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Another speaker, Malcolm Morris, President of Stewart Title and Guaranty Inc. and founder of Living Waters International, a Christian mission organization that drills wells to provide needy communities with potable water, reported on the insidious role oil has played in the war. The government has systematically pursued tactics of ethnic cleansing to secure oil fields for international companies—some of which, Morris said, seem conspicuously indifferent to such tactics, so long as they obtain their leases.

Two other effective speakers were U.S. Rep. Thomas Tancredo (R-Colo.), who spoke on the Sudan Peace Act, and Kezia Nicodemus, a Khartoum-based Christian Women's Rights activist, who detailed the extensive efforts to help refugee mothers, most of whose husbands have been killed, to cope with health, child-rearing, and family-stability issues.

But the conference was not just about trouble in Sudan; it was also about Sudanese refugees in this country, building community and working together to survive well in an alien culture. Blackwood hopes the conference will bear fruit in opening more opportunities for refugees needing work, education, technical training, and friendship.

Perhaps naively but fervently, most of the Sudanese I spoke with expressed the belief that God has given America the moral authority and means to successfully promote the democratization of the Sudan, the establishment of a nonsectarian multi-party system of government, and the legal enforcement of religious freedom. Not once did I hear any lashing out at Muslims or desire for revenge and reprisal. Indeed, Bishop Yacoub pointed out that moderate Muslims opposed to the radical fundamentalism of the NIF hold leadership roles in the SPLA/M. He noted also that the SPLA follows Geneva Convention in its treatment of prisoners of war. The talk was consistently about how God would show a way to reconciliation and freedom.

I found that Sudanese attending the conference believe a secular government under a U.S.-style Constitution would be best for their country. The people of South Sudan apparently have had more than enough of theocratic government. In speech and prayer, conference leaders advocated separation of church and state as the only workable alternative to the current NIF practice of sharia, which makes Qur'anic law the civil and criminal law code for the country.

The Sudanese at the conference are pinning their hopes for effective U.S. intervention on a bill now in the Congress. H.R. 2052 has been coordinated with a similar Senate bill, S 180, to form the Sudan Peace Act. This bill forcefully condemns the Sudanese government's arming and support of "murahalliin" (or "mujahadeen") tribal militias and Popular Defense Forces (PDF) as well as its ordering "regular Sudanese Army units into raiding and slaving parties in Bahr al Ghazal, the Nuba Mountains, Upper Nile, and Blue Nile regions, and its aerial bombardment of civilian targets." The Act confirms "that the use of raiding and slaving parties is a tool for creating food shortages as a systematic means to destroy the societies, culture, and economies of the Dinka, Nuer, and Nuba peoples in a policy of low-intensity ethnic cleansing."

Both the House and Senate versions of this bill passed almost unanimously in November 2001. Conference speakers and participants spoke enthusiastically of its passage. But it still sits in conference committee some six months later. Why, I wondered, have American media rarely reported on the world's longest civil war that, since 1983, has claimed the lives of two million black Africans, the displacement of many millions more, and the enslavement of thousands?

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June (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46