As If You Yourselves Were Suffering

In the village of Pochalla, next to the spreading banana trees along the banks of the Akobo River, they came to church. This relatively small area in Eastern Equatoria, in southeast Sudan, is home to several congregations: Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Anglican and the Africa Inland Church.

The latter met in an elongated tukul, the circular mud-and-thatch huts that serve as home for the people of southern Sudan. The "pews" — merely an arrangement of boxes and logs — could hold no more than 25 or so worshipers. The musical accompaniment was a single drum, the pulpit an arrangement of sticks lashed together with elephant grass.

But the warm worship of the congregants made the rude surroundings irrelevant. They sang several hymns in Dinka, the language of the predominant tribe in southern Sudan, accompanied by the tonk- tonk- tonk of the drum. The pastor read from a Dinka-language prayer book, and I was asked to give that Sunday's message. With the help of a Dinka translator, I told the story of the prodigal son found in Luke 15, a story with special resonance for the pastoral people of the region. The service ended with a Dinka rendition of "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus."

Afterward, several worshipers surrounded me. One was eager to show me the fine lines across his forehead, the ritual scarring distinctive to the Dinka. Another had a pattern of small dots across his brow, the ritual scarring of the Nuer tribe. There were also men from the Anyak and Kakwa tribes.

The mixing of these different peoples is not to be taken for granted; the Dinka and Nuer, in particular, have been warring for generations, stealing each others' cattle, stealing children, killing each other at times. Now these men stress that they are all brothers in Christ. In fact, Eastern Equatoria is not the traditional home of the Dinka or Nuer. They come from farther west, mostly in the Bahr el Ghazal and South Kordofan regions. They are here as refugees from the famine, from the war, from the religious persecution.

A tragic history

Sudan is considered by many to be part of the land of Cush mentioned in the Old Testament. It was the site of a thriving church in the first centuries after Christ, although much of it eventually fell to the Islamic sword.

It is the largest country in Africa, home to 158 ethnic groups and 177 dialects, with Arabic and English the lingua franca for such a sprawling area and conglomerate of peoples and languages.

The British colonized Sudan in the mid-19th century and reintroduced Christianity, but in 1885 they suffered a major military defeat at the hands of an Islamic revolutionary called Mahdi. After his death in 1898, the British took Sudan back from his followers, but they were careful not to inflame Islamic sentiment in the process.

For that reason, they allowed Christian missionaries only into the southern portions of Sudan, away from the Islamic Arab population of the north. For the past century, then, the two cultures have grown culturally apart: the south, with a population largely black African, has a substantial Christian presence with a large number of animists as well. It is poor, undeveloped and largely uneducated. The north, consisting mostly of Arabs, is almost exclusively Muslim and is technologically developed with an educated populace.

Britain granted independence to Sudan in January 1956, and almost immediately civil war broke out. In fact, the country has enjoyed only 11 years of peace during its 44 years of independence. The most recent fighting began in 1983, when the Islamic government in the north reneged on an agreement to give political autonomy to the south and sought to introduce sharia, Islamic law, across the entire nation. A rebel armed force, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), arose under the leadership of Col. John Garang to seek full political independence for the south.

The current Sudanese government in Khartoum, under the control of the National Islamic Front and Sheik Hassan al-Turabi, is a particularly brutal regime. It sided with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War in 1991, and it has harbored terrorists hostile to the West. But perhaps most important, it is determined to stamp out Christianity in southern Sudan, which it sees as the final block to its spreading of Islam from the Nile basin throughout all of Africa.

The National Islamic Front will use any weapon to achieve this goal. Since 1983, 2 million people in the south have died, either directly from fighting or from war-induced famine. More than 4 million have been displaced. The Khartoum government finances a "people's army," the Popular Democratic Front, as well as bandit armies called beggara to spread terror throughout southern Sudan.

Khartoum rounds up refugees and places them in "peace villages" — refugee camps, really — where it uses food as a weapon against the people it purports to help. Martin Aligo, a Sudanese pastor in Pochalla, described what happens when a person arrives in one of these camps.

"They will ask the person's name," Aligo said, "and when he gives his African name, they will say, 'Oh, we can't write that. Here's your new name.' It's an Islamic name, and if they don't use that name, they don't eat."

To keep people from leaving the camps and returning to their villages, the government poisons the wells or plants land mines in the fields or orchards, according to Hedd Thomas, a program officer with the British relief group Christian Aid. The National Islamic Front has pursued a scorched earth policy against the south. "Whatever they find they destroy," Thomas said. "Villages, farms, people."

By destroying infrastructure, they destroy the economy, which allows the Khartoum government to move in and Islamicize the area. The National Islamic Front also steals children from the camps and forcibly enrolls them in Islamic schools in the north. "This is a form of slow-motion ethnic cleansing," Thomas said.

Michael Wall, director of ACROSS — the acronym means Association of Christian Resource Organizations Serving Sudan — describes an incident last February when a hospital in Yei was bombed by a government plane. (That hospital compound was bombed more than 13 times in 1999.) Wall was hiding in a bomb shelter with other health workers when a piece of shrapnel the size of a small book tore through the room and slammed into the wall just over his head.

Wall inscribed Psalm 91 on the ragged chunk of steel ("He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty") and now keeps it on his desk as a paperweight.

"It's no accident that they hit the hospital," Wall said. "There's a [SPLA] garrison on the outside of town, and they never bomb that. This is a breach of all international conventions and needs to be brought up to the international authorities."

Such raids are psychologically shattering, since several groups use the same type of Russian-made Antonov planes: the north to bomb, the various relief agencies to airdrop food. John Kimbrough, the Sudan program coordinator for World Relief, said, "You never know what's going to drop."