RUTHFULLY YOURS

A handsome Southern Sudanese from the Shilluk people group, Simon Deng cuts a striking figure. He is tall and strong, with a row of tribal markings spanning his forehead. It was deeply moving to see Deng stride the long miles from New York to Washington, carrying an American flag to show his love for his adopted country, in his recent “Sudan Freedom Walk.” Even more moving, however, was to see this warrior weep for his homeland at the rally that ended his walk in front of the U.S. Capitol on October 7, 2010. There is much about which to weep.

A Darfurian friend, Dr. Abdelgabar Adam, joined Deng in his September 15-October 7, 2010 trek. Walking together, the two Sudanese, Christian and Muslim, symbolized the reconciliation that has taken place between two former enemy groups in Sudan. Deng and Abdelgabar worry that U.S. Sudan policy is not holding the Islamist regime in Khartoum accountable for its many violations of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), or its ongoing perpetration of genocide in Darfur. They are calling for U.S. Sudan policy to ensure a free and fair referendum on secession from Sudan for the people of South Sudan – the agreed-upon conclusion of the CPA that is set to take place on January 9, 2011. They also called for an immediate ceasefire in Darfur, where hostilities continue.

Though their journey was called “The Sudan Freedom Walk,” it was also a walk against jihad. To frame Sudan as a humanitarian crisis is to identify the effect, but not the cause, which is jihad waged by the Government of Sudan in Khartoum against all those who resist the forced imposition of Shari’a to transform the country into Africa’s largest Islamic state. Jihad has prevented freedom in Sudan. Jihad was responsible for the enslavement of tens of thousands of South Sudanese. Jihad caused the death of over 2.5 million in South Sudan, Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile, and other contested areas during the so-called civil war, as well as the death of over 400,000 Darfurians in the past decade.

In America we face the “stealth jihad” described by strategic thinkers on Islamism such as Robert Spencer, Andrew McCarthy, Frank Gaffney, and Walid Phares. In Sudan there has never been anything stealthy about jihad. When the South and then the Nuba Mountains and other marginalized areas dared to resist the forced imposition of Shari’a by the Islamists in power, all hell literally broke loose. Sudan’s National Islamic Front regime (now the National Congress Party) declared jihad against these areas of resistance. And the jihad has never been rescinded.

Regular army troops were joined by Arab militias on horseback to attack villages, killing, burning, raping, and enslaving. Antonovs, which dropped bombs on civilian sites such as churches, hospitals, market places, and schools, were followed by helicopter gunship strafing of men, women, children, and cattle. Government orchestrated-starvation through forced displacement and scorched-earth policies, setting ethnic groups against each other, abduction and forced Islamization of children for future use in the military, and extrajudicial killings were all part of the jihad playbook. Now Khartoum is using the same playbook in Darfur and elsewhere. At the same time, the regime has provided obstacles, delays, and denials throughout the five year tenure of the CPA by cynically using promises of peace in Darfur as a bargaining chip to send Western politicians bowing and scraping, and offering nothing but carrots to a regime which ought to be thrashed soundly with a big stick.

Long before the most recent North/South war, or the genocide we now acknowledge in Darfur, this Islamist Arabist minority saw itself as the elite of Sudan, and the black, Africans throughout Sudan as “slaves.” (It is remarkable that with all of the apologies issued by Western governments, church groups, and others for Western participation in the slave-trade, no one demands that the Arab world apologize for its racist enslavement of black Africans. It might be difficult, granted, since it is still going on.)