Genocide Fueled by Oil

...Special Envoy John Danforth to broker cease-fire agreements...

...These people stand in the way of Khartoum's vision of spreading militant sharia throughout Africa...

...As commission chairman Michael Young testified before the House International Relations Committee in June, the "only way to get Khartoum's attention is to curtail its oil revenues...

...The State Department says so...

...The idea was picked up by Rep...

...The odd thing about this vehemence is that American companies are already prohibited from doing business in Sudan because of sanctions against the regime for its sponsorship of terrorism...

...The specter of oil as the life blood of Sudan's murderous clique moved the bipartisan U.S...

...But this isn't foreordained...

...sanctions, might cease its jihad...

...Northerners contemptuously refer to Africans as abd or abid, a word used interchangeably with slave or black...

...Last fall local promoters organized a rally in conjunction with "Rock the Desert," a Christian music festival that drew more than 30,000 youths to Midland...

...By rekindling the slave trade, the government of Sudan has also fueled a racist ideology of Arab superiority...

...Parts of this vast country were Christianized as early as the sixth century...

...Frustrated with Senate inaction, a bipartisan group of House members wrote to Senate leaders Tom Daschle and Trent Lott urging them to stop blocking the Sudan Peace Act...

...That brutal campaign led the U.S...

...This mobilization of religious Americans reaches the supposedly isolationist heartland...

...despite attempts by U.S...

...Clearly, standing against genocide carries a cost...

...This caused apoplexy among investors...

...Though the dominant Muslims have long sought to control or assimilate non-Muslims, what's new under this Islamist regime is the attempt to eradicate the minority entirely...

...Midland also hosted the "national service" of the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church last November (and will do so again this year), with some 40 congregations participating...

...Spencer Bachus, a Republican from Alabama, who attached it as an amendment to the Sudan Peace Act...

...Though the regime kills animists and even moderate Muslims who resist its fundamentalism, it has attempted to wipe out Christianity, prompting the Committee of Conscience of the U.S...

...Without the capital-market provision, they wrote, "the Government of Sudan will continue to pay for oil with the blood of its people...

...Another key argument against Bachus is that cutting access to U.S...

...Concerned that Daschle was using Gramm's threatened filibuster to rationalize his own inaction, all 39 members of the Congressional Black Caucus signed a letter to the Democratic majority leader stating that they considered measures against Sudan comparable to "the struggle against the apartheid regime of South Africa...

...Foreign companies producing the oil have largely acquiesced in this policy and in some cases actively supported it...

...Certainly not exposure of Sudanese atrocities in the mainstream media, which have barely covered the genocide...

...Graham represents a growing number of American religious leaders who run programs in Sudan or travel there to bring relief supplies outside of Khartoum's manipulation...

...Instead, the energy behind this effort derives from the growing international engagement of evangelical Christians...

...One of the featured artists was the Hollywood recording artist and gospel songwriter Ken Tamplin, who produced a CD dedicated to the Sudan cause...

...The showdown on Sudan thus points toward a growing foreign policy divide in the Republican party—and in the Bush administration—between religious moralists and market purists...

...One lobbyist for Goldman Sachs said that every PAC dollar coming out of Wall Street would have "Bachus written all over it...

...Thus, an offensive last October in Ruweng County displaced an estimated 80,000 people, who fled scurrying for food and shelter...

...They all beat me and laughed and called me 'Abid, abid.'" Bok was made to sleep with the animals because, as his master told him, "You are an animal...

...Calculated military terror, including indiscriminate bombing, has resulted in massive population displacements...

...It was probably this threat that induced Khartoum grudgingly to agree to participate in peace talks under the aegis of special envoy Danforth...

...capital markets would be ineffective because it would just drive companies elsewhere...

...Hundreds of thousands of refugees have been herded into "peace camps," where many die and others are told to convert to Islam or starve...

...Consider: On the same day that the House passed capital-market sanctions against Sudan, delegates of the 15 million member Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution condemning Khartoum and calling for direct aid to the victims...

...Emaciated women have reportedly sold their babies to Muslims in the hope at least of saving the children's lives...

...When was the last time the Congressional Black Caucus and the Southern Baptist Convention joined forces with major Jewish organizations, Catholic and Episcopalian bishops, human rights activists, conservative evangelical groups, and national security hawks...

...No, says Wall Street...

...Alan Greenspan testified against the Bachus amendment, and the big guns on Wall Street weighed in...

...The local Catholic church, meanwhile, hosted a presentation on the work of Bishop Gassis among the Nuba people, who face extinction...

...Markets are sacrosanct...

...By enacting capital-market sanctions against Sudan, our leaders can show the world that Americans are still willing to pay a price to advance the cause of human dignity...

...Ex-slave Francis Bok was featured at a local Hispanic church...

...Francis Bok, a former Sudanese slave now living in Boston, recounted how he was captured when he was 7 and sold to an Arab herder, who called out the whole family to meet their new acquisition: "They all had sticks...

...The bill passed the House by a vote of422-2 last summer...

...The idea was bold but plausible: Check Khartoum's aggression by restricting dollars for its oil development...

...All are backing the selective use of capital-market leverage against the militant Islamist regime in Khartoum, which has waged a bruAllen Hertzke is professor of political science and director of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma...

...This saga of ongoing contempt is what makes the outcome in Sudan momentous for the broader cause of human rights...

...But advocates respond that extraordinary circumstances demand exceptions...

...As the House members wrote in their letter, "Why do we allow foreign companies that obtain Sudanese oil to trade on our capital markets when American companies are prohibited from doing so...

...Down the street at First Baptist Church, Kevin Turner of Strategic World Impact recounted touring devastated villages where buzzards feasted on human flesh, and dodging air attacks for days with his fleeing Sudanese brethren...

...Opponents of Bachus fear a slippery slope, that there would be no end to de-listing companies from the stock market that putatively finance human rights violators...

...Activists hope this pressure from right and left will break the logjam...

...But oil production began in 1999, giving new life to the regime by filling its coffers with cash to buy weapons and increasing its influence in the region...

...The alternative is pretty clear...

...Galvanized initially by the suffering of fellow believers abroad, evangelicals have emerged as the vanguard of a new movement for more assertive American leadership on behalf of human rights...

...Inspired by the same ideology that built al Qaeda, the country's leaders declared a campaign to Islamicize or wipe out the country's African population in the Nuba mountains and the south...

...That is why the judgment on Sudan could define the politics of human rights for a generation...

...Prior to September 11 the conflict in Sudan was often deemed an African "civil war" beyond the scope of America's strategic interest...

...What is driving the current push in Washington for capital-market sanctions is a simple fact: Genocide is being fueled by oil...

...The Bachus amendment merely extends the ban to foreigners...

...As recently as May 5, an assault by Khartoum's military devastated the oil region of Eastern Upper Nile...

...The chairman of the commission at the time, Elliott Abrams, made the case for the policy in these pages shortly before assuming a top post in Bush's National Security Council...

...At issue: Should foreign oil companies doing business in Sudan be denied access to U.S...

...To achieve this dubious distinction, the regime sends Arab militias to attack, loot, and destroy undefended villages, killing the men and abducting the women and children into slavery...

...Despots hope, and dissidents fear, that in the end business values or pinched calculations of realpolitik will prevail in American foreign policy...

...Yes, asserts a coalition of religious and civil rights groups...

...For a while it seemed that the National Islamic Front, facing setbacks on the battlefield and isolated by U.S...

...Traveling through the ruined villages, Dennis Bennett of the relief organization Servant's Heart declared that a community of some 15,000-20,000 people "now ceases to exist...

...Fearing that a House bill containing this provision might prevail in conference over a Senate version that lacks it, opponents of capital-market sanctions, notably Texas senator Phil Gramm, have blocked the appointment of Senate conferees...

...Certainly not the feckless Europeans or our State Department...

...After its cynical "cooperation" in the hunt for terrorists earned fulsome praise from our State Department last fall, the regime reaffirmed its internal jihad, continued slave raids, attacked U.N...

...This caused apoplexy among investors...

...Much of the oil lies in the south, leading the government to "cleanse" the population surrounding the fields...

...Genocide Fueled by Oil A showdown over Sudan policy pits "doing good" against "doing business" BY ALLEN HERTZKE A potential showdown is looming in Washington that will affect the fate of a people and could define the politics of human rights for a generation...

...Alan Greenspan says so...

...Their homes looted and burned, refugees "fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs...

...The president accuses Sudan of "crimes so monstrous that the American conscience had to assert itself," but his economic advisers vehemently oppose acting on that conviction...

...The cause has indeed forged an incongruous alliance...

...Also participating in the Midland event were a group of independent oil producers—conjuring up the prospect that Texas oilmen, in a different kind of Christian disciple-ship, might lobby Senator Gramm to release his hold on the Sudan Peace Act...

...indeed, the Christian Kingdoms of Sudan fell to Arab invaders only in the sixteenth century...

...So what will finally spur the Senate to action...

...From the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, evangelical leaders have won significant victories by mobilizing church networks that political scientist Robert Putnam has called the "largest" and "best organized" grass-roots system in the country...

...Baroness Carolyn Cox of Christian Solidarity Worldwide spoke at First Presbyterian Church of the fidelity of Sudanese Christians in the face of atrocious suffering...

...tal war against the country's religious and ethnic minorities since it seized power in 1989...

...Commission on International Religious Freedom to label Sudan the "world's most violent abuser of the right to freedom of religion and belief...

...The war pits the Arab Muslim north of Sudan, anchored by Khartoum, against a black African south comprising mostly tribal religionists and Christians...

...Women and girls are raped, many become concubines, and genital mutilation is common...

...Remarkably, the Bush administration's point man on the issue, Walter Kansteiner, denies that Sudan's case rises to that level of severity...

...In other words, Bachus might just work...

...The real loss of oil revenue could pressure the regime to halt its predations...

...The casualties are staggering: 2 million dead—more than were killed in the conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo combined—and another 4 million displaced...

...As Republican congressman Chris Smith put it, "I'm a free market guy," but "when it comes to a country that has killed 2 million people," sanctions are justified...

...Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2001 to recommend denying capital-market access for oil companies doing business there...

...By the thousands, African slaves have been branded, beaten, given Muslim names, and forced to renounce their faith...

...Goldman Sachs says so...

...Midland, Texas, for example, is not only home to the Bushes but also ground zero in the public awareness campaign against genocide in Sudan...

...Commission on International Religious Freedom to recommend delisting the oil companies there from our stock markets...

...capital markets...

...Joining the SBC in the cause are Charles Colson, whose Prison Fellowship Ministries operates in some 80 countries, and Franklin Graham, whose clinics and schools in Sudan have been bombed...

...If Sudan's well-documented record does not merit the selective use of American economic power, then the message is clear: There is no circumstance so horrific that it will be allowed to disrupt the flow of capital...

...Religious and ethnic cleansing continued this year, The specter of oil as the life blood of Sudan's murderous clique moved the U.S...

...If we will not change," Catholic bishop Macram Gassis laments, Khartoum "will kill us, or starve us to death, or put us in chains...

...To subjugate the Dinkas and the tribes of the Nuba mountains Khartoum employs scorched earth policies, which create famine, then denies those areas U.N...

...But James Buck-ee, CEO of Talisman Energy of Canada, one of the key petroleum producers in Sudan, said his company would pull out rather than risk losing access to American stock exchanges...

...We now see that it was the front line in a global terrorist jihad...

...Holocaust Memorial Museum to issue an unprecedented "genocide warning" on Sudan last year...

...Shortly thereafter the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, a consortium of foreign oil firms, moved in to begin drilling...

...A special exhibit on Khartoum's atrocities is still running at the museum...

...Evidence suggests that it continues to harbor and finance terrorists...

...relief planes attempting to deliver food to starving people, and burned down villages near oil fields...