Genocide in Sudan

For more than 10 years, the government of Sudan has waged a cruel war against its own citizens, a war that has resulted in the greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe in the world, dwarfing that of Kosovo. The war has claimed nearly 2 million lives[1] and displaced an additional 4 million people.[2] While all sides have committed human rights abuses, the forces of the Sudanese government - which scholar Paul Marshall calls "the worst practitioner of religious persecution and the worst violator of human rights" in the world[3] - bear the largest share of responsibility.[4] As Macram Max Gassis, a Roman Catholic bishop in Sudan, states, "War is the cause of our problems. And the cause of the war is the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum."[5]

The government of Sudan has tried to break the spirit of its opponents. It has attacked civilians, used famine as a weapon, and countenanced the revival of slavery. Its aim is to force the non-Arab, non-Muslim peoples of the south and other marginalized areas, such as the Nuba Mountains, to abandon their culture and religion. The U.S. Department of State calls the effort, which remains strong, nothing less than forced Islamization and Arabization.[6] Exiled Sudanese politician and journalist Bona Malwal has described the situation this way:

This people have suffered such long agonies at the hands of their would-be national government in Khartoum, that most of the time they feel that the world has turned its back on them; abandoning them to the cruelest and ugliest form of modern slavery and atrocities perpetrated by the state; murder, rape, famine, constant war and a holocaust-type genocide.[7]

Christianity, seen by the current regime as a rival to Islam to win the allegiance of Africans, has been the government's particular target. Hassan al-Turabi, the intellectual and spiritual leader of the Sudanese regime, remarked candidly, "To be Sudanese is to be Muslim. Islam is the only religion for Sudan and for Africa."[8] According to Anglican Bishop Daniel Deng, "Ten years ago the Muslims declared a jihad. ... They have a plan to conquer the land of southern Sudan, to kill the people, or make slaves of them."[9] Likewise, Paul Marshall writes, "Jihad - holy war - is preached in mosques, universities, schools, and on TV and radio."[10] In January 1992, South Kordofan's governor, Lt. Gen. al-Hussein, formally declared a holy war in the Nuba Mountains.[11]

Recent reconciliation among southern tribes in Sudan, along with accelerating peace talks between Eritrea and Ethiopia, offer hope of a unified opposition against the regime. Ominously, however, the Sudanese government is about to begin pumping oil from fields in the South, via a new pipeline, to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. At this critical time, America must take resolute action to end the human rights and humanitarian violations of the world's longest-running war. If the Sudanese government wins the war and brings its oil reserves on line, it is likely to be a destabilizing force in the region and beyond.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Because of the blatantly religious nature of the persecution, a review of the changing religious dynamics in Sudan over the centuries puts the present conflict in perspective. Rather than being merely an importation from missionaries in the 19^th century, as Turabi claims, Christianity in Sudan dates from apostolic times and precedes Islam by many centuries. One of the seven original deacons, Philip, evangelized an official from the court of Candace of the land of Nubia,[12] the land just south of Egypt and just north of Ethiopia that is now called Sudan.

Christianity thrived in Sudan. Egypt, which in the first centuries A.D. was a Christian land, strongly influenced Sudan's culture, and missionaries from Egypt played the leading role in spreading Christianity throughout the country. However, when Islam engulfed Egypt in the seventh century, Nubia was cut off from the rest of the Christian world. Nonetheless, and despite increasing pressure from Arab Muslim forces, Christian kingdoms persisted within Sudan until at least the late 1500s, as did isolated pockets thereafter.[13]

Western Christians - Catholic and Protestant - began to re-evangelize Sudan in the 19^th century. One of these was Catholic priest Daniel Comboni, who founded a religious order dedicated to helping Africans evangelize Africa.[14] Western Christians also came to fight against the slave trade practiced by Arabs against the black tribes. The most famous of these Christians was Gordon of Khartoum, an English military officer who died fighting the slave trade in 1885.[15]

Sudan, the largest country in Africa and more than one-fourth the size of the United States, gained its independence from Britain in the 1950s. At independence, approximately two-thirds of the population, occupying the northern two-thirds of the country, was Arab and Muslim. The remaining one-third of the population, located principally in the South, was composed of ethnic black African tribes, which were split between animism (traditional African religion) and Christianity. The total Christian population at independence was about 10 percent.[16] Human rights authority Nina Shea, however, estimates that currently more than half the southern Sudanese are Christians, despite severe persecution.[17]

Northerners and southerners had an uneasy coexistence from the start. Religious discrimination, though not persecution, by the North against the South became a fact of life after Sudanese independence in 1956. Immediately after independence, the teaching of the Koran was required in southern schools, and the missionary schools were nationalized. In 1962, the Missionary Societies Act imposed discriminatory licensing requirements on Christian missions. Under President Jaafar Muhammad Nimeiri, the Ministry of Religious Affairs was staffed entirely by Muslims. Though the Missionary Societies Act was amended after the visit of John Paul II to Sudan in 1993, these cosmetic amendments did not lessen the discrimination to which churches and Christians were subjected.[18]

The present civil war was sparked in 1983 when President Nimeiri tried, unsuccessfully, to impose Islamic law, or sharia, on the country. Nimeiri had come under increasing pressure and influence from the Islamic radicals who would dominate the National Islamic Front (NIF).[19] His regime lost international legitimacy when it executed Ustaz Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, a Muslim religious scholar and advocate of a tolerant Islam, for apostasy in 1985.[20] After the NIF came to power through a military coup in 1989, it made the imposition of sharia a centerpiece of its campaign against non-Muslims.

Under sharia, only Muslim men enjoy equality under the law and rights of political participation. According to exiled Sudanese intellectuals Abdullahi An-Na'im and Peter Kok, "Muslim women and non-Muslim believers are disqualified from holding high ranking executive and judicial offices since this would entail the exercise of authority over Muslim men."[21] Accordingly, the NIF has moved to "cleanse" the judicial system of non-Muslims; since 1989, no new non-Muslim judges have been appointed to the judiciary.[22]

According to the U.S. Department of State, a Muslim man may marry a non-Muslim in Sudan, but a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim unless he converts to Islam. Furthermore, while non-Muslims may convert to Islam, the 1991 Criminal Act makes apostasy (including conversion to another religion) on the part of a Muslim punishable by death.[23] As detailed in the State Department report:

Muslims may proselytize freely, but non-Muslims are forbidden to proselytize. ... Children who have been abandoned or whose parentage is unknown - regardless of presumed religious origin - are considered Muslims and can be adopted only by Muslims. Non-Muslims may adopt only other non-Muslim children. No equivalent restriction is placed on adoption by Muslims of orphans, or other abandoned children.[24]

In northern Sudan, the Catholic Church has been a particular target. A five-year campaign of harassment against the Khartoum Catholic club (used as a school and a meeting place) concluded with the seizure of the club on February 8, 1998.[25] In addition, more than 20 persons, including Catholic priest Hilary Boma, were arrested in connection with a series of bomb explosions around Khartoum on June 30, 1998. While in prison, several priests have been tortured and threatened with crucifixion.[26] Most observers are skeptical of the charges against the clerics, noting that the government had often targeted Father Boma, the chancellor of the Khartoum archdiocese, for harassment because of his defense of the people.[27]

The NIF clearly does not represent the views of most Muslims in Sudan. As Abdullahi and Kok note,

Although about 70 percent of the population profess Islam nominally, Sudanese Muslims subscribe to a wide diversity of beliefs and practices. More significantly, the experience of Islam in the Sudan has been largely social rather than political. To the extent that Islam had a political role in the country [before 1989], it was characterized by toleration and peaceful coexistence.[28]

The author witnessed such peaceful coexistence in the Nuba Mountains where Christians and Muslims live in peace and fellowship and together resist the NIF.[29]

The NIF has also harassed northern Muslims who do not embrace its extremism. Christian Solidarity International has called attention to the plight of the Islamic Beja tribe in northeast Sudan:

The NIF has ... confiscat[ed] the Beja's fertile ancestral agricultural lands ... selling it to its wealthy supporters, amongst whom is the exiled Saudi Islamist financier and 'Godfather' of the international Islamist terrorist network, Osama bin Laden.[30]

WAR AGAINST THE SOUTHERN PEOPLE

The NIF's war machine, however, has been directed mainly against the people of the South and those in other marginalized areas where black tribes are resisting Arabization and Islamization, such as the Nuba Mountains in the center and southern Blue Nile to the east. As has been extensively documented, the Sudan government bombs civilian targets, including hospitals.[31] Villages that harbored international non-governmental aid agencies have also been special bombing targets.[32]

Churches have been targeted as well. A recent visit by an Episcopal delegation witnessed the bombing of Episcopal and Catholic churches despite the absence of resistance forces in the vicinity.[33] One member of the team, a former Navy bombardier, said that it was clear that the bombing raid intentionally targeted the churches:

The cathedral in Maridi was the first, and therefore, the primary target. It is the largest brick structure in the area, and sits on the top of a hill. It is, like most Anglican cathedrals, built in the shape of a cross. In broad daylight, it cannot possibly be mistaken for anything other than what it is - a church.[34]

The Sudan government also poisons water supplies and destroys crops - and there are credible reports that it uses chemical weapons.[35] While the government has promised to sign the international convention banning the use of chemical weapons, this appears to be a ruse.[36] Noting international action to protect the Kurds and the Kosovars, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Torit, Paride Taban, laments, "Our people ask ... are we not to be protected from the Sudanese air force by the imposition of a no-fly zone?"[37]

The aim of all these actions by the government is to demoralize the people, causing them to abandon their homes. A huge internally displaced population has been created. Many refugees are sent to "peace camps" that are "little more than death traps."[38] Refugees often must convert to Islam in order to receive food.[39] Some refugees migrate to the North and settle in shantytowns around Khartoum, where the government often destroys the churches and schools they build. The Washington Post reported in 1998 the "routine ... bulldozing - 30 times in the last eight years - of sanctuaries and schools by earthmovers guarded by truckloads of Sudanese soldiers."[40] Still others enter southern refugee camps, which may also be bombed by the government.[41]

The systematic destruction of food and water and bombing of villages has placed the population in the South and the Nuba Mountains at continuous risk of famine.[42] While the United Nations has organized relief efforts through a consortium of non-governmental organizations, called Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the Sudanese government has often denied the consortium permission to deliver food, thereby using food as a weapon against its own citizens, even at the height of famine. As recounted by Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon, the most flagrant incident occurred in 1998: "Sudan used this veto to ban relief to rebel-controlled areas for weeks on end, while simultaneously raiding farmlands. For half a year, the world averted its eyes from this use of food as an instrument of war, until 2.6 million Sudanese suffered from famine."[43]

The government appears to be using similar tactics against its opponents in the southern Blue Nile district in the vicinity of the oil fields.[44] Since 1989, the government has denied all food aid to those portions of the Nuba Mountains not under its control. Though the regime promised in May 1998 that it would permit a humanitarian assessment by the United Nations of the Nuba Mountains, it delayed permission until June 1999.[45] When the assessment team arrived, sources report, government forces shelled it.

Furthermore, the government has taken actions that have led to the revival of slavery and the slave trade. It created and armed political militias under the Popular Defense Act of 1990.[46] It also accelerated the practice begun a few years earlier of arming Muslim tribesmen, called murahleen.[47] As NIF Minister of Health Mahdi Babo Nimer admitted, "The regime has made a decision to arm the Arabs and to command them to destroy the Dinka."[48] According to two Sudanese Muslim scholars, these actions transformed traditional tribal conflicts and allowed the Muslim tribes to take Dinka slaves on a grand scale. As a result, "slavery, in its classical and known sense ... reemerged in Sudan."[49] In some cases, militias accompany military trains that travel to Wau, raiding along the way and returning with slaves.[50]

Though the government continues to deny publicly that slavery is practiced in Sudan, the evidence is undeniable.[51] Some have tried to shift the focus to the efforts by Christian Solidarity and others to redeem slaves (charging that these efforts only make the problem worse). However, the redemption of slaves is a secondary issue. Whatever the morality and/or prudence of redeeming slaves, the taking of slaves - not the freeing of them - is the problem.[52] That problem exists because of actions of the Sudanese government. United Nations Special Rapporteur Gaspar Biro (who ultimately resigned in frustration over United Nations inaction) noted that years of inaction on the part of the government, after it was fully informed of the facts surrounding the practice of slavery, have demonstrated the government's approval and support of the practice.[53] As Bona Malwal notes:

At the end of the twentieth century and at the dawn of a new millennium our people are still being branded like cattle so that their masters will recognize them; their Achilles tendons are cut so that they are no longer able to walk, their hands only being freed for slave labour; our women are forcibly infibulated, that is, genitally mutilated, to gratify the sexual tastes of their masters.[54]

GENOCIDE

The people bearing the brunt of the Sudanese regime's assault do not doubt that it is genocidal. At the 1998 Lambeth Conference, Sudanese Bishop Deng stated simply, "Genocide is taking place now."[55] Indeed, the actions for which the Sudanese government may be held responsible appear to satisfy the standard for cultural, ethnic, and religious genocide under the United Nations' Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

(a) killing members of the group

(b) causing bodily or mental harm to members of the group

(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.[56]

According to Paul Marshall, "The word genocide is ... thrown around too frequently. ... In the case of Sudan, however, it is simply a factual description."[57] The United States House of Representatives recognized that the actions of the Sudanese government amount to genocide in a recent resolution.[58] Formal recognition that genocide is occurring should compel the United States, as a party to the United Nations Convention, to take action.[59]

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS

The southern resistance to the NIF was badly splintered in 1991 when Riek Machar led a rebellion against John Gurang, the military leader of the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA), the main southern resistance force. (The SPLA is cooperating with the northern resistance under the umbrella organization, the National Democratic Alliance). As Machar is a member of the Nuer tribe and Gurang is a Dinka, their personal rivalry spilled over into tribal politics. Many Nuer joined Machar's South Sudan Defense Force (SSDF). The government took advantage of the split by aligning itself with Machar, even concluding a formal peace agreement with him in April 1997.[60]

Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, the Sudanese government has been working to bring on line untapped oil fields in the south. Sudan has been building a 1600-kilometer pipeline, with assistance from Iraq, from these fields to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.[61] Machar's forces have helped guard these fields.[62] The Sudanese government will certainly use the oil revenues to finance the war. Blomberg News reported in June that Sudan, which imported 62,000 barrels of oil a day in 1998, began exporting 150,000 barrels a day at the end of May.

However, the government's strategy received a serious blow as efforts to effect reconciliation between the Dinka and Nuer succeeded in the Wunlit Covenant of March 7.[63] A crucial element in bringing the sides together was a joint commitment to spiritual reconciliation, including confession and forgiveness. Military unity between Machar and Gurang may be restored soon, preventing the government from exploiting the oil fields.[64] Thus, the situation concerning the oil fields is currently in flux. The government has begun uprooting thousands of local people so as to depopulate the areas around the fields.[65] Yet some elements, at least, of Machar's SSDF are battling government forces.[66] In addition, overseas protests have begun against those foreign oil companies involved in exploration of the fields.[67]

In December 1998, northern opposition forces united in an historic statement that was signed by all of the opposition Islamic and secular parties, as well as prominent individual Sudanese, including Abel Alier of the Court of International Arbitration at the Hague. This statement denounces recent constitutional changes that are being touted by the NIF as evidence of its respect for pluralism. The statement noted that the constitutional revisions were cosmetic changes that leave the underlying inequalities unchanged, and are, thus, unacceptable to all parties:

The present regime worked assiduously to entrench its ideology in the country so that all other political forces operate only within bounds carefully laid down by it. ... In order to impose and entrench these ideologies, you promulgated a constitution in which the political forces, the true representative of the people, did not participate in the discussion and drafting. This situation led to the boycott of the plebiscite on the constitution by the masses. The constitution in its reality is the compilation of all the regime's previous constitutional orders. ... This in effect means that the constitution is the institutionalization of the [regime's] hegemony, as it has been designed to concentrate all powers exclusively in the hands of the regime.[68]

The statement also recognizes the right of the South to autonomy and self-determination.

The rights to autonomy and self-determination, along with separation of church and state, are cardinal principles of the Declaration of Principles of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). IGAD's peace initiative began in 1993, when leaders from four other African countries - Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea - following an earlier invitation from Lt. Gen. Omer Hassan El Beshir, met with representatives of both sides of the Sudanese conflict.[69]

IGAD negotiations have been hampered by the border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which the government of Sudan has exploited.[70] However, it seems that a peace agreement between those two states may be at hand.[71] If so, it would position a revived IGAD to play the central role in negotiations between the parties.

The IGAD process offers hope for a negotiated settlement. But the remaining difficulties should not be underestimated. As the December statement indicates, though the government of Sudan has endorsed the Declaration of Principles, it has been trying to find a way to avoid compliance. The government of Sudan is adept at making promises, but it seldom keeps them.[72] Thus, international pressure will be necessary to force the Sudanese government to abide by the Declaration.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

At this critical time, the United States must take resolute action to end the human rights violations of the Sudanese government's brutal war against its own people. Over the past several years, Sudan has been implicated in the assassination attempt against President Mubarak of Egypt and in the bombing of the World Trade Towers in New York.[73] Sudan has been placed on the State Department's terrorist list for supporting international terrorism.[74] Further, Sudan has sponsored rebellious forces in its southern neighbors, such as Uganda, which alleges that its children are being abducted into slavery.[75] A recent report states that fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden is buying child slaves from kidnappers to work on his marijuana farms in Sudan.[76] If the Sudanese government is able to overrun the South, it is likely, with its new oil revenues, to become an even more destabilizing force in the region and around the world. The aim of U.S. policy should be to convince the Sudanese government that it cannot overrun the South.

· The United States should continue, and accelerate, diplomatic and economic pressure on the government of Sudan to cause it to agree to terms for a just peace with the South and other marginalized areas in accord with the Declaration of Principles. The existing sanctions, established by President Clinton's Executive Order 13067 (November 4, 1997), should be maintained and strengthened to address the sale of securities of companies developing the oil fields for the government. No licenses should be granted, nor should any existing licenses be extended, for the importation of Sudan's major cash crop, gum arabic, into the United States.

· The Clinton administration has indicated that it will appoint, as many observers have long advocated,[77] a special envoy to Sudan.[78] This will be a futile gesture, however, unless the envoy's portfolio is to support and strengthen the ongoing IGAD peace process, rather than operate outside it.

· In the last few months, both houses of Congress have passed resolutions strongly condemning the abuses committed by the Sudanese regime.[79] Splendid words, however, must be followed by resolute deeds. Congress should explore every means of pressuring the United Nations to cease permitting the government of Sudan to veto deliveries of food by Operation Lifeline Sudan to starving people. Unless this practice ends, Congress should reprogram foreign operations appropriations for voluntary contributions to the United Nations to non-governmental organizations, including indigenous churches operating outside OLS.

· Congress should instruct the Agency for International Development to support reconciliation efforts and aid the development of infrastructure and the strengthening of existing programs for building civil society in the South.

· The State Department should work with the United Nations to select, train and place human rights monitors in southern Sudan. Additionally, the department should work with UNICEF to establish a system to trace and repatriate slaves.

· In order to safeguard and sustain threatened civilian populations, Congress and the president should consider action - in conjunction with either the Organization of African States, IGAD, or the United Nations - to establish a "no fly" zone in southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and other marginalized areas unless the government of Sudan immediately and unilaterally ceases the practice of targeting civilians and permits the delivery of food aid wherever and whenever it is needed.

· Given the critical role that the new oil reserves might play in enabling the Sudanese government to oppress its own people and to export terrorism, the president should consider whether any action should be taken to disrupt the pipeline.

· Finally, the United States should instruct its ambassador to the United Nations to make a public statement that the United States finds that genocide, within the meaning of the U.N. Convention, is occurring in Sudan, and thereby call upon the Security Council and other appropriate United Nations bodies to take action to stop it.[80]

***

Mr. Saunders serves as human rights and foreign policy counsel to the Family Research Council. An attorney who specializes in international human rights law, he previously served the Washington office of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and signed the Ramsey Colloquium's statement, "On Human Rights: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Fifty Years Later."

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