Sudan: Fear of Repression of Christians in the North

By Eric Sande

JUBA--After a successful referendum, the churches in the northern Sudan are raising concerns of the aftermath. Southerners are mostly Christian or follow traditional, folk religions, but the North has been under Islamic law since 1983.  It's unclear what will happen to Christians in the north now that the Christian South has seceded.

A good number of Christians are fleeing south with their place of worship, parishes and church schools in the north closing down. This follows earlier comments from President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's that Sharia law will be strengthened after secession.

For a while, Christian marriage certificates weren't recognized, and the government confiscated the Catholic Club, repainting it with green Islamic colours and using it to house a northern political party.  After the peace agreement in 2005, when former southern rebels were allowed into the national government, churches say that they were afforded more rights and that non-Muslims were "better protected" in the capital. 

"The Islam in Sudan is very quiet and very kind and no one from the Muslim people would attack any church," said proto-priest Filotheos Farag, who explained that he was paid respectful visits by prominent Muslims during Coptic Christmas in January.

"With the mass movement of the southerners and people from the Nuba Mountains, some of the churches have been left empty," said Rev. Ramadan Chan Liol, the general secretary of the Sudan Council of Churches (SCC), a grouping of Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Churches, confirming that some of these parishes were mainly of southern people.

"Individual denominations are considering what to do with the properties of such parishes."

The Roman Catholic Church is planning to restructure and merge some parishes in the north, according to the Rev. George Jangara Modi, the Khartoum diocesan education secretary. "We are updating records. We want to see who will remain in the parishes," he said.

Observers say the southerners flee because they could not be assured of their safety. In a recent interview, Chan said, "We are concerned about the security of Christians in the north because they are going to be a minority. We are trying to see if they can be protected through a law as minorities."

The diminishing Christianity in the north is a fate left to the Muslim government in the north to see if it will fully adopt strict Sharia law, as it has promised, or adopt a freedom of worship as it were before.