Militants single out Christians for persecution.
As international relief workers grapple with civil war in the former Yugoslavia and with starvation in Somalia, millions of Sudanese groan under the weight of both—and more.
The government in Khartoum, in its determination to create a fundamentalist Islamic state, is committing “gross human rights violations” and aggravating wide-scale famine, according to U.S. government and international human-rights officials.
“We remain deeply worried about Khartoum’s policy of coercive Islamization of non-Muslim Sudanese,” Herman Cohen, U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told a House committee in March.
The Sudan, in eastern Africa, is the continent’s largest country—and one of its most troubled. A religious target of early Christian and Muslim missionaries, and a political target first of Egypt and then colonial Europe, Sudan is now a nation at war with itself. Since independence from the British in 1956, north and south have been in near-continuous conflict, fueled by politics, ethnicity, religion, and race.
Islamic law imposed
The mostly Arab north, controlled by the National Islamic Front (NIF), is predominantly Muslim; the black African south, a haven for the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), is mainly Christian or animist. The fundamentalist government, by imposing Islamic law in the north soon after seizing power, has intensified the struggle.
Christians and other religious minority groups, which make up about 25 percent of the country’s 25 million people, have faced stepped-up government restrictions of civil rights and outbreaks of intense persecution in recent months. Amnesty International says it continues to receive “disturbing accounts of extrajudicial executions, disappearances and torture” carried out by the Islamic government. At a March meeting in Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Commission appointed a special investigator to examine reports of human-rights abuses.
“The regime’s professed aim is the establishment of an Islamic state, even if that means the disintegration of the foundations of the nation state,” says Mohammed Ibrahim Khalil, a former speaker of Parliament and member of Sudan’s Constitutional Assembly.
Muslim fundamentalists, guided by NIF leader Hasan al-Turabi, overturned a national coalition government in a 1989 coup. Since then, civil liberties have begun to evaporate, religious persecution has intensified, and hundreds of thousands have died or been displaced by famine and war.
“It’s worse here than anywhere else,” U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) told CHRISTIANITY TODAY after a two-day trip to refugee camps in southern Sudan. Wolf said relief efforts “seem, at best, to fend off starvation and sickness for the moment.”
The UN appointment of a special rapporteur for the Sudan—over the strenuous objections of Sudanese officials—represents its first public investigation of Khartoum’s human-rights record. A UN resolution in December 1992 expressed “deep concern” at human-rights violations and urged a closer look. In March, Amnesty International reported “mass killings” by government forces in the remote Nuba Mountains and elsewhere, “which appears to [be] ‘ethnic cleansing.’ ”
The government, headed by Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has dismissed reports of atrocities against black African Christians and animists as “baseless rumors” and has vowed to “turn a deaf ear to any condemnation.”
International pressure to isolate the regime seems to be mounting, however. In addition to the recent UN resolutions, pressure is coming from relief organizations trying to cope with large-scale famine. Relief workers say the war is hampering the delivery of aid. Food assistance is often seized by either government or SPLA troops.
A famine in the making
The result: Estimates are that about 1.7 million Sudanese are in dire need of food, and that perhaps several hundred thousand people face starvation in coming months. Since 1985, nearly 1.5 million southerners have died from starvation, disease, and war—a figure that exceeds the death toll in Somalia.
Religious organizations and international relief groups have called on al-Bashir to cease the bombing of civilians and allow private relief organizations to operate freely in the country. “They’re going after these people largely because they’re black,” Wolf said, “and because they’re Christian.”
Field workers for the New Sudan Council of Churches who barely survived a recent bomb attack in Mundri said that five villagers were killed in the raid. “We know the terror now firsthand.”
In the southern half of the country, where most of the fighting has occurred, more than 6 million people have been displaced. Refugees have fled north to Khartoum, others to camps in the southern and western provinces or to neighboring countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia.
Meanwhile, reports of attacks and restrictions against the institutional Christian church in the Sudan, which intensified last year, continue. Measures include closing church properties, requiring conversion to Islam in order to receive food aid in refugee camps, and beatings and executions.
Christians in the north, many of them refugees, are subject to shari’a, or Islamic law. Under the 1991 penal code, all non-Muslims are barred from most jobs in the government, military, or judiciary; cannot testify against Muslims in courts; are required to memorize the Qur’an; and are required to submit to an Islam-based school curriculum.
Government policies have prompted harsh criticism from the larger religious community. Pope John Paul II, in a February trip to the country, specifically condemned the persecution by Khartoum. The Sudanese Council of Churches (SCC) has complained to al-Bashir that government policies seemed aimed at “destroying Christianity in the Sudan,” or reducing Sudanese Christians to “a status of foreigners.”
Khalil, a political refugee and international consultant in the U.S., said the NLF’s brand of fundamentalism directly threatens political and religious freedom. The 1991 penal code, for example, relegates Christians to “second-class status,” while making it a capital crime for Muslims to renounce the faith. Observers fear compliance with a narrow and highly political version of Islam is becoming the litmus test for enforcing the apostasy law.
“The prohibition on apostasy can easily become an instrument of terror for enforcing political and religious conformity on Muslims and non-Muslims alike,” says Africa Watch, a Washington-based human-rights group.
In addition, Khalil warned that Khartoum is receiving assistance from Iran, apparently to set up training camps for Muslim extremists—in hopes of using the Sudan as a springboard for Islamic fundamentalism throughout North Africa.
The SCC and the Nairobi-based New Sudan Council of Churches, at a recent meeting in Geneva, called on Muslims and Christians to assist all persons affected by the conflict, regardless of ethnic or religious background.
By Joe Loconte, with reports from Michelle Tapp in Washington, D.C., and News Network International.
