The government in the Arab north is hell-bent on establishing an Islamic theocracy -- even if it means genocide in the south. Relief from the West has been slow in coming.
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What is happening in Sudan is not a product of a natural disaster or of tribal insurrections. Rather, such atrocities are part of a systematic and unceasing war Sudan's radical Islamic regime, the National Islamic Front, or NIF, is waging against its non-Muslim and moderate-Muslim citizens in the southern third of the nation.
It is a "zero-sum conflict," says Francis Deng, who served as ambassador from Sudan to the United States under an earlier and more democratic government. "It is genocidal. . . . The bare existence of southern Sudanese with any sense of dignity and self is seen as a threat by the [Arab] north. Either you assimilate them or you eliminate them, unless you partition the country."
Sudan is one of just three officially fundamentalist Muslim states in the world. Since a 1989 coup in which Gen. Omar al-Bashir overthrew the elected government and installed Sheik Hassan al-Turabi as leader of Sudan, nothing has deterred the government from its determination to Islamize the entire nation according to sharia law. To be a member of a minority group -- whether ethnic, racial, religious or political -- is to be a second-class citizen at best. For the most part, it is to be marked by radicals for extermination.
"Sudan is a country of superlatives," says Brad Phillips, whose newly organized Persecution Project is producing Sudan: The Hidden Holocaust, the first in a series of documentaries on Africa to be released in May. "It is the largest country in Africa. It is engaged in the longest continuous civil war currently going on in the world. It is the site of some of the worst persecution of Christians."
Indeed, according to the 1999 report of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a Washington-based advocacy group, the mostly Christian and animist people of southern Sudan have suffered more war-related deaths during the last 15 years than any single population in the world -- an estimated 1.9 million people having died there. Sudan's death toll is greater than the number of fatalities suffered in current and recent conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia and Algeria combined. In addition, at least 4 million people now are internally displaced within the country, huddled in refugee camps because government armies and militias have driven them from their homelands -- burning and looting their farms, slaughtering the men and kidnapping, raping and enslaving any women and children who did not escape.
The Khartoum government last year agreed to the right to self-determination of the southern region of Sudan. A referendum was promised but never delivered -- perhaps because the population might choose to secede, and Khartoum would rather kill off the southern inhabitants than lose the untapped oil resources of the south. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and other Islamic states fund the government in its $1 million-a-day attacks.
Whatever the reasons, the West has averted its eyes from the desperate need for political change in the Sudan, raising funds for often ill-conceived and poorly executed emergency humanitarian projects in the south that have created a total dependency there on foreign aid, salving Western consciences while leaving the causes of suffering unaddressed.
The U.N.'s Operation Lifeline Sudan, or OLS, serves as the umbrella bureaucracy for dozens of the most high-profile relief organizations, including the World Food Project, the International Committee of the Red Cross and World Vision. The U.S. government, mostly through the U.S. Agency for International Development, has been the largest contributor to the U.N. relief effort, providing $800 million since 1989. On the ground, UNICEF runs the U.N. efforts in the south from a base in Lokkichoggio, Kenya.
But at the time of its founding in 1989 -- after an uncoordinated response to a 1988 famine left 250,000 dead -- OLS signed an agreement with the National Islamic Front that, in effect, gives the government the right to say when, where, how and to whom relief is delivered. Government forces consistently use food as a weapon in the areas under their control, denying it to the people they have driven to government-controlled refugee camps unless they convert to Islam and imposing flight bans on the OLS in the most needy regions for "security reasons."
Khartoum maintains control by threatening to take away what access it has deigned to give. Some allege that the Khartoum government sometimes has opened towns to OLS food shipments -- claiming kudos for its humanitarian concern -- only to raid those same villages days later to appropriate the food for use by government forces.
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On behalf of this desperate population, private organizations -- at great personal risk -- are going where the OLS groups cannot or will not go. They rely on planes and even porters and bearers to deliver any donated supplies to vast regions where the few existing roads have gone unrepaired for years.
Thorne, for example, volunteered to make his first trip to Sudan in spring 1997 when Kevin Turner, a twentysomething real-life Indiana Jones, brought Voice of the Martyrs' plea for help to the church Thorne attended with his wife and five daughters. In Africa the two men hired a DC-3 to deliver themselves and a cargo of Bibles and relief supplies to the remote Nuba mountain region in central Sudan where the carnage has been the worst and the government persistently has prohibited all relief flights.
The pilot planned to return for Thorne and Turner four days later. But less than 45 minutes after the supplies were unloaded and the plane departed, a wave of horror swept over the hundreds of families who had gathered to meet these helpers from the outside world. The two men looked over their shoulders to see Russian helicopters approaching over the foothills. Flying low, the helicopters opened fire on the panicked Christians. Running for their lives, Thorne and Turner saw women just steps away from them blown to shreds. They would run for 10 days, often by cover of night, finally escaping via a rebel airstrip 90 miles north.
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Turner moved on to found another effort, Strategic World Impact, to assess the emergency needs of the most catastrophe-ridden places on earth. He, too, continues to work in Sudan and to report about it to Congress, the State Department and the general command staff college of the U.S. Army.
Just days after returning from a trip to deliver aid in the wake of yet another government-sponsored genocide in the Nuba mountains, Turner received word that 13 of the pastors who helped him distribute aid had been captured and shot and their churches burned.
Turner calls the OLS arrangement with Khartoum "ludicrous," saying, "It would be like NATO asking Serbia if it could bring aid in to the Kosovar refugees."
Phillips tells Insight his days on the ground in Sudan delivering relief supplies and gathering footage for Persecution Project's documentary convinced him that private initiatives are the most effective in such circumstances. He says the U.N. practice of dropping bags of grain in "targeted" relief zones is to spare the international bureaucrats the inconvenience and danger of attempting to land in Sudan. "Many U.N. 'field workers' never actually set foot in Sudan," Phillips says.
Ted Dagne, the Sudan expert for the Congressional Research Service, does not equivocate either. OLS is "not effective or smart," he says. "The Sudanese government has effectively used this agreement [with OLS] to deny food to the suffering people in Sudan." He believes the agreement is to blame for the 1998 famine in which at least 100,000 died and 4.2 million were estimated at risk of starvation. He adds, "OLS has done virtually nothing to expose this government's intransigence. Even today under the agreement signed in '89, OLS simply waits for government permission."
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What will become of this holocaust? Where are the people whose pressure defeated apartheid in South Africa?
Jacobs, a political liberal, fears that a sort of self-righteous racism has fueled the inertia in the mostly white, international humanitarian-rights community toward condemning this radical Islamic regime. Conduct that would enrage us in Europeans, he says, is overlooked in Arabs. "Especially from the corner of American society that wants everyone to feel good about everyone else's cultural background -- the nonwhite bad guys get a free pass. The human-rights movement wants to improve white conduct, which is fine as a starting point. But it's a kind of racism to say we've pulled ourselves up to a certain standard, but what other people do, we can't say."
Roger Winters, director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, concludes that group's recent report: "Because the principle of self-determination is an established element of international doctrine, the U.N. Security Council should, for once, act decisively on behalf of the Sudanese people."