Religious freedom, along with everything else, is unraveling in Sudan

Between 2019 and 2021, Sudan was heralded as the prime example of progress in religious freedom in a country that had been known to have one of the worst records on the matter. Today, that progress has crumbled, and the prospects for religious freedom are, if anything, possibly grimmer than the prospects for peace. 

As 2023 nears a close, there remain no signs of peace in war-torn Sudan. 

Since mid-April, the country has been upended by a civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces. The country’s capital, Khartoum, has been decimated beyond recognition. Just last week, the second-largest city and nation’s breadbasket, Wad Madani, was captured by the Rapid Support Forces in what has been described as a watershed moment of the conflict. 

It is estimated that over 10,000 have been killed and roughly 6.6 million have fled their homes and are now displaced within the country’s borders or in neighboring countries. All accounts indicate that those who chose to remain are losing hope.  

With no end in sight to the intense fighting and atrocities, lawmakers in Washington are pressuring the Biden administration to appoint a new special envoy to Sudan to “breathe new life” into the U.S. government’s strategy on the evolving crisis.  

One group particularly at risk in Sudan’s conflict is the nation’s Christians. 

Sudanese Christians, while only comprising 5.4 percent of the country’s population, have been largely based in and around Khartoum. As the capital city has been at the epicenter of the war, the Christian community has been heavily impacted. They have been sought out and attacked for their faith, and many have had to flee the country and settle in refugee camps.  

Many churches have been destroyed. Earlier this month, Rapid Support Forces fighters attacked a Coptic Christian Monastery in Gezira State and started using it as a military base. Last month, a Presbyterian Evangelical Church in Omdurman and a Roman Catholic building in the Al-Shajara area were attacked amid Rapid Support Forces and Sudanese Armed Forces fighting. These are just the most recent examples of the ongoing spate of attacks on churches and Christian buildings since the fighting broke out.  

While neither civil war nor the persecution of Christians is new in Sudan, the current situation is particularly tragic in light of the extraordinary progress the country made in recent years toward civilian-ruled democracy and the protection of human rights — including most prominently religious freedom.  

In 2014, Meriam Ibrahim became the poster child of Sudan’s atrocious religious freedom violations when she was imprisoned with her toddler while pregnant and sentenced to death for marrying a Christian man. After this incident, Sudanese human rights activists sought out every opportunity to improve the country’s human rights record on religious freedom; they were finally able to move the needle after the fall of former dictator Omar al-Bashir.  

When Bashir’s 30-year rule came to an end in 2019, the transitional government made remarkable strides towards protecting religious freedom through decriminalizing apostasy, making it lawful for the people of Sudan to choose and change their religious beliefs without fear of criminalization, and broadening blasphemy laws which had only accounted for insults to Islam to apply to all religions. A 2020 constitutional amendment was enacted that not only specified protection for religious freedom but also, significantly, no longer referenced Sharia Law as the source of this right. 

Christians reportedly felt free during this time to worship and hold religious celebrations publicly. The U.S. State Department recognized and applauded Sudan’s progress in 2020 by removing it from its “Countries of Particular Concern” list of the world’s worst religious freedom violators, ending its 27-year run on the list.  

But the progress was short-lived. By the fall of 2021, the joint military and civilian leadership crumbled when the military forcefully took full control of the country and began steadily slashing away at the country’s two years of high watermarks on the protection of human rights. 

The military coup of 2021 brought in its wake a sharp rise in cases of religious persecution. Shortly after the military takeover, authorities in Gezira State arrested a young couple, Hamouda and Nada, after their conversion to Christianity. Even after the coup, the 2020 constitutional amendment deterred prosecutors from bringing charges of apostasy, but the fall of the civilian government emboldened them to charge the couple with adultery, premised on the claim that their conversions voided their marriage, rendering their union criminal. 

The charges against them carried sentences of 100 lashes, possibly stoning and one year of expatriation. After many months of trials and threats from the community to carry out honor killings against them, they were forced to flee the country. They are now in the United States, and a video documenting their ordeal was released by ADF International, where I serve as the director of advocacy for global religious freedom, this month. 

In March 2022, the military arrested Pastor Abdulla Haroun Sulieman of the Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church in Gezira State for alleged “witchcraft” after he presided over a healing prayer service where individuals reported being healed.     

In June 2022, prosecutors in Central Darfur State tried to bring charges of apostasy against four Christian converts from the Sudanese Baptist Church, who were arrested, beaten and interrogated, and had their heads shaved forcibly. Two months later the charges were dropped with the judge recognizing that apostasy was no longer criminal — but the authorities had already accomplished their goal of deterring other Christian converts from meeting or praying together.  

According to a November report from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the current conflict has “diminished any possibility of safe, open religious practice in Sudan” and a return to Sharia law is highly likely.    

As the Biden administration considers calls to appoint a special envoy to Sudan to shape U.S. strategy going forward, it will need to focus on goals beyond the end of open conflict. While the consensus perspective in recent weeks has been that there is no end in sight to the fighting, the Rapid Support Forces’s conquest of Wad Madani may change that calculus and presage a consolidation of power in the not-so-distant future. Peace on those terms would do little to alleviate concerns about religious freedom.  

The Rapid Support Forces, which had served as al-Bashir’s “praetorian guard,” expected to protect him against disloyalty from the Sudanese army, appears to some observers to aim for the imposition of Sharia law in full across Sudan. Such an eventuality could mean Rapid Support Forces doubling down on al-Bashir’s legacy of brutality toward religious minorities in Sudan, quickly burying in the dustbin of history the brief glimmer of hope witnessed between 2019 and 2021.  

A U.S. special envoy to Sudan would need to make avoiding that grim future a central goal-shaping policy, remembering that just a few short years ago Sudan seemed poised to become a bastion of stability, human rights and moderate governance in the region. 

The elements of Sudanese society that produced that possibility may have been driven underground by the present conflict, but the U.S. and the international community must invest in their return to influence. 

Kelsey Zorzi is ADF International’s director of advocacy for global religious freedom.