Jihad & Genocide
Sudan’s Islamic Government & Its Christian Citizens
by Faith McDonnell
Since gaining independence in 1956, Sudan has been plagued by civil war, the result of the Sudanese government’s desire to Islamize and Arabize all of Sudan. This so-called “Sudanization” of Sudan disregards the “Africa-ness” of much of the country: the multiplicity of languages and dialects, the Sudanese with black skin, the traditional religions of the Nilotic region, and the Christian identity of Sudan that reaches back beyond the Christians of southern Sudan, beyond the ancient Christian kingdoms of Nubia, beyond the conversion of the court official of Queen Candace of Meroe, to the prophecies of Isaiah 18, Ezekiel 29, and Zephaniah 2.
When interviewed by the Episcopal News Service in 1999, southern Sudanese politician and human rights lawyer Abel Alier spelled out the intentions of the current regime. “The Sudanese government is on an Islamic crusade,” he said, explaining that it has long been the agenda of radical Islamists to see if a country of varied racial, cultural, and religious populations could be totally Islamized and Arabized. The “Sudanese experiment,” well-funded by the Arab world, would be followed by the rest of Africa, and beyond.
Days of Destruction
The only years of relative peace until the current ceasefire were those between 1972 and 1983, when the Addis Ababa Agreement created a separate Southern Regional Government subordinate to the central government in Khartoum. Islamist hardliners in the north were unhappy with these concessions, however, and Hassan al Turabi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-based terrorist group that spawned Hamas, gained influence in President Jaafer Numeiri’s government with the objective of institutionalizing sharia (Islamic law) throughout Sudan.
During these years, substantial quantities of oil were discovered in southern Sudan. Southerners believed that the government intended to rob them of their natural resources—and the brutal treatment in later years of those living near the oil proved them correct. The Khartoum regime wanted the southerners’ land, but did not want the people.
On September 8, 1983, President Numeiri announced the imposition of new sharia provisions in the criminal code, to be applied to all Sudanese as Turabi had wished. Full sharia includes such punishments as cross amputations (cutting off the left hand and right foot, for instance), stonings, floggings, discrimination against non-Muslims (for instance, the testimony of a non-Muslim man is worth only half that of a Muslim man), and death sentences for apostasy and blasphemy. Previously, Islamic law had been confined to its family law provisions for Muslims in the north.
“All Southerners were shocked by this development—the abrogation of the September Laws has been one of the unbending demands of Southern resistance ever since 1983,” wrote the authors of Day of Devastation, Day of Contentment in 2000. Christians
protested against the imposition of Islamic laws on non-Muslims, feeling that Christians were treated more harshly. Church leaders protested against the cruelty of many of the punishments—which they said degraded the victim, elevated extreme punishment above the rehabilitation of the offender, and “dulled the moral and human feelings of the nation.”
Southern Sudan resisted the imposition of sharia and has paid the high price of that resistance with the blood of its people. Military resistance took the shape of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), formed in 1983 under former army colonel Dr. John Garang de Mabior. But the government did not just engage in combat with the SPLA. Numeiri’s successors ensured that the entire south was engulfed in war. And the National Islamic Front (NIF), which took power in Khartoum through a military coup in 1989, has carried out relentless and horrific warfare against its own civilian population under the banner of jihad.
Faith McDonnell is Director of the Church Alliance for a New Sudan (CANS) at the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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