ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — Followed by a gaggle of children, Julius Salik walks a muddy dirt track in one of this city's squalid Christian slums, past open sewers and ramshackle homes with stick roofs.
With a weary sigh, he motions to a row of neat brick apartment buildings just a few hundred yards away.
"Muslims live there," says the 60-year-old social worker and former federal minister. "Good construction. Big houses. Big cars."
Pakistan, he says, is a place of extremes. Muslims represent the vast majority of this Islamic homeland's 162 million residents. They control the legislature and economy, often leaving minorities to endure second-rate status.
For years, Salik has waged an unorthodox human rights campaign of public protests he says is necessary to get the attention of a neglectful government.
He has gone on hunger strikes, cut himself, burned his clothes and furniture and even lived in a cage -- all in an effort to improve the lives of Ahmadis, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and especially Christians like himself.
In 1996, then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. But now Bhutto has been assassinated. And Salik says Christians here are in more trouble than ever.
"I want to tell the government that Christians are not afraid of them," he said. "We're willing to fight."
For an estimated 6,000 Christians here, religious equality is the elusive Pakistani dream. Because of restrictive laws, they are barred from equal pay, educational opportunities and housing.
Intimidated by rising Islamic extremism, many are afraid to wear any outward symbols of their faith. Dozens are in jail on the basis of draconian blasphemy laws that forbid anyone to defame Islam.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom wants the State Department to name Pakistan a "country of particular concern."
"It's one of the most serious problem spots for religious freedom in the entire world," said Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights and a former chairwoman of the commission.
"Discriminatory legislation has fostered an atmosphere of religious intolerance and eroded the legislative status of people who belong to minorities."
The alliance between the government of President Pervez Musharraf and the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a coalition of six Islamist political parties, gives inordinate influence to these extremist groups and has seriously compromised freedom of thought, conscience and belief in Pakistan, she said.
