Zeev, I stick by what I said.....You are no doubt a post-modern era moral relativist like your Swedish friends, eh? Also Reverend Al Sharpton is headed to southern Sudan in a couple of weeks in order to buy back slaves taken in the oil field areas....Fortunately, something that I wanted to see happen for a long,long time, has finally happened, and that the leadership of the African American Community is now becoming directly and heavily involved in the Sudan issue....Also hats off to Mr. Steven Wondu and all of his wonderful work in Washington, D.C.,representing the SPLA, and also to the "secret" friends of the southern Sudanese in Nigeria, you know who you are....
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News Article by WP posted on March 24, 2001 at 08:20:24: EST (-5 GMT)
Christians' Plight In Sudan Tests A Bush Stance
Evangelicals Urge Intervention
By Steven Mufson
Washington Post
Saturday, March 24, 2001; Page A01
It's a long way from Room 116 at the Longworth House Office Building to the southern part of Sudan, but an unusual assortment of people gathered in the congressional meeting room last month to plot ways to shorten the diplomatic distance.
Among the 40 activists were evangelical Christians, a rabbi, a black radio talk show host and aides to conservative senators -- all united in a crusade for U.S. intervention to help Sudan's largely Christian south in its civil war with a predominantly Islamic government in the north.
Many in the room had personally traveled to Sudan to pay money to "redeem" southerners abducted by northern raiders and pressed into slavery. "I felt like someone put me in a time machine, like I was in a scene from 'Roots,' " the radio host, Joe Madison, said of his visit to Africa's most expansive country. "I was literally just torn apart."
Such passionate appeals are quickly making the 17-year-old Sudanese civil war the first test of the Bush administration's posture toward humanitarian crises abroad.
Although the fighting has contributed to more than 2 million deaths from violence and hunger, no clear U.S. national interests are at stake. American companies have no large investments in Sudan, and it is far from U.S. bases. It appears to be precisely the kind of place that President Bush and his advisers said they wanted to avoid during last year's election campaign, when they criticized the Clinton administration for undertaking "nation building" and failing to focus on the "big" foreign policy issues, such as Russia and China.
Yet the persecution of Christians and minority ethnic groups in southern Sudan has mobilized many parts of the Republican base, from neoconservative interventionists to evangelical Christians. They are pressing for steps such as tightening economic sanctions, sending a special envoy, arming southern forces or even declaring "no-fly" zones similar to those over Iraq, which would require U.S. military action.
In the process, they are pushing Sudan onto the administration's foreign policy agenda and forcing Bush to choose between his campaign promises and an ardent, vocal wing of his party.
Alliance Finds an Audience
The people who gathered at the Longworth Building last month reflected this diverse coalition. They included conservative Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.); liberal former D.C. delegate Walter Fauntroy (D); Rabbi David Saperstein of the Reform Judaism Social Action Center; and an aide to the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham.
"To me this is a moral outrage," said the younger Graham, who gave the invocation at Bush's inauguration and whose organization, Samaritan's Purse, runs a hospital in southern Sudan that has been bombed nine times. "We should use our economic power to bring this [Sudanese] government down. We should use our political power to persuade them to change their policies. And, if need be, use the military option as a last resort," he said.
The administration is starting to listen. Last week, White House political adviser Karl Rove met with Saperstein, former education secretary William Bennett, prison evangelist Chuck Colson and others to discuss U.S. policy options for Sudan.
"Whatever the policy discipline that people seek to impose, they never stop being human beings in a very deep way," Saperstein said afterward. "Whatever the policy analysis, this is an issue that clearly touches the conscience and soul of some of the leaders of this administration."
Politics matter too. Earlier this month, at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was cross-examined on U.S. policy toward Sudan by Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Powell also met with Wolf, the new head of the appropriations subcommittee that handles the State Department's budget. Frist, Brownback and Wolf have all visited southern Sudan.
On Thursday, at the dedication of a cultural center at Catholic University, Bush himself took note of the issue, declaring that "we're responsible to stand for human dignity and religious freedom wherever they are denied, from Cuba to China to southern Sudan."
The civil war between Sudan's largely Arab and Islamic north and its largely black and non-Islamic south began in 1955, when southern troops mutinied and demanded autonomy or secession. A 1972 accord ended the fighting. But the discovery of oil near the middle of the country -- combined with the imposition of sharia, or Islamic law, by the government in Khartoum, the capital -- reignited the violence in 1983.
Since 1989, the United States has sent more than $1.2 billion of humanitarian aid to Sudan. But relations have been strained both by the war and by Sudan's alleged support for terrorists. U.S. Embassy personnel were withdrawn in 1996. U.S. trade sanctions were imposed in 1997; a notable exception allows imports of gum arabic, an ingredient in many packaged foods and soft drinks.
In August 1998, President Clinton unleashed a cruise missile attack on a suspected chemical weapons site, which turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory. That only added to confusion about whether the Clinton administration's top priority was to topple the Sudanese regime, push democratic reforms or concentrate on a peace settlement.
Rising Pressure for Aid
Now, pressure is mounting on the Bush administration. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, established by Congress, issued its annual report this week, branding Sudan "the world's most violent abuser of the right to freedom of religion and belief." It strongly backed tighter economic sanctions, bars to U.S. capital markets for companies exploiting Sudanese oil, the appointment of a high-profile envoy and direct U.S. assistance to Sudanese southerners.
"It may mean radios, it may mean trucks, it may mean medical kits," said one commission member. "It's not lethal aid, but I don't think you could call this humanitarian aid."
Some church groups are organizing an economic campaign modeled on the one against South Africa during the 1980s. They are pressing pension funds and universities to divest stock in companies involved in Sudan's oil sector. Several institutional investors -- including TIAA-CREF, New Jersey's state pension fund, the city of New York and the Texas teachers' retirement fund -- already have done so.
Madison, the radio host, said he is working with Fauntroy, Coretta Scott King and activist Dick Gregory to try to stop feuding within the African American community about whether people of color can enslave other people of color and whether southern Sudanese have been abducted or enslaved.
"My point is abduction is the verb, slavery is the noun," he said. Like other African Americans involved in the Sudan issue, Madison said he is amazed to be making common cause with conservatives such as Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), with whom he shook hands at a recent hearing.
Al Sharpton also is reportedly planning a trip to Sudan -- along with King, former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson and black corporate leaders -- to buy the freedom of slaves.
The U.S. Catholic Conference, which in November condemned the "cruel, fratricidal conflict in Sudan," might send a delegation led by Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law to Sudan at the end of the month. Sudan's population of 35 million includes about 2.5 million Catholics, and a total of about 5 million Christians.
Support has also come from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has made the plight of southern Sudan the first exhibit mounted by its committee of conscience. Jerry Fowler, director of the committee, said "organized violence is underway that threatens to become genocide . . . and the U.S. needs to place higher priority on it."
"I do think a critical mass is being reached. This could be the year of Sudan," added Elliott Abrams, chairman of the Committee on International Religious Freedom. "The great unknown is the administration's attitude. Some of the things said during the campaign suggest the administration wants to be careful of crusades. On the other hand, the president is an evangelical with close ties to Franklin Graham and Chuck Colson."
Colson, a Nixon administration official convicted in the Watergate scandal, now ministers to prisoners and has taken a growing interest in Sudan.
Difficult Choices
Critics of aiding southern forces point out that the leading rebel group, the Sudanese Peoples' Liberation Army, has a checkered human rights record. Recent fighting also has been reported between the SPLA and another southern group, the Sudan Peoples' Democratic Front.
One Washington think-tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has issued a report recommending that instead of aiding such groups, the Bush administration should restaff the largely empty U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, focus on negotiations to end the war, and support a "one country, two systems" plan that would preserve a single Sudan with two self-governing regions, north and south.
Timothy M. Carney, the last U.S. ambassador to Khartoum, also favors diplomacy over military aid. He flew to Sudan in January and met with all the key politicians in the north, including President Omar Hassan Bashir.
"The bottom line is that the desire for peace is real from Bashir on down, but the will has not yet crystallized," Carney said. "There is a realization that they can't win the war in the south, and they have stopped using terms like Islamic mission and jihad."
Proponents of aiding southern forces contend that the northern regime is impervious to diplomacy. "We have used that leverage and not succeeded," argued Ted Dagne, a Congressional Research Service expert on Sudan who opposes restaffing the embassy and favors support for the SPLA.
"I say to the Bush administration, 'Can you live with this government or not?' And if not, give support that would bring about the downfall of the government," he said. "There is no other way." |
