(This was written for the Patheos Faith & Chelsen: Tackling Tough Topics in Church and Culture blog, where the entire article can be found.)
In his speech announcing the release of the 2016 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called out the Sudan government.
“In Sudan the government arrests, detains and intimidates clergy and church members,” Tillerson said. He added that the government “denies permits for the construction of new churches and is closing or demolishing existing ones.”
Secretary Tillerson encouraged Sudan to “engage concretely on the religious freedom action plan provided by the department last year.” But that’s not likely to happen.
Sudan is not just a country whose report card says “needs improvement” in the religious freedom category. Religious freedom violations are just the tip of the iceberg.
As Christians themselves will tell you, the Sudan government’s persecution of them and of other minorities — including black African Muslim people groups — is part of its ambitious agenda of Islamization and Arabization.
Khartoum’s desire is to remove these people groups from their own land by displacement or death, by hell or high water. And the end goal of Khartoum’s genocidal ambitions is demographic transformation of the entire country. They want to replace African people groups for jihad-sympathizers from other nations to build a new caliphate, an ambition now shared by ISIS. Ironically, Sudan gets kudos from the clueless for “accepting refugees.”
In addition, every year indicted war criminal President Omar al Bashir turns out thousands of new jihadist graduates of terrorist training camps in Sudan from countries in the Arab world, North Africa, and beyond.
Killing Civilians: Khartoum’s favorite targets
In advocacy for Sudan and other regions of Islamic supremacism, you learn to connect the dots. For Sudan, religious freedom ‘violations’ connect to: mass rape, government-orchestrated starvation, and seeing the indigenous people of Darfur, Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile State, and elsewhere as “black insects” to exterminate.
Khartoum’s genocidal ambitions would have been fulfilled long ago, if it were not for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N) and other rebel groups. They defend their people and to try to bring about a Sudan with justice and equality, religious freedom, and secular democracy. And they win militarily with little help from anyone, and with the added handicap of being treated as morally equivalent with Khartoum.
Mostly civilians have died in Khartoum’s decades of genocide that have killed over 3 million people and displaced some 5 million. The regime drops bombs from the sky onto homes, markets, schools, churches, and hospitals. They poison food supplies. They wage scorched earth campaigns. They target houses of the rebels’ supporters. And now, what we knew all along has been proven. Khartoum uses internationally-banned chemical weapons against men, women, and babies.
Khartoum’s use of chemical weapons goes back decades, but only now has been exposed.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Amnesty International reported the the use of chemical weapons in Darfur by the Khartoum regime last September. Amnesty said that “at least 30 likely chemical attacks” had taken place in the Jebel Marra area of Darfur. The documented attacks were in the period from January to September 9, 2016.
Amnesty’s Director of Crisis Research, Tirana Hassan, said of the Darfuri civilians affected by Khartoum’s chemical warfare:
The scale and brutality of these attacks is hard to put into words. The images and videos we have seen in the course of our research are truly shocking; in one a young child is screaming with pain before dying; many photos show young children covered in lesions and blisters. Some were unable to breathe and vomiting blood.
It was not all that long after the report of this monstrous evil came out that President Barack Obama decided to ease the 20 year sanctions on Sudan on a probationary basis. Former Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, justified the lifting. She said that there had been a “sea change of improvement in humanitarian access.”
