TRY GRADUAL AND LOGICAL:

ONE HELLHOLE UNDER GOD: Why the Republican Party suddenly cares about Sudan—or at least pretends to. (Christopher Lord, 7/27/04, NY Press)

Of all the unlikely places for America to be getting involved in another war, western Sudan has particularly little going for it. Unless you count a few million potential candidates for the Christian missionary business, there's little to interest outside entrepreneurs. What the country has in extraordinary abundance of is problems. And thanks to a surprising chain of events, it looks as though some of these problems now belong to the United States, too. [...]

[T]he antislavery idea was not quite enough to reach mainstream white churchgoers, key members of the Bush II voter base. Hence, oversimplification number two: The war in Sudan was essentially about the persecution of Christians by Muslims.

This "de-blacked" message made white evangelicals and Republican politicians comfortable, so on March 22, 2001, Republican Dick Armey, at that time House Majority Leader and ally of the evangelicals, said of Sudan: "It is the only place in the world in which religious genocide is taking place. People are being tortured, mutilated and killed solely because of their Christian faith."

The religion-driven interest in Africa led directly to the bizarre spectacle in Kampala last year, when mystified Ugandans listened to George W. tell them that God sent him there. In fact, he wasn't talking to them at all, but to Christian voters back home. Church groups, in this case white church groups, had also begun organizing around the issue of an abstinence-based AIDS policy in Africa. Without this link to his fundamentalist base, Bush would be unlikely to ever mention the continent.

But like slavery, the persecution of Christians is a side issue in Sudan, where some estimates put Christians as outnumbered two- or three-to-one by those with traditional beliefs in spirits and magic, and people now counted as Christians are recent converts, the targets of European and American missionary campaigns (and in many cases still believers in traditional spirituality). Even by evangelical standards, there are some weird versions of Christianity on offer. The notoriously brutal Lord's Resistance Army, for instance, a Ugandan group also operating in southern Sudan, claims to want a society based on the Ten Commandments—and abducts children to be soldiers.

The Muslim/anti-Muslim explanation falls apart further when you consider that there are Christians in the south, and Muslims in the north. Many American activists are attracted to the fact that the Sudan People's Liberation Movement are Christians. While this group is the main opponent of the government in the south of the country, in Darfur the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) is avowedly Muslim, and the other main opposition group, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) has a message of equality of religions under the law.

Fact is, the issue of self-determination for the south has been a contentious issue since the years before its independence in 1956, and it seems to cut straight across religious lines. Khartoum has been trying to run a centralized state, while the rebel leaders in the south of the country have wanted either to secede or achieve local power-sharing.

Against this shifting background, the Bush administration last month decided to get more actively involved. Colin Powell was the natural person to lead the charge. After Somalia, there was no question of military involvement, but the State Department threw its weight behind the idea of peaceful negotiations.

This surprised the Sudanese. America, after all, had stood by while a number of other African countries melted down. Why pick on them? As far as they're concerned, they're trying to stop their state from falling apart.

Once they realized what was happening—that they were on the receiving end of televised visits from leading American evangelists—the Khartoum government denounced the American religious right for interfering in Sudanese affairs.

"Fears are rising that if American evangelicals continue to focus exclusively on the religious dimensions of the Sudanese war, there could be a backlash from Islamic fundamentalists, thus intensifying the conflict," wrote Matthias Muindi of Arab American News in May 2001. "Analysts, mainstream Church officials, and aid workers are worried that the stance taken by the Christian Right might jeopardize relief operations and precipitate a humanitarian crisis in Sudan."

This is a pretty good description of what's happened over the last three years. In the words of a December 2002 State Department report on religious freedom: "The U.S. Government has made it clear to the [Sudanese] Government that the problem of religious freedom is one of the key impediments to an improvement in the relationship between the two countries. High-level U.S. officials and U.S. Missions to international forums have raised consistently the issue of religious freedom with both the Government and the public."

The "Peace Envoy" sent by the Bush administration in 2002 to oversee their Sudan engagement was none other than retired Senator John "Saint Jack" Danforth, who last month replaced John Negroponte as Ambassador to the U.N. Danforth is an ordained Episcopalian minister who has described himself as "a warrior doing battle for the Lord."

On paper, the U.S.-led diplomatic effort has seen modest success, with a ceasefire declared in April and a power-sharing agreement between the government and the rebels accepted in principle by both sides.

So why is this either sudden or unlikely? Doesn't the whole essay demonstrate the opposite?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2004 1:58 PM