In order to assess the credibility of
the New Sudan Council of Churches, one must examine the
situation within those areas in which it exists. These are
areas controlled by the SPLA.
This organisation has
been described by the New York Times, no friend of
the Sudanese government, as "brutal and predatory"
and "an occupying army, killing, raping and pillaging".
SPLA leader John Garang has been described by the same newspaper
as a "pre-eminent war criminal". In December 1999,
Human Rights Watch stated that:
The SPLA has a history
of gross abuses of human rights and has not made any effort
to establish accountability. Its abuses today remain serious.
Human Rights Watch has
pointed to summary executions, arbitrary arrests and food
aid theft from civilians in famine areas by the SPLA. Established
and respected humanitarian organisations such as CARE, Save
the Children, World Vision, Church World Service and the
American Refugee Committee have jointly stated that the
SPLA is guilty of "the most serious human rights abuses".
The SPLA's involvement in ethnic cleansing in parts of southern
Sudan is also clear. Most recently, for example, the BBC
has reported growing friction in SPLA-controlled areas of
southern Sudan, specifically within Didinga areas:
The Didinga have accused
the SPLA of becoming an army of occupation in the area.
In addition, the Roman
Catholic Church in southern Sudan has accused the SPLA rebel
movement of stealing 65 percent of the food aid going into
those parts of southern Sudan controlled by the SPLA. Agence
France Press also reported that:
Much of the relief
food going to more than a million famine victims in
rebel-held areas of southern Sudan is ending up in the
hands of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA),
relief workers said Tuesday.
This food aid was often
quite literally taken out of the mouths of starving southern
Sudanese men, women and children at the height of the 1998
famine.
While the New Sudan Council
of Churches is publicly committed to speaking on behalf
of southern Sudanese people, particularly in respect of
political, civil and human rights, the NSCC is silent on
all these and many other gross violations of human rights
by the SPLA throughout southern Sudan. Leaving aside its
politicised origins, it is only fair to note as African
Rights has stated, that the NSCC exists "in a society
which is dominated by armed.movements", and that its
leaders are "personally vulnerable",
It is a matter of record,
for example, that the chairman of the New Sudan Council
of Churches, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Torit, Bishop
Paride Taban, has, in the words of African Rights, been
subjected to "vicious treatment". Bishop Taban
was imprisoned and publicly humiliated by the SPLA. African
Rights also reported that nuns under his care had been raped
by John Garang's forces. Church property was looted or destroyed.
Bishop Taban was again imprisoned and mistreated by SPLA
gunmen in 1992. Church property was again stolen. Given
this level of intimidation, it is perhaps unsurprising that
any NSCC criticism of human rights abuses has been mostly
directed at the government.
Nonetheless, the inability
or disinclination of the New Sudan Council of Churches to
speak out on the appalling human rights violations amongst
their very own parishioners can only but detract from their
objectivity and reliability as commentators and witnesses
on Sudanese affairs.
The New Sudan Council
of Churches' political orientation, forced or otherwise,
has certainly followed a pro-Garang line. This was clearly
manifested in the wake of the fragmentation of the SPLA
in 1991 when several senior rebel commanders broke away
from John Garang, accusing him of "war lordism",
human rights abuses and using child soldiers. Commenting
on this support for Garang, the SPLA-United grouping, one
of the breakaway rebel factions, stated that the NSCC was
not a neutral body. A SPLA-United leader, Dr Lam Akol, said
that: "Most of the Church leaders happened to be in
the area where Garang was, and could not resist the pressures
of taking sides." The NSCC has also been accused of
bias in its allocation of aid. African Rights quotes the
leader of another rival grouping to the SPLA as saying that:
"As a structure, NSCC is behind Garang. He was the
one who started it, and they are still close to him. Their
resources are almost all channelled to his areas."
African Rights' study
of churches in southern Sudan, Great Expectations: The
Civil Roles of the Churches in Southern Sudan, placed
on record the fatal limitations on the New Sudan Council
of Churches:
Church leaders in
the New Sudan recall the anti-church stand of the SPLA
in its early days, and observe continuing repression
against dissenters. Even the most courageous Church
leaders have been selective in their criticisms, choosing
not to name certain commanders responsible for abuses.
Even currently serving
SPLA national executive members such as Dr Peter Nyaba have
described SPLA abuses, abuses seemingly ignored by the NSCC:
(W)ithout sufficient
justification, the SPLA turned their guns on the civilian
population in many parts of the South.the SPLM/A.degenerated
into an agent of plunder, pillage and destructive conquest.The
SPLA became like an army of occupation in the areas
it controlled and from which the people were running
away.
Given that African Rights
also makes it clear that little if any attention is paid
to complaints by the New Sudan Council of Churches, or individual
churches, about allegations of SPLA murders, ethnic cleansing,
armed robbery, rape, forced labour, food aid diversion,
punishment beatings or theft, the effectiveness of the NSCC
on the issue of human rights is unclear, save perhaps in
its directed, "selective" and somewhat propagandistic
use by the SPLA against the government of Sudan.
An example of this use
were the comments made by Haruun Ruun, the executive director
of the NSCC, to an American church group, when he described
the SPLA as:
a guerilla movement
of mostly Christian and animist Africans fighting for
autonomy from the Arab Muslims based in the north. The
reasons behind this movement are unequal opportunity
in economics and education, racial and religious discrimination,
and suppression of human rights, especially freedom
of religion.
Ruun is conspicuously
silent about the well-documented pattern of human rights
abuse and suppression of human rights and civil liberties
in the parts of southern Sudan in which the NSCC is itself
active, choosing instead to echo SPLA positions.
Despite the fact that
it is clearly compromised, the New Sudan Council of Churches
is presented to, and accepted by, many outsiders as an independent
body in southern Sudan. An all too typical example was the
presentation of Runn, and the NSCC program director, Emmanuel
Lowila, by World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National
Association of Evangelicals, as Sudanese church leaders
who were to "provide perspective on critical Sudan
issues at consultation for U.S. Church Leaders", and
that Ruun and Lowila would share "their hopes and goals"
and would help "their American counterparts work through
their questions and concerns" about Sudan. Sudan Church
Leaders. There can be little surprise that so many American
and Canadian perspectives on Sudan have been flawed with
groups such as the NSCC providing a skewed and demonstrably
"selective" reading of events within Sudan.
This state of affairs is not a healthy one. Given its political
affinity with the SPLA, and a marked reluctance to criticise
the SPLA to any meaningful extent, for international observers
to unreservedly accept NSCC perspectives on human rights,
political developments and peace in Sudan can only but serve
to further distort an already muddied picture. At best the
NSCC serves as an apologist for the SPLA, and at worst a propagandist.
Considerable caution must be exercised in assessing statements
and claims made by the New Sudan Council of Churches.
