News in Christian-Jewish Relations:  June 2001

John Pawlikowski, OSM, Ph.D.

Several years ago the United States Holocaust Memorial on, fulfilling a provision of its original Mandate, established a Committee on Conscience to alert the nation and the world to potential genocidal situations. The feeling ran deep among the members of the Museum’s board that memorializing the Holocaust would remain incomplete without such a contemporary component.

The current Committee on Conscience includes members of the board as well as persons well known in the public arena such as Kitty Dukakis, Robert J. Lifton, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Coles, Ambassador Lindy Boggs, and Hyman Bookbinder.

In its first public action the Committee on Conscience has issued a formal genocide warning regarding Sudan. In addition to the warning, which carries special weight because the Committee is part of an official governmental body, the Museum has mounted public programming and an exhibit on the situation in Sudan at the Museum itself. The genocidal warning is based on the following realities.

An estimated two million people, mostly civilians, have died in Sudan and some four million have been driven from their homes in the past seventeen years as a result of the civil war. The principal victims include the Dinka and Nuer peoples in southern Sudan and the Nuba who live in the central part of the country. Primary responsibility for this devastation lies with the government of Sudan, a military regime whose support comes mostly from the northern part of the country.

The Sudanese government employs a divide and conquer strategy which pits ethnic groups against each other. Rape, murder, seizure and destruction of property and food supplies are central to the government’s strategy. It tolerates the taking of slaves by Arab tribal militias that raid villages in the south and the Nuba Mountains. It also uses religion as a means to incite violence against Christians, followers of indigenous religions and Muslims who reject the government’s extreme form of Islam.

Application by the government of the "food deprivation" strategy produced a famine in southern Sudan in 1998 that endangered millions and killed tens of thousands, primarily Dinkas. The famine situation was further enhanced by food diversion policies orchestrated by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SOLA) and some local chiefs. In light of threats by the Sudanese President Omar al-Basbir the United Nations was forced to curtail humanitarian relief flights into Sudan.

A new factor has worsened the threat of genocide in recent years: oil. Western oil companies such as Talisman Energy of Canada has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Sudan. These oil revenues greatly assist the government in the purchase of weapons. They also provide it with an incentive to clear wholesale areas where the Dinka and Nuer reside in order to tap the vast oil reserves there.

Amnesty International has documented what it terms "the human price of oil" in the Sudan, describing "a pattern of extra judicial and indiscriminate killings, torture and rape--committed against people not taking active part in the hostilities."

Taken individually, each of these actions is an unmitigated disaster for the people of Sudan. Taken together, they threaten the destruction of entire groups. Hence the Committee on Conscience’s genocide warning.

In January of this year Comboni Missionaries working in southern Sudan released a document which termed the situation in Sudan "immoral and a tragic farce." The civil war, they said, has become "a struggle for power, business and greed," taking a tremendous human toll, especially on women and children. They appealed to all people of goodwill to "break the silence" and intensify mediation efforts for peace in the Sudan.

A recent delegation of United States bishops, after a visit to the Sudan, called on the United States to play a central role in the effort to end the near genocide in the Sudan. The US government must join the United Nations and the international community in this effort. Two million deaths in the Sudan is enough. Bishop John Richard, head of the episcopal delegation and of Catholic Relief Services, urged the Bush administration to take up this challenge.

TOP