Will the World Council of Churches Protest?
✔ People around the world are hearing about the terrible persecution heaped upon Jehovah’s witnesses in the African country of Malawi, and here and there an outcry of protest is published in the news media.
For example, the Washington, D.C., Star, of November 8, 1975, carried an article under the headline “Will the WCC Rise to This Challenge?” William F. Willoughby, staff writer for the Star, declared that “concern is growing over the fate of 34,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses who fled from Malawi persecution in 1972 into neighboring Zambia and Mozambique, but who now are being forcefully repatriated.” The article went on to detail some of the heinous atrocities perpetrated against these harmless Witnesses by “the Young Pioneers, a political youth group of the ruling party of President H. Kamuzu Banda, [which] carried out the edicts with savage gusto.”
Where, then, can this persecuted minority look for relief? “With the United Nations remaining silent on the guarantees of religious freedom that member nations are supposed to guarantee their people, there appears to be little help for these targets of oppression from that quarter,” laments Mr. Willoughby.
“But the World Council of Churches,” he points out, “soon is to meet in an important plenary session in Nairobi [Kenya]. It has a strong record of speaking out against oppression by white colonialist powers in Africa in their exploitation of the black population. It has risked its reputation as a religious organization in supplying funds and supplies for freedom groups. It would appear that such a body, concerned—and rightly so—with the freedom of the oppressed, would be in the most powerful position to speak to President Banda, a staunch elder in Malawi’s Presbyterian Church of Central Africa, about granting a little bit of the same freedom to his fellow blacks in Malawi.”
Mr. Willoughby then asks: “Will the WCC rise to this poignant but opportune occasion? If not,” he concludes, “any other pronouncement it makes against oppression—religious, racial or otherwise—will sound less than convincing.”