Pope Francis visits Africa amid 'religious' terrorism

(ANSA) - Vatican City, November 25 - Pope Francis's first apostolic visit to Africa begins Wednesday and takes place under the rallying cry the pontiff sounded following the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, when he declared that killing in the name of God is blasphemy.
    In the Central African Republic, Kenya and Uganda, Pope Francis will face the challenge of the role various religions must play together to find peace in Africa, where terrorism is camouflaged within religious, ethnic and tribal differences.
    "We expect the pope to help heal the divisions and that interreligious occasions help bring understanding to the believers of different faiths and to dispel fear," said Monsignor James Maria Wainaina Kungu, bishop of Muranga in Kenya.
    The Kenyan bishop spoke on religious terrorism in his country in the wake of the Garissa massacre on April 2 of this year, when al-Shabaab militants stormed a Christian boarding school, killing 148 people, most of whom were children.
    "In Garissa, it was just terrorism," Kungu said. "Al-Shabaab came into Kenya from Somalia and attacked mainly tourists, so Kenyan military went into Somalia, to respond to the attacks. It's terrorism. Religion has nothing to do with it. And in any case it's not only Garissa. Al-Shabaab even attacks supermarkets, kills Christians, Hindus and Muslims," he said.
    "They want to show that you can't live safely even where there is security and control by the State. They want to bring in an element of fear".
    In the Central African Republic, the pope will encounter a significant attempt to peacefully bring together different religions, in the Interfaith Peace Platform programme created by Catholics, Protestants and Muslims to defend civilians from the uncertainty of violence between self-declared Muslims and self-declared Christians.
    "Until 2012, relations with Islam were peaceful, but they started going into the mercenary countries of Chad, Sudan, Senegal and Mali as anti-government Muslim rebels, which was something new in the history of the country," said Father Hervè Hubert Koyassambia Kozondo, a young Catholic priest from Bangui who is studying in Rome.
    "It wasn't simply a rebellion, they were armed to conquer with the strong presence of foreign mercenaries, and they sacked structures, carried gratuitous violence on civilians, began the cultural destruction of the country, from administrative offices to symbols of the nation. There's more than religious motivation behind that," he said.
    "This is what brought anti-Muslim sentiment to the Christian population that had suffered a planned action against its structures and churches - all the dioceses were damaged.
    "From the anti-Muslim sentiment grew the self-declared Christian resistance movement. "They call themselves Christians, they have Russian weapons, and the resistance movements are manipulated at a political level. The bishops have always said this has nothing Christian about it, neither its motivation nor its identity, and without these anti-Christian actions there wouldn't have been anti-Muslim hate," he said. "We have great hopes for the Platform, but it works only up to a certain point because, for example, the imam doesn't have power over these aggressive Muslims. The work is so that the pope can find a calmer and better situation. The problem isn't whether or not the pope is safe in the mosque, but rather if after the pope has left, anyone can be safe".
    Religious manipulation for subversion is always in waiting, not only in the Central African Republic with Seleka and Balaka, but also in Somalia with al-Shabaab or in Nigeria with Boko Haram - terrorists have always hit whoever puts up obstacles to their objective, whether Muslims, Christians, or indigenous people.
    Numerically speaking, Father Giulio Albanese said Nigerian terrorists in recent years have killed more Muslims than Christians.
    "Every time they attacked Christians, they did it because it would be covered by the international press and would resound worldwide. Religion often represents, in many contexts, the excuse to affirm authoritarian interests, against the recognition of human dignity," he said.
    Africa's recent history involves a number of attempts at interreligious dialogue for peace.
    Since its founding in 1997 in northern Uganda, the interfaith Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative has worked incessantly to find a non-violent solution through talks between Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the government in Kampala.
    In the 1990s in Sierra Leone, rebels with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) also committed unspeakable crimes against the exhausted civilian population. There, the Inter-Religious Council of Sierra Leone (IRCSL) played a significant role in the difficult national peace process, bringing together Muslim, Catholic and Protestant leaders who volunteered as mediators in talks between the Freetown government and the rebels.