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Gold/Mining/Energy : Lundin Oil (LOILY, LOILB Sweden) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mantis who wrote (1614)	5/3/2000 11:11:00 PM
From: Tomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2742

Sudan: The greatest hypocrisy & blatant double standards The Commission on International Religious Freedom's apparent concern about religious freedom and Islamic fundamentalism, while useful in attacking Sudan, did not of course extend to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia was not listed as a country of particular concern. This despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is the most fundamentalist country of all. As much has been placed on record in <<Foreign Affairs>>: "The greatest hypocrisy in the debate over political Islam is the fact that the Americans have fought a war and committed their military and diplomatic power to secure the survival of the most fundamentalist state of all - Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime's own legitimacy is based on an alliance with the Wahhabi movement, and extremely conservative Sunni sect. The Saudi government is actually more rigid in its application of Islamic law and more repressive in many respects than the one in Tehran. Saudi Arabia has no form of popular representation, political rights are totally denied to women and non-Muslims, and the regime has consistently applied sharia to criminal justice. It has financed a variety of Islamic groups worldwide, including the Hamas - Saudi Arabia, like all the other Arab oil-exporting states of the Persian Gulf, is an absolute monarchy that does not recognize the concepts of civil rights or civil liberties." Not a single church is allowed to exist in Saudi Arabia. Tens of thousands of Christian workers in Saudi are denied any freedom of worship. There are thousands of hudud punishments annually, including executions and amputations, and hundreds of people are currently incarcerated on formal religious grounds. By way of comparison, Sudanese Christians occupy key posts throughout Sudanese political life. They include the Sudanese vice-president, cabinet members, ambassadors, legislators and civil servants. There are hundreds of churches all through Sudan, north and south, and as the Commission itself has stated Christians can worship freely in these churches. Sudan may be far from perfect but it has not warranted the particular attention given to it by the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom. It is sadly clear that the Commission has allowed itself to be used for all too obvious propaganda purposes in its "focus" on Sudan. In so doing it has undermined its own credibility, as well as that of the United States Congress and government, with regard to the issue of religious freedoms. ... The blatant double standards of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom are central to its usefulness to the Clinton Administration. These double standards were highlighted by the fact that the Commission has also taken a stance, on grounds of "religious freedom" against investment in Sudanese oil projects, while it remains mute with regard to the Saudi Arabian oil industry. It is a matter of record that the Sudanese government has on several occasions invited the U.S. State Department's Committee on Religious Freedom, the Commission's forerunner, to visit Sudan to assess at first hand the religious situation in Sudan. They never visited. ... The signs are plentiful, in a visit to Sudan, that the Islam practiced there is less strict that that of Egypt, to say nothing of Saudi Arabia. One scarcely sees the hijab, the headcovering that makes many women in Egypt appear so forbidding, much less the Saudi veil. Full article: Partisan and Hypocritical: The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and Sudan By The European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council Date of Publication: May 2000 sudan.net