ICC Note: A new report by a religious freedom watchdog says Christians in Sudan are facing ethnic cleansing. The Open Doors publication sites Sudan’s intention of creating a “fully homogenized” Arab-Muslim state as the fuel behind continuous bombing campaigns in the states that border South Sudan, along with targeting of churches and pastors’ houses for destruction. Sudan represents one of Africa’s most notorious persecutors of the Church that regularly rounds up pastors for arbitrary prison stays and trumps up charges to try and disrupt the work of the Church.

7/11/16 Sudan (World Watch Monitor) – Five years ago today (11 July, 2011), South Sudan became the world’s newest country after seceding from the North. Following a lengthy dispute over where a border should be drawn, it was decided that Sudan’s predominantly Christian South Kordofan and Blue Nile states would remain in the mainly Sunni Muslim North. In the five years since, the Sudanese government has waged a bombing campaign against this restive, resource-rich southern region.

Sudan’s Christians, who along with indigenous groups are concentrated in the southern regions of the country, are among the hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced by the violence, and whose homes, crops, churches, schools and hospitals have been destroyed. In the latest incident, in June, the sole secondary school in South Kordofan’s Umdorain Country was destroyed.

In April, the US State Department designated Sudan a “Country of Particular Concern” for the tenth consecutive year under the International Religious Freedom Act, for “having engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom”.

A new report by Open Doors, a charity that supports Christians under pressure for their faith, says Sudanese Christians – especially those in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states – have been facing and continue to face “ethnic cleansing”.

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