The movement to help the victims of religious persecution in Sudan has taken a new tack—civil disobedience.

The added approach to influencing the United States government to act on behalf of Christians and other Sudanese at the mercy of a militant Islamic regime began with the recent arrest of a leader in the movement and is expected to grow in March.

Michael Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute and a driving force behind the campaign against Christian persecution, was arrested February 2 for blocking an entrance to the State Department. His arrest followed by only a day a report in The Washington Post that President Clinton had decided not to supply food directly to the opponents in southern Sudan of the National Islamic Front and the administration is rethinking its economic boycott of the North African regime.

Sudan has been cited as possibly the world's worst perpetrator of religious persecution.

The first arrest of his life came "in protest against cynical and indifferent administration policies towards the victims of a Holocaust in Sudan," Horowitz said in a written statement.

He will help organize protests against the State Department's policy, Horowitz said. Those demonstrations are expected to begin in March, said Faith McDonnell of The Institute on Religion and Democracy. The organizers are looking for church groups willing to participate, including, in each, a person prepared to be arrested, McDonnell said.

"I now believe that standard processes of political discourse will no longer alter the administration's policies towards the Khartoum regime," said Horowitz, who is Jewish. "Similarly 'polite' efforts to awaken State Department policy makers to the evils of genocide were [of] as little ...