Tag Archives: Sudan

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Over 99 percent of people in southern Sudan vote for succession

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Map of Africa
Map of Africa

Great news in Sudan. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

More than 99 percent of Southern Sudanese voted to secede from the north, a referendum official said Sunday in the first official preliminary result announcement.

“The vote for separation was 99.57 percent,” said Chan Reek Madut, the deputy head of the commission that organized the referendum, to a crowd in the South’s capital of Juba, according to Reuters.

Voter turnout in the South was 99 percent, Madut said. And over 60 percent of Southern Sudanese living in the north turned out to vote, with 58 percent voting to secede, he stated.

Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, chairman of the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission, said 99 percent of the Southern Sudanese diaspora in eight nations also voted to secede.

After decades of civil war and ongoing tension between the northern and southern governments, it looks like the south will finally become its own country. The weeklong referendum, which began on Jan. 9, is called for by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended more than two decades of civil war.

[…]Southern Sudan President Salva Kiir, who is expected to lead the independent South, has called for Southern Sudanese to forgive the North for the years of violence during the civil war. Some 1.9 million people died during the war between the North and South and more than 500 churches were destroyed in the South.

“For our deceased brothers and sisters, particularly those who have fallen during the time of struggle, may God bless them with eternal peace,” said Kiir at Catholic Cathedral in Juba on Jan. 16.

“And,” he continued, “may we, like Jesus Christ on the cross, forgive those who have forcefully caused their deaths.”

Southern Sudan is the more Christian part of Sudan, so this is good news for Sudanese Christians.

Here’s a close up of southern Sudan:

Map of Southern Sudan
Map of Southern Sudan

Muddling linked to an interesting post providing more historical context for the referendum.

I’m still very worried about what is going on in Egypt and Pakistan. I am still trying to catch up on Egypt but the two posts linked by Gateway Pundit are the two best that I’ve seen.

News

MUST-READ: Why Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world

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A very fine article from the normally ultra-liberal Toronto Star. (H/T Jojo)

Excerpt:

Virtually every human rights group and Western government agency that monitors the plight of Christians worldwide arrives at more or less the same conclusion: Between 200 million and 230 million of them face daily threats of murder, beating, imprisonment and torture, and a further 350 to 400 million encounter discrimination in areas such as jobs and housing. A conservative estimate of the number of Christians killed for their faith each year is somewhere around 150,000.

Christians are “the largest single group in the world which is being denied human rights on the basis of their faith,” the World Evangelical Alliance has noted.

In a report to a conference on Christian persecution hosted by the European Parliament last month, the U.S. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life put it this way: while Muslims and Jews worldwide and Baha’is in Iran certainly suffer too, Christians were “harassed” by government factors in 102 countries and by social factors, such as mob rule, in 101 countries.

“Altogether, Christians faced some form of harassment in two-thirds of all countries,” or 133 nations, the report said. Muslims also face “substantial” harassment, the Pew report found, but in fewer countries.

Christians face harassment in more countries “than any other religious group,” a Pew Forum spokesperson told the Star.

Put in sharper focus, “at least” 75 per cent of all religious persecution in the world is directed against Christians, the conference was told.

The euphemistic term “harassment” encompasses vigilante and terrorist attacks against Christians in more than a dozen Muslim countries. In Sudan, an estimated 1.5 million Christians have been murdered by the Islamic Janjaweed militia, including some who were crucified. In Nigeria, 12 states have introduced sharia law. Thousands of Christians were killed in the ensuing violence.

In Saudi Arabia, the only faith permitted by law is Islam. Christians are regularly imprisoned and tortured on trumped-up charges of drinking alcohol, blaspheming or owning religious artifacts.

In Egypt, Coptic Christians are still reeling from a church attack last January in which eight worshippers were killed. “The situation is deteriorating and is very tense,” Sam Fanous, a leader of Toronto’s Coptic community, told the Star from Cairo. He said that after Friday Muslim prayers, streets fill with anti-Coptic protests.

In historically tolerant Indonesia, Islamic militias have bombed churches in majority Christian regions and killed or forcibly converted thousands.

China, meantime, continues to shutter “underground” churches and ship pastors to prison.

Read the whole thing. This is one-stop shopping on the persecution issue, and the sources are unimpeachable. Send it to your friends.