Christians and Muslims in Sudan have endured 13 years of internal warfare, which experts say neither side can win on the battlefield.
But the struggle is not solely a political one. Theology and a clash of religious values between fundamentalist Muslims, Christians, and animist groups are in part driving this conflict. Today, experts think the war has the potential to destabilize much of East Africa, partly because Sudan’s military rulers see themselves as the leading edge of Islamic revolution.
In recent years, the Islamic military government of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmad al Bashir has intensified efforts at forced conversions, especially of Christians, under threat of death. A U.S. Department of State human rights report issued in March says pressure on non-Muslims to convert is strong. “The government treats Islam as the de facto religion and has declared that Islam must inspire the country’s institutions and laws.”
Last month, for the first time since seizing power in 1989, the military government held a presidential election in an attempt to show Bashir has a popular mandate to lead. Despite having 41 opponents, Bashir had little problem winning. No one had ever heard of most of the other candidates because political parties are outlawed–and the campaign lasted only 12 days.
Sudan’s civil war splits the country into two regions: the dry, primarily Islamic north and the tropical south, populated by spirit-worshiping cattle herders and mission-trained Christians. Overall, an estimated 70 percent of the country adheres to Islam, 10 percent to traditional/animist beliefs, and 20 percent to Christianity.
One-third the size of the United States, the nation has 28 million widely scattered people in 579 tribal groups speaking 115 languages. To forge national union, Sudan’s leaders have pursued a policy of grafting Arabic culture and Islamic religion onto the country by force. Yet, southerners persistently reject the north’s culture, religion, and government.
“A myriad of official and secret government security forces routinely harassed, detained, and tortured opponents,” according to the State Department report about conditions during 1995. “Displaced women from the south are particularly vulnerable to harassment, rape, and sexual abuse.” Last August, five women were sentenced to death because they had converted to Christianity.
In the past decade alone, the war has left an estimated 1.3 million people dead and another 3 million to 5 million displaced. In February, the U.S. Embassy staff withdrew from the Nile River capital, Khartoum, citing vulnerability to armed assault.
CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE: Civilians of the south are caught in the crossfire as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and other rebel groups fight Khartoum’s army, and more often than not, each other.
All the combatants stand guilty of atrocities, but the government’s extensive control and resources make it the country’s most extensive violator of human rights. For decades, missionaries and relief workers have been straggling out of the remote region with tales of bush battles approaching genocide. Recently, they have described bombed and burned villages, rape and torture, military conscription of preteen boys, crucifixion of children as young as 7, and capture of women and children for domestic slave markets.
In Nyamlell, a Dinka town beside the River Lol in southern Sudan, the government militia burned buildings, looted goods, killed 82 men, and captured 282 women and children as slaves, according to reliable local reports. “We were armed with spears and they with Kalashnikov rifles,” recalls Garang Amok Mou, who lost seven brothers in the battle.
“They beat me unconscious,” says Akuac Amet, a 50-year-old village woman. “Now my legs are paralyzed, and I can only crawl. They shot my four sons who were tending cattle and abducted my 14-year-old daughter. My husband died in famine. I am now completely destitute.”
The war has destroyed much of the south’s economy, educational system, health services, and communications network. Only three hospitals remain, with an estimated one doctor per 125,000 people. Of the few schools still operating, overcrowding is severe, with class size averaging 94 pupils to one teacher. “Our children have grown up in ignorance,” says one villager. “They know the sound of each different gun, but little else.”
Meanwhile, displacement of millions of subsistence farm families makes malnutrition an ongoing problem. Four major famines have occurred in the past 12 years, with at least a quarter-million southerners perishing in 1988 alone.
In 1989, the United Nations organized Operation Lifeline Sudan, a consortium of humanitarian agencies bringing relief assistance to southern Sudan. From Kenya, 40 aid agencies fly workers throughout the south where they dodge battle lines to distribute food, clothing, medicines, farm tools, and seeds to hundreds of thousands of people left homeless, destitute, and ill.
The war, resuming at the end of every rainy season when travel becomes possible, fluctuates in endless stalemate. U.S. State Department officials say the war is unwinnable by either side.
DESTABILIZING EAST AFRICA? One relief organization that is working exclusively in Sudan is Operation Nehemiah (ON), headed by William Levi Ochan, a south Sudanese in exile in Kenya. on, based in Newark, New Jersey, helps with agricultural development, education, medical needs, and spiritual growth of refugees in Kenya and Uganda, as well as those displaced in war zones in southern Sudan.
“It is only a matter of time before what has happened to us in Sudan engulfs Africa,” says Ochan, whose father died in village fighting.
Kate Almquist, a World Vision policy analyst in Washington, D.C., agrees. “It’s destabilizing the whole of East Africa,” she says. Eritrea and Uganda have severed relations with Sudan, while Egypt and Ethiopia have charged Sudan with harboring Muslim extremists who attempted to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak last year. “This war has gone on too long and has caused more suffering than any other human emergency of our time,” Almquist says.
THE GROWING CHURCH: Southern Sudan’s Christian churches are persevering–and multiplying–in the face of grave deprivation and death. Nathaniel Garang, bishop of the Episcopal Church of Sudan, estimates that three-fourths of southern Sudan’s population is Christian, compared to 15 percent before the war began.
“The church is the only institution offering hope,” says Joseph Ikalur, a worker with the New Sudan Council of Churches.
Renato Kizito Sesana, a Catholic priest from Nairobi, Kenya, says hundreds of adults have been baptized in areas where a decade ago only Islam and traditional animist religions thrived. “We visited chapels deep in the bush where people from nearby villages would congregate,” Sesana says, describing undernourished villagers in rags worshiping outdoors by moonlight. “Their faith and love for Jesus were utterly serious and unquestionable.”
This spring, Seattle-based World Vision is organizing humanitarian groups and churches to urge the U.S. Congress, the Clinton administration, and the United Nations to help negotiate an end to the conflict.
Human-rights groups are keeping up government pressure. “The U.S. pulled embassy staff out because it’s too dangerous for them, but we refuse to speak out against appalling violations of basic freedoms in the country,” says James Jacobsen, president of Christian Solidarity International in Washington, D.C. “I find it very hypocritical.”
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