Colombo, 24 July (ENI)--The Anglican Communion has its headquarters in London but Anglican Bishop Duleep de Chickera of Sri Lanka says he will not visit Britain unless it lifts the mandatory fingerprinting of visa applicants from his nation, or applies it to citizens of all countries.

"This is discriminatory and an insult to the Sri Lankan citizens," said Chickera, as he described his campaign against British fingerprinting requirements for Sri Lankan visa applicants, along with citizens of several African nations. "I know this decision is a costly one for us as our mother church is there. But, my conscience does not permit me to honour this partisan requirement," Chickera told Ecumenical News International.

Britain made fingerprinting mandatory for Sri Lankans applying for visas in 2004 after introducing it in 2003 on a trial basis. It also announced the scheme would be applied to those applying for visas from Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda. Since then, Bishop Chickera has been demanding the revoking of the requirement, sending off protest letters to the British interior ministry, and the British high commissioner [ambassador] in Sri Lanka.

"Our demand is to make it universally applicable and stop the selective discrimination," he added. "Britain is singling out Sri Lanka and a few others. This is unacceptable." In his letters, Chickera said the fingerprinting requirement evoked painful memories of a humiliation experienced by Sri Lankans due to suspicion that "all or most of us" are terrorists, asylum seekers or economic refugees.

Many thousands of Sri Lankans have migrated to European countries due to the ethnic conflict in the island nation where more than 65 000 people have been killed and nearly two million people have been displaced from a population of 20 million. [301 words]

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Rome, 21 July (ENI)--World Christian leaders, including the Pope and the head of the World Council of Churches, the Rev. Samuel Kobia, have called for an immediate cease-fire in the Middle East while urging their faithful to pray for peace in the region. Pope Benedict XVI called for a day of prayer and penance on 23 July.

"In particular, the Supreme Pontiff hopes that prayers will be raised to the Lord for an immediate cease-fire between the sides, for humanitarian corridors to be opened in order to bring help to the suffering peoples, and for reasonable and responsible negotiations to begin to put an end to objective situations of injustice that exist in that region," the Vatican said in a 20 July statement.

Separately, Kobia, general secretary of the Geneva-based WCC, in a pastoral letter appealed to WCC members to urge their governments to exercise pressure for an immediate cease-fire. "The people of Lebanon are suffering violence whose scale defies comprehension; citizens of Israel fear death from the sky; Palestinians and Iraqis mourn new losses day after day. No end to the suffering is in sight," Kobia said in the 21 July letter, in which he urged prayers for the "safety and well-being of all communities in the Middle East - Muslim, Christian, and Jewish."

"In Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Israel as well as Iraq, no amount of fear and anger can justify retaliatory targeting of homes, bombing of communities and destruction of a nation's infrastructure," said Kobia. "Acts of terror do not give license to wreak terror in return," he said. "However, instead of policies anchored in law, certain states seem bent on applying new and dangerous remedies to well-known problems in the region," the WCC official warned.

"Their leaders excuse uses of force that go well beyond the constraints of international law. They brand enemies as 'terrorists', bypass laws, courts, and juries, and mete out punishment at will even including assassinations from the air," Kobia stated. "Militant groups adopt similar tactics, fuelling conflicts and spreading contempt for human lives." The WCC groups more than 340 churches, predominantly Anglican, Orthodox and Protestant.

Criticism of the "repeated harsh and disproportionate retaliatory attacks on the country of Lebanon" came from the president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, in a letter to partner churches in Lebanon.

"The severe loss of life among innocent civilians and the massive destruction of infrastructures and blockage of access weigh very heavily on our hearts and minds," said Kirkpatrick, who is also stated clerk (chief executive officer) of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

He said his denomination had called on the US government "to press for a cessation of hostility and to intervene for a return to the peace process and a just end to the occupation of Palestinian territories". WARC, whose headquarters are in Geneva, brings together 75 million Reformed Christians in 218 churches in 107 countries.

In London, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, joined calls for Britain to press for a cease-fire in the Middle East.

"The major players in this at the moment who are not supporting a cease-fire - our own government and the United States government - maybe perhaps have to reckon with a rising level of public despair and dismay at the spiral continuing," he told BBC radio. [575 words]

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Jerusalem/Vatican City, 21 July (ENI)--Church relief agencies are pleading for an urgent cease-fire so emergency assistance can be provided to hundreds of thousands of civilians uprooted and threatened by Israeli bombarding of Lebanon and Hezbollah attacks on Israel. "The humanitarian crisis in Lebanon is reaching catastrophic levels," said the Geneva-based Action by Churches Together International saying the Middle East Council of Churches had set up an emergency council to deal with the calamity and destruction in Lebanon.

"The indiscriminate targeting of the civilian population and infrastructure, disregarding all lines, is preventing relief workers reaching the affected villages and towns," the Beirut-based church council reported. "The attacks have destroyed villages and towns in south Lebanon as well as the southern suburbs of Beirut. Most of the communication networks are disrupted delaying the efforts to save the wounded and remove the dead from under the collapsed buildings."

In Vatican City, the Roman Catholic relief agency Caritas said it had called for a cease-fire and for the parties to enter fresh negotiations. "Caritas is also calling for humanitarian organizations to be given access to the area to bring relief to the civilian population." More than 300 people have been killed in Lebanon and around 40 in Israel since Israel launched a massive military assault on its neighbour it said is aimed at destroying Hezbollah after the capture of two Israeli soldiers on 12 July. Most of the casualties are civilians.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on 20 July: " There may be 500 000 conflict-affected people." It quoted UNICEF as saying that 30 per cent of those killed in Lebanon are children. Caritas Lebanon said: "The Israeli Army is making the situation even worse for Lebanese civilians by targeting warehouses and factories ... In fact, food storage houses in particular have become the target of Israeli reprisals."

From Lebanon, Hezbollah launched rockets into Nazareth, the Galilee town where Jesus grew up, killing two Arab children as they played in their yard on 19 July. It was the first time that rockets fired by Hezbollah hit Nazareth, although hundreds of rockets have hit other Israeli cities and towns around the Sea of Galilee including Tiberias, the Roman-built spa town that overlooks sites where Jesus is said to have performed miracles.

One of the rockets in Nazareth landed close to the Church of the Annunciation, where according to tradition the angel Gabriel informed the Virgin Mary she was to bear Jesus. Residents of the mostly Arab town of Nazareth said they were not warned to seek shelter as the air raid sirens did not go off and they had not received proper instructions about how to act in the face of rocket strikes.

"If they had instructed us to enter protected areas, as they did in the Jewish towns, the tragedy might have been prevented," Nazareth resident Tarek Kubati told the Ynet News Web site. [504 words]

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Potpathy, Sri Lanka, 19 July (ENI)--The fishing community in Sri Lanka's troubled north and east is suffering intensely. Some families are forced to sneak illegally across the sea into neighbouring India, says a prominent church leader as the ethnically-riven island slides into a state of full-out civil war once again.

"What's the point of going for fishing in a situation like this? It's better to do something else," says fisherman B. Gnanaselvem, from Potpathy, a hamlet near Point Pedro, the northern tip of Sri Lanka that depends on the resources of the sea. Following the recent escalation in violence, beaches along the coastline of the Jaffna isles are dotted with navy and army bunkers to ward off attacks by the rebels known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The security forces have imposed severe restrictions on the movement of fishermen on the coast, and fishing has been restricted. As a result, fishing families are on the verge of starvation, Roman Catholic Bishop Rayappu Joseph of Mannar told Ecumenical News International. He said, some fishing families have sold off their boats and nets to raise money to steal away illegally to India as refugees.

"What can they do in such a situation?" asked Bishop Joseph who heads the overwhelmingly Tamil-majority Mannar diocese. Since 1983, the Tamil rebels have waged a violent campaign seeking autonomy for the ethnic Tamil majority areas in the north and east. The bloody civil war had claimed nearly 65 000 lives besides displacing more than 1.8 million people prior to a cease-fire in 2002.

But that cease-fire, brokered by Norway, that brought protracted hostilities to a halt, is now on the verge of collapse. More than 700 people including civilians have been killed this year in the worsening security situation in the troubled Tamil majority areas in the north and the east.

"We can enter the beach only during the day and that too, at limited entry points," Gnanaselvem told Ecumenical News International while idling away his time in a coconut-palm-leaved shed far from the beach with other fishermen of Potpathy. "Normally, we get a good catch when we go fishing in the night. But, now we can go for fishing only during the day and we do not get the fish to buy even the diesel to run the engines," said fisherman who now struggles to feed his family of four.

Another fisherman requesting anonymity told ENI that security personnel have confiscated boats with high-capacity engines that can go deep-sea fishing as the security forces are afraid of these boats being "misused" by Tamil Tigers to mount attacks on them.

"It's the poor fisherman who is deprived of his livelihood due to this war," said the despondent Potpathy fisherman. He noted that that 50 of the 60 fishing boats in the hamlet have been taken by the fishermen to their homes, one kilometre inland.

Following the increasing violence, more than 4500 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees have already reached the shores of Indian state of Tamil Nadu which is only 40 kilometres from Mannar, say Indian authorities. [530 words]

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Chennai, 18 July (ENI)--The work of a Protestant missionary from Germany who arrived in India 300 years ago and saw education as essential for human development, is inspiring Lutheran women in the south Asian country to campaign for equality. Lutheran missionary Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, who landed on 9 July 1706 at Tranquebar (known as Tarangambadi in Tamil), then a Danish colony on India's eastern coast, is credited with setting up the first public school for girls in India in 1710.

At celebrations this month to mark the missionary's arrival, several women described Ziegenbalg's commitment to gender justice and equality as a litmus test for the church as it marked the tercentenary. "There is only lip service to women's equality in the Church," Evangeline A. Rajkumar, a professor at the United Theological College in Bangalore, told Ecumenical News International. "What we need is affirmative steps for greater role to women in the church," asserted the professor who is also the vice-president of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in India.

As well as translating the New Testament into Tamil for the first time, the missionary is credited with bringing the first mechanised printing press into India and with compiling a Tamil-Latin grammar text that was reprinted in Halle, where he studied. He is also known for his pioneering work in herbal medicine. Bernard D'Sami of the Roman Catholic Loyola College in Chennai noted that Ziegenbalg believed that education was indispensable for societal development.

Priscilla Singh, secretary for women in church and society at the Geneva-based Lutheran World Federation (LWF), also urged churches to pursue the model set by Ziegenbalg. "Churches tend to have a propensity for remaining status quo," she said at a seminar discussing the achievements of the missionary who was sent to India by Danish King Frederick IV. "We fail to have a stock taking and reality check," Singh noted. "History has proved that mission becomes a success only when it starts to include women."

More than 300 delegates including the LWF's president, Bishop Mark S. Hanson and its general secretary, the Rev. Ishmael Noko, attended the celebrations. [361 words]

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Jerusalem, 17 July (ENI)--Galilee sites where Jesus is said to have performed miracles have been hit by Hezbollah rocket fire as fighting deepened between Israel and the militant movement which is based in Lebanon. Hezbollah rockets hit targets near Nazareth, Jesus' childhood home town, as well as Tiberias and the banks of the Sea of Galilee in Israel where the Gospels say that Jesus walked on water, performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes and calmed a storm.

"I sat on a bench facing the Sea of Galilee with my grandson and son and heard two fall and a few seconds later we heard a great explosion and we understood that it had hit close by," the former mayor of Tiberias, Asher Yaish, told Israel's Channel One Television on 15 July after a rocket strike. World Christian leaders including Pope Benedict XVI and the Rev. Samuel Kobia, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, have expressed alarm at the new violence in northern Israel and in Lebanon. They have strongly urged all parties to immediately stop hostile acts.

The Pope on 16 July noted from Italy "the many victims among the civilian population". The roots of the conflict, he said, were found in "violations of rights and of justice". He urged both sides to seek resolution of those problems through negotiations. "No positive results can be achieved" through the cycle of attacks and reprisals, said Benedict.

On 13 July Kobia said, "The use of force and the harsh rhetoric of war are driving the new government of Israel and its neighbouring states deeper into a chasm of killings and destruction, and further away from the prospect of peace." Nearly 200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and 24 Israelis have been killed in six days of fighting triggered by rocket attacks and the capture of two Israel soldiers by Hezbollah that was followed by Israeli aerial bombardments of the militant group's strongholds. Attacks were also launched on Lebanese infrastructure in the southern suburbs of Beirut and southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has since attacked Haifa with rockets.

Israel authorities said a grandmother and her grandson eating the traditional Friday night Sabbath meal were killed by a rocket that hit their home by Mount Meron, a Jewish holy site near the Galilee town of Safed.

It was the first time that Tiberias, 32 kilometres from the Lebanese border, has been targeted by Hezbollah which Israel says has recently been armed by Iran and Syria with longer range rockets capable of reaching the lower Galilee and even Tel Aviv. [440 words]

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Jerusalem, 14 July (ENI)--A shadow has been cast over increasingly warm ties between Jews and Christian supporters of Israel after an attack on a group of pro-Israeli Christian tourists visiting a Jewish ultra-Orthodox enclave in Jerusalem. The Christian visitors wore orange T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase "Love thy neighbour as thyself" during their tour of the enclave of Mea Shearim in the heart of Jerusalem.

A group of about 100 ultra-Orthodox men spotted the group of about 50 tourists and pushed, shoved and beat them in the incident which took place at the end of June. Three of the tourists and a policeman who tried to stop the mob were lightly injured in the attack, a police spokesperson said. Police arrested two men suspected of assaulting policemen who rushed to the scene. Police said nobody had been charged with beating up the tourists because up until now no member of the tour group or their guide had filed a complaint, a step necessary for an investigation to be opened.

The ultra-Orthodox Jews who live in the Mea Shearim enclave often resent non-religious people entering their neighbourhood where residents live according to a strict interpretation of Jewish law. They wear modest clothes that cover them from head to toe. Signs in the neighbourhood warn women visitors especially to dress modestly and in keeping with the practises of the ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood.

The police spokesperson said the Christian groups were from North America and that some ultra-Orthodox residents complained that some of the visitors were not dressed appropriately for a visit to their neighbourhood. [274 words]

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Geneva, 13 July (ENI)--Thirty-nine religious leaders from around the world, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have signed a statement sent to the G8 heads of state, calling on them to keep their promises and scale up their response to HIV and AIDS. The statement made available to the media on 12 July was signed by another Nobel Peace Laureate, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader. Signatories included the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Mark Hanson, and the Rev. James Christie, president of the Canadian Council of Churches.

"We call on you to 'Keep the Promises' which you have already made and to strengthen your leadership in fighting the three diseases through financial support of the Global Fund and committing to long-term, concrete targets for achieving universal access to treatment," the religious leaders say. Health and HIV in particular have been increasingly important agenda items for the annual meetings of the G8 countries - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom and the United States. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is a product of Group of Eight discussions five years ago.

This year's meeting from 15 to 17 July is hosted by Russia whose President Vladimir Putin has already pledged to put HIV high on the agenda. Many AIDS activists see this meeting as a key opportunity to lobby for full financing of the Global Fund in the context of achieving another G8 target - universal access to anti-retroviral therapy by 2010.

"We have seen the tremendous impact of the AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria pandemics in our congregations and in our communities," the religious leaders say in their statement. "We are appalled that a lack of resources to address these three diseases is in large part responsible for the deaths of 6 million people each year."

A new round of grant applications to the Global Fund was launched in April 2006 and proposals for funding will be reviewed at the November 2006 board meeting. However, the Fund is in danger of not meeting its resource needs to fully fund this round.

Currently, the funding gap is estimated to be US$ 900 million for 2006 and at least US$1.2 billion for 2007.

:: Full text of the letter at: www.e-alliance.ch/media/media-6599.doc [396 words]

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