Whereas the Government of the Republic of the Sudan and the Sudan  People's Liberation Movement/Sudan People's Liberation Army (the Parties) have been conducting negotiations in Naivasha, Kenya, since 2nd September, 2003 under the auspices of the IGAD Peace Process; and

Whereas the Parties reiterated their commitment to a negotiated, peaceful, comprehensive resolution to the Sudan Conflict within the Unity of Sudan as set forth in the Machakos Protocol of 20th July 2002; and

Now record that within the above context, the Parties have reached specific agreement on Security Arrangements during the Interim Period, the initialled text of which is annexed hereto and which will be subsequently incorporated into the final Peace Agreement; and

It is agreed and confirmed that the Parties shall immediately resume negotiations on the remaining outstanding issues and subsequently negotiate a comprehensive ceasefire agreement in order to achieve a final, comprehensive Peace Agreement in the Sudan.

Signature

Hon. Idris Mohamed Abdelgadir
For: The Government of the Sudan 

Cdr. Pa'gan Amum Okiech
For: The Sudan People's 
Liberation Movement/Army

Signature:
Witnessed by: Lt. Gen. Lazaro K. Sumbeiywo (Rtd) Special Envoy IGAD
Sudan Peace Process and On behalf of the IGAD Envoys
 

Framework Agreement on Security Arrangements During the Interim Period 
Between
The Government of the Sudan (GOS
And
The Sudan People's Liberation Movement / Sudan People's Liberation
Army (SPLM/SPLA)

1. Status Of The Two Armed Forces:

a. In the context of a united Sudan, and should the result of the referendum on self-determination confirm unity, the Parties (the Government of the Sudan and the Sudan People's liberation Movement and Army) agree to the formation of the future army of Sudan that shall be composed from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).

b. As part of a peace agreement and in order to end the war, the Parties agree that the two forces, the SAF and the SPLA shall remain separate during the Interim Period, and further agree that both forces shall be considered and treated equally as Sudan's National Armed Forces during the Interim Period taking into consideration 1(c) below.

c. The parties agree to the principles of proportional downsizing of the forces on both sides, at a suitable time, following the completion of the comprehensive ceasefire arrangements.

d. The national Armed Forces shall have no internal law and order mandate except in constitutionally specified emergencies.

2. Ceasefire:

The parties agree to an internationally monitored ceasefire which shall come into effect from the date of signature of a Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Details of the Ceasefire Agreement shall be worked out by the two parties together with the IGAD mediators and international experts.

3. Redeployment:

a. The two forces shall be disengaged, separated, encamped and redeployed as will be detailed in the Comprehensive Ceasefire Agreement.

b. Except for those deployed in the Joint/Integrated Units, the rest of the forces of SAF currently deployed in the south shall be redeployed North of the South/North border of 1/1/1956 under international monitoring and assistance within and up to two and one half years (2 1/2) from the beginning of the pre-Interim Period.

c. Except for those deployed in the Joint/Integrated Units, the rest of SPLA forces currently deployed in Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile shall be redeployed South of the South/North border of 1/1/1956 as soon as the Joint/Integrated Units are formed and deployed under international monitoring and assistance.

d. The SPLM/A undertakes that the demobilized Southern Sudanese from those currently serving in SAF in Southern Sudan shall be absorbed into various institutions of the Government of Southern Sudan along with demobilized SPLA soldiers.

e. The parties agree to implement with the assistance of the international community DDR programmes for the benefit of all those who will be affected by the reduction, demobilization and downsizing of the forces as agreed in 1(c) , 3(d) and 7(B).

4. Joint/ Integrated Units:

There shall be formed Joint/ Integrated Units consisting of equal numbers from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) during the Interim Period. The Joint/ Integrated Units shall constitute a nucleus of a post referendum army of Sudan, should the result of the referendum confirm unity, otherwise they would be dissolved and the component parts integrated into their respective forces.

4.1 Elaboration On Joint/Integrated Units:-

a. Their Character:-

They should have a new character based on a common doctrine.

b. Their Functions:-

I. They will be a symbol of national unity during the Interim Period.
II. They will be a symbol of sovereignty during the Interim Period.
III. They will participate in the defence of the country together with the two forces.
IV. They will provide a nucleus of a post Interim Period future army of the Sudan should the vote of referendum confirm unity.
V. They shall be involved in the reconstruction of the country.

c. Size and Deployment:

The size and deployment of the Joint/Integrated Units throughout the Interim Period shall be as indicated below:-

I. Southern Sudan: twenty four thousands (24.000)
II. Nuba Mountains: six thousands (6.000).
III. Southern Blue Nile: six thousands (6.000).
IV. Khartoum: three thousands (3.000).
V. Eastern Sudan:-

a. The redeployment of SPLA forces from Eastern Sudan to South of the South/North border of 1/1/1956 shall be completed within one (1) year from the beginning of the pre-Interim period.

b. The parties shall discuss the issue of establishing Joint/Integrated Units.

5. Command and Control of The Two Forces:-

1. The Parties agree to establish a Joint Defence Board (JDB) under the Presidency, and shall be comprised of the chiefs of staff of the two forces, their deputies and any number of senior officers to be agreed to by the parties. It shall take its decisions by consensus and it shall be chaired alternately by the respective Chiefs of Staff.

2. Functions of JDB:

The JDB shall perform the following functions:

a. Co-ordination between the two forces.
b. Command of the Joint/ Integrated Units.

6. Common Military Doctrine:-

The parties shall develop a common military doctrine as a basis for the Joint/Integrated Units, as well as a basis for a post Interim Period army of the Sudan, if the referendum vote is in favour of unity. The parties shall develop this common doctrine within one year  from the beginning of the Interim Period. During the Interim Period, the training of the SPLA (in the South), the SAF (in the North) and the joint units (in both North and South) will be based on this common doctrine.

7. Status of Other Armed Groups In The Country: 

a. No armed group allied to either party shall be allowed to operate outside the two forces.

b. The Parties agree that those mentioned in 7(a) who have the desire and qualify shall be incorporated into the organized forces of either Party (Army, Police, Prisons and Wildlife forces), while the rest shall be reintegrated into the civil service and civil society institutions.

c. The parties agree to address the status of other armed groups in the country with the view of achieving comprehensive peace and stability in the country and to realize full inclusiveness in the transition process.

8. National Security Organs and Police forces:

Structures and arrangements affecting all law enforcement organs, especially the Police, and National Security Organs shall be dealt with as part of the power sharing arrangements, and tied where is necessary to the appropriate level of the executive.

Done at Lake Naivasha, Simba Lodge.

Date: Thursday, September 25th, 2003.
 

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The European Union welcomes the resumption on August 10th of the IGAD-sponsored peace talks on Sudan. 

The EU considers that time is ripe to strike the final compromises on the outstanding key issues and reach a comprehensive agreement to put an end to the conflict and to the sufferings of civilian population in Sudan. 

The European Union calls on the Parties to work actively with the IGAD mediators led by the Kenyan Special Envoy with a view to achieve a comprehensive solution, based upon a strict observance of the rule of law and full respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms to fulfil the aspirations for peace and prosperity of all the Sudanese people within a unified Sudan. 

The European Union commends the pivotal role of the IGAD member states and particularly of Kenya for its facilitating role and reiterates its full and continued support for the IGAD peace process. 

The European Union assures the Parties of its readiness to assist them in the implementation of the Peace Agreement and to accompany Sudan on a path of peace building, democracy and development. 

The European Union welcomes the extension of the cessation of hostilities and of the Addendum on the Verification and Monitoring Team for a further three months and stands ready to support the monitoring mechanism.

The European Union urges the parties to fully abide by their commitments to signed agreements.

The Acceding Countries Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia, the Associated Countries Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey and the EFTA countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, members of the European Economic Area align themselves with this declaration.
 

Fear for safety / fear of torture / incommunicado detention 

Yusuf Arkoi Minawi (m), aged 45
Sherif Ahmad Ilaga (m), aged 38
Ramadan Jabir Nahar (m), aged 35
Dawood Mohammad (m), aged 55
Zakaria Mohammad (m),aged 70
Yunis Mohammad Banni (m), aged 25
Mandi Mamoun (m), aged 55

The seven people named above were all arrested in Darfur state, western Sudan. They being detained incommunicado and are at risk of torture. Amnesty International is gravely concerned for their safety.

The seven were all detained by the national security service in connection with the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) attacks on the airport in the town of El Fasher in Darfur on 24 April. They are currently being held incommunicado at an unknown location and are at risk of torture by security forces in detention. It is not known whether they have been charged with any offence. Amnesty International is concerned for their safety, especially after reported statements by the President suggesting that those who supported rebels might receive extrajudicial punishment. 

Ramadan Jabir Nahar was detained in al-Tina, North Darfur near the Sudan/Chad border on 26 April. Yusuf Arkoi Minawi, Dawood Mohammad, Sherif Ahmad Ilaga and Zakaria Mohammad were all detained in El Fasher on 27 April. Yunis Mohammad Banni was detained in Furawiyia, in Kutum, Western Darfur on 27 April and Mandi Mamoun was detained in El Fasher on 12 May. 

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The SLA has been fighting government forces since early February 2003. It accuses the government of keeping Darfur, an area that borders Chad in the western part of the country, under-developed and marginalized. Cattle and camel herders have attacked farming communities in the region, from ethnic groups such as the Fur and the Zaghawa, over scarce water resources and pasture. Dozens of villagers have been reportedly killed in such attacks; members of the security services and police were also killed. 

On 24 April, the SLA reportedly attacked the airport in El Fasher. According to Sudanese Government figures, 75 soldiers were killed and four combat aircraft were destroyed in the attack. Since then, the SLA has continued their attacks, attacking Mellit, a district capital, on 11 May. 

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible, in Arabic, English or your own language:
- expressing grave concern for the safety of Ramadan Jabir Nahar, Yusuf Arkoi Minawi, Dawood Mohammad, Sherif Ahmad Ilaga, Zakaria Mohammad, Yunis Mohammad Banni and Mandi Mamoun who were all detained in connection with the Sudan Liberation Army attack on El Fasher on 24 April;
- urging the authorities to allow the detainees immediate and unrestricted access to their relatives, legal counsel and any medical aid they may need;
- calling on the authorities to give assurances that the detainees will not be tortured or ill-treated;
- calling on the authorities to abide by its commitments under Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and either charge the detainees with a recognizably criminal offence and give them a prompt and fair trial in accordance with international standards or set them free immediately. 
 

Confiscation of Al Sahafa and Al Shari' Al Syasi newspapers

The National Security Agency has confiscated the Al Sahafa and Al Shari' Al Syasi newspapers, which were due for distribution in the early hours of Tuesday morning, 6 May 2003 and Wednesday 7 of May. The confiscation took place at the printers before distribution.

The security agency confiscated 6,000 copies of Al Sahafa and 5,000 copies Al Shari' Al Syasi. The security officer responsible is called Mohamed Osman; he came with several other officers for the confiscation of the newspapers.

The reason for the confiscation is due to the to the publication of articles by the newspaper on Saturday, 3 May 2003. The articles contained reports of the Sudanese Foreign Minister accusing Chad and Kenya of being involved in the recent unrests that took place Darfour region. However, the Foreign Minister withdrew his comments and all newspapers were ordered not to report it.

As the Al Sahafa and Al Shari' Al Syasi did not follow the restrictions, the National Security Agency (media section) ordered the editor of Al Sahafa, Ahmed Yousef Al Tai, and the political editor of Al Shari' Al Syasi, Abd Al Raziq Al Harth Ibrahim, to report back to them and not cross the so called 'red line'.

 SOAT also recieved an update information on Yousif Al Bashier Mousa, a 35-year-old reporter for the Al Sahafa daily newspaper in Nyala, Who was arrested on May 3rd, 2003. His arrest was extended for further six month .The district prosecutor  ordered his release on May 6th, after he had been interrogated and not charged. However, he was reportedly immediately re-arrested by the security forces. On May 7th, 2003 the Muhafiz (Governor) of Nyala province, Mr. Adam Jama'a, issued a decree to extend Mr. Al Bashier Mousa's detention for six months, in accordance with article 26 of the emergency Act 1998. Mr. Al Bashier Mousa was accused of "spreading incorrect information against the State." He was transferred to Nayala prison on Saturday May 10th, 2003.

 It is speculated that the reason behind the confiscation of the newspapers was to cause them financial loss, a financial punishment for not following the security agencies orders.

Background

Despite the formal ending of press censorship in Sudan in December 2002, official pressure and restrictions on the media has continued. The government has censored independent newspapers more than a dozen times over the past year. The authorities have drawn what has been termed a 'red line' to newspapers about the following issues:

The peace process
Abduction of women and children
Arrests and releases of political activities or human rights defenders
Any information or news about the security forces
Any news or information about the Popular National Congress and its leader, Hassan Al Turabi

And recently any information or news on Darfour current confilict In addition to these issues, restrictions have also been brought to bear on newspapers for their handling of the October student demonstrations, and of sexual health issues, notably female circumcision.

SOAT condemns the continuing restrictions on freedom of expression in Sudan and urges the Government to:

i)  - Cease the imposition of suspensions, pre-printing and post-printing censorship on newspapers, and allow full freedom of expression in accordance with international
human rights standards.

ii)  - Allow proper research, discussion and dissemination of information on issues related to press freedom

iii) - Guarantee the respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms throughout Sudan in accordance with national laws and international human rights standards.
 

 From a Europe looking for its soul, with Robert Schuman, to India trying to cope with misery, with Mother Teresa, Christ speaks to us through his followers and shows us how the paths of both politics and charity can converge and turn into roads to holiness. Last Sunday the philosopher Maurice Blondel helped us to understand the meaning of our existence. Archbishop Montini, the future Pope Paul VI,  spoke of Blondel as the Good Samaritan “whose intellectual charity, directed towards wounded mankind, strove to understand it and, speaking its own language, broadened its intelligence and prepared it to receive the Good News of Saving Love.” Today we are thinking of wounded humanity in Africa, and it is from that continent that the light of the Gospel is given to us to shed on our path the light of faith which opens to us the way of freedom and of holiness with Christ.

She is still hardly known in France, but the African Bakhita is like a cartoon heroine who meets Christ through slavery and finds in him the freedom to live a fully human life as a child of God. Her story might seem incredible, but it is true. It is the story of a happy little girl brutally torn from her family, sold and re-sold as a slave, a story as sorrowful as it is marvellous. For the slave Josephine went with her new masters to Italy and one of them gave her a crucifix. “It will remind you that Jesus Christ also died on the Cross for you.” The little slave received Baptism and found in her faith the strength to resist her masters who wanted to take her back to Sudan against her will. She declared: “I will not leave here. I do not wish to lose my God.” For she knew that if she went back to her home country, she would not have the freedom to practise her faith. “I looked at the crucifix, and I felt within me the peace and the strength to resist.”

Because slavery is forbidden by the law of Italy, Bakhita’s masters were obliged to leave her in Italy. So she was now a free person in a new country. Baptised and a religious Sister, as cook, laundress, embroiderer, sacristan, receptionist, she won the hearts of all by her sweet simplicity and great charity. She died on 8 February 1947, and her sanctity was recognized by the Church on 1 October of the Jubilee Year 2000. Josephine Bakhita’s message thus spread from African Sudan to the whole world at the dawn of the new millennium. She was now a Sister for the world, the product of that suffering Africa which Robert Schuman already had urged us not to forget. We Europeans may no longer have overseas territories to govern, but we still have obligations to them, as Paul VI stated in his Encyclical Populorum Progressio:  “We must help them towards a full human development, from subhuman to more human conditions.
“Subhuman conditions include both the material destitution which deprives people of the necessities of life, and the moral deprivation of those mutilated by egotism. We are thinking of oppressive structures, whether they originate from the abuse of possessions or of power, the exploitation of workers, the injustice of commercial practice. More human conditions mean a movement from misery towards the possession of the minimum needed for life, the conquest of social scourges, the broadening of knowledge, the acquisition of culture. ‘More human’ means also an increased respect for the dignity of others, an orientation towards a spirit of modest living, of co-operation for the common good, of  the will for peace. It also means man’s recognition of supreme values and of the God who is their sources and final term. Finally and above all, more human includes the gift of faith, given by God and welcomed by man, and unity in the charity of Christ who summons us to participate as sons in the life of the Living God, Father of all men.” [1]

The name “Bakhita” means in Arabic “Fortunate”, and it was the name given to our saint, with savage irony, by those who dragged her away from her loved ones. This happy Sudanese girl became the unhappy slave. And she has left us an account of her extraordinary adventures which led her from Western Sudan to Khartoum, Genoa, Venice and finally Schio. After being sold to a slave-dealer she escaped but was recaptured and sold to a very rich man and then to a Turkish General. Finally she was ransomed by the Italian consul who took her with him to Italy where she was given to Signora Michielli. This lady was anxious to take Bakhita back with her to Africa, but Bakhita, now twenty, refused. She had come to know Jesus through her contact with Italian Sisters, and, she tells us, “I refused to follow my lady to Africa because I had not finished my preparation for Baptism. I also thought that once I was baptised, I would have no chance of professing my religion in Africa. The best thing therefore was for me to remain with the Sisters.”

Eventually she was declared a free person by the King’s representative in Venice, and she received the three sacraments  of Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Eucharist from Cardinal Domenico Agostini, Patriarch of Venice. She became a happy religious Sister, giving joy to all, a living example of Christ in freedom. The little slave girl had become fully free in Jesus Christ.

The story of her life was written in Italian by Maria Luisa Daguino, and published by the Generalate of the Canossian Sisters in Rome in 1996. [2] It has now been translated into several languages, including Polish and Russian. She excites our interest as an exploited child, a humiliated woman, and a disinherited African. She also shows us how Baptism opened for her the way of freedom, leading to total consecration to God in the religious life, joyfully lived until death.

Bakhita’s native country is now known as the Independent Republic of the Sudan. Christians are numerous in Khartoum, the capital city, but they have always been persecuted. The total population of the country is about twenty million, of whom some one million are Christians. The Archbishop of Khartoum, Gabriel Zubeir Wako, spoke to the Plenary Assembly of the French Bishops of the sufferings of Sudanese Catholics when he addressed them in Lourdes on 6 November 1999. [3] It is a cry for help from the Bishop of a persecuted people to a world which remains indifferent.

“Christians are continually harassed by the security forces, subjected to constant humiliation, and often made the scapegoat in times of crisis.”
“The Church in the Sudan is neither anti-Islam nor anti-government. It is a Church living in a country divided and torn by war which seeks to bear witness to Christ, who will always be a sign of contradiction.”

“Since 1995 there has been a systematic destruction of Christian schools and prayer-centres, under the pretext either that they are situated along the path of new urban roads, or that they have been built illegally without planning permission. It is a strange thing that all the new roads should have to pass through our centres. At least twenty-five of our establishments have been demolished in this way. The Church has received no compensation for the demolished buildings, nor any alternative sites.”

“Our schools educate 42,826 pupils, most of them children of displaced persons. Since the month of May, we have been struggling to retain these schools. The governor of Khartoum wanted to close them and send the children to state schools instead. The government recently issued a statement saying that they never had any intention of taking our schools, but we are nevertheless continually harassed by unannounced inspections, sometimes carried out by armed soldiers or security officers. The principal targets of all this harassment are the personnel of the schools, the schools themselves, and the rights of ownership to the land. Another source of anxiety is the frequent use of armed police and soldiers to harass the Church.  I was arrested by a detachment of at least fifteen armed men who entered my house by climbing over the fence. Father Hilary was arrested by about ten armed men. Father Gilles was expelled, with an armed escort. The Catholic club was confiscated by two lorry loads of armed men. The same methods of intimidation are being used against our schools.”

“The present regime has made Islam its principal programme and the programme involves all the organs of the State, political, judicial, executive, legislative, economic, social. The problem however is not simply that of religion. There is also the government system which suppresses basic human rights and uses repressive measures, including secret imprisonment, summary executions, torture in detention, imprisonment without trial. There is also the whole machinery of intimidation, designed to operate outside the law.”

“We must not confuse political problems created by governments with the attitude of ordinary Muslims. In the Sudan, Muslims and Christians live and work side-by-side. It is at least partly true to say that tolerance and mutual respect are generally speaking characteristics of Sudanese culture. The spirit of good neighbourliness is also part of the tradition of most of the tribes. Left to themselves, without political pressure, there would be no grounds for accusing the Sudanese of mutual persecution.”

“In spite of all, the Church struggles to continue its mission. Our priorities are evangelization and adult catechesis.”

“We wish to appeal to all the Bishops of France and to all those here present to pray for us. Ask your faithful to pray for my country and its people and to make sacrifices for them. We ask you to speak in our name and work for the establishment of a peace based on dialogue and respect for human rights in the Sudan.”

Sudan is an immense country covering almost the whole of the Nile basin. After the Romans had made themselves masters of Egypt, they began to cast jealous eyes on the Sudan, but Nero’s envoys reported that the country was too poor to be worth conquering. Later on however the Arabs were of a different opinion, and in the seventh century, also after the conquest of Egypt, they advanced as far as Nubia and began systematic slave-trading. In the nineteenth century, Mohamed Ali Khedive, viceroy of Egypt, and his son Ibrahim abolished the old chieftainships. When Great Britain was planning to mount an invasion from Egypt, Mohamed Ahmed the Mahdi, the so-called envoy of God, carried out a wholesale programme of destruction of Catholic missions, imposing the Islamic law on everyone and giving the imprisoned missionaries, men and women, the alternative of conversion to Islam or death. All opted for death, and they died in prison of misery or disease. The Mahdi’s Holy War had been victorious. Sudan had been conquered, the Church was in ruins. The population was helpless in the face of slave-traders who descended on villages and carried off men, women and children to be sold as slaves, in defiance of international treaties and with total lack of respect for any human rights. “The fact is,” wrote Bishop Comboni from El Obeid, “the Islamic government pays only lip-service to the 1856 treaty of the Congress of Paris. In Central Africa, slavery remains as flourishing as ever, but the cries of the victims are never heard far away in Europe. The desolation continues and will continue for a long time.”

We may hear what Bakhita has to say. I summarize her account, while preserving its original freshness.

“My family lived exactly in the middle of Africa. I was very happy and had no acquaintance with suffering. I was about nine years old when one morning I was walking in the fields with my friend, some distance from my home. Two strange men, both armed, suddenly leapt out of a hedge in front of us. One of them took me roughly by the arm, drew a huge knife from his belt, and told that if I cried out I would be killed. In fact I did cry for help to my father and mother, in indescribable anguish, but no one could hear me. One of the men pushed me into a filthy hut full of tools and locked the door. I stayed there for more than a month. I still remember those hours of agony. I felt that my heart would burst.”

Finally Bakhita was sold to a slave-dealer and she walked in a column for eight days, across woods and mountains, valleys and deserts. The men were in front with the women behind. They were tied together with a heavy chain locked round their necks, causing great bleeding sores. Bakhita was then dragged with her friend to the slave-market and locked in a hut. One day their warder came and took the chains off their legs, telling them to strip ears of maize and give the food to the mule. Having perhaps other things on his mind, the warder forgot to close the door when he left, and the two girls fled, with the maize in their hands.

“We spent the whole night running and panting. Sometimes we heard the roaring of wild beasts in the dark, and we climbed trees to save ourselves.”

Finally the girls were recaptured and sold to an Arab chief who flew into a rage at the slightest lack of attention. 
“He threw me on the ground and kept kicking me before leaving me half-dead.”

“Three months later, I was sold to a new master, a General in the Turkish army. We were whipped mercilessly. I doubt if in three years I passed a single day without fresh wounds. The General had a daughter, and when she discovered that I had run away from my previous master she put a heavy chain on my feet which I had to wear for over a month. I was scourged by two soldiers, and the sticks tore the flesh from my thighs, leaving a long furrow which prevented me from walking for several months.

“But the worst was still to come. With the whip waiting if I resisted, I was tattooed with six marks on the chest, sixty on the stomach, and forty-eight on the right arm. I thought I was dying, especially when the woman tattooist rubbed salt into the wounds. I was bathed in blood and had to remain lying down on a mat for more than a month, with no piece of cloth to wipe the liquid continually oozing from the wound which the salt had left half open. The reason I did not die can only have been that the Lord was miraculously preserving me for ‘better things’.

Threatened by the Mahdist rebellion, the Turkish general took flight and Bakhita was sold to the Italian consul. She had been enslaved for ten years, and now for the first time she was given clothes and began to live a more human life. After two years, the consul was recalled to Italy:

“I do not know how it was, but when I heard the name ‘Italy’, whose beauty and charm I did not know, I felt in my heart a strong desire to follow my master. It was God who wanted it. I would soon understand.”

Once in Genoa, the consul offered Bakhita as a present to the Michieli’s,  friends of his who had a big hotel at Suakin. That meant going back to Africa for another nine months. Signora Maria Tuurina Michieli became fond of Bakhita and brought her back to Italy with her daughter. When she had to leave again on business, she left both her daughter and Bakhita with the Canossian Sisters.

At this point, Signor Illuminato Checcini enters the scene. He was Madame Michieli’s manager, an upright man with a heart of gold, and he gave Bakhita a silver crucifix.

“When he made me this gift, he kissed it devoutly and explained to me that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who died for us. I do not know why it was, but a mysterious force led me to hide this crucifix in case the Signora should take it from me. I was entrusted with Madame’s daughter to Sister Maria Fabretti, who was in charge of the instruction of catechumens. When she learned that I not only wished to be a Christian but had come there precisely with that intention, she rejoiced with all her heart.”

Bakhita continues her story in moving words:

“These holy Sisters instructed me and enabled me to get to know the God whose presence I had felt in my heart from my childhood, without knowing who He was. I remembered how, on seeing the sun, the moon, the stars, and the beauties of nature, I would say to myself:  ‘Who could be the Master of all these beautiful things?’ and I had a great desire to see Him, to get to know Him, to worship Him. Now I knew him. Thank you, thank you, for God!”

In this moving testimony, Bakhita shows us how in the complete destitution of her personal journey, in spite of her agony, through all the miles of the forced march, she never lost her extraordinary peace of soul. In all her account of her sufferings, there is no word of hatred or of resentment against those whom one can hardly consider other than her executioners. Later on, when she was invited to tell her story, she would say:

“All through my life, the Lord has always been good to me. My whole life has been a gift of God. If I met these slave-traders who captured me, even those who tortured me, I would kneel down to kiss their hands. For, without them, I would never have become either a Christian or a religious.”

When I read these moving confidences of Bakhita, I cannot help thinking of my dear and venerable friend, the Vietnamese Cardinal Nguyên Van Thuân, whom the Lord called to himself last September. On 24 April 1975 Pope Paul VI had appointed him coadjutor Archbishop of Saigon, on the eve of that city’s conquest by Hô Chi Minh. As this Archbishop told me himself, on the 15 August of that same year he was dragged brutally to the government headquarters and spent the next thirteen years in detention, nine of them in solitary confinement. Part of the time he spent under electric light night and day, and at others times he was in complete darkness, also for night and day, the aim being to break his spirit by breaking the rhythm of time. But he was never broken. There was never any question of a trial. During the last years, we were neighbours on the same landing in Rome, and I heard from him many times the story of his arrest, his detention, his ingenuity in obtaining a little wine, under the pretext of medicine for the stomach, in order to celebrate the Eucharist. He was a man of unshakable patience and gentleness, able, with the strength of God, to convert successive warders. They used to say to him, “How can you say that you love us after all the suffering we have inflicted on you?" His only reply was a gentle smile, and in Rome too he continued to wear, as his cardinal’s pectoral cross, the little wooden cross and the chain made from the electric wire in his cell. I often asked him about the barbarities of his tormentors, but I never heard from his lips a word of hatred or of revenge or even complaint.  Like Bakhita, he found the strength of Christ in the prayer of Jesus on the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Like Cardinal Farnçois-Xavier Van Thuân, and like the little Bernadette of Lourdes, Bakhita found it painful to talk about herself. But she did it for the glory of God and to exalt the power of the one who had made her know salvation. Sister Giulia Campolongo knew Bakhita when she was herself a boarding-school pupil.  “When she spoke to us of the most tragic events, she never lost the expression of peace and tranquillity which was her characteristic. She did not know the meaning of the word enemy.” When she entered the religious life, any time left over from her duties as doorkeeper, cook or laundress she spent in prayer in the church. When she was asked what she was thinking about during these hours of prayer, she would reply:

“I meditate on the life of Jesus Christ, so that I may always know and love him better, and help others to know and love him.

“She often spoke to us of our Guardian Angel, and told us that he was our guide and we must follow him and never make him sad.”

“She told us that our Reverend Mother Superior had invited her to tell us something about her life as a slave. She said that remembering these episodes made her appreciate more and more the great gift which God had given her in choosing her as His spouse. Later on she would say: There are things which only the Lord has seen. One can neither speak of them nor write of them.”

In all this lapidary simplicity we see a soul remarkably open to what she called “the better things” which happened to her before her Baptism and in which she perceived the mysterious action of the Spirit who wishes all men to be saved.

When she was a happy little girl in the midst of her family, she contemplated heaven and the beauties of nature and felt a burning desire to know the author of all these marvels and to worship him. We think of the words of Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.” [4]  Bakhita found him, and she offered Him thanks in all the simplicity of her fresh heart: “Now I knew Him. Thank you, thank you, my God.”

This voice from Africa echoes Francis of Assisi’s Hymn of Creatures which in turn recalls the cry of the Psalmist:

The heavens are telling the glory of God;

And the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night  declares knowledge. (Ps 19, 1-2)

O Lord, our God,
How majestic is thy name in all the earth!
Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted
By the mouths of babes and infants,
Thou hast founded a bulwark because of thy foes,
To still the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at the heavens, the work of thy hands,
The moon and the stars which thou hast established:
What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?
Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
And dost crown him with glory and honour…
O Lord, our Lord,
How majestic is thy name in all the earth!  (Ps 8)

Pope John-Paul II canonized our little Bakhita on 1 October 2000, thus offering her to us as a model of holiness. 

If we are not careful, the wonders of modern scientific discoveries and of technological progress, the growth of the human sciences and of urbanization, can obscure our vision as believers and lead us into a scientific positivism which claims that science can do everything and the hypothesis of God is therefore no longer needed. It is salutary, after listening to the philosophical analyses of a Maurice Blondel, to rediscover the open-eyed wonder of little Bakhita looking at the stars of heaven. Both of these Christian people provide us with an antidote against modern scientism, the science which recognizes no frontiers. “The positive sciences are not sufficient,” repeated the philosopher of Aix, “because they are not sufficient.” As believers, we trust like Blondel in the power of reason, while like him too we rely on faith. We do not limp between two antagonistic systems, but we go ahead with confidence, standing solidly on both of our legs. Science can have nothing to tell us about the origin of things, any more than faith can tell us about the mechanism of the material world. For science, knowing means explaining. For faith, it means loving. We are all searching for truth and love, and we need them both, the love of truth and the truth of love. It is love, the poet Dante tells us, which moves heaven, earth and stars. Bakhita offers us the same message. Science cannot remove the mystery dimension from the universe but it rather invites us ever more to worship its Creator, thanks to those thinkers who, led by the hand of God, continue their humble and persevering effort to penetrate the secret of
things.  [5] Faith and reason, Pope John-Paul II tells us, are the two wings which enable the human spirit to rise up to the contemplation of truth. [6] Bringing into harmony the values of science and the values of conscience  is the great moral challenge facing the coming generation. [7]

From Slavery to the Freedom of Christ

In 1462 Pius II described slavery as the great crime, the magnum scelus. It was of this crime that Bakhita was the victim, and it is still alive and well in Sudan, as we were reminded in La Croix of 12 August 2002. After twenty years of war which produced two million dead and four million displaced persons, and during which animists and Christians were the object of persecution, we have the right to our identity as Africans, as Christians, as  animists, cried Bishop Paride Taban, President of the Episcopal Conference of Southern Sudan, which is struggling to retain this threatened and persecuted identity. The terrifying struggle in the land of Bakhita is our struggle too, for it is a struggle for the rights of human beings, black or white, my neighbour, my brother, for the liberation of men sunk in slavery, whether as traders or purchasers. Pope John-Paul II spoke of this anthropological tragedy in Korea on 22 February 1992: “It is time that this sin was confessed in truth and humility, for it is a sin of man against man and of man against God.” [8]  Historical reflection on slavery and on the damage it has done in Africa and elsewhere is salutary and necessary. But we must not forget the modern version of slavery which, with all the horror of the old barbarity, still oppresses, offends and humiliates the human person, created in the image and likeness of God. There is still much to do, especially in centres of education, to offer to Africans and to all men of the third millennium an integral development, based on respect for the human person, interracial acceptance and openness to other cultures. In particular African women have to be rescued from the humiliations and murders of which Bakhita was the victim before she was able to thank God for her liberation. For love of us, Christ took on himself the condition of a slave and knew death. But with the whole Church we sing with joy in the Paschal Liturgy that the Master of Life has died, but now lives and reigns.

We have seen how Bakhita, in her determination to remain faithful to Christ in all liberty, refused to accompany her mistress. “I do not wish to lose my God.” She involved all the authorities, down to the Patriarch of Venice and the King’s representative. “The latter declared that since I was in Italy, where there was no buying and selling of slaves, I was entirely free. It was God Himself who gave me this strength of purpose, because He wanted me for Himself alone. I received Baptism with a joy which only the angels could describe. They called me ‘Josephine Margaret Bakhita’, which in Arabic means ‘Fortunate’.”

Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, who was later to become Pope as Pius X, questioned the young postulant for the religious life and declared to her: “Pronounce the holy vows without fear. Jesus loves you. Jesus wants you. Love him and serve Him always, as you have done up to now.”

“Since that day,” Bakhita tells us, “fourteen years of religious life have passed, and every day I have come to appreciate more and more the goodness which God has shown to me…I have been completely free. God made me strong because he wanted me to belong to him by Baptism and religious profession.”

So Bakhita the slave became the model of a free faith. This is Bakhita’s most important message for our times, just as it is also the most difficult to understand in our fractured post-modern culture still thirsting for freedom. For us Christians of the third millennium perhaps the most urgent and the most fascinating challenge facing us is how to convince our contemporaries, and especially young people, that freedom is not the same thing as a permissiveness which ends up in nihilism. True freedom spreads out into the gift of love given and received, lived and cultivated like a tender plant. [9] Freedom, beautiful freedom, is the great ideal which everyone sings about, carved in stone at the entrance to our public buildings. Freedom, equality, fraternity, we chant; but it was Henri Bergson who pointed out that only the last of this trio, fraternity, could reconcile the other two. “Theoretical democracy proclaims freedom, demands equality, and reconciles these two warring sisters by reminding them that they are sisters in virtue of fraternity.” Solidarity, we say, Solidarnost in Polish. John-Paul II warned his compatriots against a false ideology of freedom and the noisy propaganda of liberty which preaches a liberty without either truth or responsibility. [10]

The word freedom may be magical but it is also ambivalent, like all the great human values. Born out of the purity of the image and likeness of God, it is obscured by man’s sin, continually surfacing afresh since its appearance in our first parents in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, but finally set free by the free gift of Jesus, son of God and of the Virgin Mary, who died on the Cross to give us life.

The perverted freedom of the African slave-trader destroyed the happy freedom of the little Bakhita and imprisoned her in slavery. The freedom of the slave-trader is the freedom of the free fox in the free hen-house. Father Lacordaire, the great preacher of Notre Dame, expressed it in lapidary terms: “When it comes to a struggle between the strong and the weak, it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free.” 

We can certainly acknowledge with gratitude the achievements of our social legislation, so often the fruit of bitter struggles, while recognizing too that such achievements are far from being universal. I remember the tribute which Pope John-Paul II paid to our social legislation which he saw as one of the fruits of the Gospel. It was in 1980 at the airfield of Le Bourget to which I had accompanied the Holy Father in a helicopter after welcoming him to the Institut Catholique early on the morning of 1 June.

“We know how much the sons and daughters of your nation have contributed to our understanding of man and to the formulation of his inalienable rights. The ideas of freedom, equality and fraternity have deeply marked your history and your culture. These are at bottom Christian ideas, even if those who first formulated the ideal restricted their vision to man and did not associate it with an alliance between him and eternal wisdom. For ourselves, God’s wisdom is the basis of all culture and of all truly human culture.” [11] 

As St Paul wrote in letters of fire, Where there is the Spirit of God, there is freedom. The Gospel message is a message of liberation. Ancient Christianity owed some of its extraordinary dynamism to its strong affirmation of freedom. The authentic evangelical distinction between the temporal and the spiritual includes the distinction between the State and the Church. It means recognizing the legitimacy of the political kingdom while rejecting its totalitarian claim to be the ultimate reality, a claim already vigorously rejected by the first generation of Christians in the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. We might think too of Antigone, in her pious innocence, standing up to Creon and paying with her defenceless life for her refusal to accept the impious claim of totalitarian power.

In our day we have seen other examples of defenders of human dignity against the arrogance of the police state. We think of people like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, and of all those others, believers or non-believers, with whom I was commissioned by Pope John-Paul II to institute a dialogue. We are on the side of all those who oppose the dehumanising tendencies which are so often hiding behind dominant cultures. The confrontation between the religious vision of the world and the agnostic or even atheistic vision is a feature of the modern scene, but common ground can be found in a loyal and respectful recognition of the essential rights of conscience of every man and woman on earth. Human rights are as indivisible as the Republic itself. Christians see these rights as dictates of conscience, the universal moral teacher of mankind. There is still much to be done, in Africa and elsewhere, to give to all that access to freedom which the little Bakhita so appreciated, and especially to that freedom of belief which is the guarantor of all other freedoms.

From the very beginning of his pontificate, Pope John-Paul II has insistently urged all the members of the international community to respect human rights. In his first Encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, he spoke with the strong convictions generated in his tragic Polish experience of a totalitarian regime:

“Among these rights are very properly included religious freedom and freedom of conscience. The Second Vatican Council considered especially necessary the preparation of a fairly long declaration on this subject. This is the document called Dignitatis Humanae, in which is expressed not only the theological concept of the question but also the concept reached from the point of view of natural law, that is to say from the ‘purely human’ position, on the basis of the premises given by man’s own experience, his reason and his sense of human dignity.  Certainly the curtailment of the religious freedom of individuals and communities is not only a painful experience but it is above all an attack on man’s very dignity, independently of the religion professed or of the concept of the world which these individuals and communities have. The curtailment and violation of religious freedom are in contrast with man’s dignity and his objective rights. The Council document mentioned above states clearly enough what the curtailment or violation of religious freedom is. In this case we are undoubtedly confronted with a radical injustice with regard to what is particularly deep within man, what is authentically human. Indeed, even the phenomenon of unbelief, a-religiousness or atheism, as a human phenomenon, is understood only in relation to the phenomenon of religion and faith. It is therefore difficult, even from a ‘purely human’ point of view, to accept a position that gives only atheism the rights of citizenship in public and social life, while believers are, as though by principle, barely tolerated or are treated as second-class citizens or are even – and this has already happened – entirely deprived of the rights of citizenship.

Even if briefly, this subject must also be dealt with, because it too enters into the complex of man’s situations in the present-day world and because it too gives evidence of the degree to which this situation is overburdened by prejudices and injustices of various kinds. If we refrain from entering into details in this field in which we would have a special right and duty to do so, it is above all because, together with all those who are suffering the torments of discrimination and persecution for the name of God, we are guided by faith in the redeeming power of the Cross of Christ. However, because of my office, I appeal in the name of all believers throughout the world to those on whom the organization of social and public life in some way depends, earnestly requesting them to respect the rights of religion and of the Church’s activity. No privilege is asked for, but only respect for an elementary right. Actuation of this right is one of the fundamental tests of man’s authentic progress in any regime, in any society, system or mileu.” [12]

Little Bakhita, guided by Providence, was obliged to leave her native country in order to find freedom of belief, and indeed in the first place any freedom at all. We may think of all those legions of brothers and sisters of ours, especially in Africa and Asia, who are deprived of freedom, and not only of freedom of belief, and who are often waiting for God, “groping after Him” in the word of St Paul, by following their right conscience with generosity and love. The astonishing life of Bakhita sheds a marvellous light on all those persons who do not know God, as she put it, but who are faithful to Him in following their right conscience and find in him joy in its fullness when finally they meet Him. Bakhita did not need to go in search of God. He was already present in her heart. “You would not be looking for me, if you had not already found me.” This little girl who contemplated the wonders of nature also endured three consecutive days of frightful torture in which her breasts were twisted as if they were wet rags. “Nevertheless,” she says, “when my master sent for me I ran to him and knelt to receive his orders.” When she was asked whether she did this because she thought that God was looking at her, she replied: “I did not know the good God. I behaved in this way because I thought in my heart that that was how I should behave. I was sunk in the mud, but I was not defiled. Our Lady protected me even when I did not know her. Even when I was a slave, full of sadness and discouragement, I never despaired because I felt within me a mysterious power which sustained me. I did not die because the good Lord had destined me for ‘better things’. And finally I came to know this God whom I felt in my heart when I was little without knowing who He was.”

When she was asked how she came to be a religious Sister, she could only reply, “I do not know. He was the one who did it all.”

The joyful mysteries in her early African childhood, the sorrowful mysteries of her slavery, the luminous mystery of her life as a baptised religious, the glorious mysteries of her holiness. Called by Christ to freedom before she even knew Him, her whole life was finally spent in making Him loved: “Be good, love the Lord, pray for these poor people who do not know Him. If you realized what an infinite grace it is to know the good Lord. Yes indeed, the Lord is good, eternal his merciful love.”

Then she prayed for her family, her people, for Africa, for her country:

“O Lord, if only I could fly there to my people and preach to all of your Goodness at the top of my voice. How many souls would be drawn to you! My mother and my brother, my sister who is still a slave, all the poor, poor people of Africa. O Jesus, may they too come to know and love you.”

We pray that we may share Bakhita’s wonder at the marvels of creation, her uprightness of conscience, her courage in terrible trials, her joy in believing, her burning hope, her fervour in loving Christ and in bringing others to love Him.  We may ask that she give us also the grace of her own simple trust in the final meeting with the Father.

“I am making my way gently towards eternity. I am taking two bags with me, one containing my sins and the other, much heavier, with the infinite merits of Jesus Christ. When I present myself before God’s tribunal, I will cover my poor little suitcase with the merits of the Virgin Marty, and then I shall open the other and present the merits of Jesus. Then I shall say to the Eternal Father: ‘Now, you be the judge of what you see!’ I am quite sure that I shall not be sent away. Then I shall go on to St Peter and say to him: ‘You can close the door, for I have come to stay.’”

What a challenge is holiness! Here was little Bakhita, the African slave-girl, and she rose to the freedom of the saints. She shows us the price and the meaning of freedom. “Freedom for what?” Georges Bernanos wondered. Bakhita answers the question: we are all called to be free in order to love with the same love both God and our brothers and sisters. 

Notes :

1 Paul VI, Populorum progressio, n°20-21.

2 Maria LuisA Daguino, Bakhita raconte son histoire, Maison Généralice des Sœurs Canossiennes, Rome, 1996. 
Cf aussi L’Histoire de Bakhita écrite et illustrée par Augusta Curelli, Ed. du Signe, Trasbourg, 2000,
Bakhita, l’esclave qui rencontre le Christ, textes : Don Roberto Lamita, Illustrateur : Giorgio Trevisan, Ibid, 2000,
Bakhita, inchiesta suuna sancta par il 2000, Roberto Italo Zanini, San Paolo, Turin, 2000.

3 Cf. Conférence des Evêques de France, Lourdes 1999. Chercheurs du Christ, Centurion, Cerf, Fleurus-Mame, 1999, Témoignage de Monseigneur Zubeir Wako, Archevêque de Khartoum, Soudan, samedi 6 novembre 1999, p.95-105.

4 Luc, 23, 34

5 Saint Augustin, Confessions, Prologue, I, 1, éd. Lucien Jerphagnon, coll. « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », Gallimard, 1998, p.781.

6 Psaume 18.

7 Psaume 8.

8 Gaudium et spes, n°36, 2.

 9 Jean-Paul II, Fides et ratio, 14 septembre 1998.

10 Cf. Paul Poupard, Après Galilée. Science et foi : nouveau dialogue, DDB, 1994.

11 La Documentation Catholique, 1992, p.325.

12 Cf. les actes des deux colloques que j’ai réunis à Madrid et Prague sur « Dieu, l’Eglise et la liberté en Europe ». Paul Poupard, Nouvelle Europe. Reconquête de la liberté et défi du libéralisme, Mame, 1993.

13 Cf. Paul Poupard, intervention aux XXVIII èmes Rencontres internationales de Genève, l’exigence d’égalité, Histoire et Société d’aujourd’hui, Ed. de la Bâconnière, Neuchâtel, 1982, p.296.

14 Homélie du pape Jean-Paul II au Parc Blonia à Cracovie, le 18 août 2002, dans Cocumentation Catholique, t, XCIX n°2277, 6 octobre 2002, p.827.

15 Jean-Paul II, France, que fais-tu de ton baptême ? Centurion, 1980. p.139.

16 Jean-Paul II, Redemptor hominis, n°17.

17 Psaume 117
 

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SUDAN'S OILFIELDS BURN AGAIN:
BRINKMANSHIP ENDANGERS THE PEACE PROCESS OVERVIEW
Sudan's peace process survived a major challenge in the first weeks of the new year.. Indeed, signature by the parties of a strengthened cessation of hostilities agreement on 4 February and a memorandum of understanding codifying points of agreement on outstanding issues of power and wealth sharing two days later indicates that the momentum to end the twenty-year old conflict is strong. However, the crisis produced by a government-sponsored offensive in the Western Upper Nile oilfields at the end of 2002 and through January raised questions about the Khartoum government’s commitment to peace and showed that much more attention needs to be paid to pro-government southern militias and the commercial and political agendas for which they are being used. 
The fighting, the brunt of which was borne by those militias, with regular government troops in support and backup roles, highlighted three major obstacles in the path of a final peace deal:
· the willingness of the government to disregard signed agreements;
· the spoiler role that the government-supported militias can play in the peace process, including following conclusion of a formal peace agreement, if greater efforts are not made to encourage their reconciliation with the SPLA insurgents; and 
· the ongoing danger that the dynamic of oil development represents for the peace process, at least so long as the government and a number of foreign oil companies with which it is in partnership are prepared to pursue that development by whatever means necessary.
Strong international engagement remains the key to buttressing a still fragile peace process and seeing it through to success in the next several months. In the first instance that means insisting on full implementation of the newly agreed ceasefire provisions including an active role for the authorised verification team and the withdrawal of troops to the positions they occupied before the offensive. Holding the parties publicly accountable for violations will be key in ensuring their seriousness at the negotiating table.
The offensive from late December until the beginning of February was an extension of the government’s long-time strategy of depopulating oil-rich areas through indiscriminate attacks on civilians in order to clear the way for further development of infrastructure. Eyewitness accounts confirm that the tactics included the abduction of women and children, gang rapes, ground assaults supported by helicopter gunships, destruction of humanitarian relief sites, and burning of villages. A senior Sudanese civil society member concluded: "The Nuer militias are the most potent threat to human security and stability in the South, regardless of whether peace is concluded or not".
The Khartoum authorities deny it, but their responsibility for the latest round of hostilities is clear. They and the other participants in the fragile peace process now face crucial decisions.
The government must choose between continued reliance on military brinkmanship, which would bring it renewed international condemnation and isolation, or the benefits of a peace that is within reach. The latest fighting reflected a calculated decision to violate the cessation of hostilities agreement signed on 15 October 2002. The signing of new agreements, therefore, does not guarantee their implementation. 
The SPLA, which was forced onto the defensive by the attacks, must decide not only whether to keep its emphasis on the negotiating track but also whether to intensify its efforts to achieve reconciliation with the Nuer militia leaders who did most of the recent fighting for Khartoum. Despite the new agreements, many in the SPLA feel increasingly pessimistic about the intentions of the government, as well as about the commitment and ability of the international community to hold Khartoum to its word. 
The next several months will be decisive for the peace process. A looming crossroads date may be 21 April, when President Bush is required to report to the U.S. Congress on the state of progress in the negotiations. If Khartoum is assessed to be obstructing the process, that report could trigger new U.S. action under its recent legislation (the "Sudan Peace Act"). Because of the State Department’s policy of engagement, "Khartoum is underestimating our response. That would be a mistake", said one well-placed U.S. official, citing Congressional and constituency pressure as unknown variables. "The whole thing could blow up", a Western official close to the talks said in January 2003 out of concern for the consequences if the offensive continued.
The peace process held together – narrowly – this time but the situation remains volatile.
Nairobi/Brussels, 10 February 2003
 

After an armed attack on government forces and the attack, apparently by bandits, on the manager of the Jebel Marra Development Project, Amnesty International is urging the Government of Sudan to set up an independent Commission of Inquiry into the situation in Darfur in the West of Sudan. 

"The situation must not be allowed to deteriorate further into another Sudanese war. We call on the government to respond to the escalating cycle of attacks by immediately settling up an independent Commission of Inquiry which should investigate the situation, report publicly and make recommendations which must be implemented." 

Over the past few years hundreds of civilians, mostly from sedentary agricultural groups like the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, have been killed or wounded, homes have been destroyed and herds looted by nomadic groups. Sometimes dozens of civilians have been killed in a single raid. 

For instance, on 28 April 2002 the village of Shoba, near Kabkabia, was attacked at dawn by an armed group, which killed at least 17 people and injured 16 others. 

At the beginning of January 2003, another village, Singita, 14 km south of Kas was also attacked by armed horsemen. About 25 people are reported to have been killed, including 10 persons who were shot and allegedly subsequently thrown into the fire by the attackers. In both places, homes and crops were burnt down and cattle and other herds were looted by the attackers. 

"Those who commit crimes, must be brought to justice, but international human rights standards of fair trial must be respected", said Amnesty International. 

An Amnesty International delegation was allowed by the Government to visit the Sudan in January for the first time in 13 years. They visited El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state where they met the governor, justice and police officials as well as lawyers and victims of human rights violations. 

The sedentary groups have complained that the Government forces have failed to protect them and suggest that the attacks are an attempt to drive them from their lands. Government sources point out that dozens of members of the security forces have also been killed and lay the blame for clashes on desertification. 

"Government responses to armed clashes have been ineffective and have resulted in human rights abuses," said Andrew Anderson, leader of the recent delegation. 

"We met leaders of the Fur who had been arbitrarily thrown into prison without charge or trial and denied communication with the outside world for up to seven months. Leaders of nomad groups have been similarly treated. Special Courts set up in 2001 have sentenced people to death without even the presence of a lawyer. Such abuses of human rights will only cause more bitterness," he added. 

Last month 13 Fur were arrested in the Jebel Marra area; they are still held incommunicado in detention centres in Niyertiti and al-Jeneina in West Darfur and have reportedly been tortured. 

On 14 February a group of armed Fur and other groups attacked a convoy of security forces near the village of Martajelo in Jebel Marra, killing at least 12. Their leader said that the attack was in response to the lack of equality and underdevelopment of the Fur as well as the government's failure to protect farmers from attack. 

In January, Amnesty International expressed concern about the deteriorating situation in Darfur and urged the Sudan Government to intensify efforts to involve different community leaders in a reconciliation process. 

"The situation in Darfur must not be allowed to escalate into all-out war," Amnesty International said. "All groups living in Darfur would welcome the setting up of a Commission of Inquiry which could clarify to the people of Darfur and the world the complex factors which have led to the present deteriorating situation. Above all, it could identify mechanisms which are in accordance with human rights standards to protect effectively the population from attacks." 

The Commission of Inquiry should respect the following principles:members appointed on this Commission should be known for their independence and their impartiality and should include people with a profound understanding of the region and a professional and recognized knowledge in human rights law and practice. such a commission should be accorded sufficient time and adequate resources in order to make proper investigations and conclusions; witnesses and victims of attacks in Darfur and other human rights abuses should be encouraged to come forward to give evidence without fear and with protection against any reprisals;the findings and the recommendations of this Commission of Inquiry should be made public and easy for the Sudanese people to access and should be implemented. 

Background 

Peace talks in Sudan between the Government of Sudan and the Southern People's Liberation Army (SPLA) have been continuing, with intermissions, since June 2002. A Civilian Monitoring Protection Team (CPMT) was set up to investigate cases of killings of civilians in the southern Sudan. However, Darfur, in the western Sudan, is not covered by the current peace negotiations and the recent Darfur killings have not been investigated by any monitoring force. Amnesty International has consistently stressed the need to include concrete mechanisms to strengthen human rights monitoring, which should extend also to conflict areas in West and East Sudan, as part of the peace process. 

For more information please call Amnesty International's press office in London, UK, on +44 20 7413 5566
Amnesty International, 1 Easton St., London WC1X 0DW. web: http://www.amnesty.org

- having regard to the agreement reached in Machakos, Kenya on 20 July 2002, and the ceasefire memorandum of 15 October,
- having regard to the statement by the Presidency of the European Union of 14 November 2002,
- having regard to its previous resolutions on human rights abuses and the situation in Sudan,

A.  deeply concerned by the continuing civil war, which has been raging in Sudan for more than 19 years, killing more than 2 million people and causing immense human suffering, particularly among civilians, as well as gross human rights violations by all parties involved in the conflict, massive displacement and a breakdown of economic and social structures,
B.  pointing out the urgent need for a just and durable peace settlement, and welcoming in this context the recent progress made at the IGAD-sponsored peace talks in Machakos, Kenya,
C.  welcoming in particular the signing on 15 October by the Government of Sudan and the SPLA of the Memorandum of Understanding on the Cessation of Hostilities, which commits both parties to unimpeded humanitarian access to all areas and to all people in need; deploring, however, that both sides have already accused the other of violating the ceasefire agreement,
D.  whereas this is the first occasion on which the SPLA/SPLM has signed an agreement on the cessation of hostilities,
E.  having regard to the agreement between the government, the SPLA and the United Nations on a programme for the disposal of mines and unexploded ordnance,
F.  whereas priority should be given to the IGAD-sponsored process,
G.  mindful of the government's pledge to respect and promote human rights and the rule of law and thus to embark upon a process of democratisation which should result in the establishment of a democratically elected executive and legislature,
H.  whereas the 1997 constitution recognises the right of the southern provinces to self-determination, I.  mindful of the extremely valuable potential contribution of oil production to the country's economic development, but deploring the fact that oil revenues have so far only exacerbated the war by fuelling the Government's military expenditure,
J.  whereas several European oil companies are involved in the extraction business despite human rights abuses by both belligerents and the continued suffering of the civilian population,
K.  horrified by the widespread and indiscriminate aerial bombardments by government forces, which have continued even subsequent to the Machakos agreement and seriously and repeatedly affect the civilian population in southern Sudan,
L.  deploring the continuing violations of human rights, in particular the restrictions on freedom of religion, as well as restrictions on freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, imposed under national security laws,
M.  deploring the recent passing of at least 200 death sentences by unconstitutional emergency courts in Darfur State,
N.  whereas in recent months the Sudanese Government has on several occasions banned humanitarian flights, particularly flights organised by the UN World Food Programme,
O.  welcoming the progress achieved in some areas by the EU-Sudan political dialogue, particularly the improved relations between Sudan and its neighbours and the removal of any suspicion that the country is supporting international terrorism,
P.  whereas EU development aid to Sudan has been frozen since March 1990, but on 21-22 November the EDF Committee will discuss the Country Strategy Paper for Sudan, which represents a major step towards the normalisation of EU relations with this country,
Q.  whereas the resumption of European Union aid must remain conditional upon progress as regards respect for human rights, political and religious freedoms and the rule of law,
R.  whereas no meetings of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly may be held in a country whose cooperation agreement with the European Union has been suspended,

1.  Fully supports the IGAD-sponsored peace talks in Machakos, Kenya, and the Memorandum of Understanding on the Cessation of Hostilities signed on 15 October, and calls on both parties to fulfil their obligations immediately and thus cease all armed action, particularly against the civilian population, with a view to facilitating the implementation of humanitarian assistance programmes and to reaching a negotiated and lasting solution to the conflict;
2.  Welcomes the willingness shown by donors to step up financial aid for the peace process and humanitarian assistance;
3.  Calls on the Sudanese Government to put an end to aerial bombardments of civilian targets and abuses committed by the army and paramilitary militia against the civilian population; calls for an end to measures aimed at deporting people living in oil-producing areas and for the government to allow the displaced communities, particularly the Nuer and Dinka peoples, to return;
4.  Calls for the OECD code of conduct to be scrupulously observed by all oil companies operating in the country;
5.  Calls on the Commission to provide it with a report on the possible involvement of European oil companies in abuses committed against local communities in oil-producing areas;
6.  Condemns the continued serious human rights violations by all parties to the conflict in southern Sudan an urges all parties to stop atrocities such as enslavement, child abuse, torture, rape, killings and other abuses;
7.  Calls on the Government of Sudan rapidly to relax the restrictions on the freedom of religion, as well as restrictions on freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, and to take more effective action against torture, discrimination against Christians and abductions (which particularly affect women and children);
8.  Calls on the government and the SPLA to ensure compliance with the ban on female genital mutilation;
9.  Calls for the immediate abolition of the unconstitutional emergency courts in Darfur State and for the commutation of all the death sentences passed by these courts, in compliance with international human rights laws;
10.  Notes that while some improvement has been made in the areas currently covered by the EU-Sudan political dialogue - notably human rights, democracy, the rule of law and good governance - the situation regarding all of these remains profoundly unsatisfactory;
11.  Welcomes the progress made in the dialogue between Sudan and the European Union and hopes that all the requirements for a resumption of normal relations under the terms of the Cotonou Agreement will be met at the earliest opportunity;
12.  Calls on the Commission considerably to increase staffing levels at the European Union delegation in Khartoum with a view to the additional tasks that will be assigned to the European Union;
13.  Notes the willingness of the Sudanese authorities to invite the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly to hold its plenary session in their country and expects a final peace agreement to be concluded and the other requirements for a resumption of cooperation with the European Union to be met, in accordance with the Cotonou Agreement;
14.  Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the ACP-EU Council and Joint Parliamentary Assembly, the Commission, the secretaries-general of the United Nations and the African Union, the Government of Sudan and the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement.
 

“Breakthrough on peace!” shout the headlines. “It’s a sham, it won’t work!” protest the National Islamic Front’s opponents. Five weeks of closed-door discussions at Machakos, Kenya, between the NIF government an the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement, ended on 20 July. The talks, under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) produced a protocol of understanding and an agreement to reconvene at the Machakos Garden Hotel on 12 August.
The enthusiasm came almost entirely from the government side. Its team, led by presidential Peace Advisor Ghazi Salah el Din el Atabani, a core NIF man, talked as if peace already reigned. The SPLA/M delegation, led by Colonel John Garang de Mabior’s deputy, Commander Salva Kiir Mayardit, was far less effusive, with good reason. Chaired by Kenya, overseen by Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda and driven (in top gear) by Britain and the United States, the talks were heavily weighted in the Sudan government’s favour. Southerners say this looks like the usual sell-out; the northern opposition says the process further entrenches the regime, giving it the international blessing which oil wealth had not quit managed to buy.
The diplomatic, often woolly, sometimes contradictory language of the Machakos Protocol of 20 July must be read between the lines. The main message is “divide to rule”. The conflict is portrayed purely in north-south terms and, since there is no insistence on democracy or human rights in the north, the government is treated as the only interested northern party. If it implemented democratisation, the regime would sign its own death warrant –so the northern Sudanese majority is left out, as are southern parties other than the SPLA/M.

Self-determination still out of reach
The protocol says resolution of the conflict will be based on the Declaration of Principles signed by the SPLA in July 1994 and, reluctantly, by the NIF in July 1997. The DOP’s key clauses propose the separation of state and religion in the South and a referendum there on self-determination.
These principles were also the basis of the opposition National Democratic Alliance’s crucial Asmara Declaration of 1995. The NDA is mainly northern, but the SPLA is a member and most of its troops are southern. Yet before Machakos, the NIF was claiming it had signed the DOP only as a basis discussion and Ghazi Salah el Din declared that no Sudanese government would accept the separation of religion and state.
This was designed to appeal to the religion-based Umma and Democratic parties, both of which signed Asmara Declaration but uphold Islamic law, albeit not the NIF version. It ignores Sudan’s secular parties, whose role in national life is greater than their numbers. The nation had a secular criminal code until 1983, when the President Ja’afar Mohamed Nimeiri brought in the ‘September Laws’. Machakos stipulates Sharia (Islamic civil and criminal law) in the North, secular law in the South –not what the DOP says at all.
A sentence in the signatories’ 20 July statement encapsulates the other key issues: “The parties agreed that a peaceful and just resolution based on the unity of the Sudan is their common objective and that a military solution is neither viable nor desirable”. This commits neither side to much. The SPLA still officially fights for a united Sudan, as the southern clamour for independence swells to a roar. Most northern Sudanese, even those who support the SPLA, oppose breaking up the country. The government clearly has no intention of losing control of the oil reserves, almost all in the South, and sees the South as its future breadbasket and Islamist springboard into Africa.
Western peacemakers say neither side can win. Combatants see it differently. The SPLA has improved its military capability this year. Garang, Commander in Chief of the SPLA and NDA, repeats that the conflict can be resolved only after the NIF is overthrown (a refrain he took to the USA this year, though few in George Bush’s government appear to have listened). In late June, when a draft of the Machakos Protocol leaked out , southern “civil society” group rejected its proposal, while SPLA commanders, we hear, said there would “be blood” if leaders went ahead with it. After the signing, a senior SPLA official told us the war would never ender until the rebels got what they wanted. He did not mean national unity.
Khartoum’s arsenal is growing faster. The military-industrial complex know as Giad (whose part is owned by Salah Idriss, owner of the El Shifa factory) is assembling weapons and tanks based on the Russian T55 and T72. Models named after President Omer Hassan Ahmed el Beshir and the late Vice-President Zubeir Mohamed Salih, Beshir 1 and Zubeir 1, lumbered off the production lines for the 13th anniversary of the NIF coup on 30 June. The Defense Minister, General Bakri Hassan Salih, went to Moscow in April and said Sudan supported Russia’s anti-terrorist war, bizarrely comparing Chechnya’s Islamist terrorists to the Southern Sudanese rebels. Defense Minister Sergio Ivanov said Russia would ’carry out a thorough and inexpensive modernisation of Sudan’s Soviet and Russian military equipment’. Bakri also bought some expensive weapons, including twelve MiG-29 fighters. The NIF has long promised that oil would buy weapons.
The joint Statement (issued by Sudan’s London embassy as if it were the entire Protocol) speaks of agreement  ‘to discuss the outstanding issues of state and religion, self-determination for the people of South Sudan, power sharing, wealth sharing and human rights’. In other words, nothing of substance was agreed. The NIF has not shared power or wealth, or granted human rights to Northerners; it is not expected to do so for Southerners. The idea of accepting some SPLA people into government sounds like an echo of the Khartoum Peace Agreement mad in 1993 with Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon and Lam Akol Ajawin. Riek is now back in the SPLA; Lam, though still Minister of Water Resources, has resigned from the National Congress, Vice-President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha’s faction of the NIF, which few realised he had joined. However, the SPLA cannot afford to succumb to the ministerial tokenism accepted by some other parties or individuals, Northern and Southern.
Minefields ahead include definition of the North-South border, which at present places the Nuba, Ingessana and Abeyi areas in the North. Machakos appears to consign the several million Southerners in the North to second-class citizenship. And a State House press conference in Nairobi on 20 July, Ghazi was suitably ambiguous about the legal status of the South itself. The government and the SPLA have since publicly disagreed about whether they had agreed that the federal constitution should be Islamic. Demobilisation is another destabiliser. SPLA troops may vote with their guns if they disagree with their leaders and the NIF might not welcome home an army that feels it has been sold out.

Leverage, what leverage?

The current IGAD talks are driven largely by the USA and UK. The British team is led by Special Representative and former Sudan Ambassador Alan Fletcher Goulty. The US team is led by the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Walter Kansteiner III and Special Envoy John C. Danforth. Sources in Kenya say they knocked heads together, as did talks’ Chairman, Kenya Chief of Staff Lazarus K Sumbeiywo. The Nairobi joke is that President Daniel arap Moi is after a Nobel peace prize.
The knocking together heads produced spin, as each side came to believe that the other was under real pressure to settle. Sources inside the talks say that with no agreement reached on the evening of 19 July, participants were each told by the ‘facilitators’ to settle or else they would be portrayed as intransigent and responsible for the failure. However, Africa Confidential has learned that the NIF had long before decided to sign the Protocol. In other words, it was manipulating even this stage of the process. Contrary to what they seem to think, Western government have little leverage with the SPLA and even less with the NIF, which they seem to believe has abandoned Islamism. The only thing the NIF really needs is not to be overthrown, whether by its own citizens or by cruise missiles. Its tactics and strategies aim at survival; a peace accord is a means not an end for the NIF, which is now much stronger than four years ago, when the USA bombed El Sifa, or last year, when Al Qaida attacked the Twin Towers and Pentagon. Few outsiders take seriously the fact that the ‘war on America’ and the West was effectively launched at the 1991 People’s Arab Islamic Conference (PAIC) meeting in Khartoum: the NIF was key to consolidating Al Qaida and building its capacity.
The Machakos Protocol opens the prospect of NIF power stretching into infinity. Its stipulates an interim six years before a referendum on self-determination (the Khartoum Peace Agreement said four), during time the government will work ‘to make the unity of the Sudan an attractive option especially to the people of the South Sudan’. The NIF has reinforced the damage of decades of internal colonisation by 13 years of bombing, torturing, raping, enslaving and plundering civilians under the ‘jihad’ banner. Yet the six-year interim period does not start until a peace agreement and ceasefire have been agreed, theoretically after a six-month ‘pre-interim period’. This is not encouraging.
In June the NIF’s bombing of civilians was be heaviest yet: records of air raids are diligently kept, collated and distributed. Yet Britain’s Africa minister, Valerie Amos, told the House of Lords this month: ‘In most cases it has not been possible to verify the details of the number of civilians casualties. We have urged the Sudanese Government not to carry out such raids and to respect their agreement with the SPLA to refrain from attacks against civilians targets. We expect an international verification mechanism to be up soon to confirm compliance’. International verification has made little impression since the first truce agreement was negotiated by Senator Jack Danforth in January (AC Vol. 43 n°10). People and money to monitor over 800,000 square kilometres of the largely roadless south in the rainy season will be hard to find, as the government well knows. It also knows that bombing its own civilians arouses barely a murmur of protest from foreign governments.

The worst scene

For year, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Torir, Paride Taban has travelled the south amid war and famine. He witnessed the bombing on Ikotos on 26 June (it happened on 29 June) and returned on 1 July. ‘We came out form the bomb shelters and drove the town, we found big commotion –people crying- many bodies mutilated on the ground- some had heads and limbs missing, some lungs and breast opened –seven dead and 14 wounded. It was the worst scene I had in my life- They were women and children, two men killed, all of them civilians… The world must do something about this’.
The urge to do something helps motivate external involvement in the IGAD process. Meanwhile, the NIF not only bombs civilians with impunity but also withholds food and medicine from those who survive and flee their homes, herds and fields. Recent non-governmental agency reports from both Eastern and Western Upper Nile tell of utterly destitute people without a possession in the world and no relief aid: the price of living in or near the oilfields. Yet in June the NIF, with little difficulty, forced the United Nations to change its relief programme, Operation Lifeline Sudan, an umbrella for UN agencies and NGOs. OLS, which constantly protest against NIF flights-bans has operated out of Lokichoggio, Kenya, for South Sudan.
After meeting the government, including Ali Osman Ghazi, in Khartoum, the UN Special Representative for Humanitarian Affairs in Sudan, Ambassador Tom Vraalsen, agreed that OLS would work only out of El Obeid –well inside northern Sudan and the NIF’s main base for air raids on the South. Sudan is installing new radar from Alenia Marconi (Italy/Britain), touted as updating civilian air traffic control. In a war zone where most flights are military, such distinctions are hard to make. Many non OLS relief agencies also fly from ‘Loki’: pilots fear the new radar will enable the NIF to target aid flights. The NIF shot down a Médecins Sans Frontières plane in 1990. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan visited Khartoum this month and discussed the question, which remains unresolved.
Participants at Machakos have signed but may renege later. Yet the very agreement gives Western business interests the opportunity many seek. Egypt is delighted: it is clear that southern independence is no threat under the Protocol. The only pressure the NIF fear now is internal. Some Western advisors claim the peace process itself will weaken the NIF perhaps fatally. Certainly, reports from Khartoum suggest that NIF supporters fear that Islamism is being abandoned. The NDA’s initial response to the Protocol was merely to criticise it for saying nothing about northern Sudan. The opposition still doesn’t behave like a government in exile –another reason why Western governments cooperate with the NIF. The SPLA is therefore the main threat to the NIF; it is under tremendous pressure from many southerners to flight for full independence and abandon the NDA to its fate. This week’s rejoicing looks premature.

Who is Sulaf ? 

Hot on the heels of the Machakos Protocol signed in Kenya on 20 July, Relationships Foundation International held its own round of peace talks from 22 July in Britain. The UK-based RFI initiative, which enjoys some funding from, inter alia, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is presided over by a Kenyan former Finance Minister and Luo Leader, Professor Washington Okumu (AC Vol. 42 n°15). Its approach is to bring Sudanese leaders together on a personal basis: