Sudan: Modern crusade to save souls and change Bush's foreign policy
The Independent (UK), April 14
By Declan Walsh
The Reverend Franklin Graham's executive plane was cruising at 23,000ft above the war zone. The Jesus preacher was at the controls and keeping an eagle eye out for government bombers. "I'm always looking for somewhere to hide in case there's trouble. These clouds look like a good place. I sure hope they don't have radar," he said in a soft Southern drawl.
He pushed on the controls and the plane plunged through the bank of cloud towards a rough airstrip hacked from the bush far below. Two days earlier, Mr Graham, son of the legendary TV evangelist Billy and intimate of President George Bush, had taken off in his personal jet from his home in North Carolina. Now he was touching down in the torrid heat of Sudan for a modern-day crusade.
The fundamentalist Islamic regime in Khartoum was bombing, murdering and forcing into slavery the people of the south, he said. He was bringing them medicine, Bibles and the pledge that American Christians would help them fight back.
"This country has declared a jihad on its own people," he declared. "It's wrong. It's wicked. And it's evil." Mr Graham is spearheading a powerful American lobby group, merging forces as diverse as a Jewish rabbi, a Watergate ex-convict, the arch-conservative Jesse Helms and Martin Luther King's widow, aiming to push Sudan to the top of the American foreign policy agenda. They say President Omar el Bashir is leading a corrupt and evil regime that persecutes Christians and encourages barbaric slave-taking.
But human rights atrocities are old news in Sudan and the US has traditionally shown little interest. In 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered air strikes on a Khartoum "chemical weapons plant", an attack now thought to have been a mistake. President Bush was also expected to view Sudan as another obscure African country with little strategic interest for America. Until now, that is.
European oil companies, including some British, are controversially helping the Bashir government exploit Sudan's vast oil reserves. Chevron was one of the first companies to tap the oil in the Seventies but later pulled out. Now America finds itself excluded from the new oil rush by its own trade embargo.
And then there is the Holy War. For conservative Christians such as Mr Graham, the war is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is the front line of a global war between Muslim fundamentalists allied with terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and Christian souls friendly to God and America.
Analysts and aid workers deride this view as a shallow view of a complex conflict. But it is a portrayal that sells well in the States. With an ice-chest full of cold sodas and Snickers bars, Mr Graham's Mitsubishi plane landed in Lui, a dusty town 25 miles from the front lines where his evangelical aid agency Samaritan's Purse runs one of the best hospitals in southern Sudan. Equipped with the only ultrasound machine within 1,000 miles, it is staffed by highly motivated Christians, mainly American, who cure illness by day and show Jesus videos by night.
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