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Sudan amputates Christian's hand for theft
Emergency Courts Activate Harsh Islamic Law Punishments
By Barbara G. Baker
Compass Direct (06.03.2002) / HRWF International Secretariat (08.03.2002) C Website http://www.hrwf.net C Email info@hrwf.net -- The government of Sudan amputated a Southern Sudanese Christian's right hand for alleged theft in late January, furthering evidence that the Islamist regime has begun enacting harsh Muslim punishments against both Christian and Muslim citizens within the past three months.
Church and family sources confirmed to Compass this week that Anthony James Ladou Wani, a member of the Kakwa tribe from South Sudan, had his right hand amputated on January 24. Wani had been jailed in Khartoum's Kober Prison since May 2000, when he was convicted and sentenced for allegedly stealing spare car parts.
According to the Swiss-based World Organization Against Torture (OMCT), which reported Wani's amputation last week, Wani had no legal representation at his trial, and there was not enough evidence to convict him.
"Even if it had been proved," a Khartoum relative told Compass yesterday, "he is a Christian. He is not a Muslim. So he should not have been punished under Islamic law."
Neither Wani nor his family had any warning that the sentence was going to be carried out. "We were actually rung about a half an hour before, by one of the prisoners who knew our telephone number," the family member said.
"He called us and said that Anthony is going to be amputated." But by the time his family arrived, Wani's hand had already been severed. Described as "staunch Anglicans," Wani's relatives only learned of his arrest after he had already been convicted and sentenced. "We were not living close to each other," the family source said. "By the time we heard of it, it was already six months that he was in jail, and the sentence was already passed."
The family promptly took his papers to an experienced Christian lawyer, who concluded there had not been sufficient evidence to convict Wani of the charges. But by then it was too late to appeal Wani's sentence, which had already been ratified by a higher court. Released from prison shortly after his amputation, Wani is now recovering at home, his relative said. His arm is still far from healed, however. Initial reports listed Wani's age as 46, although a relative told Compass that he was "much younger, somewhere in his 30s."
"He is having to get used to only using one hand," the relative said. "He needs prayer, just to adjust to his situation, and accept it."
According to Human Rights Watch, the tribunals handing down recent sentences of limb amputation are all so-called "emergency courts," composed of one civil judge and two military judges. "The accused are not allowed legal representation and are allowed only a week to appeal to the district chief justice," the New York-based advocacy group said in a February 1 report.
According to OMCT's partner organization, Sudan Victims of Torture Group (SVTG), an emergency court in the southern Darfur city of Nyala gave amputation sentences on December 12 to two other Christians, both expatriates studying in Sudan.
Abdu Ismail Tong from Guinea and Yousif Yaow Mombai from Zaire were accused of stealing three million Sudanese pounds ($1,160). The two Christians confessed to the theft while in police custody, but later denied these confessions. They were refused the right to legal representation by a lawyer during their trial. Tong and Mombai, both 31, remain in jail awaiting punishment.
At least four Muslim defendants in Northern and Southern Darfur states have been identified who also received amputation sentences during December, two of them to cross amputation (severing of the right hand and left foot).
Under Article 171 of Sudan's 1991 penal code, anyone convicted of theft can be sentenced to amputation if the stolen items equal the value of 4.25 grams of gold. Judicial amputation was first introduced into the Sudanese penal code as part of President Gaafar Nimeiri's "September Laws" in 1983, but since 1985 it has rarely been carried out.
A Sudanese government spokesman in Nairobi told the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs last week that amputation was a "rare" punishment only carried out twice under the rule of President Omar al-Bashir, who came to power in 1989.
"The punishments are part of our religion," Charge d'Affaires Muhammad Ahmad Dirdiery of the Sudanese Embassy in Nairobi said on February 27.
"Amputation as a punishment occurs throughout the Islamic world, so why single out Sudan?"
The Sudanese government officially exempts the 10 southern states, where most of the population is non-Muslim, from parts of Islamic law permitting the physical punishments of lashing, amputation and stoning. But Islamic law is applied to all residents of the northern states, regardless of their religion.
Over the past decade, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Sudan has noted in his annual report to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that corporal punishments like amputation, flogging, death-by-stoning and crucifixion enshrined in Sudanese law are "radically opposed to provisions of the international conventions to which the Sudan is a party."
The Sudanese government's standard response has been to accuse the commission of attacking Islam.
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Sudan jihad forces Islam on Christians
Women refusing to convert gang-raped
By Art Moore
WND (04.03.2002) / HRWF International Secretariat (05.03.2002) C Website http://www.hrwf.net C Email info@hrwf.net - Sudan's militant Muslim regime is slaughtering Christians who refuse to convert to Islam, according to the head of an aid group who recently returned from the African nation.
The forced conversions are just one aspect of the Khartoum government's self-declared jihad on the mostly Christian and animist south, Dennis Bennett, executive director of Seattle-based Servant's Heart told WorldNetDaily.
Villagers in several areas of the northeast Upper Nile region say that when women are captured by government forces they are asked: "Are you Christian or Muslim?"
Women who answer "Muslim" are set free, but typically soldiers gang-rape those who answer "Christian" then cut off their breasts and leave them to die as an example for others.
Bennett says these stories are corroborated by witnesses from several tribes in the region. Upon returning to the U.S., he wrote a letter to influential members of Congress and activists.
"After witnessing once again the situation on the ground there," Bennett wrote, "I must ask 'How long will the United States government allow the Government of Sudan to continue its jihad against the Black African Christians of South Sudan?'"
Backed by Muslim clerics, the National Islamic Front regime in the Arab and Muslim north declared a jihad, or holy war, on the south in 1989. Since 1983, an estimated 2 million people have died from war and related famine. About 4.5 million have become refugees.
Sudan's holy war against the south was reaffirmed in October by First Vice President Ali Osman Taha.
"The jihad is our way, and we will not abandon it and will keep its banner high," he said to a brigade of mujahedin fighters heading for the war front, according to Sudan's official SUNA news agency. "We will never sell out our faith and will never betray the oath to our martyrs."
The U.S. House of Representatives adopted a resolution finding that Khartoum is "systematically committing genocide," but current legislation that would impose sanctions has been stalled. The Sudan Peace Act is opposed by both the White House and Wall Street.
Sanctions in the House version of the bill target oil revenues that Khartoum is using to fuel its war effort. Bennett, with 20 years experience in international risk management and banking, said he was the first to probe the link between oil and jihad that is now documented and publicized by human rights groups. His research began in 1996 when he asked: If you're the government of Sudan and you're broke, how are you paying for your war?
In his letter urging action by the U.S., he points out that Sudan's military continues to decorate and promote known war criminals such as Commander Taib Musba, who in the mid-1980s killed an estimated 15,000 unarmed, civilian, ethnic Uduk Christians.
In 1986, Musba entered the Uduk tribal capital of Chali and declared to its Christians: "You are all going to convert from Christianity to Islam today, because here is what's going to happen to you if you don't."
Musba then killed five church leaders in front of the gathered villagers. When they refused to convert, he began killing unarmed men, women and children. Some were herded at gunpoint into a hut then run over by a 50-ton, Soviet-made tank.
He also herded groups of about a dozen people into a hut, where he asked the first person "Do you renounce Jesus Christ?" Anyone who refused was killed by a three-inch nail driven into the top of the head.
The U.N. high commissioner for refugees granted the Uduks international refugee status in 1992 after investigating the atrocities, but almost as many died during the six years they waited for the declaration.
Islam also is forced on Sudanese in the Muslim north. Security police in Khartoum are pursuing a local convert to Christianity who went into hiding three weeks ago to escape arrest and possible death, the Compass Direct news service reports. Aladin Omer Agabni Mohammed, who left Islam 11 years ago to become a Christian, is subject to the death penalty under Sudanese criminal law for "apostasy." According to a church leader, two other converts face a similar situation.
Forced starvation Bennett says that in addition to the more immediate, readily apparent atrocities taking place, there is a slower, less perceptive persecution that is equally deadly.
Forced starvation is one of the primary tools of the Khartoum regime, he says. When government forces attack a Christian village, they kill everyone they catch, but those who flee lose everything necessary for survival.
"The government comes in and burns the crops, burns grain stored if there was any excess, burns houses down," Bennett said. "Now you have only the clothes on your back, no tools, no cooking pots, no buckets for water, and you have to run two days through the bush in 115-degree temperatures in order to escape."
In the arid wilderness, escapees try to survive on tree leaves and stagnant, dysentery-infested water. If a women is breastfeeding, her milk dries up, Bennett said, and the baby starts dying. Small children, just weaned, also start dying.
"But all the family has to do is change their name to Muhammad or Ramadan, convert to Islam and walk the two days back to the government of Sudan who will care for them," he said.
Last year, the government of Sudan burned all the crops in the area where Bennett's group works.
"There wasn't anything to harvest," he said. "Literally we saw people eating roots and tree leaves. It's like eating the nutritional properties of cardboard. It's enough to put something in your stomach but not enough to feed you."
A food drop came from the U.N. World Food Program, he said, "but they never came in to do an assessment; they just dropped it from the air."
As the "hungry season" approaches - the rainy period of June, July and early August - emergency food supplies become critical. Servant's Heart believes it will need to feed 50,000 people in its area during that time.
Slavery is another tool of the National Islamic Front regime, though Bennett says it is not known in the northeast Upper Nile region, mainly because of lack of transportation.
Western Bahr El Ghazal is one location where it persists because the railroad line allows captured men, women and children to be taken to slave markets in the north.
"If you want to end systematic slavery, blow up the train line and keep it blown up," Bennett said.
The ongoing controversy surrounding slave redemption - the practice of buying freedom promoted by some humanitarian groups - arose again in the past week when the Irish Times and Washington Post published exposes acknowledging the existence of slavery in Sudan but alleging that fake slave redemption is taking place.
Bennett respects the work of groups buying back the slaves, but he believes it is inevitable that some will be conned. Engaging in the practice is a matter of individual conscience, he says.
"Anytime you have tens of thousands of American dollars coming into an area you've got potential problems of corruption," Bennett said.
He says the "jury is still out" on whether it fuels the market by increasing demand.
"Slave-taking would still be happening even if nobody was buying back slaves," he said. "Maybe not to the full extent."
But he believes it's important to keep in mind that taking slaves is "just one more facet of the jihad against the civilian population" in southern Sudan. The methods may vary in different parts of the country, but the aim is the same.
"In the Uduk tribe, Taib Musba drove three-inch nails into people's heads," he said. "In northeast Upper Nile, they are gang-raping women and cutting off their breasts; in western Bahr El Ghazal, they are capturing women and selling them as slaves."
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Sudanese police launch manhunt to find Christian
Former Muslim in 'Critical Danger', Church Leader Say
by Barbara G. Baker
Compass (27.02.2002)/HRWF International Secretariat (04.03.2002) C Website http://www.hrwf.net C Email info@hrwf.net Sudanese security police have mounted a widening manhunt to track down a local convert to Christianity who went into hiding in Khartoum three weeks ago to escape arrest and possible death.
According to a church leader in contact with Aladin Omer Agabni Mohammed, the former Muslim is in "a real tough situation now."
"He is being hunted everywhere," said the Khartoum churchman, who requested anonymity for the protection of all concerned. "The situation is really becoming intolerable, and I am not sure how he is going to survive, because he's really being threatened."
As a known "apostate" who left Islam 11 years ago to become a Christian, Mohammed is subject to the death penalty under Sudanese criminal law. Now 34 and unmarried, Mohammed was denounced by his family and expelled from his university studies shortly after his conversion. He has since been jailed on several occasions for months at a time.
But so far as Mohammed knows, formal legal charges have never been filed against him. Instead, authorities of the Islamist Khartoum regime have resorted to a pattern of harassment, trying to force him to renounce his faith and return to Islam.
Since late January, Mohammed has been subjected to ongoing interrogations, beatings, drug injections and death threats by Khartoum authorities.
When he tried to leave the country by plane on January 30 and again on February 3, the police intervened, pulling him out of the check-in line at the Khartoum airport. Both times, Mohammed had bought a ticket to Uganda, where he planned to apply to study theology in neighboring Kenya.
Ordered to stay in Khartoum, Mohammed was put under constant surveillance and summoned repeatedly to a security office located opposite St. Francis School in Khartoum. But after the second travel ban was imposed, he decided to go into hiding, changing his lodging frequently and maintaining only occasional telephone contact with relatives and friends.
"Up to this moment Aladin is safe," one of his friends told Compass. "He is now ready for any relocation anywhere, but traveling by land and escaping is too dangerous." Mohammed's passport remains in the hands of the security police, who must also approve his exit visa before he can leave.
Since his release last September after four months in prison, Mohammed stayed with relatives in Khalakla, a district of south Khartoum, and in Morzuk, an area in the adjoining city of Omdurman. But when he spoke with family members by telephone two weeks ago, he said they all admitted they were being watched by the police, who had instructed them to report immediately any contact with him.
Mohammed's relatives reportedly pressed him to say where he was and turn himself in, accusing him of "causing our family much trouble."
So far, his Christian friends have been unable to arrange for any medical check-up for the former Muslim, who in January was forcibly given a series of injections of unknown drugs that left him drowsy and disoriented.
"We really wanted to find out what medical injections were being given,"the source said today, "but we are not in a position to do this now." He identified this as an "immediate need" for Mohammed, along with prayer support, protection and his daily necessities while he waits in hiding.
"We are even getting more worried," the source admitted. "It's like we are passing through a tunnel which is completely dark, and when we reach the end, we don't know whether there will be some glimmering light there or not."
According to the church leader, two other Sudanese converts to Christianity are caught in a similar situation, facing "critical danger" under threats from the security police. Both are reportedly in hiding to avoid arrest and further torture, he said.
"Since [the authorities] do not want them, then they should be allowed to get out!" he declared.
U.S. Congressman Joseph R. Pitts commented on Mohammed's case from Washington, D.C., today, noting that leading Islamic scholars had assured him that according to the Quran, "There is no compulsion in religion."
"The government of Sudan disturbingly appears to be following the pattern of the Taliban in its treatment of people," Pitts observed. He urged the Khartoum authorities to "protect religious freedom for all people in Sudan, and allow Aladin Mohammed to freely leave the country."
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