in part because it would end up producing fewer lockdowns.

They are the sort of calculations we hoped never to have to make.

There’s still a chance we might not. With a Herculean effort NSW and Victoria could yet join Taiwan, New Zealand and every other Australian state in being effectively COVID-free. But they are running out of time.



Read more:
NSW risks a second larger COVID peak by Christmas if it eases restrictions too quickly


The Conversation

Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

COVID-19 cost more in 2020 than the world’s combined natural disasters in any of the past 20 years

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Ilan Noy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Nguyen Doan, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of WellingtonWhat have we lost because of the pandemic? According to our calculations, a lot — and many of the worst hit countries and regions are far from world media attention.

Typically, damage from any disaster is measured in separate categories: the number of fatalities and injuries it caused, and the financial damage it led to (directly or indirectly).

Only by aggregating these various measures into a comprehensive total can we begin to formulate a fuller picture of the burden of disasters, including pandemics.

The usual approach has been to attach a price tag to death and illness. Many governments calculate this “value of statistical life”.

They do this based on surveys asking people how much they are willing to pay to reduce some risk (for example, improve a road they often use), or by calculating the additional compensation people demand when they take on high-risk occupations (for example, as a diver on an oil rig).

By observing the amount of money people associate with small changes in mortality risk, one can then calculate the overall price of a “statistical life” as valued by the average person.

By adding the dollar value of asset damage to the “priced” value of life lost (or injured), the overall cost of an adverse event (such as an earthquake or an epidemic) can be calculated.

Ship washed up on street after Japanese tsunami
The massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011 cost far less than COVID-19 in 2020.
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Calculating ‘lost life years’

But “value of life” prices can vary a lot between and even within countries. There is also an understandable public distaste for putting a price tag on human life. Governments typically don’t openly discuss these calculations, making it difficult to assess their legitimacy.

An alternative is a “life years lost index”. It is based on the World Health Organization (WHO) measure of “disability-adjusted life years” (DALY), calculated for a long list of diseases and published in a yearly account of the associated human costs.



Read more:
How would digital COVID vaccine passports work? And what’s stopping people from faking them?

In conventional measurements of the impact of disaster risk, the unit used is dollars. For this alternative index, the unit of measurement is “lost life years” — the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health.

This is a sum of three key measures of the pandemic’s impact: lost life years because of death and sickness from the disease, and the equivalent lost years due to decline in economic activity. The map below presents these figures per person, in order to enable the relevant comparison across countries.

For example, in the map above we see Australia has a life-years-lost figure of 0.02. This means, on average, every person in Australia lost just over seven life days from the pandemic. In New Zealand, where fewer people died and there have been only a few thousand cases, the figure is 0.01, meaning each person lost fewer than four life days.

In India, by contrast, the average person lost nearly 15 days and in Peru the equivalent figure is 25 days. That loss is based on a combination of the precipitous recession and the death and sickness caused by the virus directly.

So, how do we put this in context? Is losing 25 days a catastrophic loss that justifies the kinds of public actions we have observed around the world? We can answer that question by comparing the impact of COVID-19 to other disasters.



Read more:
COVID lockdowns have human costs as well as benefits. It’s time to consider both

The price of a pandemic

When we compare the total aggregate costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with the average annual costs associated with all other disasters in the previous 20 years, we find the pandemic has indeed been extremely costly (in terms of lost life years).

This is despite those past two decades having seen many catastrophic events: horrific tsunamis in Indonesia (2004) and Japan (2011), very damaging hurricanes in the US (2005 and 2017), a high-mortality cyclone in Myanmar (2008), deadly earthquakes in India (2001), Pakistan (2005), China (2008), Haiti (2010) and Nepal (2015), and others.

The graph below shows the life years lost in 2020 by continent, per person, from COVID-19 compared to the average annual cost of all other disasters 2000-2019. As we can see, the costs of the pandemic are much higher — more than three times higher in Asia and more than 30 times higher in Europe.

The most vulnerable countries have been small, open economies such as Fiji, Maldives and Belize, which rely heavily on the export of services, especially tourism.

These are not necessarily countries that have experienced a high number of deaths from the pandemic, but their overall loss is staggering.

More generally, the per-capita loss associated with COVID-19 is particularly high in most of Latin America, southern Africa, southern Europe, India and some of the Pacific Islands. This is in stark contrast to where the global media’s attention has been directed (the US, UK and EU).

Costs will continue to rise

These measures are for 2020 only. Obviously, the pandemic is continuing to rage, and will most likely continue to have an impact on the global economy well into 2022. Many of the adverse economic impacts will still be felt years from now.

Worryingly, some of the countries that have already suffered the greatest economic impact have also been slow to secure enough vaccine doses for their populations. They may well see their economic slumps carry on into next year, especially with larger, richer countries having the resources to buy vaccines first.

Much public and media attention has focused on the death toll and immediate economic impact from COVID-19. But the human and social costs associated with that economic loss are potentially much greater, particularly in poorer countries.



Read more:
Global obsession with economic growth will increase risk of deadly pandemics in future

The heavy burden many small countries have borne has, to some extent, been overlooked. Countries such as Lebanon and the Maldives are experiencing dramatic and painful crises, largely under the radar of world attention.

However, our conclusion that the human cost of the economic loss is possibly much higher than the cost associated with health loss does not imply public policies such as lockdowns, border restrictions and quarantines have been unwarranted.

If anything, countries that experienced a deeper health crisis also experienced a deeper economic crisis. There has been no effective trade-off between saving lives and saving livelihoods.

This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the stories here.The Conversation

Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Nguyen Doan, Doctoral student in economics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The evidence is in. WHO says corticosteroids really do save lives of people critically ill with COVID-19

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Andrew McLachlan, University of Sydney

Readily available drugs, which dampen the runaway inflammatory response in patients severely ill with COVID-19, save lives, according to evidence released this week.

An analysis by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which drew together results from several studies, confirms the benefit of this group of anti-inflammatory steroid drugs, known as corticosteroids.

While earlier studies showed the apparent benefit of one of these drugs, dexamethasone, this latest evidence goes further.

It shows other cheap and readily available corticosteroid drugs, including hydrocortisone, could benefit patients at the life-threatening stages of coronavirus infection.

Remind me again, what are corticosteroids?

Corticosteroids have been used for decades to treat a variety of inflammatory conditions. These include severe forms of lung inflammation, such as pneumonia, shock due to infection, and severe respiratory syndromes. They are also used to treat more common conditions, including asthma and eczema.

These medicines are on the WHO list of essential medicines, meaning they are widely available (usually at low cost).



Read more:
What medicines would we pack for a trip to Mars?

What do we already know about corticosteroids for COVID-19?

In June, early release of results from the RECOVERY trial showed dexamethasone reduced the risk of death by up to a third in people hospitalised with COVID-19 who needed a ventilator to help them breathe.

Results of the dexamethasone trial were released early.

Despite the early release of the trial results, and limited details at the time, the findings were compelling and clinical practice changed.

Several other trials were stopped. All patients switched to receive active treatment with a corticosteroid.

The results of the RECOVERY trial have since been formally peer reviewed and published.



Read more:
Dexamethasone: the cheap, old and boring drug that’s a potential coronavirus treatment

What does the latest evidence say?

The WHO drew together results from seven randomised clinical trials, including data from 1,703 critically ill patients with COVID-19.

This is a powerful and compelling way to combine information and truly address the question of whether these medicines benefit people in hospital critically unwell with COVID-19.



Read more:
ICU ventilators: what they are, how they work and why it’s hard to make more

The study, which included patients from Australia and New Zealand, found almost 33% of people treated with corticosteroids died within 28 days of treatment. This was compared with 41% of patients who received supportive care (or placebo). Corticosteroid treatment helped patients whether or not they needed ventilation or oxygen.

Importantly, the analysis also concluded the benefits were not specific to one corticosteroid drug but were the same for dexamethasone and hydrocortisone.

Corticosteroids can also have an impact on the immune system. So the researchers looked at the risk of infection from other causes, for example bacterial pneumonia, and found it was not a major concern.

What does this mean for patients?

The weight of evidence has led WHO guidelines this week to strongly recommend using corticosteroids to treat people with severe or critical COVID-19.

This aligns with current Australian guidelines for treating hospitalised patients with COVID-19 needing oxygen support.

Corticosteroids are not for everyone and are not a cure

It is important to remember these findings only apply to using corticosteroids in critically ill people hospitalised with COVID-19. There is currently limited information to suggest these medicines are appropriate for people with mild COVID-19.

While corticosteroids help treat the body’s response to the coronavirus infection, they are not antiviral drugs. They do not inhibit the virus itself, so they are not a cure.



Read more:
In the fight against coronavirus, antivirals are as important as a vaccine. Here’s where the science is up to

A new way of doing research

Usually, several clinical trials on a common theme are published over a series of years. Then a meta-analysis draws together their results, publishing these combined results much later.

But the amazing thing about this latest evidence is the meta-analysis included data from clinical trials published at the same time. This shows a degree of co-operation and collaboration between researchers to share data to urgently address important research questions that guide clinical care.

Evidence to guide the best treatments and management for people with COVID-19 continues to emerge. You can follow the evidence and how it’s applied in Australia here.



Read more:
Ivermectin is still not a miracle cure for COVID-19, despite what you may have read


The Conversation

Andrew McLachlan, Head of School and Dean of Pharmacy, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The evidence is clear: the medevac law saves lives. But even this isn’t enough to alleviate refugee suffering

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Protesters holding a vigil last year for deceased asylum seeker Hamid Khazaei, who died in a Brisbane hospital due to an infection at the Manus Island detention centre in 2014.
Darren England/AAP

Sara Dehm, University of Technology Sydney

Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie has some sobering reading to do over the coming weeks: an 88-page Senate report into the government-sponsored bill to repeal the medevac law that allow refugees and asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru to seek medical care in Australia. The publication of the report last Friday paves the way for a Senate vote on the bill in mid-November.

As predicted, the Senate committee that issued the report split along party lines, with the Coalition majority calling for the medevac provisions to be repealed and the ALP, Greens and Centre Alliance senators releasing dissenting reports.



Read more:
Lambie stays mute on medevac vote after Senate inquiry splits on party lines

What is less predictable is how the report will influence Lambie’s deciding vote. She has indicated she will approach the bill as a conscience vote, saying

Tasmanians don’t want deals done over humanity.

An overwhelming health crisis in offshore detention

The medevac law allows a person to be transferred to Australia for medical treatment or assessment if two Australian-registered doctors recommend such care is necessary and unavailable in PNG or Nauru. There are limited exceptions for the minister of home affairs to reject a transfer on security and character grounds.

Since the law came into effect in March, over 130 people have been transferred for care.

The Coalition government maintains the pre-medevac medical transfer policy for refugees was adequate. This allowed transfers only in life-threatening cases in which the required specialist medical care could not be provided on PNG, Nauru or a third country like Taiwan.

However, evidence given to the Senate committee showed a drastic drop in medical transfers to Australia from 2015 to mid-2018, despite clear medical need.

Statistics given to the committee by the National Justice Project, a not-for-profit legal service that acts on behalf of refugees, documented how some patients had to wait more than four years for medical transfers to Australia.

Tony Bartone, the Australian Medical Association president, described the government’s pre-Medevac process as “torturous” and involving “long periods of delay,” without any appropriate oversight.

Court injunctions and prospective litigation from mid-2018 onwards did compel the government to bring around 350 people to Australia for urgent medical treatment or as an accompanying family member. But such court interventions can be costly, slow and resource-intensive for those in need of immediate medical attention.



Read more:
Peter Dutton is whipping up fear on the medevac law, but it defies logic and compassion

And that need is still extremely high for those refugees remaining in offshore detention. An independent health assessment in June found a staggering 97% of those in detention and processing facilities have been diagnosed with physical health conditions. A further 91% were experiencing mental health problems, including severe depression and PTSD.

All but two of the 95 public submissions received by the committee were strongly in favour of retaining the medevac law.

Tellingly, those two submissions were from the Department of Home Affairs and the International Health and Medical Service, a government-contracted health provider on Nauru.

Overlooked refugee suffering in Australia

What is missing from the Senate report is any mention of the intolerable situation that refugees and asylum seekers face even after they have been transferred to Australia.

Although people can access critical medical treatment here, most remain in community detention, facing economic insecurity and legal uncertainty about their future. Research shows such legal limbo can lead to feelings of despair and dehumanisation.

The day before the report’s release, 32-year-old Afghan doctor Sayed Mirwais Rohani died in Brisbane, the victim of an apparent suicide. Rohani had come to Australia for medical treatment two years ago, after spending four years in immigration detention on Manus Island.

After his death, his former roommate posted on Facebook:

We shared same pain for long time, long enough to destroy someone’s life.

Rohani’s death was at least the 13th among refugees held in offshore detention on Manus or Nauru.

‘Trying to kill themselves because they’ve lost hope’

No doubt the government will use the Senate report to convince Lambie to support its bill when the vote happens next month.

So far, Lambie has remained relatively reticent, even if she did rebuff Dutton’s claim that the “vast majority of veterans” want her to vote to repeal medevac.



Read more:
Explainer: how will the ‘medevac’ bill actually affect ill asylum seekers?

Instead, Lambie indicated she would look to “national security” considerations in weighing up the report’s findings, including the dissenting reports. She has in the past called for children not to be in immigration detention and voted against the Coalition government’s bill to introduce temporary refugee visas in 2014.

Even if the medevac provisions stay in place, the status quo of Australia’s offshore detention regime remains unsustainable and inhumane.

As former MP Kerryn Phelps, a key architect of the medevac law during her brief time in parliament, stated in her evidence to the Senate committee, refugees and asylum seekers are

not trying to make a point; they’re trying to kill themselves because they’ve lost hope.The Conversation

Sara Dehm, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia: NSW – Bushfire Story (One Person’s Story)

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The link below is to an article that reports on one person’s experience in the devastating bushfires currently impacting on homes and lives in NSW, Australia.

For more visit:
http://www.biblesociety.org.au/news/im-christian-house-just-burned

Iran: Latest Persecution News

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The link below is to an article on the latest persecution news out of Iran, which looks at how persecution in that country is impacting on the lives of families.

For more visit:
http://www.christiantelegraph.com/issue16990.html

Pastor, Church Official Shot Dead in Nigeria

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Muslim militants of Boko Haram blamed for killings in Borno state.

JOS, Nigeria, June 10 (CDN) — Muslim extremists from the Boko Haram sect on Tuesday (June 7) shot and killed a Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN) pastor and his church secretary in Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state.

The Rev. David Usman, 45, and church secretary Hamman Andrew were the latest casualties in an upsurge of Islamic militancy that has engulfed northern Nigeria this year, resulting in the destruction of church buildings and the killing and maiming of Christians.

The Rev. Titus Dama Pona, pastor with the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) in Maiduguri, told Compass that Pastor Usman was shot and killed by the members of the Boko Haram near an area of Maiduguri called the Railway Quarters, where the slain pastor’s church is located.

Pona said Christians in Maiduguri have become full of dread over the violence of Boko Haram, which seeks to impose sharia (Islamic law) on northern Nigeria.

“Christians have become the targets of these Muslim militants – we no longer feel free moving around the city, and most churches no longer carry out worship service for fear of becoming targets of these unprovoked attacks,” Pona said.

Officials at COCIN’s national headquarters in Jos, Plateau state, confirmed the killing of Pastor Usman. The Rev. Logan Gongchi of a COCIN congregation in Kerang, Jos, told Compass that area Christians were shocked at the news.

Gongchi said he attended Gindiri Theological College with Pastor Usman beginning in August 2003, and that both of them were ordained into pastoral ministry on Nov. 27, 2009.

“We knew him to be very gentle, an introvert, who was always silent in the class and only spoke while answering questions from our teachers,” Gongchi said. “He had a simple lifestyle and was easygoing with other students. He was very accommodating and ready at all times to withstand life’s pressures – this is in addition to being very jovial.”

Gongchi described Usman as “a pastor to the core because of his humility. I remember he once told me that he was not used to working with peasant farmers’ working tools, like the hoe. But with time he adapted to the reality of working with these tools on the farm in the school.”

Pastor Usman was excellent at counseling Christians and others while they were at the COCIN theological college, Gongchi said, adding that the pastor greatly encouraged him when he was suffering a long illness from 2005 to 2007.

“His encouraging words kept my faith alive, and the Lord saw me overcoming my ill health,” he said. “So when I heard the news about his murder, I cried.”

 

Motives

The late pastor had once complained about the activities of Boko Haram, saying that unless the Nigerian government faced up to the challenge of its attacks, the extremist group would consume the lives of innocent persons, according to Gongchi.

“Pastor Usman once commented on the activities of the Boko Haram, which he said has undermined the church not only in Maiduguri, but in Borno state,” Gongchi said. “At the time, he urged us to pray for them, as they did not know how the problem will end.”

Gongchi advised the Nigerian government to find a lasting solution to Boko Haram’s violence, which has also claimed the lives of moderate Muslim leaders and police.

The Railway Quarters area in Maiduguri housed the seat of Boko Haram until 2009, when Nigerian security agencies and the military demolished its headquarters and captured and killed the sect’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf, and some of his followers.

The killing of Pastor Usman marked the second attack on his church premises by the Muslim militants. The first attack came on July 29, 2009, when Boko Haram militants burned the church building and killed some members of his congregation.

On Monday (June 6), the militants had bombed the St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, along with other areas in Maiduguri, killing three people. In all, 14 people were killed in three explosions at the church and police stations, and authorities have arrested 14 people.

The Boko Haram name is interpreted figuratively as “against Western education,” but some say it can also refer to the forbidding of the Judeo-Christian faith. They say the word “Boko” is a corruption in Hausa language for the English word “Book,” referring to the Islamic scripture’s description of Jews and Christians as “people of the Book,” while “Haram” is a Hausa word derived from Arabic meaning, “forbidding.”

Boko Haram leaders have openly declared that they want to establish an Islamic theocratic state in Nigeria, and they reject democratic institutions, which they associate with Christianity. Their bombings and suspected involvement in April’s post-election violence in Nigeria were aimed at stifling democracy, which they see as a system of government built on the foundation of Christian scripture.

Christians as well as Muslims suffered many casualties after supporters of Muslim presidential candidate Muhammudu Buhari lost the April 16 federal election to Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian. Primarily Muslim rioters claimed vote fraud, although international observers praised the polls as the fairest since 1999.

Nigeria’s population of more than 158.2 million is almost evenly divided between Christians, who make up 51.3 percent of the population and live mainly in the south, and Muslims, who account for 45 percent of the population and live mainly in the north. The percentages may be less, however, as those practicing indigenous religions may be as high as 10 percent of the total population, according to Operation World.

Report From Compass Direct News
http://www.compassdirect.org/

 

Suspected Islamists Burn Down Two Homes in Ethiopia

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Two thatched-grass structures belonged to evangelist who received threats.

NAIROBI, Kenya, April 21 (CDN) — A Christian near Ethiopia’s southern town of Moyale said suspected Islamic extremists on March 29 burned down his two thatched-grass homes.

Evangelist Wako Hanake of the Mekane Yesus Church told Compass he had been receiving anonymous messages warning him to stop converting Muslims to Christ. The Muslims who became Christians included several children.

“Inside the house were iron sheets and timber stored in preparation for putting up a permanent house,” said Hanake, who is in his late 30s. “I have lost everything.”

The incident in Tuka, five kilometers (nearly three miles) from Moyale in southern Ethiopia’s Oromia Region, happened while Hanake was away on an evangelistic trip. A neighbor said he and others rescued Hanake’s wife and children ages 8, 6 and 2.

“We had to rescue the wife with her three children who were inside one of the houses that the fire was already beginning to burn,” said the neighbor, who requested anonymity.

Church leaders said neighbors are still housing Hanake and his family.

“The family has lost everything, and they feel fearful for their lives,” said a local church leader. “We are doing all we can to provide clothing and food to them. We are appealing to all well wishers to support Hanake’s family.”

Hanake said he has reported the case to Moyale police.

“I hope the culprits will be found,” he said.

An area church leader who requested anonymity told Compass that Christians in Moyale are concerned that those in Tuka are especially vulnerable to a harsh environment in which religious rights are routinely violated.

“The Ethiopian constitution allows for religious tolerance,” said another area church leader, also under condition of anonymity, “but we are concerned that such ugly incidents like this might go unpunished. To date no action has been taken.”

Tuka village, on Ethiopia’s border with Kenya, is populated mainly by ethnic Oromo who are predominantly Muslim. The area Muslims restrict the preaching of non-Muslim faiths, in spite of provisions for religious freedom in Ethiopia’s constitution.

Hostility toward those spreading faiths different from Islam is a common occurrence in predominantly Muslim areas of Ethiopia and neighboring countries, area Christians said, adding that they are often subject to harassment and intimidation.

Ethiopia’s constitution, laws and policies generally respect freedom of religion, but occasionally some local authorities infringe on this right, according to the U.S. Department of State’s 2010 International Religious Freedom Report.

According to Operation World, nearly 40 percent of Ethiopia’s population affiliates with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 19 percent are evangelical and Pentecostal and 34 percent are Sunni Muslim. The remainder are Catholic (3 percent) and ethno-religious (3.7 percent).

 

Jimma Violence

In Jimma Zone in the country’s southwest, where thousands of Christians in and around Asendabo have been displaced as a result of attacks that began on March 2 after Muslims accused a Christian of desecrating the Quran, the number of churches burned has reached 71, and two people have reportedly been killed. Their identities, however, were still unconfirmed.

When the anti-Christian violence of thousands of Muslims subsided by the end of March, 30 homes had reportedly been destroyed and as many as 10,000 Christians may have been displaced from Asendabo, Chiltie, Gilgel Gibe, Gibe, Nada, Dimtu, Uragay, Busa and Koticha.

Report from Compass Direct News
http://www.compassdirect.org