In article <peter.takeuchi-4A502A.16451904082004@nnrp1.phx1.gblx.net>,
Pete Takeuchi <peter.takeuchi@publius.edu> wrote:
BEARING THE CROSS: Sudan: No Greater Tragedy - Christianity Today
Magazine
By Jeff M. Sellers
They are Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Catholics.
They are the black Africans of southern Sudan, and for believing that
Jesus is God, they are raped, tortured, enslaved, or burned to death at
the hands of their Islamic Arab countrymen.
They are crucified--the infant children nailed to trees with steel
spikes--or beheaded. In a campaign of systematic genocide, Sudanese
government forces spray them with helicopter gunfire to run them off
oil-rich land and bomb their hospitals, schools, relief centers, and
marketplaces. This is the testimony that Roger Winter, executive
director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, recently gave to the House
subcommittee on Africa.
The northern Arabs pierce the lips of their torture victims, then insert
and shut padlocks to keep them from telling of their ordeals. Beyond the
political-economic issues in Sudan's 18-year-old civil war--the south
seeks autonomy, inflicting its own military terrors upon Arab
civilians--official smothering of religious freedom is part of the
government forces' cruelty, according to the U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom. The government in Khartoum imposed
Islamic law nearly 10 years ago, and forced conversions (with
accompanying genital mutilation) are common.
The commission's annual report, which identified Sudan as the world's
most violent infractor of religious rights, noted that the discovery and
drilling of oil reserves in the south has led to a "scorched earth"
policy, driving civilians from areas around oil facilities. The
government uses the facilities (airstrips and roads) for military
staging, and oil revenues have enabled it to increase its weaponry and
other hardware.
More than 2 million people have lost their lives due to the war or
related causes, and more than 4 million of the 5 million southern
Sudanese have been displaced from their homes. Says U.S. Secretary of
State Colin Powell, "There is perhaps no greater tragedy on the face of
the earth today."
To be the chosen people of God to spread His Gospel has always ment
redicule, abuse, torture, crucifixion, and oppression. The events in the
Sudan are only paled by Christian oppression elsewhere in Africa, the
Middle East, China and Indonesia, and some say even the Economic Union.
--
May God Bless You
Michael
GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL.
We make a Living by what we get, We make a Life by what we give.
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