Africa: Sudanese Churches Feel Increased Persecution

Wide-ranging persecution against the institutional Christian church has intensified across the Sudan in recent months, say relief-agency and church officials based in Khartoum.

Soon to enter its tenth year, a jihad is being waged by northern Arab Muslims against the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south. In the war’s wake, millions of southern Sudanese blacks, who are predominantly either animist or Christian, have been displaced and subjected to unprecedented persecution.

Measures directed against Christians include closure of church properties; making conversion to Islam a prerequisite to receive food aid in the displaced camps; summary arrests; beatings and executions; imposition of shari‘a (Islamic law) requirements; and the expulsion of expatriate church workers.

Despite repeated government assurances that all Sudanese citizens have equal rights, a letter by Roman Catholic Archbishop Gabriel Zubeir states, “We see clearly that the reality is different. It is very evident that present government policies are aimed at creating one nation—a nation that is Islamic in religion and Arab in culture.”

The “Foreign” Church

In closing down Christian churches, government officials have invoked as their legal pretext the Missionary Societies Act of 1962, says William Knipe, spokesman for the Maryknoll Fathers. Knipe says the act was originally intended to curb the activities of foreign missionaries, but that the state is now interpreting the historic Sudanese church as a “foreign organization,” even though Christianity predates Islam in the Sudan by several centuries. Christians constitute an estimated 10 percent of the population.

“Without a certificate approving a fixed site for Christian assembly,” Knipe says, “all gatherings of Christians for prayer, worship, education, medical care, et cetera are forbidden.”

An official with the Sudanese Church of Christ says that those preaching at the prayer services, which are now held in private homes since the churches were closed, know they could be put under arrest immediately.

In an open letter to President Umar Hassan al-Bashir in December 1991, the Sudanese Council of Churches (SCC) called for the repeal of the 1962 Act. Claiming the act “aims at destroying Christianity in the Sudan,” the SCC complained that it relegated Sudanese Christians to “a status of foreigners if not citizens of second level.”

The SCC further claimed that the act violates human rights by putting religious preaching under government controls; forbidding land ownership and development; and proscribing the printing and distribution of Christian literature. The open letter declared the act was even being used to prevent the church from feeding victims of the ongoing civil war and resulting devastation in the country.

Churches Razed

Composed of 11 member organizations, the SCC is the only independent Sudanese organization that has not been dissolved or silenced by the Muslim fundamentalist government guided by Hasan al-Turabi, leader of the National Islamic Front.

Various denominational leaders report that state security officials routinely harass church representatives by demanding proof of authorization to exist. This has led to a cycle of applications and denials that bring an eventual “legal” closure or the actual razing of church buildings.

Knipe says such action has been stepped up significantly since Lieutenant General al-Bashir came to power in 1989. “It did not begin with this government,” Knipe says, “but they have moved it ahead.”

More than 30 Roman Catholic centers alone have been closed, although every Christian denomination has reportedly suffered the closure of some meeting places. “Sometimes,” says Knipe, “the 1962 Act is applied retroactively to church properties which predate it.”

Sudanese Christians were also alarmed by last year’s imposition of Arabic as the national medium of school instruction. The government justifies this ruling in the interests of “national unity” for Sudan, where more than 300 dialects are spoken. One government directive issued in October 1990 stated that students must pass Islamic studies to obtain entrance into higher education.

By Waddi Abdulhaqq, News Network International.

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