Fugitive bishop wants pressure on Islamic Front

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 17, 2000 by Arthur Jones

Gassis struggles to alert Americans to plight of his people in oil rich land ravaged by civil war, persecution

Nothing seemingly penetrates the indifference to genocide in Sudan. Not the cries of the hundreds of young girls being raped or abducted as concubines. Not the death rattles of the school children whose mountain villages have just been bombed or the moans of the hordes of maimed people, stumping around on what's left of their bodies after stepping on land mines planted by the government of Sudan. Not the widespread rounding up of the people of entire villages who are then sold into slavery, or the 600,000 persons displaced during the past five months. Not the forced conversion of animists and Christians to Islam. Not the use of starvation as a weapon of war and suppression. Not the 1.2 million people wandering toward death in Bahr el Ghazal, the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile, Upper Nile, Ingessena Hills and Eastern Equatoria if food relief is too long delayed.

Everything augurs against anyone listening to the religious persecution and suffering stemming from the 17-yearlong civil war in Sudan.

Westerners stumble over the names: Gassis and Wako. Abangite and Nyiker. Taban and Tombe. Majak and Mazzolari. Menegazzo, Kur and Mutek. Western ears don't even hear the pleas of these Sudanese bishops who issue statements on atrocities and grievous injustices, statements soon shelved, easily ignored.

Certainly Western governments issue their protests and support ineffectual sanctions. But when the bishops of Sudan insist "the Sudan conflict does not differ from Kosovo, Sarajevo, East Timor and Sierra Leone, where violations of human rights have prompted massive international intervention," Western governments turn away from suggesting "massive international intervention."

The government of Sudan is Arab. It is Muslim. To Western minds, Arab and Muslim equal oil. The Western view is: Best not rock the oil tanker.

Sudan is the largest country in Africa; Christians are its smallest minority. In the predominantly Muslim country of 27 million, Christians probably number fewer than 4 million, less than one-sixth of the population.

For those who think in terms of emergency relief aid -- aid that the Sudan government tries to subvert -- the logistics are a nightmare. There are few roads in a country so enormous that nine countries share its boundaries. Starting at the top and moving counterclockwise, Sudan's neighbors are Egypt, Libya, Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopa and Eritrea. At the northeast corner, Sudan borders the Red Sea.

Sudan's climate ranges from desert to equatorial swamp and jungle. But it is religious politics, not geography and topography, that governs Sudan today. Its extremist Islamic government is the National Islamic Front, based in the nation's capital, Khartoum. Khartoum is in the east-central part of the country, at the meeting of the Blue Nile and the White Nile.

The front achieved power through a coup in 1989 and declared the rule of Islam.

Civil war in a nutshell

Sudan's civil war, in a nutshell, has three elements: resistance, religion and oil. First, the South -- predominately black African and non-Muslim -- has demanded autonomy for decades from the Arab North. But the South's Sudan People's Liberation Army, the SPLA, has been unable to defeat the National Islamic Front's forces on Southern soil, and is splintered into various strongholds by government incursions. Next, the South deplores and resists the Khartoum-based government's Islamization-or-extermination policies.

Finally, there's oil in Sudan, and the promise of more discoveries ahead. That means more fighting because the government of Sudan wants to control the oil, and the known deposits are generally in the South.

For all these reasons, the minority black Africans of the South have resisted. For their pains and liberation movements, they have bled. And still they bleed.

The U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom says Sudan suffers "the worst religious persecution in the world. And persecution on other grounds as well." They mean racial, ethnic and tribal.

The story is complex. The witnesses are compelling.

One such witness is the plucky, outspoken Bishop Macram Max Gassis -- a bishop on the run.

To enter his Sudan diocese from virtual exile, Gassis first has to find between $8,000 and $13,000 to hire a plane to fly him in from Nairobi. He has to enter under cover because the Sudan government has a warrant out for his arrest.

Next, he needs a safe place to land -- safe meaning an area of his El Obeid diocese not occupied by the pillaging soldiers of the National Islamic Front or the equally wanton militias.

Finally Gassis has to enter clandestinely so that the government's air force, consisting of old Soviet Antonov transports converted into bombers, doesn't start dropping bombs wherever he goes.

Once in his diocese he is as public as can be. Soldiers opposed to the National Islamic Front regime guard him 24 hours a day. Yet he dare not stay too long, usually a week to l0 days at the most.