Dr. Tristan Azbej came to Ottawa determined to recruit allies in the mission to support oppressed followers of Christ around the world.

Azbej, Hungary’s state secretary for the aid of persecuted Christians, dialogued with Canadian lawmakers and church leaders on Oct. 3 and 4. His sojourn concluded with a presentation at the Cardus Institute called “10 Years after Genocide: Christian Present and Future in a Post-ISIS Middle East.” 

In a Sept. 26 interview with The Catholic Register, the 45-year-old diplomat spoke of how his remarks centred around the work accomplished through Hungary Helps, a government-backed humanitarian aid and developmental support organization launched in 2017. He also delivered a call to action for Canada and fellow Western countries to join this effort.

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Azbej said the “murderous mass atrocities that ISIS committed against Christians, Yazidis and other people in Iraq and Syria” from 2014 to 2017 mobilized Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government into action.

June to August 2014 marked the peak of the crisis. Approximately 200,000 Aramaic-speaking Christians fled Mosul, Qaraqosh and surrounding towns in the Nineveh Plains Province when the Islamic State invaded and later decreed Christians would have to pay a tax (jizya) to ISIS or convert to Islam to avoid execution if they stayed in their homeland.

A principal aim of Hungary Helps is to break through the “wall of silence” posture adopted by many countries towards the tragic reality of anti-Christian persecution. Azbej said the agency works to inspire governments and non-profits to provide support to the “300 million people in the world who exist, who are discriminated or threatened by extremists because of their faith in Jesus Christ,” particularly in the Middle East.

“Our observation was that some faith-based Christian charity organizations were providing this assistance, but it seems like the big international aid programs, the Western big-donor countries and the multilateral aid programs were completely blind to Christian persecution,” said Azbej. “They acted as if anyone else's life deserved protection but Christians.”

What motivates the apparent unresponsiveness? Azbej suggested that “somehow it is not politically correct to talk about Christian persecution in the Western world.”

However, the next two months offer Hungary a continued opportunity to incite discussion on this issue as the nation assumed the presidency of the Council of the European Union from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2024. Incidentally, the Register spoke to Azbej one hour after he presented the Hungarian presidency’s priority of providing “humanitarian need to beleaguered religious communities” in front of the council’s international development committee

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“I also expressed our objective and priority to convince the European Union and its institutions to directly engage with Christian and other faith-based charity and humanitarian actors in the areas of crisis and the developing world,” said Azbej.

Hungary Helps has aided over two million people via the 350-plus projects it has carried out in over 55 countries. Of the over 60 initiatives carried out between Iraq and Syria, more than 50 are devoted to post-war reconstruction efforts. For example, the non-profit launched a school for displaced Christians who fled from Nineveh to Erbil in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Between 2021 and 2023 in Syria, Hungary Helps backed the Christian Hope Centre in Aleppo’s effort to provide 47 families with the equipment and infrastructure to restart their businesses.

Notably, Hungary Helps has also been active throughout Africa, opening a humanitarian development centre in Chad, a youth-counselling centre in Ethiopia, supported the expansion of an eye clinic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and provided emergency assistance funds to the Catholic Church in Nigeria.  

Recently, the Sahel region of Africa has been a predominant focus of Hungary Helps because of the jihadist attacks being waged on Burkina Faso civilians. Reportedly, up to 400 people were killed in a massacre in the town of Barsalogho on Aug. 24. In February, the Catholic Diocese of Dori confirmed over 15 parishioners were killed during a Sunday Mass in Essakane village.

Azbej was inspired to devote his life to supporting persecuted Christians because his Catholic family “suffered a lot under communism” when the country operated as a one-party socialist state — the Hungarian People’s Republic — from 1949 to 1989. There are tributes to Christian martyrs on display in the basement of the ministerial office where Azbej works.

“There is a chapel dedicated to the persecuted Christian martyrs, and we have different relics and icons of the martyr saints,” said Azbej. “There is a main relic in the altar stone of the chapel and that is of the Hungarian vicar Zoltán Meszlényi, who was martyred by the communists.” 

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Meszlényi, a bishop, accepted the role of vicar to the archbishop of Esztergom in 1950. This chapter appointing Meszlényi was deemed an act of defiancefor rejecting the communist state’s candidate of choice Nicholas Beresztóczy. Meszlényi was arrested within 12 days and sentenced to the Kistarcsa internment camp. He was placed in solitary confinement, deprived of food and tortured for years before he died between 1953 and 1954.

“That (relic) is a reminder to us, and myself, personally, and my family story is a reminder, that Christian persecution is not a distant thing,” said Azbej.