(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has issued a statement in support of today’s ”˜Sudan Day of Action’ which calls for a renewed commitment to sustainable peace in Sudan. The Sudan Day of Action, organised by Baroness Cox and the Sudan Action Group, aims to raise awareness for the desperate plight of the people of Sudan.
Well, I’m sure glad to see this kind of statement from ++Rowan Williams. And I’m also gald he mentions the truly heroic labors of Baroness Cox in support of religious freedom in southern Sudan (often called New Sudan by the people there).
The Episcopal Church of Sudan is the fourth largest province in the AC, and one of the fastest growing, despite the fierce, sustained persecution that it has had to contend with for so long. We need to stand with our brave, long-suffering brothers and sisters in that desperately needy part of the world.
There is indeed a very grave danger that the treacherous National Islamic Front government in Khartoum, which is openly committed to the goal of the complete Islamization of all East Africa by force, will once again sabotage the peace accords and delay the scheduled referendum (due to take place in a year and a half).
Bottom line: the infamous President of Sudan, Omar al Bashir, is totally untrustworthy.
This fanatical Muslim ruler has been indicted for war crimes in Darfur by the World Court in the Hague, Netherlands, but he simply laughs in contempt at that unenforcable charge. In a world pagued by many cruel tyrants, including the notorious Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or the insane leader of North Korea, or the brutal military junta in Burma (Myanmar), I think the dubious distinction of being the absolute worst dictator in the world goes to Sudan’s Omar al Bashir.
I regard Bashir as demonically evil and utterly wicked, in the same way that Hitler was, in that he has unrepentantly pursued over many years a policy of outright genocide against the Christians in the southern part of Sudan.
And I fully expect that he’ll just mock this kind of empty statement by the ABoC in the same kind of way that Stalin dismissed his condemnation by the Pope. The brutal Soviet dictator (who among other unspeakable crimes starved tens of millions of Ukrainians to death to subdue the largest ethnic minority in the former Soviet Union) is reported to have just laughed and said about the Pope, [i] “And how many divisions (of tanks and soldiers) does he have?” [/i] I suspect that Bashir has even less reason to lose any sleep over what ++RW thinks or says.
David Handy+