NEWS ANALYSIS: Diverse Religious Effort Made Sudan Peace Accord Possible

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) On July 14, 2004, the Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the mainline National Council of Churches, was arrested with a number of other protesters at the embassy of Sudan, a gesture aimed at drawing attention to conflicts in that African country. At about the same time, a group […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) On July 14, 2004, the Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the mainline National Council of Churches, was arrested with a number of other protesters at the embassy of Sudan, a gesture aimed at drawing attention to conflicts in that African country.

At about the same time, a group of evangelical leaders, meeting in Washington under the auspices of the more conservative National Association of Evangelicals, drafted a letter to President Bush praising him for his diplomatic leadership in addressing the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan but urging the administration to take additional actions against the government in Khartoum.


And, even as Edgar was being arrested, Bishop John Ricard, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Policy, was making his sixth visit to Sudan, and lobbying both his fellow bishops and U.S. government officials to alleviate the crisis in Sudan.

While it was never a full-fledged coalition, the odd alliance of U.S. religious groups has seen one part of its decades-long campaign reach fruition. On Sunday, a final peace agreement was signed between the government and southern Sudan’s People’s Liberation Movement.

It was a campaign that over the years was waged across both North America and Europe by international and national religious institutions such as the World Council of Churches and the World Evangelical Fellowship, the NAE and the NCC, as well as such groups as the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Freedom House and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. It involved lobbying governments, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience and disinvestment campaigns against corporations involved in Sudan.

Sudan has been enveloped in two bloody conflicts: a civil war between the national Islamic government in the north, and southern rebels, mostly Christian and animist, seeking more autonomy and opposing the imposition of Islamic Shariah law in their area; and a conflict in the western Darfur region that pits ethnic African tribal groups, who are primarily settled farmers, against more nomadic Arabs. In Darfur, both warring parties are Muslim.

Among Christians it was the war in the south that first sparked religious interest in Sudan _ Church World Service, the relief arm of the NCC, for example, has been working with refugees for more than 13 years _ but it has been the 18-month-old Darfur conflict that has generated the most attention and sparked the debate over whether genocide is occurring there.

Appropriately, religious leaders, including officials from the WCC and the All Africa Conference of Churches _ two groups that have long pushed for peace in Sudan _ were among the dignitaries, who also included Secretary of State Colin Powell, witnessing the ceremony ending the civil war that erupted in 1983 and cost 2 million lives.

“Many people in southern Sudan are joyful about this signing of peace,” Archbishop John Marona of the Episcopal Church of Sudan told Ecumenical News Service, the Geneva-based religious news service. “The peace means a lot to them because southern Sudan has suffered for many years.”


In Washington, Nina Shea, director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, an early and tenacious advocate of religious and political autonomy for southern Sudan, hailed the accord.

“This is a time of jubilation for the people of southern Sudan, and it is also a victory for religious freedom,” she said Monday. “For the first time in a generation, the south Sudanese people have guaranteed rights to worship.”

But the accord, which has sections covering a permanent cease fire, power sharing, wealth sharing and security issues, has yet to be implemented. Nor does it address what has become the more prominent Sudan issue: the crisis in the Darfur region, which the United States, at the urging of some religious groups, has labeled genocide.

In a statement welcoming the signing, President Bush said “the difficult work” of implementation must now begin.

“Only the implementation of this agreement in good faith can result in long-term peace and development,” he said, adding that it could “serve as an inspiration and model” for settling the Darfur conflict.

Powell, in his remarks at the signing in Nairobi, Kenya, called on the world to “stay closely engaged in Sudan in the hard work of reconstruction,” adding that the “new `partners for peace’ must work together immediately to end the violence and atrocities in Darfur _ not next month or in the interim period, but right away, starting today.”


Marona, of the Sudanese Episcopal Church, also pointed to an equally difficult implementation task: reconciliation.

“People have killed their relatives,” he said of the conflict. “This is very painful. We have to teach (people) not to pay wrong for wrong.

“They also have to forgive themselves.”

MO/PH END RNS

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