Source: Morning Star News, December 9, 2015<\/p>\n
Yaqub Masih is one of thousands of impoverished Christians facing demolition of his makeshift home in Islamabad after a government agency last week stated that informal slum settlements of Christian migrants threatened the city\u2019s Muslim-majority demographic.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is one thing being poor, but things are far worse if you are poor and Christian,\u201d said the middle-aged man who ekes out a living as a mason. \u201cHas the government even considered where I would take my family if they put us out on the street?\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement that rights groups called bigoted, Pakistan\u2019s Capital Development Authority (CDA) asserted on December 4 to the Supreme Court of Pakistan that \u201cit is necessary to identify the fact that most katchi abadis [slum settlements] are under the occupation of the Christian community\u201d from other parts of Pakistan, and \u201cthis pace of occupation of land may affect [the] Muslim majority of the capital.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not all of Islamabad\u2019s slum dwellers are Christian, and initially the CDA had generated propaganda that the settlements housed Islamic terrorists as justification for the evictions, as many of the settlers in [this area] were from the Khyber Pakhtunkwa Province, a heavily radicalized area formerly known as North-West Frontier Province along the Afghanistan border. Islamabad\u2019s settlements overall, however, are largely inhabited by Christians, estimated at nearly 80,000.<\/p>\n
\u00bb Read full story<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00bb Also read 2016: The Global Punishment for Being a Woman and a Christian<\/a>. Among other things it addresses how religious persecution plays out for Christian women in Pakistan (Women Without Borders).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Source: Morning Star News, December 9, 2015 Yaqub Masih is one of thousands of impoverished Christians facing demolition of his makeshift home in Islamabad after a government agency last week stated that informal slum settlements of Christian migrants threatened the city\u2019s Muslim-majority demographic. \u201cIt is one thing being poor, but things are far worse if … Continue reading PAKISTAN: Christian Slum Dwellers Fight Eviction<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6109,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6108\/revisions\/6109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}