Note #9191 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:
06156 March 10, 2006
Churches' help urgently needed in southern Sudan, author says
'Someone has got to get into the trenches with the sufferers of ... war'
by Alexa Smith
LOUISVILLE - Churches must seize the moment to help tribes in Sudan shattered by more than a half-century of war, says a veteran war correspondent who covered the conflict from a perch in the country's Nuba Mountains.
"For the church, this is a great moment," said Gabriel Meyer, a correspondent for Roman Catholic periodicals who has published a book on Nuba culture, a tribe that has survived a genocidal Islamic campaign. "I've seen the church have other great moments and fail to respond. The church came out of this war with ... great respect. But it could lose its focus and squander the opportunity."
Meyer noted that, after the fall of Communism in Poland, the Catholic Church tried frantically to reclaim lost property, rather than mobilizing for the spiritual care of the people.
Meyer's book - War and Faith in Sudan - was just released by William B. Eerdman's Publishing Co. It is a very personal tale of a stubborn bishop, Macram Max Gassis, who defied Khartoum to run chartered relief flights into his sprawling, decimated diocese in central Sudan.
The book is a testimony to the endurance of the persecuted Nuba, whose cultural and spiritual legacy enabled them to survive some of the worst violence in the hemisphere as a people intact, unlike tribes further south that were fragmented by a war that displaced them and wrecked their identities.
Meyer and photographer Jim Nichols made six trips into Nuba country from 1998 to 2001, and returned to the region in 2004 during the final negotiations of the peace agreement that was ultimately signed by the government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A) in January 2005.
"I have always believed that it is one of the functions of journalism to bring to light what is hidden, to tell, not the story that everyone is telling, but (the story) that no one is, to seek out the 'invisible' realities that all too often can't be seen from our customary vantage points and with our typical points of reference," Meyer wrote in the introduction to his book.
Now, he said, international churches need to be strategic about three things:
creating an infrastructure in a decimated country to provide safe water, roads, schools and medical care
tending to a society traumatized by violence on a grotesque scale, including the tens of thousands of abducted women and child who were sold into slavery
organizing to provide spiritual nurture and care for people who in some cases have not seen church personnel for decades
Meyer said he stayed at a convent where traumatized southern Sudanese who had lost everything came to pour out their grief - either with the help of the sisters, or simply wailing in anguish at the walls.
"This recovery is not just about digging wells or creating development projects," he said. "Someone has got to get into the trenches with the sufferers of ... war," he said by telephone from his Los Angeles home.
Christians are respected in southern Sudan, he said, because churches often have been the only functioning institutions available to help its nearly five million people displaced by the violence.
That is more than half of the population of the south.
Churches responded even when international aid agencies complied with an embargo imposed by the government in Khartoum, which stopped relief flights into rebel-held areas and consigned entire populations to disease, starvation and death.
Bishop Gassis, exiled to Kenya for criticizing Khartoum's human-rights record abroad, defied the government and flew chartered relief flights into the Nuba Mountains. Meyer said the rudimentary infrastructure that exists there today owes much to Gassis.
"The bishop ... addressed systemic problems," Meyer said. "He focused on the education of women (since the Islamic government did not allow women in the schools). He ran co-educational schools. He focused on building civil society even in the midst of war."
Meyer said the Nuba were targeted by Khartoum for aligning with the south to resist the government's policies.
The Nuba Mountains fall territorially within Khartoum's domain. Nuba soldiers once filled the ranks of northern armies sent to quell rebellion in the black south, which the southerners haven't forgotten.
Gassis also established relief stations for women and children rescued from slavery.
According to Meyer, the isolation of the hill country inhabited by the Nuba - an area about the size of Maine - offered some protection from attacks by the central government and allowed them to maintain their traditions of tribal and religious tolerance.
Although the origins of the Nuba are not clear, Meyer said that the culture typically absorbs refugees, rather than keeping them in camps outside their communities, where people are more vulnerable to attack. The Nuba had functional political institutions, including a parliament, that gave elected representatives a voice.
Even tribal politics were governed by elders and shamans rather than chieftans or kings.
The Nuba also have a history of interference from outside. For example, they would build a village, knowing it would be burned by the government and would require rebuilding the next year.
"The Nuba are very proud, and, were very clear from the beginning of the war that what they wanted wasn't the World Food Program dropping them bags of sorghum from planes," Meyer said. "They wanted seeds and farming tools. They wanted to stay farmers, and not become wards of the international community."
Meyer said the Nuba are probably an amalgam of refugee groups that fled the northern slave trade eons ago. They are composed of 55 tribes who speak 38 languages.
"I've often thought that it is cruelly ironic that the people who had the skills to live (among themselves) are the people being exterminated," he said, speaking of Khartoum's raids on the Nuba that displaced, killed or wounded thousands, many of them children.
Meyer said a young SPLA commander in the Nuba Mountains once told him that his soldiers need to "fight and not hate."
"Not unfamiliar with 'popular' militias and guerrilla movements from both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Balkan war, it was the last thing I expected to hear," he said. "'Fight the enemy, if you must,' (the commander) went on, 'but why catch his disease?'"
Another Nuba political leader, the late Yusuf Kuwa, once said, "I will build my civilization and then I will forgive everyone who humiliated me."
Religiously, the Nuba are Muslim and Christian - Presbyterian, Catholic and Anglican - and often intermarry.
Meyer said that northern Sudan has constructed a "national identity" based on identification with the Arab world and considers its language, culture and religion to be superior to tribal culture. But central, western and southern Sudanese consider themselves part of the African world, call themselves Africans and resist assimilation.
The vision in the south was to create a secular democracy that accommodated Islam, but a military rebellion was set off when the north imposed Islamic law and displaced the indigenous people by taking their land.
Meyer said the strategy is the same now in Darfur, where the government is driving the civilian population into camps and taking the land to lease to agri-businesses and other industrial entities.
Under the current peace agreement, Sudan has a coalition government and does not force the southerners to follow Islamic law. A referendum in 2011 will determine whether Sudan will remain a united nation or split.
Meyer recalled once a day when Nuer tribesmen saw the bishop's plane land in the Nuba Mountains once and hiked four days to attend Mass. They begged for priests and for trained catechists to live among them.
"It is a time for spiritual growth," Meyer said. "There are not easy solutions ... but what most people want are directly spiritual things: the gospel, personnel to lead religious services, teaching, spiritual formation.
"And some of this is coming from people who have only the vaguest ideas of Christianity."
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