Sufferings of Catholics from China to Czechoslovakia

Amnesty puts spotlight on world's martyrs
THE WORLD community must face up urgently to the use of political killings by governments said Amnesty International in its 1982 annual report, published last Wednesday.
Thousands of people, it says, were killed in 1981 "by order of their government or with its complicity." Examples given included El Salvador and Syria.
The 367-page report has entries for 121 countries. A special report focuses on the practice of deliberate political killings by governments and stresses that "their problem must now be confronted by the world community as a matter of the utmost urgency."
The preface points out that "this is a report about people, not statistics."
Amnesty has subscribers and supporters in 154 countries totalling more than 350,000 people, says the report.
During 1981 Amnesty International groups worked on behalf of 4,952 individual prisoners of conscience or cases under investigation as possible prisoners of conscience. These included 1,703 new cases taken up during the year. A total of 1,109 prisoners were released,' said the report.
Some of the worst areas reported were Iran, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Syria.
In Iran there were more than 2,600 executions during 1981. In Guatemala, Amnesty International said its paramount concern was that "people who opposed or were thought to oppose the government were systematically seized without warrant, tortured and murdered."
It mentions in detail the repression of the Catholic church, which, it says, intensified in 1981, with priests and catechists among the victims.
In El Salvador Amnesty International reported the visit of its fact-finding mission to the country in August 1981, mentioning that testimony from refugees in Honduras, Costa Rica, Mexico and the United States "confirmed accounts received by Amnesty
International that identified regular security and military units as responsible for widespread torture, mutilation and killings of non-combatant civilians from all sectors of Salvadorian society."
Reports of killings by troops or police in other countries including India, the Philippines, Bolivia and Colombia were also mentioned.
The 1982 report covers the period from January to December 1981, and does not therefore include instances of large scale civilian killings such as occurred in Lebanon, and in Guatemala after the rise of the Rios Montt government.
On July 1, 1981 a Franciscan Father, Marco Tulio Maruzzo was machine gunned to death. He was the eighth priest to be killed or abducted in Guatemala in 15 months.
In Czechoslovakia Anton Zlatohlavy, a Catholic priest was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for building a church with the help of his parishioners and celebrating Mass at harvest time without State permission.
In November, 1981, in China, five Catholic priests were arrested for maintaining links with the Vatican and opposition to the government sponsored Chinese patriotic Catholic Association. All of them had previously spent up to 20 years in detention having been arrested on similar charges in the mid-50's.
During 1981 1,019 of Amnesty's 'adopted' Prisoners of Conscience were released. There is no way of knowing if this was due to Amnesty International's work or other sources but it is almost certain that the letter writing campaigns and other appeals have a positive effect.
In the report the space given to countries varies from a couple of paragraphs to pages of carefully documented evidence of human rights abuses. No comparisons are made.
* Price £5 plus 80p p&p from Amnesty International, British Section, 8 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HF.