Bishop Jeffrey Lee of Chicago says that the roots of the strife in Sudan are political, not religious.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune, he says:
I recently visited Renk, Sudan, a city that sits on the border between that country’s mostly Arab and Muslim north and its primarily African and Christian south. If you have followed the situation in this oil-rich, yet impoverished country, which teeters always on the precipice of civil war, you might assume that I observed the conflict in microcosm, witnessed outbursts of violence and repression, and sensed the simmering tension between adherents of Africa’s two largest religions. I assumed as much myself before I went to Renk.
What I experienced, instead, in the market center of a sprawling farming belt, was a place where Christians and Muslims live peacefully together, where Muslim children attend Christian schools and where soldiers act as peacemakers. In Renk, people living fragile lives in sometimes desperate economic conditions work together, regardless of religious differences, because they recognize that they depend on one another to survive. In this regard, it is emblematic of what I have come to think of as the Sudan that happens when no one is looking.
What you learn in Renk is that we in the West are mistaken in thinking of Sudan’s civil war as a religious conflict. Rather, it is a conflict in which men with self-serving political and financial motives have created a climate of terror, forcing people who fear for their lives, and the lives of their families, to seek security in whatever identity seems most advantageous. In such a climate, minorities are easy to identify, and their persecution easier to justify.
We will do well to keep the proclivity of Sudan’s rulers to turn the nation’s people against one another in the run-up to the January 9 balloting in which experts believe that southern Sudan will choose to secede and form a separate government. If there is violence in the aftermath of this vote, it will stem not from interreligious animus, but from the strategic cultivation of hatred and grievance by Sudan’s rulers.
Misunderstanding the causes of the Sudanese conflict could have devastating consequences.
There are political and military leaders in those parts of Africa where Muslims and Christians are present in roughly equal numbers pursuing a quest for dominance by instilling mistrust among people of different faiths. But in Renk and elsewhere, people of differing faiths coexist in relative harmony when left to their own devices. The problem is not ancient religious hatreds, but self-seeking political and religious figures who view the Christian and Muslim faithful as tinder for their conflagrations.
Read the rest here.