Thirty-five Christian Ethiopians were arrested on 15 December in Saudi Arabia on charges of “illegal meeting of unmarried people of opposite sexes.”
The Saudi police raid took place as the group of Ethiopians met to pray at a house in Jeddah during the Christmas Fast.
Located on the coast of the Red Sea, Jeddah is the largest Saudi urban centre after the capital, Riyadh: an immigration destination attracting masses of people from all over the world, Africa in particular.
A multi-ethnic crossroads, Jeddah remains a strong centre of Islamic culture: it is the main gateway to Mecca and Medina.
Of the thirty-five arrested, twenty-nine are women who, according to statements by Human Rights Watch and other NGOs, have been subjected to harassment and completely arbitrary body searches.
According to international sources, the men in the group were held for two days at the al-Nuhza police station in Jeddah before being transferred to Buraiman prison.
In a telephonic statement, Ethiopians said that after about ten days some of them were taken to court, where they gave their fingerprints as signatures to some documents which they were unable to read.
The charge against them is based directly on the Saudi Civil Code.
Shaikh Ibrahim al-Ghaith, President of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Sin - the Saudi religious police - told Human Rights Watch: “The meeting of people of different sexes is prohibited in public, but permitted in private if it is not for the purposes of corruption.”
In Saudi Arabia, in fact, any public display of religious worship is forbidden outside the Islamic circuit, though prayer meetings in private homes are permitted.
But these arrests were actually made at a prayer meeting on private premises.
The case has been the focus of an interrogation presented to the European Parliament on 2 April by the Group of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats).
The EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, said she was fully aware of the situation.
The issue is now being followed by the European diplomatic delegation in Riyadh, in cooperation with the embassies of member states.
This episode does not come as a surprise. Just last 21 March, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its fourteenth annual report, under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.
Saudi Arabia was included in a list of sixteen countries that violate the right to religious freedom on the most massive and systematic scale in the world.
Even that did not come as a surprise: violence against Christian foreign workers is not new in Saudi Arabia, from asset seizures to arrests. Moreover, on 16 March, the Saudi grand mufti - the highest authority under Islamic law - said it was necessary to destroy all churches in the area.
After receiving an international backlash, he clarified that his reference was to Kuwait.
The case of the thirty Ethiopians arrested in Saudi Arabia is just the latest in a long series of such incidents. Just last June, Eyob Mussie, an Eritrean refugee fleeing his country’s regime, was sentenced to extradition after being arrested on charges of “proselytism,” a crime punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.
Then there is the Islamist violence against the Ethiopian Orthodox community, which has been plentiful over the years, including within the borders of Ethiopia itself.
About a year ago, hundreds of Orthodox Ethiopians were forced to flee their homes in the village of Asendabo, in midwestern Ethiopia, after some fifty churches and dozens of private homes were set alight.
According to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the Islamic group Kawarja was behind the attack.
As previously mentioned, the attacks on Ethiopian Orthodoxy come not only from Islamists, but also from inside the country.
Since March, in fact, some Ethiopian opposition networks, led by the Ethiopian Heritage Society of North America (EHSNA), have denounced attacks by the Ethiopian government against some areas of the country through the creation of infrastructure projects and business activities that entail the destruction of about eighteen places of worship, including ancient monasteries and churches, some of which have already been included on the UN list of World Heritage Sites.
According to some opposition political parties, such as the aforementioned EHSNA and the Marxist EPRP, these government projects are connected with recent fires which not only destroyed hectares of Ethiopian forests, but were intended to threaten certain monastic and lay communities in an attempt to force them to surrender.
On 19 March, in fact, a fire that raged for days produced a real environmental disaster around the ancient monastery of Ziquala, 45 km south of Addis Ababa.
The next day, another fire threatened the area surrounding the Asebot monastery in eastern Ethiopia.
The two sieges on the Ethiopian monasteries occurred nearly one week after an attack on several historic Christian buildings.
According to opposition sources, the demolitions began the week before the fire at the monastery of Waldba, in the territory of Gondar in northern Ethiopia.
The EHSNA denounced this, stating that this is one of the “oldest monastic educational institutions in Ethiopia, which has trained numerous religious leaders in over a millennium of activity. Waldba also houses an important archive of writings and texts in the ancient language of Ethiopia ...”
The attacks on places of worship are hardly a surprise: in November last year, the Zenawi regime forcibly moved hundreds of men and women from the ancient villages where they had lived for generations.
The regime’s strategy relies on the country’s current socialist system of law, under which all property is owned by the state, which can then dispose of it at will.
The current operation, in fact, also permits the transfer of entire tracts of Ethiopian land to Indian and Chinese companies, which will use those areas mainly for agriculture.
The EHSNA complains that at least “8.8 million acres of land have been sold to the Ethiopian government and foreign companies since 2008,” not to mention that the regime “is ready to sell 5.1 million acres more right now.”
The press reports that, according to “a report published recently by Human Rights Watch, about seventy thousand Ethiopians have been forcibly removed from the western parts of the country and relocated under a government ‘supervision’ program.”
As for the ecclesiastical bodies of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Synod of the Tawahedo Orthodox Church in exile, residing in the United States and led by Patriarch Abuna Merkorios, successor of Abuna Tekle Haymano, is maintaining an opposing stance.
Haymano was elected in 1979 by Mengistu’s Marxist military regime, after the prison assassination of Patriarch Abuna Teophilos. Abuna Tekle Haymano has never been recognized, however, by other Orthodox churches in communion with Addis Ababa.
Abuna Merkorios, in turn, was a loyal parliamentarian in DERG, the committee that once administered the country. He then abdicated and fled abroad along with some followers, after the fall of the regime.
In 1991, Addis Ababa elected Patriarch Abuna Paulos, current ruler of the synod in Ethiopia and recognized by the Coptic Church of Alexandria in Egypt. Ethiopian Orthodoxy was thus split into two ecclesiastical jurisdictions; both called the Tawahedo Orthodox Church of Ethiopia.
In the current situation, while the synod in exile of Abuna Merkorios stands firmly in opposition, the one headed by Abuna Paulos has taken a strong collaborative stance towards the Zenawi regime.
Just last 30 March, in fact, the Synod in Ethiopia convened a meeting of the clergy, where it was reiterated that the government projects - especially the Wolkayit Sugar Development Project, tied to the government corporation that manages the sugar market - have no negative impact either on the environment or on the places of Ethiopian Orthodoxy.
Yet, the incontrovertible video and photo evidence remains, showing monks and monasteries literally besieged by flames, and whole hectares of forests and green space completely burned to the ground.
In conclusion, therefore, we can identify at least two major issues that weigh on Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. If, on the one hand, the threat of Islamic groups within the country is still quite limited and not a consistent threat to coexistence inside Ethiopia, the situation facing Ethiopian Christians who have immigrated to areas contiguous with the Arabian Peninsula is quite different, especially inside the great Islamic bulwark formed by the Saudi kingdom.
Secondly, beyond the serious threat posed by commercial government projects to some historic places of worship and the environment, there is still the reality of a church that is canonically split and in conflict.
In short, just to touch on the problem, we can say that the big question of Ethiopian Orthodoxy - and not just for them - lies in autocephalous churches and their links with institutions of political power.
Surely autonomy, or the erection of an absolute self-governing Metropolitan, is a hallmark of Orthodoxy, especially in modern times, but this does not change the fact that sometimes the autocephalous church is built on a foundation of nationalism and politics rather than real administrative needs or theological foundations.
Although this is not completely the case for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the country’s recent history has certainly shown that the undue and anti-canonical ties, from the Orthodox point of view, between Church leaders and politicians have caused much damage to one of the oldest Churches in the world.