NEWS FEATURE: Religion inflames war in Sudan

c. 1998 Religion News Service AWEIL, Sudan _ Geng Kuack Athiang lost a childhood of playing in the trees with friends when soldiers on horseback stormed into his village and captured him. He says he was sent into slavery and given an Islamic name. Achol Deng Ngong lost her innocence after a similar attack on […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

AWEIL, Sudan _ Geng Kuack Athiang lost a childhood of playing in the trees with friends when soldiers on horseback stormed into his village and captured him. He says he was sent into slavery and given an Islamic name.

Achol Deng Ngong lost her innocence after a similar attack on another village separated her from her husband and child. As a slave, she says she became the concubine of a master who forced her to face Mecca and pray.


Peter Mayen Akot lost the church he helped build when soldiers scaled its roof and tore down a large cross that was the Roman Catholic community’s most sacred symbol. Akot says he watched from a hiding place as the church went up in flames.

Such stories are common in the southern part of Africa’s largest and poorest country, where persecution of Christians in the name of Islam has become a hallmark of a brutal civil war.

The Christians don’t blame Islam, which, like Christianity, is by definition a peace-loving religion. But they do blame a northern military regime for turning a decades-old conflict into a jihad, or “holy war,” targeting the black Christians of southern Sudan.

Roman Catholic Bishop Marcus Gassis said the extent of the persecution became evident to him five years ago, when he observed the bruised hands and feet of a lay religious leader, Agostino el-Nur, then 45 years old.

“He was crucified for 24 hours in the Nuba Mountains,” Gassis said. “He was not nailed but tied to a pole in the form of a cross, hands and arms outstretched. He was denied food, denied water and beaten with the butt of a gun.”

The bishop saw the victim, who lived to tell of his ordeal, a few days after his torture. “When will our holocaust end?” the bishop said he asked then.

In Sudan, the boundary between north and south has long been considered a dividing line between an Arab-Muslim culture and an African one that incorporates Christianity and tribal religions.


In the first half of this century, a colonial British government channeled Christian missionaries to the south while prohibiting Islamic proselytizing. The two sides have been at war almost continuously since the British left in 1956. An estimated 1.5 million people have died in the fighting. Meanwhile, famine brought on by the conflict has killed or threatened more than a million people.

This is a war about culture, language, race, political systems and allocations of natural resources.

It is also about religion.

Bona Mawal is a consultant to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the rebels of the south. He credits Christian nuns and priests with giving him and nearly all the learned people of southern Sudan an education.

Mawal, 60, has degrees in economics, journalism and international affairs. He has taught African history at Oxford University in England.

He said he has lost 19 brothers to the war.

“This is attempted genocide,” he said. “It’s an effort to wipe out an African group. That African group happens to be largely Christian, which makes their urge to commit genocide even stronger.”

Since 1993, the United States has considered Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism. A congressional mandate forbids U.S. economic or military aid to such countries. Although humanitarian aid has not been cut off, the United States last year imposed an embargo forbidding most companies from trading with Sudan.


A law enacted last month requires the president to take action against countries with a pattern of religious persecution. Because heavy sanctions are already in place against Sudan, it’s unclear what additional action the president might take.

In 1983, the Arab government of northern Sudan instituted strict Islamic law in the entire country. Then came a 1992 fatwa, a religious decree that gave theological justification to the extermination of non-Muslims. Gaspar Biro, special investigator for the United Nations, says the northern government publicly supported this.

A northern political party _ the Umma Party, made up mostly of Muslims _ is aligning itself with the rebels of the south while accusing the government of distorting Islamic principles.

Mohammed Abdglrhman Salih, an Umma Party official, shakes his head as he inspects a southern Sudanese village recently attacked in the name of his religion.

“They just talk about Islam to gain support from the Muslims in the north,” Salih says. “We condemn this.”

Abdullahi An-Naim, an expert in Islamic law from northern Sudan who now teaches at Emory University’s law school in Atlanta, says: “To call it jihad does not make it jihad in Islamic terms.” He says the use of the term doesn’t meet either the classic military definition or the common usage of jihad, which for most Muslims means “struggle” or “effort” on behalf of Allah, and has nothing to do with war.


That may be true, Gassis says. But it doesn’t negate the fact that Christianity and its followers have been singled out for destruction in the name of another religion.

“How can they say it’s not a religious war when people speak of a `holy war’ against the `infidels’?” Gassis says. “Who are the infidels? The Christians. Why do they target the churches? Why do they target the catechists? These people who say this isn’t a religious war are senseless.

“It’s religious persecution.”

In this civil war, slavery is a weapon.

The United Nations and human rights organizations have documented slavery in Sudan for years. The Sudanese government blames it on tribal disputes. Some doubt that the captives’ fates amount to slavery.

In a 1995 report, Human Rights Watch/Africa asserted that it’s fair to call the victims slaves. “They were taken as war booty,” the reports said. “They ended up far from their villages of origin, performing unpaid household labor and herding animals; some were sexually abused by their masters.”

Gassis says what human rights organizations and media reports often have overlooked is the increasingly religious aspect.

“Slavery is now occurring in a holy war,” Gassis says. “Anything they get from holy war is their property, including the human person. This is their interpretation of jihad.”


(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Geng Kuack Athiang, 15, is on his way home.

His ordeal began three years ago, he says, when he and his friends, playing in the trees, heard machine guns.

Athiang ran into three soldiers on horseback. Whether they were from the National Islamic Front or from a tribal militia group doing the army’s bidding, Athiang does not know.

He says he saw more than a dozen men executed, the skulls of children crushed, the arms and legs of a dozen older boys amputated.

Athiang appears fortunate. He was taken into slavery and forced to look after cattle. His master rarely beat him, he says. And he wasn’t forced to memorize the Koran and learn Islamic prayers, as many slaves are.

The Roman Catholic Athiang was, however, given an Islamic name, Ahmed Khalil. According to Paul Marshall, a Canadian expert on religious persecution, renaming slaves qualifies as persecution.

“To change a name doesn’t always mean too much in North America,” says Marshall. “But it does mean a lot in Africa. It would mean you’re trying to force someone to identify themselves as a Muslim.”


Achol Deng Ngong, 30, saw her Christianity as part of her identity. When told to face Mecca and pray five times a day, Ngong says she played dumb and refused to participate. But she says she couldn’t refuse her master, who once stabbed her in the shoulder when she tried to resist his sexual advances.

She bore two sons to her master, she says. They were given Muslim names.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM )

Famine is a man-made weapon of war in southern Sudan. It’s enough to drive David Kagunda, field program officer for the United Nations’ Operation Lifeline Sudan, crazy.

Kagunda’s job is to feed people, not save souls. But as he sees it, religion has as much to do with the starvation as anything.

The United Nations wanted to send food to the hardest-hit area, the vast Bahr el-Ghazal province, in January. But the food stayed in warehouses in Kenya because the government in Khartoum denied all flights.

By May, the government succumbed to international pressure and lifted the flight ban. According to Kagunda, the delay potentially cost 450,000 lives, nearly all of them Christians and animists.

“We can’t say people are being starved just because of religion,” Kagunda said. “But if these were Muslims in the south, all these restrictions and denials of access to get food in just wouldn’t be there.”


Horse-riding bands of militias pour down from the north to attack not only the villages but also their churches.

It happened in Maper Giir on April 4. More than 20,000 people were displaced in the raid, and 436 women and children were captured and presumably taken into slavery, says the village’s chief, John Aher Arol Aher.

But what struck Peter Mayen Akot, 22, and Samuel Akot Agok, 25, was what the troops did to the village’s Catholic church.

Akot and Agok are the church’s catechists, teaching Bible lessons and directing a choir in the absence of a priest. They say they watched two soldiers scale the thatched roof, tear off the church’s cross and toss it to the ground. Another soldier threw the cross into the sanctuary before setting fire to the structure, they say.

Christian Solidarity International has documented similar treatment of Christian churches in other villages.

“It’s part of the persecution of Christians,” Gassis says. “They want to wipe out even any sign of Christianity from the land.”

According to Akot, church attendance has increased since the attack, even though services must be held under trees.


“This has made people even more determined to be Christians,” Akot says. “The church is even fuller now because of this persecution.”

DEA END O’KEEFE

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!