Humanitarian bases and civilians in southern Sudan will continue to be the bombing targets of Khartoum’s militant Islamic regime, despite the efforts of U.S. special envoy John Danforth, who left the country this week.
The former U.S. senator, sent to help prepare a path for ending more than 18 years of civil war, said he had made progress on three other “confidence-building” proposals put before Khartoum and the opposition Sudan People’s Liberation Movement.
The reaction from Sudan observers is mixed, according to Paul Marshall, a senior scholar at
the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House in Washington, D.C.
Halting the government’s bombing of civilian targets, including hospitals, is an essential step toward peace, Marshall told WorldNetDaily.
“Danforth is coming back and saying we’ve got three out of four, but the fourth is a big one,” he said. “You’ve got some people thinking, ‘Oh, Danforth’s selling out,’ and others saying there is some momentum right now.”
In any case, “there is a lot of diplomatic energy,” said Marshall, noting also that U.S. and Swiss-brokered cease-fire talks are under way in Switzerland. “Which way it will fall out, I’m not sure.”
Danforth, who agreed that not ceasing the bombing is a major obstacle, said progress has been made on the issues of humanitarian access to the Nuba Mountains, establishing areas and times of safety in which humanitarian assistance can be given and bringing an end to the slave trade.
Khartoum insists it must continue to bomb civilian areas because the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army intentionally has established its operations among the people.
The rebels of southern Sudan, a mostly Christian and animist region, are fighting for autonomy from the radical National Islamic Front regime, which aims to impose Islamic law on the entire country. Since 1983 about 2 million people have died from the fighting and war-related famine.
This week, a missionary base in southern Sudan that has endured 10 aerial bomb attacks in the past two years by the government army reported that it was robbed at gunpoint by “renegade elements” of the rebel SPLA. South Africa-based Frontline Fellowship, a Protestant mission, says its personnel have been threatened by the soldiers, who have stolen valuable equipment from the mission’s facilities, which include a school and health clinic.
Many hospitals have been targeted by Khartoum bombers, including facilities run by U.S.-based Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian aid group run by Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham.
“The Government of Sudan just continues to demonstrate that they are a terrorist nation,” Graham said in a statement responding to several attacks in March 2000 that resulted in casualties.
A broad-based movement in the U.S. that includes many religious groups, called the Sudan Coalition, is pressing Congress to ban from U.S. markets companies that cooperate with Khartoum. Critics of the Islamic regime charge that it is using oil revenues, gained through foreign investment and trade, to fuel its military campaign against the south.
The U.S. House of Representatives adopted a resolution in 1999 stating that “the National Islamic Front government is deliberately and systematically committing genocide in southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and the Ingressa Hills.”
