(This article was originally published by the Philos Project on June 5, 2015, and is reprinted with permission.)
Today in the Islamic Republic of Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, two Christian pastors, ministers from the South Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church, are on trial for their lives.
Today in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, the remaining men, women and children who have notfled to refugee camps and are not alongside those whose rotting flesh lies in hurriedly dug graves, sit with skeletal, haunted faces outside the hillside caves that provide their only shelter. They are waiting for the next cluster bomb to drop nonchalantly from a Sudan Air Force Antonov, as they have been for four years now. And today, Carl Medearis, an American Christian writer self-defined as “an international expert in the field of Arab-American, Christian-Muslim relations,” chuckled knowingly to his disciples and blog-followers at the thought of Sudan being “dangerous.”
In March, the families and church of the reverends Michael Yat Ruot and Peter Yen Reith were finally informed that the two men were alive. The pastors had been held incommunicado since their arrests. Yat and Yen, charged with espionage and other crimes against the state under Sudan’s notorious Criminal Act of 1991, went on trial on May 19. Three of the eight charges against them carry a possible death sentence. Punishments for the other “crimes” under which they are charged include a life sentence, confiscation of property, and flogging.
According to Middle East Concern, Yat was arrested by the dreaded National Intelligence and Security Services on Dec. 21, 2014, at the end of the church service at the ruins of the Bahri Evangelical Church where he had been in the guest preacher. He had spoken out courageously about the Sudanese government’s treatment of Christians and theirtheft and destruction of church property all over Sudan, including the church where he was preaching. The pastor is from Juba, South Sudan, but had traveled north to Sudan to seek medical treatment for his young son.
Yen, who is also from South Sudan, but who had been in Khartoum since September 2014, was taken into custody on Jan. 11, after obeying orders to appear at the Religious Affairs Office in Khartoum. It is believed he was arrested as a result of sending a letter to Sudanese authorities asking for information about Yat. At the pastors’ hearing, the prosecutor did not finish presenting his case, so the trial was adjourned until Sunday, May 31, and then extended until June 15 “to give the prosecutors more time to try building a case,” according to an update from Morning Star News.
When Sudanese prisoners – Christian or Muslim – are “incommunicado,” it is often because they are being held in one of the Sudanese government’s “ghost houses.” These are secret, unofficial detention centers where prisoners are horrifically tortured. Many reports about these ghost houses explain that prisoners are then taken to Kober Prison, where the two pastors are now incarcerated. It is not known if Yat and Yen were in a ghost house, but if so, Carl Medearis may have strolled past that very site while his Sudanese new best friend, hardline Islamist religious and political leader Hassan al Turabi (who helped to create and cover up the ghost houses), talked about how much Muslims love Jesus.
“I’ve heard that Christians around Sudan are being persecuted,” Medearis admitted. “I’ve heard the stories. I haven’t experienced them, but I know some who say they have.” But he seems to prefer to hear the stories of Turabi, the “warm, engaging, honest” perpetrator of genocide, who “talked freely of personal faith, Jesus and Christianity.”
Of Turabi, who was also a mentor to Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Medearis continued incredulously, “He’s accused of fanning the flames of terror and supporting the dictator President Bashir in his efforts against both South Sudan and Darfur.” Well, if being the one who invited Osama bin Laden to Sudan to live and do business (i.e. conduct terror operations and create al Qaeda, run a “road construction” company used to build tunnels for Hamas, etc.); promoting the slavery of South Sudanese; institutionalizing Sharia; being a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood; being complicit in genocide in both South Sudan and Darfur; and being the organizer of the Pan Arab Islamic Congress and known in western European newspapers as “The Pope of Terrorism” count as fanning the flames of terror, you could say his accusers are correct.
“But my experience was much different,” Medearis declared, with his vast empirical evidence of a day’s exposure to one of Khartoum’s greatest practitioners of the charm offensive (let’s call it charm jihad). “He had the kindest things to say about America.” Medearis provided a short video interview to prove his point.
In the months prior to Medearis’ three-day pilgrimage to Khartoum, the National Islamic Front regime, renamed the National Congress Party, tripled the number of bombsdropped on civilian areas in the Nuba Mountains. This month (June) is the fourth anniversary of the ongoing attacks on the Nuba people, whom Sudan President Omar al Bashir called “black insects,” “rubbish” and other racist terms. On June 5, 2011, NCP security forces, the Popular Defense Force, created by Medearis’ other Sudanese best friend, Foreign Minister Ali Karti, began house-to-house searches for Christians and other non-Muslims, ethnic black African Nuba (both Muslim and Christian) and members of or sympathizers with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement or other opposition parties in the Nuba Mountains capital, Kadugli.
Medearis should hear the “experience” of Brad Phillips, who has had a bit more experience in Sudan than Medearis does. The founder and president of the Persecution Project Foundation (who also worked in Sudan and South Sudan for more than 20 years), Phillips testified before Congress that “more than 5,000 ethnic Nubians who sought refuge in the United Nations Mission in Sudan compound were dragged out by NCP security forces and slaughtered at the gate while Egyptian UNMIS forces watched and in some reports actually laughed.” Images provided by the Satellite Sentinel Project and UN reports revealed that the bodies of thousands of innocent Nuba men, women and children lie in mass graves around Kadugli. But Medearis didn’t venture outside of rarified and deceptively peaceful air in Khartoum.
The only defense of the Nuba people is the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North’s fighting the ground war against Sudan’s armed forces. Even without any anti-aircraft weapons, the SPLA-N has been very successful. Although the United States Administration, the United Nations and others want to paint them as morally equivalentto, or even more at fault than, the Khartoum jihadists, they have been the only obstacle to Khartoum’s “final solution” in the Nuba Mountains.
Medearis ended his pilgrimage by demanding why the United States has sanctions on Sudan. “Fear,” he says. “America is afraid of what might come out of Sudan, so without thinking deeply about the issue, the U.S. simply slaps sanctions on a whole nation.”
Those who have thought deeply about the issue may beg to differ with Medearis. National and global security experts appreciate the sanctions placed on Sudan in 1993 as a “state sponsor of terrorism” after the first bombing of the World Trade Center. And advocates for human rights and religious freedom for Sudan’s marginalized and oppressed people groups also appreciate the sanctions. It is therefore extremely disturbing if, as Medearis claimed, “the top ranking U.S. embassy official in the country [the Charge d’Affaires, Ambassador Jerry Lanier] clearly proclaimed that the sanctions were ridiculous.”
Continuing on, Medearis asked why some Christians feel threatened, presumably by Islam. And then since no one can articulate it as he can, he answered his own question. “Fear,” he said. “Fear of the unknown. Of the strong majority taking away their rights. Fear of being hurt and even death.”
“But what does a dead man fear?” he pondered:
There are two ways to drive fear out. One is to die. Jesus calls us to come and die. To follow him into his death. Dead men don’t fear.
The other is love. Love drives out fear. God’s love for us, when fully experienced, leaves us in a state of wondrous awe. And when that love is shared with those around – whether or not they are reported to be good people or bad – love forms a bond that cannot easily be broken.
There are several problems with Medearis’ conclusions as they relate to Islamic supremacism in general and to Sudan in particular. First, it is not “fear of the unknown” by which Christians (and others who comprehend reality) are threatened (they don’t “feel” threatened; the threat exists and is very well known). Sticking to Sudan: Christians know that the regime in Khartoum officially has declared jihad against them. They know that the Islamist hardliners in Sudan are as intent upon building a caliphate as is ISIS. Imprisoned pastors Michael Yat Ruot and Peter Yen Reith know the threat they are facing.
Secondly, there is a difference between talking about living fearlessly because of following Christ while you are sipping tea with Khartoum’s powerful and – whether deliberately or not – you are being used to rehabilitate Khartoum’s image to the world, and obeying the personal call of Jesus to follow Him and die to self. Does Medearis have the nerve to stand in front of the body of a tiny Nuba child, torn in half by shrapnel from one of Khartoum’s bombs and repeat his mantra, “Dead men don’t fear”?
Medearis offers that love is the second way to drive out fear. Very true! But love – unconditional love – does not lie. The Bible says that “faithful are the wounds of a friend.” It is wonderful that Medearis loves those who commit horrific crimes against humanity in Sudan – but it does not mean that he should deny what they do, or try to undermine those who do speak the truth about them (even George Clooney!) by accusing them of being “fearful,” “threatened” or far less adept at following Jesus. He creates a false dichotomy between “the dictator President Bashir” and his friends Turabi and Karti. And if he were following his own precepts, he’d be giving a big hug to Bashir, too.
Before, during, and after Medearis’ three days in Sudan, an American who epitomizes following Christ’s call to die to self did what he does every day: showed his love “not with words, but with actions and truth” – by dealing with severed limbs, horrific burns, emotional trauma, disease and starving children. Dr. Tom Catena is the only surgeon for more than a million people in the Nuba Mountains. In Mother of Mercy Hospital in the village of Gidel, Catena conducts more than 1,000 surgeries per year, taking care of men, women and children who are the victims of Khartoum’s war on the Nuba. A March 18Daily Mail article about Catena explained, “Those in the know are unequivocal about exactly what it means for Dr Catena to remain, a witness to a genocide which seems to have been all but forgotten by the world.”
Mother of Mercy Hospital has been bombed deliberately by Khartoum twice since the war began. The most recent time was last May, when the Sudan Armed Forces attacked. The Daily Mail said, “When the bombs finally fell, the force was so great it blasted out the windows and buckled the roof of Dr Catena’s small home about 25 metres away.” The next day, the jets returned and bombed again, “giving weight to the fact this was not an accident, and sending the remaining patients running for the relative safety of the mountains.”
Medearis is free to think whatever he wants about Ali Karti and Hassan al Turabi, regardless of what the facts show. He is free to attend “Peace Prayer Day” in Khartoum and believe that because he asks 25 Christian leaders in a room filled with more than 100 Islamists if they are being persecuted by government and they say no, that is really the case. He is free to declare that he didn’t see any sign of persecution, while two South Sudanese pastors sit in one of Sudan’s most notorious prisons. But if he does, he also has to take responsibility for his statements and actions – statements and actions that give validity to the jihadists in Sudan and that are a slap in the face to Christians, Darfuris, Nuba and other victims of the regime’s racial and religious marginalization and persecution.
An article about Catena by the World Activist Group against Genocide demanded, “Where is the American government when American citizens are punished for doing good deeds in the middle of genocide – a genocide created by a government that has supported terrorism for over 25 years?” The sad truth is that statements that create doubt about Sudan’s persecution and genocide – and about the regime that perpetrates it – give the U.S. government and the world community one more excuse to not act to stop it.
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