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Sample Excerpt: Social-Concern Magazine Feature Story on Religious Genocide
On a Tuesday morning this February in the Nuba Mountains of the Sudan, a woman named Salawa rose early with her children and began preparing for the day. Her nine-year-old, Gandi, complained that he didn’t feel well. Fearing it could be Malaria, Salawa said he could stay home from school and suggested that his twin sister, Munira, might also stay home as well. Munira wanted to go, however, and set off on her daily one and a half-hour trek. That morning they’d be studying English out of the "Read With Us" course.
Salawa would never see her daughter alive again.
At 9 am while class was underway, the northern Islamic Government of Sudan (GOS) dropped several bombs on Munira’s Holy Cross Primary School, sending hot shrapnel exploding in all directions, viciously slaughtering 14 children and one teacher, with 18 or more children permanently maimed or injured. The remains were a scene of tragedy and desolation, with blown apart chalkboards and schoolbooks, to shrapnel scarred trees. Where there were once school grounds, lay only bomb craters, with even one barrel bomb, which somehow failed to explode, lying nearby.
Yet another mother, Tabetha Kuku, was cleaning the yard around her hut when she heard the all-too-familiar sound of the Antonov plane approaching. A few seconds later came the explosions from the direction of the school. She immediately started running through the bush, only to be met by some of the men saying it was too late. Tabetha insisted on seeing her daughter, Ruza. She found her body, decapitated with both legs blown off. Within minutes Tabetha herself collapsed and died from a heart attack at the shock of what she had seen.
Few would deny that war is barbaric, and that in most wars, sometimes civilians, women and children, are direct, if incidental casualties. But, when a Sudanese Government Ambassador was later asked whether this school bombing was perhaps another of these regrettable consequences of war, he replied, "The bombs landed where they were supposed to."
The Islamic Jihad
Such insidious propaganda promotes a different type of warfare, where breaking the spirit of a people is just as high a priority as conquering them. It is clothed in the glory and force of the Islamic Jihad, or "Holy War," as it is know in modern rhetoric. It involves the systematic strategy of the Sudanese Government to impartially eradicate every man, woman and child from the region of southern Sudan to make way for a completely Islamic State.
In his 1995 piece, Murder in the Sudan, Paul H. Liben calls the 17-year civil war "a calamity that experts say is actually worse than anything the world has seen since Pol Pot’s rampages in Cambodia in the 1970s."
Since instituting the Islamic, fundamentalist Shari’a law in 1983, and much more so since the 1989 coup of the Sudanese government by the National Islamic Front (NIF), the people of the South and Central Sudan have been the victims of vile persecutions rarely seen in modern times, in large part because of the profession of their Christian faith.
More than 2 million Christians, including a fraction of Animists and Muslims have died at the hands of the Arab capital in Khartoum, with some 4 and a half million people displaced from their homes, becoming hopeless, starving refugees. A territory that has been essentially Christian nearly since the time there were Christians is in imminent peril of being white-washed from existence in the name of Islamic imperialism.
Numerous eyewitness accounts detail countless crucifixions, even of children as young as seven. Other atrocities include arms and legs being cut off, whipping and clubbing, electric shock, partial castration, shackling and suspension by wrists, burning with hot irons, denial of food, water, and sleep for refugees and slaves who refuse to denounce Christ.
Women have been raped by the tens of thousands, many in hope that they’ll bear children with Arab ethnicity and divided loyalties. Young men have been kidnapped and forced to fight against loved ones. Entire villages and towns have been burned to the ground, their people burned alive or taken into slavery.
Over a million south Sudanese remain trapped in refugee camps, primarily in neighboring Kenya and Uganda. Areas of the South are under constant attack from the air and by ground troops. Man-made famines are created as villages and crops are being regularly destroyed, typically at harvest time to ensure that they cannot plant again before the rainy season. Wells are poisoned or mined, civilians are being hung up in trees and used for target practice—the list goes on and on.
Blood and Oil
And over the last few years, the motive for this annihilation of the Sudanese south has taken an entirely different, and ironic, tenor. Vast amounts of oil said to rival those already found in the North Sea have been discovered under the soil of southern Sudan, and as of last Fall, it is being pumped out at perhaps more than 10 thousand barrels a day. Now, the northern government stands to profit even more should they succeed in removing the southern "nuisance."
And, of course, even more ironic, the cause of the North has adopted allies. Numerous countries have flocked to Khartoum for a piece of the oil action, and many are allegedly, to say the least, therefore feeding the coffers of the NIF war machine. Before, the government was certainly a terror to the people of the south, but as a military entity, they weren’t that well armed. Now they have gone, for instance, from the fairly inaccurate Andover bombers, to highly equipped helicopter gunships and most recently, to deadly MIG fighters.
China has the largest stake in the oil with a 40% interest, and there is mounting evidence of Chinese arms being used against the South. The Canadian company, Talisman Energy, has secured a 25% interest, followed by companies from numerous other countries. Plus, where the government isn’t attacking or displacing the people, there are reports of these oil interests hiring "security" companies who are allegedly serving some of the same violent purposes.
Where there may not be evidence of direct arms support from many of these other countries, it is clear that the increased wealth of the Sudanese government as a result of these oil investments has propelled the suffering and persecution to a far greater scale than before.
Roger Winter, executive director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, visited the Sudan this May. He says, "I’ve seen almost every refugee or civil conflict situation in the world in the past 20 years. There’s no place so pervasively crippled as the war zones of Sudan. As a society it’s totally blighted."
But, according to Tucson-native, Ken Krohn, Vice President of U.S. Operations for the African-based ministry, Faith In Action, the travesties perpetrated by the government of the North have largely fallen on deaf ears. "These people think they can get away with anything and do anything and no one will step in and stop them. And, thus far, sadly enough, they’ve been correct."
Although more people have died in the Sudan than in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Rwanda and Somalia combined, the world’s governments and humanitarian organizations have largely failed to offer any lasting, aggressive assistance to the persecuted people of central and southern Sudan. Certainly, Kosovo, Rwanda, etc. have received more media, humanitarian and government intervention attention for reasons that are left up to speculation.
The Fox Watching The Chickencoop
The problem, however, lies less in the willingness to supply aid as it lies in the absurdity of politics. While it’s reported that millions of dollars in relief aid do indeed enter the country through the auspices of United Nations’ relief efforts, the arrangement is such that it is the Government of Sudan who largely decides where it goes.
Says Krohn: "The GOS will tell the UN when they can drop supplies and where they can drop supplies, and what supplies to drop . . . it’s your classic case of ‘the fox watching the chicken coop.’ What happens to the bulk of this aid is that it doesn’t really reach the people in the southern Sudan. It actually ends up in the hands of the Government of Sudan."
To make matters worse, according to World magazine, the United Nations has in the past months designated strategic regions of the South and Central Sudan as "no-go" areas. Sadly, most aid organizations have acquiesced, in one sense wishing to stay out harm’s way as the violence escalates, but also wanting to maintain good relations with the UN, who regulates most of the large humanitarian efforts in other needy countries. And, although the agencies have submitted to Khartoum aid stipulations for a decade, reports World, they said submitting to the rebel parameters violated Geneva Convention standards that humanitarian aid be "impartial."
Finally, even though there are agencies that have been interested in supplying aid directly to the South, the southern rebels have largely shot themselves in the foot in seeking to match Khartoum in controlling where the aid goes. Not willing to sign a memorandum which could apparently limit their freedoms, 13 Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s), led by CARE, Oxfam, World Vision, Save the Children, the Carter Center, and Doctors Without Borders all removed their direct support from the South as of March 1st.
World quotes Nina Shea, a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom: "Politics is being used in Sudan as an instrument of starvation not only by the government, but by the relief groups."
Where are your troops?
On the largest scale, the latter is perhaps less of an indictment against these world organizations as it is a red flag for the dire need for the grassroots support of the people, says Krohn. It is fundamentally people like you and me, he says, who both fund these organizations and elect these government officials. For instance, Dr. Charles Jacobs, head of the Sudan Campaign, a recent two-week effort in Washington D.C. which hoped to highlight Sudan’s human rights abuses, said in Religion Today that the Clinton administration is not ready to take action to end the suffering because it doesn’t believe the American people care about the Sudan.
According to Religion Today, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Jacobs that the suffering of the Sudanese "is not marketable" to the American people. Her statement was not intended to be flippant, but was a challenge to human rights groups to raise awareness, Jacobs said. "She was saying, ‘Where are your troops?’"
Says, Krohn: "We have become desensitized in this country, and when you actually see people die, then it gives you a whole new perspective. You realize, this isn't television. This isn't a movie. This is real life. And, these people are suffering."
In the video, Sudan: The Hidden Holocaust, one Sudanese pastor declared, "We are totally forgotten by our people, by other believers in Jesus Christ all over the world. But, the Arabs, the Muslims in the North are being assisted by their own Arabs in other countries, in every Arab country."
Have Christians ignored the suffering of their Sudanese brethren? If so, what, if anything, can be done? The Southern People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which is the main military faction defending the Christian South, has little financial or arms support, says Krohn. Much of the arms and ammunition they do acquire is captured from the North, he said.
Since peace can end the suffering and war requires weapons, should Christians actually assist the rebels in supplying arms, or is there perhaps another way we can fight in this "holy" war? Krohn says, arms are not the answer, but "faith in action" is.
Next month, read about how members of Tucson’s Faith In Action, along with only a few other ministries, are risking their lives to provide spiritual and physical aid to the forgotten South, and what you can do to help.
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