| "Religious Persecution in Sudan" Testimony of Jemera Rone, Human Rights Watch Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on Africa September 25, 1997 (rev.) INTRODUCTION I am Jemera Rone, counsel and Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch. Thank you for conducting this hearing on religious persecution and human rights in Sudan, and for inviting me to testify. Human Rights Watch supports sanctions in principle as a means of bringing about human rights compliance, and we consider a government as thoroughly abusive as that of Sudan to be a prime candidate for sanctions. We fear that sanctions imposed solely because of religious persecution might backfire, however, from two directions: the government of Sudan and a US administration intent on defeating the purpose of the legislation for business reasons. Based on the Sudan government's track record, we can envision that it might try to take advantage of religious persecution sanctions in two ways: a) to pit Sudanese Muslims against non-Muslims, by claiming that foreigners seek to give non-Muslims a privileged status inside Sudan (despite the fact that the bill includes religious discrimination against Muslims); and b) to garner sympathy for Sudan in the Arab and Islamic world and elsewhere as a state which is victimized by the powerful, western Christian world, solely because it is a religious Islamic state religious persecution in the reverse, if you will. The current government of Sudan uses every opportunity to present itself as an underdog that deserves the political, financial and military support of Arab and Islamic countries. Imposing sanctions solely on the basis of religious persecution would inadvertently give any US administration intent on avoiding sanctions on Sudan or elsewhere the opportunity to claim that the human rights abuses are not religious abuses. For instance, Sudan is already subject to multiple sanctions related to the government's support for terrorist groups and having a civilian government ousted by a military coup in 1989. One of the few remaining sanctions that can be applied is a ban on US investors doing business in Sudan, the so-called Occidental loophole (arising from Department of Treasury regulations under the anti-terrorism legislation). However, applying sanctions on account of religious persecution alone, instead of on account of the wholesale violation of human rights, still provides wiggle room for an executive branch eager to promote business interests. Many of the grossest abuses are related to the war and not to the religious affiliation of the victim. The way to better assure protection of religious rights is to impose sanctions on account of all abuses, including religious persecution. HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES AND THE CIVIL WAR IN SUDAN Sudan is Africa's largest country 2.5 million square kilometers approximately one-third the size of the continental US; the Nile flows through it from south to north. It is a poor country of vast distances. The Sahara desert runs through the north, and equatorial rain forests and marshes dominate the south. This government is dominated by the Islamic militant party, the National Islamic Front (NIF), that took power eight years ago in a military coup, ousting an elected civilian government. It inherited a civil war, or more correctly, came to power to prevent an imminent negotiated solution to the civil war that would have restored regional and religious rights. This civil war, which has now lasted fourteen years, is not a simple matter of north against south, Arab Muslims against Christian and animist Africans. (Anthropologists tell us that animists believe that men, animals, plants, stones and so forth are inhabited by souls, and southern Sudanese peoples practice "traditional African beliefs" honoring their ancestors.) The war is not monocausal. Religion is one but only one of the factors competing to define national identity. It is also about ethnic origin and culture, language, and race, about clashes of political systems, allocation of resources in a desperately poor country, and about the centralized elite versus the marginalized peoples in this hugely diverse polity. The civilian victims of war-time abuses by the Islamist government are not targeted solely because they are Christians; indeed, the most devastated civilians are probably not Christians at all, but practitioners of traditional African beliefs, who are by a large margin the numerical majority in the south. There are many reasons for the armed conflict between the government and the rebels. One Christian southerner told me that if all non-Muslims converted to Islam tomorrow the war would still go on, and with it the gross violations of human rights. As discussed below, there are Muslims on the rebel side, and Christians on both sides of the conflict. The war started in 1983 when a prior government (of which the NIF was a member) reneged on its agreement to give the south autonomy, and moved away from pluralism to the creation of an intolerant Islamic state. This government exploits the inherited war to justify and facilitate its efforts to convert everyone to its political Islamic agenda. Government rallies are held and the head of state addresses the participants as Muslims and encourages them to continue with the Holy War, assuring them that if they die in the war they will be religious martyrs and will receive a reward in heaven as promised in the Koran. The NIF government claims to its followers inside Sudan and to the Third World, especially to Arabs and Muslims, that it is waging a defensive holy war against a vast Christian and western conspiracy to split and destroy the Arab Islamic nation. The war is not that simple, however, even for the NIF. Nothing in Sudan is so straightforward. To start with, Sudan's estimated 26.7 million population is very diverse in religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural terms. According to the 1956 census (the only one which included ethnic origin), Sudan housed nineteen major ethnic groups and 597 subgroups, who run the racial and ethnic gamut. (Despite this diversity one thing that most have in common is that some eighty to ninety percent of all Sudanese live below the world poverty line.) Those who identified themselves as Arabs formed the largest ethnic group, at 40 percent of the population. Sudanese Arabs do not usually regard themselves as one people, however, but are composed of many different tribes found along the Nile valley and elsewhere in Sudan, with visible differences in physique, dress and, among more traditional people, facial scarification. They tend to be lighter-skinned than non-Arab Sudanese, although many Sudanese Arabs are taken for African Americans when they are in the US. Sudan's ethnic pluralism is illustrated by the fact that the Dinka are the largest single people or ethnic group in the country although they form only about 12 percent of the total population. No one inside Sudan mistakes the Dinka for Arabs; they are very tall, slim, black-skinned Africans originating in southern Sudan, where they are part of a rich mix of different African peoples of distinct physiques, customs, and languages. The Dinka are just one of the peoples who have greatly suffered in loss of lives, property, and cultural cohesion in the civil war. There are three main religious groupings in Sudan: Islam, traditional African religions, and Christianity, in that order. Islam is the state religion but only about 60 percent of the population are Muslims (all Sunni Muslims). Some 4 percent are Christians (or about 15 percent of the southern population), although that number is growing. The balance, or about 36 percent, are those who believe in traditional African religions. These groups do not live in geographically separate parts of the country; there are certainly thousands of Muslims in the south and there are millions of Christians and traditional African religionists in the north. The south, if independent, would not be considered a Christian country by culture, where Christian practices are part of the fabric of everyday life. Important customary practices that have long been an intrinsic part of southern cultures, such as polygamy, continue even though they are contrary to Christian doctrine. The numbers of Christians are growing. As Father Marc Nikkel so powerfully describes, southern Sudanese have been struggling to survive and live through a period of enormous war-caused trauma and social dislocation. Many are discarding the old ways which have not protected them from the military, cultural, religious, and linguistic onslaught of the northern Islamists. Southerners are seeking an explanation, solace and defense in Christianity and its global ties as perhaps never before. This motivation for conversion also applies to southerners, Nubas and others, who have migrated there to the north to escape the war. These marginalized peoples who are neither Muslims nor Christians are subjected to second-class citizenship and discrimination on account of their perceived "backwardness;" some northerners, in ignorance of their cultures, regard believers in traditional African religions as being a blank slate and having no culture. They believe that they are doing "pagans" a favor if they convert them to Islam, even forcefully. To better resist this imposition, many African believers convert to Christianity. Politics and war in Sudan reflect the country's complex population. Members of these three main religious groups are found on both sides of the conflict, and not in small numbers, 1/ despite the fact that the self-designated Islamic state is conducting the war as a jihad or holy war. Let me outline some of the ethnic/religious alliances in the war, and why limiting sanctions to religious persecution would backfire in this context. There are southerners and non-Muslims fighting with the government in part because the government has a successful and pernicious policy of setting southerners against each other and fomenting intra-southern ethnic hatred in the south and elsewhere. In violation of human rights requiring the state to protect minorities, the government deliberately stirs up hatred and fear of "Dinka domination" although the Dinkas roughly number only three million of a total 26.7 million. A Dinka educated in US universities, John Garang, has been the head of the principal rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), since its formation in 1983. The government takes advantage of every opening to deepen ethnic rivalries and buy off individual commanders and their followers. Government manipulation and hate politics are not the only reasons non-Muslim southerners are to be found fighting on the side of the Islamic government. Many southerners and Christians now aligned with the government were SPLA members who broke away from that rebel force in the early 1990s, due in part to SPLA human rights abuses and in part to internal power struggles. Indeed, the second-largest southern people, the Nuer, mostly participate in a breakaway wing of the SPLA led by Riak Machar and since 1991 have fought almost entirely against the SPLA. They are now formally allied with the government, and signed a peace agreement in April 1997 in which the government agrees to permit a referendum in the south on self-determination. The Nuer have a history of alternately fighting against and marrying their Dinka cousins that stretches back at least to the time anthropologists began studying them. Many Nuer converted to Christianity through the work of Presbyterian missionaries. But there are Nuers in the SPLA. The government's divide and rule policy is applied to every ethnic group, including the Dinka. There are several prominent Dinka military commanders who left the SPLA and are now on the government side. Most notorious among them is Commander Kerbino Kuanyin Bol, who made world headlines in late 1996 by holding a medical relief plane and its crew hostage, absurdly demanding millions of dollars in ransom. Kerubino was a Sudan army officer before helping form the SPLA in 1983 and once again has a high rank in the Sudan army. The government grants him total impunity for his scorched earth campaign against his own Dinka people in the southern region of Bahr El Ghazal. It is also true that his resentment of the SPLA is a personal one: for allegedly plotting a coup against Garang, he was held in arbitrary detention for five years by the SPLA, until he managed to escape. Thus the government has southerners and non-Muslims fighting on its side; the pro-government southern forces are not insignificant, and the communities they come from are not small or irrelevant. Their participation cannot be dismissed as simply the result of corrupt practices, as I have indicated. But their grievances against the SPLA are being ill-used by the government, which it seems is now attempting to save northern lives by pitting southerner against southerner. One worst-case scenario, which would entail a large loss of southern Christian and other lives, would be for the government to "give" the capital city of the south, the garrison town of Juba, to the Nuer Riek Machar's forces to defend although in its ethnic origins Juba was neither a Nuer nor a Dinka town and allow the southerners to bleed each other to death in what the NIF government can self-servingly point to as "ancient tribal hatreds," or a Rwanda scenario. There is, in short, a south-south conflict in which most are non-Muslims. Religion is not a factor in their struggle, although the Islamists in Khartoum benefit from their rivalry. Abuses committed by the government in the course of the war include extensive failure to take combatants prisoners (with the exception of foreigners allegedly fighting on the side of the rebels); indiscriminate bombardment and shelling of civilian areas in the south, the central Nuba Mountains, and now the east, and targeting landing strips where displaced civilians gathered to receive relief food from U.N. and other agencies; other denial of access by humanitarian agencies to needy civilians; beating, torturing and killing civilian detainees in garrison towns, including but not limited to the disappearance of two hundred persons in Juba in 1992, among them US AID employees; and conducting scorched earth campaigns of indiscriminate firing at villages and civilians, destroying or looting valuable assets such as cattle and grain and thus exposing the population to displacement, disease, impoverishment, and death. The African population of the Nuba Mountains, which is half Muslim and half Christian, has been subjected to enormous war-time abuses. The Nuba Mountains are not in the south but in the dead center of Sudan. The Nubas are subjected to government army scorched earth campaigns where villages, churches and mosques in areas where the SPLA had a presence are destroyed. The civilian population is driven into mis-named "peace camps" where the non-Muslims are forced to choose between conversion to Islam or starvation, and all are subjected to family-destroying practices such as repeated victimization of women by rape and involuntary separation of children for education in Koranic schools. Muslim Nubas are not exempt from internment in "peace camps" or any of these other abuses. Slavery, as now practiced in Sudan, is a form of war booty. The government turns a blind eye to the practice of soldiers and militia capturing women and children in raids on unprotected southern and Nuba villages as a way to reward its poorly-paid soldiers and militia with "free" domestic labor. Abuses committed by the rebel forces, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), include holding fellow rebels prisoner in prolonged arbitrary detention, confiscating food (including emergency relief food) from civilians, looting crops, summary executions, and disappearances. The SPLA has recruited thousands of underage boys. Indiscriminate fighting between and among rebel factions has led to numerous civilian casualties and enormous displacement of the southern population. Neither the SPLA nor other rebel factions have ever accounted for their behavior. The abuses have turned not a few communities against the SPLA. "And these are the people who want to rule us?" they ask. The SPLA, formerly a professedly Marxist rebel group, like so many others in Africa, has not chosen to define its struggle as a religious war, a war of Christians against Muslims. Indeed, the platform of the SPLA demands freedom of religion for all Sudanese and seeks a "united, secular" Sudan. The SPLA includes Muslims and traditional African believers; it includes nonsoutherners. For many years the Muslim SPLA members were mostly from the Nuba Mountains, whose SPLA forces are led by Yussif Kawa, a Muslim and former school teacher whose family includes both Christians and Muslims. In the last two years the rebel cause has been joined by more Muslim forces from other parts of Sudan, greatly increasing the numbers of Muslims fighting against the purported Islamic state. These fighting forces are composed of non-Arab Muslims, such as the eastern Beja fighters of the Beja Congress, and of Arab Muslims in the Sudan Alliance Forces (SAF), including many from traditionally privileged elites in Khartoum who seek an alternative to the NIF police state. In 1995 most of the opposition came together in an umbrella group, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), joined by the two historically largest political parties which are based on traditional conservative Sunni Muslim sects; both sects and parties follow hereditary leaders. Thus Sadiq al Mahdi of the Ansar sect is head of the Umma Party (he is the great-grandson of the Mahdi who ejected the British and Egyptians from Sudan in the late nineteenth century); Osman al Mirghani, of the Khatmiyya sect, is head of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). These two political parties each consistently out polled the National Islamic Front (NIF) when there were free elections. Ironically, the NIF was never able to come to power via elections even in the Muslim north. It had to remove the elected Muslim leadership Sadiq al Mahdi of the Ansar sect was then Prime Minister by military coup in 1989. The NIF acted when it did to prevent non-dogmatic Muslim leaders from settling the war with the south by instituting reforms that would have made the state more respectful of religious rights, more religiously neutral and less Islamic, as southerners and secularists demanded. One of the most significant political developments in recent times, which seriously undercuts the NIF government's claim to speak for the Muslim majority of Sudan, is this alliance of Muslim political and military groups with the SPLA, highlighted by the flight into exile of the former prime minister Sadiq al Mahdi in late 1996 as well as by the opening of a new military front in the eastern Sudan by the SAF, the Beja Congress, and others. In exile Sadiq al Mahdi toured the Arab world, explaining in person and as a leader of a Muslim sect as well as a political party leader, the disservice that the NIF government is doing not only to Sudan but also to moderate Muslims everywhere, and how the rights of even Muslims are not protected in this self-professedly Islamic state. Many of the government's abuses outside the war zones are familiar: they are the violations of political and civil rights used by repressive regimes to maintain their grip on power. These abuses include: arbitrary arrests under oppressive national security legislation giving security agents complete discretion to target political activists; torture in unacknowledged detention centers known as "ghost houses," leading at times to death or permanent injury; a passive judicial system from which many secularists were purged immediately after the 1989 military/Islamist coup that overthrew the elected civilian government that tolerates and/or sanctions complete impunity for security and military agents who torture or kill prisoners; trials of civilians in military courts; confiscation of homes and belonging to the political exiles, without any judicial process and without any concern for the women and children living in those homes; controls over the printed media that in effect permit only Islamists to engage in debate; denial of freedom of association by a ban on all political parties, and by permitting other civic associations, such as trade unions and professional associations of doctors, lawyers and others, to open only if they were reorganized under NIF control; denial of free assembly, enforced by police brutality; restrictions on freedom of movement inside the country and outside; denial of fair treatment of the urban poor, by forcibly evicting them from their humble homes and destroying their possessions, without notice and without compensation. Other abuses are related to the NIF's political Islamic agenda, including: a) restrictions on the movement and dress of women designed to force them into second-class citizenship; and b) imposition of a legal code based on a mean-spirited interpretation of Islam that results in different treatment of women and non-Muslims, and the disproportionate jailing of the urban poor, particularly southern women heads of household accused of brewing alcohol. The NIF aspiration to create an Islamic state with "one language, Arabic, one religion, Islam," conflicts with the demands of Sudanese that their right to practice the religion of their choice (and to preserve languages and cultures), and to be treated equally by the government be respected. The dispute over the use of the Arabic language points to another nonreligious element in the war. Arabic is the official language, spoken by at least 60 percent of the Sudanese population. There are over 115 tribal languages, of which over twenty-six are spoken by more than 100,000 people. Not all Sudanese Muslims are Arabs; some are of nomadic desert or other origin who preserve their own non-Arab culture and language, even though they also may speak Arabic. They have been marginalized historically and many are among those fighting against the Islamic central government today. Muslims who do not endorse the NIF's version of Islam and attempt to criticize the government on religious grounds are not immune from religious discrimination and persecution at the hands of the government. The death penalty for apostasy (renouncing Islam) has been enshrined in the penal code; this punishment was applied by the government then composed of the NIF and the dictator Ja'far Nimeiri in 1985, with the judicially-sanctioned execution of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, a religious Muslim leader and founder of the Republican Brothers movement. This threat underlies current government tactics to repress non-NIF Muslims, such as replacing imams and confiscation of mosques and other religious property, and harassment and jailing of Islamic leaders. The government took control of the holiest shrine of the Ansar order (the base of the Umma Party), the Omdurman religious complex of the tomb of Mohamed Ahmed al Mahdi, on May 22, 1993, and has not returned it to date. It appointed an imam to lead the prayers there, and said the move was dictated by the need to preserve the national character of the shrine. Before he went into exile in late 1996, Ansar leader and former Umma Party leader Sadiq al Mahdi was detained several times, often following homilies critical of the government, delivered as prayer leader of the Ansar at the occasion of Al Eid religious festivities. Elderly Ansar patriarchs who submitted a memorandum of protest at the 1995 arrest were themselves detained in turn. Another frequent detainee is Mohamed al Mahdi, the main imam of an Ansar mosque, a well-respected religious leader. One of his favorite themes is religious justice and tolerance, against which he regularly measures government practices. The security apparatus has detained him for up to several months at a time for critical opinions expressed in sermons. The government undertook, in mid-1993, a systematic campaign of intimidation and harassment designed to lead to the replacement of imams in mosques that Ansar al Sunna, a religious group that advocates the strict interpretation of Islam, controlled. Communities in Khartoum neighborhoods defied weeks of intimidation as truck-loads of riot police parked in front of their Ansar al Sunna mosques during Friday prayers to intimidate them into accepting government-appointed imams. Security agents made a night visit to the house of the imam of the main Ansar al Sunna mosque, threatening him with arrest if he did not leave his position; they kidnaped and beat up his mu'azzin, who calls the faithful to prayer. The government managed to remove the imam from his position but his followers in the neighborhood boycotted prayers called by the new government-installed imam, and the government ultimately abandoned its campaign. These and other abuses directed at Muslims and non-Muslims by the government have been documented by the UN Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on Religious Intolerance, Mr. Abdelfattah Amor, dated November 11, 1996. The Special Rapporteur, I should note, is a Muslim. You have already heard testimony today about religious discrimination against Christians, including that suffered by Christians living in the north and in government-controlled areas of the south. These include restrictions on movement and expression, particularly of the Christian clergy, unequal status and requirements imposed on churches, refusal to grant permits for the construction of new churches, and destruction of "illegally" build churches (together with home and schools) particularly in Khartoum. Christian leaders thought critical of the government are severely hampered in their every move. For instance, Sudan security refused me permission to interview, in private, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Juba, the southern capitol, in government hands. Two Sudan security officers came to the archbishop's office when they discovered we were to meet, and refused to leave, despite polite requests by the archbishop and me. Naturally the archbishop could not speak freely in their presence about the suffering of his flock. For protesting this interference, I was placed under virtual house arrest and my visit to Juba was cut short as I was escorted to the plane. Serious religious rights violations also occur in conjunction with the government's efforts to proselytize in prisons, the armed forces, the civil service, the universities, and other sectors of society. The Popular Defense Force (PDF), a government militia, is the principle vehicle for carrying out this agenda. Participation in forty-five days or two months of its religious-military training program, intended to create holy warriors to fight in a holy war in the south, is mandatory for civil servants and others, including university students before all universities were all closed in early 1997 to free up students for the war. The mandatory PDF training, infused as it is with Islamic religious fervor, creates an atmosphere of coercion on all participants to convert to Islam in violation of freedom of religion, or if they are already Muslim, to join in the government's particular interpretation of Islam. PDF recruits are subjected to a severe regime of exercise, sleep and food deprivation, and hours of religious studies in an effort to fire up their zeal to kill. One religious Muslim student I interviewed was so offended by this distortion of his religion that he refused to pray in the PDF camp. The rights of children are violated by the government's program for street children: it takes children off the streets without finding out if they have a family and where they are, and puts them in schools where they are given a religious Islamic education, regardless of the wishes or religion of their families. Many times southern non-Muslim children on their way to market have been involuntarily separated from their families and given an Arabic name and Islamic religious instruction. Often underage children are drafted into the army and the Popular Defense Forces. Militant Islamists try to foment religious divisions by characterizing Christianity as a "foreign" doctrine, introduced by the British colonialists to divide the country. This stirring up of animosity against Christians, which violates their right to freedom of religious belief, draws on the fact that in modern times Sudanese Christians have been mostly of southern origin. Southerners were converted by foreign (mostly European and American) missionaries beginning in the nineteenth century, when some segments of western public opinion crusaded against the continuing enslavement of African southerners. After the British and their Egyptian allies overthrew the Sudanese Mahdist (Islamic) government in 1898 and governed Sudan for the next six decades, the south was put off limits to Muslim proselytizing and opened up again to Christian missionaries. Despite this missionary work, traditional African believers still form the majority religious grouping in the south, not Christians. Muslims allege that they were persecuted in the south by Christians and foreigners. There are Muslims in the south, some descended from Arab traders and some who are indigenous non-Arab peoples who have converted to Islam. Imposition of sanctions on Sudan solely on religious persecution grounds might incorrectly give the impression that religion is the only or the main source of abuse, and it might pose a danger to the Christian communities and leaders in government areas of Sudan, including Juba. It would give the government the opportunity to again claim that Sudanese Christians are not really Sudanese despite the fact that the Christian clergy is almost entirely Sudanese and that Christians are aligned with powerful foreign countries that seek to protect the interests of their own correligionists, to guarantee them privileges not enjoyed by the general population, and to use them to destroy a country that has a Muslim majority. Fashioning sanctions so that they also apply on grounds of religious persecution of Muslims and other non-Christians will not cure the perception problem. Sudanese Muslims may believe that these sanctions are intended to benefit the Christian minority; the government must be credited with the ability to follow the debate inside the US. It may use religious persecution sanctions to shift the blame for its economic, political and military problems to the Christian communities. There is also the danger that the NIF government might try to whip up resentment and hatred of Christian communities in the north and permit NIF militias to physically attack them with impunity, as these militias have been permitted to attack students demonstrators. If the sanctions are imposed because of gross human rights abuse of all Sudanese, the NIF will be less able to play on the supposed Christian menace from within. In Sudan's historical and current context, where religious persecution is part of the wholesale violation of human rights, religious rights can best be protected by not by singling them out for special treatment but by imposing sanctions on account of all gross abuses of human rights. Footnotes: 1/One reason there are non-Muslims fighting with the government is that the government has the power of conscription and uses it to draft southern Christians and traditional African believers into its army in the north and in garrison towns in the south. It uses these non-Muslims as cannon fodder for the jihad. In this it is aided by the country's dire poverty. | |
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