A Faraway Country . . . . . . about which we know a lot - 17 years of civil war in Sudan

National Review, March 5, 2001 by Kate O'Beirne

'Why do so many Americans care about saving seals and whales but not us?" a desperate woman asked Congressman Frank Wolf during his recent trip to the town of Yei in southern Sudan. Wolf-a Virginia Republican who co-chairs the Congressional Human Rights Caucus-recently returned from his fourth visit to Sudan, and is at a loss to explain the relative lack of concern in the U.S. about the brutal genocidal war against Christians in Africa's largest country.

More people have died in this conflict than in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia combined. The Clinton administration itself acknowledged that the crisis in Sudan simmered on its foreign-policy back burner. But with a new administration in Washington-and reinforcements in the ranks of activists determined to end the aerial bombing, starvation, and enslavement of non-Muslims in Sudan-the radical Islamic regime in Khartoum might finally begin feeling the heat.

The scale of the human suffering during this 17-year civil war is truly staggering: Two million people have died, and twice that number have been driven from their homes in a systematic campaign by the Sudanese government to annihilate or forcibly convert Christians and practitioners of traditional African religions in the southern and central parts of the country. The U.S. has sent a billion dollars in aid to Sudan in the past ten years, but much of this assistance has been channeled through the U.N., which permits the Sudanese government to control its distribution; those forcibly removed from their homes to "peace camps" survive under the government's practice of "convert and eat." The regime has caused massive starvation in the south by banning international humanitarian-aid flights, and regularly bombs relief facilities, hospitals, and Catholic schools and churches.

The State Department has documented that the government of Sudan is engaged in chattel slavery, in which tens of thousands of women and children have been abducted, raped, and taken north to serve as concubines and laborers. In 1993, the government secured a religious edict that declared all those who oppose the regime "apostates"-thereby granting license for government troops to persecute not just Christians, but also Muslim political opponents.

Strangely, the voices raised in support of sending U.S. troops to Haiti and engaging militarily to protect the Muslim minority in Kosovo have been largely silent about the need for U.S. diplomatic and economic pressure to save lives in Sudan. Washington regards Sudan as a sponsor of terrorism; it thus backs U.N. sanctions against the regime and recently blocked its bid for membership in the Security Council. But because the emphasis has been on fighting terrorism, little attention has been paid to Khartoum's gross human-rights abuses. Last fall, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported that it was "struck by the huge disparity between the genocidal scale of atrocities being committed by the government of Sudan and the muted response of the President and Secretary of State."

Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright made the reluctant assessment that, as she said, "the human-rights situation in Sudan is not marketable to the American people." In contrast to Albright, Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute, who has been aggressively engaged in trying to rally an appropriate American response to the atrocities in Sudan, has little trouble labeling the situation. "Sudan is the Hitler regime of our time," he says flatly. Horowitz readily explains why the genocide in Sudan has failed to awaken consciences in proportion to the enormous suffering taking place. "In Sudan, you have a politically incorrect line-up," he explains. "In Bosnia, the bad guys were Christians and the victims Muslims-so bombs away. The situation in Sudan raises fears of being called a Muslim-basher, so instead of being called a terrible thing, it's called 'complicated.'"

Since 1999, Khartoum's brutal war on the south has been fueled by new oil production. Since it began exporting oil, in partnership with Chinese and Canadian companies, it has doubled its spending on weapons and increased its attacks on the south. Nina Shea of Freedom House warns that there is a new urgency to persuading Khartoum to stop its genocidal campaign-because oil profits now enable the government to win its war on religious minorities. "If [the war] isn't stopped this year, the south will be lost. The population will have been Islamicized or driven out," she explains.

The sense of urgency offers new hope. Although Jesse Jackson has turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions of black Christians in Sudan, other black leaders haven't been as indifferent. Early in February, the NAACP announced its intention to make relief for persecuted religious minorities in Sudan a top priority, and the Congressional Black Caucus has recently labeled the international community's silence a "travesty." Congressman Wolf is "very optimistic" that President Bush will become personally involved, as President Clinton never did.