Tories in trouble
Religious freedom advocates gather at Parliament as Boris Johnson resigns
“The average Anglican is a woman in her thirties in the Global South living on less than $4 per day with a 50 percent chance of being in a zone of conflict or persecution,” said the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in remarks July 5 at the opening session of the Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief. Welby, along with others, underscored both the diversity of religious believers and the threats many face for those beliefs.
The two-day event drew high-level diplomats as well as grassroots faith-based leaders—with about 600 delegates from 100 countries—to London’s Queen Elizabeth II Centre and the halls of Parliament. Prince Charles opened the conference with videotaped remarks, and an embattled Prime Minister Boris Johnson attended a pre-conference prayer breakfast.
Welcome to this week’s Globe Trot, coming to you from sunny London. This year’s ministerial was a pale version of larger and more conspicuously high-level events launched at the State Department under the Trump administration in 2018 and 2019. (COVID-19 made the 2020 event in Poland mostly virtual and forced Brazil to postpone hosting it until 2023.) The 2022 gathering also was notable for the absence of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Under Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made appearances along with Vice President Mike Pence. (Blinken did send a video message to a religious freedom summit in Washington last week.)
This year’s smaller London event, however, seemed to allow for more intimacy and grassroots networking. The absence of high-powered delegations left mid-level officials, religious leaders, scholars, and victims of atrocities in some cases more able to plot the progress of religious freedom—not far from where the Magna Carta was first drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1215.
It also showcased reshuffled priorities in a world still trying to emerge from the pandemic. War on believers in Ukraine took top billing, along with threats to religious minorities in Afghanistan, the rise of Islamic State groups in Africa, and violence in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told a Ukrainian delegation her country would not rest until “your people are free to live, believe and thrive.”
Continuing threats—for Christians and Yazidis in Iraq, Uyghurs in China, evangelical churches in Algeria—also featured in program sessions. Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Archbishop of Erbil, reminded the gathering of ongoing threats to Iraq’s Christians. He told me the priority is less preserving church sites than investing in education and society, helping a dwindling community to become “needed and appreciated by their Muslim neighbors.”
UK: “Have you asked him to resign, Larry?” a reporter called to 10 Downing Street's resident cat—hours before Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced he will resign as Conservative Party leader but attempt to remain prime minister until September. Johnson faced mounting calls from members of his own Conservative Party, with prominent ministers quitting his government. All week traffic snarled around Westminster and roads closed without warning as officials scurried from 10 Downing Street to the houses of Parliament.
Israel: President Biden will visit Israel, the West Bank, and Saudi Arabia next week. It’s a good time to revisit this piece from my friend Rob Nicholson on a new “Abrahamic axis” built around the Abraham Accords. Authored by the Trump administration, endorsed by the Biden White House, they link the region’s competing religious interests with economic and security concerns.
The upshot is that the new approach must be a local one, since the best plans for supporting Christians will be those made in cooperation with their Muslim and Jewish neighbors.
Gunfire from Israeli military positions was likely responsible for the death of Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in May, the U.S. State Department said Monday. American officials said they found no evidence the killing was deliberate.
UN: A UN report says the “world is moving backwards,” with 2.3 billion people facing moderate or severe food shortages in 2021, a skyrocketing challenge.
Germany: Coming out of G7 meetings last week, leaders of the wealthiest democracies agreed to a $600 billion global infrastructure initiative. The United States will contribute $200 billion to the plan, aimed at competing with China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” which has funded large-scale roads, rails, and other projects in Africa and Asia.
Sudan: The work of an anti-corruption committee established under Sudan’s civilian-military transitional government may have been the victim of its own success.
A new report says the military—through a web of front charities—controlled 86 percent of the shares of one of two of the country’s largest banks, Omdurman National Bank.
A paramilitary force that carried out atrocities in Darfur held controlling interests in another major bank; its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemeti), was a key figure in the transition government.
The committee was formed as part of Sudan’s transition towards democracy following the 2019 ouster of President Omar al-Bashir. It could confiscate assets of those caught in corruption. But the confiscations struck at the core of the military, prompting senior officers to topple the civilian administration in a coup last October. It put Sudan under the military’s control once again, and has been followed by months of protests and economic hardship as the country returns to authoritarian leadership.
Don’t miss … the world-record-breaking pole vault of Mondo Duplantis. The 17-year-old broke his own record by one centimeter at a Diamond League meet in Stockholm last week.
And when in London … the Beatrix Potter exhibition, “Drawn to Nature,” now on at the V & A Museum is a serene retreat into a rare artistry that’s a relief from this performative age. The famed children’s author grew up in South Kensington and often visited the museum, an area of staid houses where she kept a pet lizard and a Belgian hare she led on a leash and named Benjamin Bouncer. (He was “partial to hot buttered toast and came running at the sound of the tea bell,” she said.) The museum area now sits amid houka bars, coffee shops selling cardamom coffee and Moroccan mint tea, where Muslim women walk veiled in soft scarves alongside friends in skinny jeans.
Potter led a singular life for her time, sketching nature from the time she was a child and becoming a botanist and conservationist. She later produced drawings of fungi so exact they ended up in scientific journals, along with the beloved Peter Rabbit stories that won her world fame. Above is an early rendition. Cheers from across the pond.