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Persecution in Different Forms
A look at the continuing conflict in Sudan, and its effects on the indigenous Christian population.

By Michael Hirst and Nicholas Jubber

Since its declaration of independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan has been immersed in civil warfare. There have been fewer than ten years of peace in more than forty years of independence. The 1980s witnessed the collapse of the economy, widespread starvation, and the renewal of separatist guerrilla activity in the south of the country. Coups and counter-coups failed to halt the fighting, and now a hard-line Islamic regime controls the Arab northern portion of the country while the black and predominantly Christian Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in effect governs large areas in the south and southeast.

Routine civilian casualties
During the past decade of fighting, missiles with a range of 80 miles have been used regularly by government forces on the more conventional battlefields of the Blue Nile area in southern Sudan. But these missiles are accurate only to without about 1.5 miles, so when they are used, civilian casualties are nearly guaranteed. After softening up an area with missiles, the government launches ground attacks by troops armed with an assortment of Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Villages are regularly targeted to ensure that civilians are driven away. Thus the government aims to reduce popular support for the SPLA, and gain control over the embattled ground.

One eyewitness to the fighting in the south told us that Muslim tribesmen are recruited by the government to serve as mercenaries with the objective of scattering the Christians and the migrant families now living in the settled areas of the south. “Since time immemorial, the northern Sudanese have tried to lay their hands on the more fertile soil of the south to exploit it,” this source explained. The objective of this government strategy, he added, is “to empower their own tribesmen.”

The Khartoum regime’s policy of providing advanced weapons to some of the autonomous tribal militias (murahaleen) has left these ill-disciplined groups freely rampaging through civilian areas, committing atrocities and heightening the conflict. The tactics employed by these militia units include the looting and burning of huts, the enslaving, rape, and murder of women and children. “Young boys are taken for indoctrination into the militias,” our source informed us. “Qu’ranic schools teach these bitter and twisted youths to kill their own people.”

In its campaign against the southern rebels, the Khartoum government also counts on help from foreign sources: oil companies seeking to exploit the rich resources of the country’s southern region. Talisman is a Canadian oil company involved in production in southern Sudan. A parish priest we met in Khartoum had held talks with the company’s manager. “Talisman,” he told us, “destroys the houses of the Dinka tribe, without offering compensation, and the oil isn’t used to benefit the local people, even though it is found on their land.” A report commissioned by the Canadian government has established that proceeds from Talisman’s oil operations have helped to fund the Sudanese government’s war efforts—including the government-backed raids against black African civilians in southern Sudan. The report states unambiguously: “Oil is exacerbating conflict in Sudan.”

At the beginning of September, the Catholic bishops of Sudan accused several foreign oil companies of “profiting from gross and systematic violations of human rights.” The Khartoum government uses revenues from these companies to gain access to the regions in which the oil deposits are located. This government campaign—a facet of the overall civil war—has come to involve the ethnic cleansing of Christian areas and the bombing of Christian schools and hospitals.

The terror network
The support that Khartoum receives comes not just from international investors, but also from countries such as Iraq and Libya. Sudan is a buffer zone between Islam and the African world, and the funding from these Islamic nations is given in the name of Islam and the spread of the Muslim faith. However, in order to achieve its stated goals of making the entire country both Arabic in culture and Islamic in faith—through the ethnic cleansing of the southern region—the government of Sudan would need to escalate its military offensives. The SPLA, one independent military analyst has claimed, has “grassroots support that would require the whole of the southern, central, and some northern areas to be exterminated. The regime will not succeed unless they use other less conventional methods.” Given the cruel methods of ethnic warfare that are already in use, one dreads to think what these “less conventional” methods might entail.

In April, the US State Department’s Counter-terrorism Report released a list of the seven governments that have been identified as sponsors of international terrorism, and on September 12, in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated the names of the “deadly seven:” Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan. A closer look at the April report reveals that Sudan continues to harbor members of various groups—including associates of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and the Palestine Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

The Sudanese government claims that it has dispelled over 3,000 “undesirables” in the last few years, and that it has severed al-Qaeda’s connections with the country. However, Bin Laden’s global operations were based here at least up until the mid 1990s; his personal jet still stands ready for use at the Khartoum airport, and he is reported to have $5 million worth of investments in the country. The wanted terrorist, says the State Department, has a “working agreement” with the government of Sudan.

On the very day of the terrorist attacks against America, a conference committee of the US Congress was due to be appointed to prepare an agreement on the Sudan Peace Act, which would subsequently be sent to President Bush for approval. An amendment to the act, passed overwhelmingly by the House, would have banned from the US capital markets all of the foreign oil companies that are providing huge revenues to the government of Sudan. A Boston Globe editorial hinted that the President was likely to veto this amendment, and commented: “A Bush policy of protecting oil companies rather than the enslaved women and children of southern Sudan should not be called realism. Its proper name is appeasement.” Any such “appeasement” could now prove a serious embarrassment for the US government.

Amnesty International has also organized a petition drive in Canada to lobby for Talisman to be barred from doing business in Sudan. The aim of that drive is that “Sudan will be left without a vital proxy in Western capital markets, and will be forced to negotiate a just peace.” But what will a “just peace” entail?

Open persecution
A Catholic parish priest in Khartoum said that he would favor the establishment of an SPLA government in southern Sudan; he observed that the rebel group has been reasonably efficient—under very difficult circumstances—in the management of a region that includes six Catholic dioceses in the south. However, this priest (who chose to remain anonymous) knows that the clergy must be careful of their connections with the rebel group; in 1998 two priests were imprisoned for a year for having had contact with the SPLA. The Khartoum government has often put heavy pressure on suspected rebel sympathizers among the clergy. “You’re forced to admit what you’ve never done,” the priest told us, “to confess what you’ve never seen. Christians are afraid, but because of our faith we resist rather than fear.” When we visited Khartoum, the government security office in the city had repeatedly detained an elderly priest, for several hours at a time, over a period of three days.

In Khartoum itself, there is open persecution of the Church through destruction of parish property, imprisonment and torture of Christians, and a general ban on processions and other public gatherings at Christian churches. A well informed source told us: “Everyone from the South who has lived in the North can tell you that there is this sense of unease—a thick curtain of oppression—and this pervasive drive by the regime to slowly, unofficially choke the Church.” Although it is aimed at all Christian denominations, this government policy applies especially to the Catholic Church, which is by far the most powerful and influential of the Christian communities inside the country.

Our friendly priest reports that the sense of repression is felt keenly by his parishioners: “We are being persecuted,” said a young Sudanese Catholic. “Before this government, we were free, but now we are unable to express ourselves.” He continued:

If you are a Christian, you cannot walk around in public with any sign that you are a Christian. You cannot wear a cross around your neck. They try to teach us the Sharia curriculum in the schools, and from the ninth grade every child is schooled in Islam. And in the south, Muslims are sent to marry and Islamize our people. The Catholic Church objects to this, and refused to register with the authorities, so the government tried to destroy the churches, and they detained and arrested many priests.

The only positive aspect of the situation in Khartoum, as one young Catholic woman saw it, was the unity of Christians, from all denominations, in the face of government repression. “When a German bishop came here in April,” she recalled, “he was detained by the government, so all the Christians came together and demonstrated.”

The Christians of Khartoum are looking impatiently toward their brothers in the Western world for help. The Catholic priest in Khartoum said:

Everybody in the West looks to his own business and follows his own interests. At least if they were impartial they would push the government, which is worse than apartheid, to treat the Christians fairly.

A cultural divide
In the southern and rural regions of Sudan, the persecution of Christians takes a different form: brute military force. Villages are displaced, church buildings are either destroyed or occupied without any form of compensation, and Christians are imprisoned without trial. Government attacks on southern villages—using cluster bombs dropped from Russian-made planes, strafing by helicopter gunships, and barrages of heavy-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers—have forced 1.5 million people to leave their homes during the past 5 years.

One Christian living in the south advanced the argument that Sudan can find peace only through “self-determination.” This would mean allowing the Christians and others of southern Sudan to “solve their own problems,” he said, adding: “The Muslims follow their own beliefs and we allow them to follow Sharia, so they should allow a secular government or an independent state in the south.” Only by stopping the encroachment of the Sharia law into the south, he explained, could the people there achieve their minimal goals: religious freedom, security in their homes and possessions, and the right to take part in democratic processes.

A well-established Muslim academic we met in Khartoum reflected this attitude. “If the people from the north act less like nobles,” he told us, “and give a bit more, the people in the south will be able to have a sense of being equal. It is a question of confidence-building.” But, when we asked him if there could ever be a fully integrated state in Sudan, combining the Islamic/Arabic culture of the north in peaceful coexistence with the Christian/black African culture of the south, he sighed and said:

Many people from the north have wives from the south. We are not completely separate. But culturally, people in the south are different from people in the north. I don’t think we can ever be fully united.

The consequences of continued disunity, however, are grave: more than 1.5 million have lost their lives as a result of over 20 years of fighting in Sudan. Tens of thousands of Christians have fled the country. Hundreds of thousands face an imminent danger of starvation, in large part because the continuation of warfare has paralyzed the economy and stopped both agricultural production and the flow of relief supplies. Unless the government abandons its hard-line policies, the death toll will continue to rise, and the dwindling number of indigenous Christians will continue to fall. n

Michael Hirst and Nicholas Jubber have written regularly for CWR from the Middle East.

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