The cry of Sudan

Commonweal, Nov 6, 1992

Q. What is the largest country in Africa? A. Sudan.

Q. What Islamic government is conducting, and concealing, a holy war against its non-Muslim peoples? A. Sudan's.

Sudan is today a landscape of bitter civil war, famine, and anguish largely unobserved by the rest of the world. The Sudanese poet J.G. Odiya describes it: "Orphans roam the land, men have lost their heads, and mercy is foreign, alien, and far away from the land of the agile gazelle." We must help mercy return.

Once a key nation in cold-war calculations, Sudan has a population of 24 million and is divided between its northern, Arab-Islamic majority and its black African, animist, and Christian southern minority. "Land of three rivers and fifty tribes, wrapped in a thirsty war" (Odiya again), Sudan reaches from Egypt and the Red Sea on Africa's Horn to the Central African Republic, bordering eight African nations all told.

Since 1983, when civil war broke out, more than 4 million Sudanese have been displaced. The famine victims of Ethiopia and, more recently, Somalia, are familiar to most Americans, but the plight of the Sudanese has been kept off the world's TV screens by the Khartoum government's calculated refusal to allow foreign observers to document what is happening.

Recent UN figures manage to tell the story nonetheless: Whereas 65 percent of the people of Ethiopia live below the UN-defined poverty line, and whereas 70 percent of Somalis do, in Sudan the figure reaches a staggering 85 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation's children are malnourished, and, according to USAID, the number exceeds 80 percent in many areas. A Maryknoll lay missioner, recently returned, writes this of a Southern Sudan refugee center: "The scene could have been any scene you see in documentaries on refugees...swollen bellies, spindly legs, crying children. Then, too, some who are healthier, laughing and playing with each other while awaiting their rations--an ironic reminder of the human spirit, how it tries to adapt and create some sense of normalcy even in the most abnormal and miserable of situations." According to the UN World Food Program, 7.5 million Sudanese are threatened by famine.

The famine and civil war are the bloody harvest of an amalgam of interreligious conflict, regionalism, racism, conflicting political ideologies, tribalism, and social caste. Sudan was granted independence in 1955, but civilian leadership ended, by and large, with the first of a series of military coups in 1958. In 1972, Colonel Gaffar Nimeiry agreed to grant limited autonomy to the South. But in 1983 he reneged, and, under the influence of Hassan al-Turabi, an Iranian-inspired Sunni fundamentalist, Nimeiry declared Sudan an Islamic republic, made Arabic the official language, and imposed Islamic law on the entire nation. Floggings and amputations for such crimes as theft became common. In the South, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) was formed and a fierce war has raged ever since. The crimes of both the government and the SPLA are legion. In particular, there is a religious war being waged against non-Muslims. In January 1992, the government seized all copies of a pastoral letter of the Sudan Catholic Bishops' Conference that criticized Khartoum's holy war. In February, the government expelled 400,000 southern refugees from the capital, driving them into the winter desert. In March, it launched a massive offensive, displacing 50,000 Nuba [non-Arab] tribesmen in the North. In the South, it captured the city of Juba, displacing 250,000 people in July, and expelling all expatriate missionaries in August in an attempt to remove any independent witnesses.

When the Vatican recently protested "the flagrant violation of human fights" in Sudan, a Khartoum official responded threat-eningly: "The Catholic church has become the enemy of the Sudanese government, and we know how to deal with it." Bishops have been forced to appear in the capital for questioning and church workers have been tortured and killed. In August the Sudanese bishops persuaded the bishops of East Africa to call on the Organization of African Unity to deplore the violations of human rights in Sudan, and to bring pressure on the various factions in the war for a peaceful settlement.

Here in the United States, Bread for the World and the Center of Concern, among others, pressed for the passage of The Horn of Africa Recovery and Food Security Act. It was signed into law in April 1992, and allows for the shift of U.S. foreign aid funds from military accounts for both emergency relief needs and long-term development projects. But as Sudanese Bishop Paride Taban remarked recently in New York, pressure on the Sudanese government must be generated on many fronts: "Feeding people is not enough if tomorrow they are to be slaughtered like cattle in the war. We need something more." That "more" is concerted pressure on Sudan from abroad. In Bishop Taban's view, it must come from the UN Security Council and from the United States. It is time for us to raise our voices.