EPISCOPAL PARISHES AND dioceses with mission work in Sudan, or those who have a ministry to young Sudanese in the United States, listened to harrowing reports of conditions in that African country during a visit to New York by the Sudanese primate and his provincial officer in late March.
The one-day conference was convened by the Office of Anglican and Global Relations at the Episcopal Church Center and drew representatives from nearly half of a group of 80 Episcopalians or church groups with links to the Sudanese.

Archbishop Joseph Marona, primate of the Episcopal Church in Sudan, and the Rev. Enoch Tombe Stephen, the interim provincial secretary, presented a 2004 core budget for the church that has 24 dioceses and bishops and is wholly dependent on its partners in the Anglican Communion.

“There is need to seek means and ways of broadening the partnership,” said Stephen, describing dire conditions in which many clergy were not paid last year.

With the settlement of the internal war that has affected much of Sudan’s south and western region, peace will be restored and the church will seek ways of self-reliance, Stephen said. But Sudan’s primate said that stabilization might not come soon.

Addressing the Episcopal Church’s bishops in Texas a week earlier, Marona called the situation in Darfur very serious. About 3,000 people have been killed there, he said, and 700,000 others have fled this impoverished region that borders Chad.

Sudanese situation grave
More recent reports by Human Rights Watch place the number of people displaced as a result of the government’s scorched-earth campaign at about one million. That organization says that government forces and militia groups have killed several thousand people, raped women and girls, kidnapped children, stolen cattle, burned hundreds of villages and contaminated wells with dead bodies.

“The Sudanese military and government-backed militias are committing massive human rights violations daily,” said Georgette Gagnon, deputy director for the African division of Human Rights Watch. It describes a Sudanese government strategy of targeting civilians of non-Arab ethnic communities.

The current conflict began about 14 months ago when two rebel groups demanded that the Sudanese government stop arming the Arab groups in Darfur and address long-standing grievances over underdevelopment in the region.
Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold in a statement April 8 called it terribly ironic that these events come at a time when many hoped that peace was possible for Sudan.

“The historic tragedy of Sudan is, in part, the result of the indifference of much of the world to the violence that the ruling power has committed against its own people. It would only add to that tragedy if the crisis in Darfur were ignored,” Griswold said.
[The Sudan peace talks in Kenya, convened in Kenya by an intergovernmental body of East African countries, are limited to the two main parties of the 20-year conflict in southern Sudan and do not include the Darfur region.]

Griswold welcomed U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s appointment of a high-level team to travel to Darfur to examine the crisis, but he said more needs to be done. He called for full access to the region and protection of humanitarian groups without delay.

Security hinders help
Episcopal Relief and Development sent an emergency grant to the Diocese of El Obeid to help to alleviate the immediate crisis. Other groups also are trying to help.

Suffragan Bishop Francis Gray led a team from the Diocese of Virginia to the Diocese of Renk in southern Sudan for two weeks in late February and early March.

“Immediate problems developed with the medicine we brought,” he said in a report on his diocese’s website. “These were critical malaria medications, costing over $50,000, specifically intended to relieve an ongoing malaria epidemic in Renk.

“Sudanese personnel confiscated the medicines, and we did not receive them while we were in the country. This incident is typical of treatment by the security [forces],” the bishop said.

Another team member, Dr. Fred Ward, a specialist in infectious diseases, reported that nine out of 10 people he examined had malaria.
Gray, who attended the New York meeting with Marona and Episcopalians with Sudan-related ministries, said he also visited a refugee camp outside Khartoum.

‘The city is ringed with such camps, in which as many as 50,000 to 150,000 displaced people live. These camps are really towns with dirt roads, shacks and mud huts … There may be four million or more displaced persons. The government of Khartoum does nothing to support its own citizens who live in these places in Sudan,” Gray said.

 “The discomfort comes from knowing of our own substantive resources and how easy it would be for even a small Episcopal Church to make a huge difference in a Sudanese church or school. A teacher, for example, works for $50 U.S. per month and in most cases has not been paid for a year.”

For more information, visit:
http://www.episcopalvirginia.org/
www.hrw.org/video/2004/sudan

For Even In Sorrow, a CD of Sudanese music and song by Slater Armstrong, visit:
http://www.joiningourvoices.com/

To make a contribution and help people in Sudan, donate to the Africa Relief Fund online at http://www.er-d.org/ or call 800-334-7626, ext. 5129. Gifts can be mailed to: Episcopal Relief and Development, c/o Africa Relief Fund, P.O. Box 12043, Newark, N.J. 07101.