CRISSA NELSON | features editor
WITH AP SOURCES

The crisis in Darfur, Sudan is a publicized political conflict within a deadly religious war.

Genocide in Darfur, Sudan. An atrocity that has taken precedent in international media on Africa. Yet while media attention is focused to the west, a deeply-rooted religious partition has continuously divided the Islamic north and Christian south with much more deadly, yet less recognized, implications.

Recent international attention on Africa has primarily focused on the atrocious genocide of the native Sudanese people in Darfur, a region the size of France in western Sudan. A government-supported Arab militia has killed an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 since the most recent uprising in 2003.

Yet while this uprising is the most prevalent, it is one political conflict within a less prevalent history of religious civil war that has taken the lives of over 2.2 million people in the past 50 years.

The minority Islamic Arab ruling party in the north, and the majority native Christian Sudanese population in the south, have stained the sand of the Sahara over border conflicts, oil revenue and humanitarian aid, for the extent of the country’s independent history.

The conflict is complex with multiple key parties and, even more, angry players. But while it is a political conflict between the National Congress Party, Sudan’s Arab ruling party of the north, and the “Rebel” liberation parties in the south, it is a political conflict with deep religious roots.

The country of Sudan is currently a united nation under a peace agreement signed in 2005. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of the National Congress Party came to the agreement with the People’s Liberation Movement, one of Sudan’s most prominent liberation parties.

Arguably, the treaty was broken in 2003 with the uprising in Darfur, yet Thursday Oct. 8 marked an official breaking when leaders of the People’s Liberation Movement announced its ministers and advisors would not work until grievances over border disputes and sharing oil profits were addressed. Peace talks, which took place on Oct. 27 in Libya, are yet another failed attempt to piece the broken entities together.

A joint United Nations and African Union peacekeeping mission (UNAMID) of over 25,000 troops is to be deployed sometime between now and Jan. 1 to replace the current 7,000 member AU peacekeeping mission, which has been ineffective at stopping the bloodshed taking place in Darfur. As one of the biggest peacekeeping mission in UN history with 20,000 soldiers, 6,000 police officers and 5,000 civilian personnel, many in the international community have been hopeful that true peace is attainable.

“This may look as a little step but its implications are wide, it’s a huge move toward the final assumption of full control in Darfur,” UN spokesman Ali Hamati said.

Months of international pressure and painstaking negotiations finally resulted in an acceptance of the hybrid mission by President al-Bashir under the condition the forces would predominantly be Arab-African. Many of these troops don’t have appropriate equipment, specifically the air and ground transport needed.

Many within the country see this as a complicated religious conflict that has been overshadowed by strong political language.

Reverend Sam Childers, an American directly fighting within the warzone, is pessimistic that peacekeeping efforts will succeed due to the harsh ethnic and religious partition. He believes the mission will consist of primarily Muslim peacekeepers whose deep-seeded religious bias will detract from a fair protection of the native Christian population.

Childers has lived in the bush of Sudan for 11 years and founded an orphanage in south Sudan for children orphaned by the war. He fights on the front line as a third entity for these children before they are displaced or either side can recruit them as soldiers.

He also attributed his pessimism to the fact that a peacekeeping mission is to “keep” peace, a peace that cannot currently be found in the country of Sudan.

The vice president of the Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary (JETS) Cliff Daffron works with many Sudanese pastoral leaders. He sees the root of the conflict as “one of an Islamic Arab-led government imposing Islam and all of its systems on the south and the Christian people.”

An Islamic North against a Christian South.

“Islam is not just a religion but a social, political and economic system,” Daffron said.

He said he has seen the Muslim population impose Islam within all aspects of society from banks to school curriculum on the Christian people.

“[Sudan] is strategic for Islam and Christianity because it is bordered by nine countries,” Daffron said. “Anything accomplished in Sudan has an effect on those nine countries.”

He recalled a story of a Sudanese pastor that depicts the intense persecution of the Sudanese Christian church.

“Government soldiers came into the village [located] in the Nuba Mountains, a significant bridge between north and south, and burned all the Christian homes, burned the churches, and demanded the pastor denounce Christ,” Daffron said. “In front of the whole village they removed a finger each time they asked and he wouldn’t renounce. Then they dragged him behind a van through the village.”

Daffron believes that only by the grace of God was the life of this pastor spared, to spread a message, not of retaliation, but of hope.

“I’m all behind [the peacekeeping troops] to stop the slaughter, but that is an external peace, imposed on the country,” Daffron said. “It’s not an internal peace, and that’s what is needed.”