The Fate of Minorities in Pakistan
by Isaac Six and Farahnaz Ispahani
Foreign Policy linked from persecution.org
The story of Bashir’s heroism has, for the most part, never made it out of Pakistan. What has trickled into the West’s consciousness are only bits and pieces of the deadly tales of Pakistan’s religious minorities: 93 Ahmadi worshipers killed in 2010; 80 Christians slaughtered at the All Saints Church in 2013; 60 Shiite Muslims murdered at a mosque in Sindh in January; 43 Ismaili’s gunned down inside a bus last month. The stories are horrific, but they hardly begin to convey the pervasive sense of dread that the nearly 40 million members of Pakistan’s religious minority communities live with on a daily basis.
The problem has become so serious that religious minorities are fleeing the country in droves. As many as 10,000 Pakistani Christians (but official United Nations’ figures say 4,000) are now believed to be living “under the radar” in Thailand, fending off arrest by Thai police for illegal entry as they cling to the hope of making it through the grueling U.N. refugee resettlement process. International Christian Concern’s offices — an NGO that assists Christians who have been the victims of religious persecution — routinely get calls from Pakistanis around the globe pleading for help as they try to find any possible avenue of escape from an endless cycle of violence and discrimination...