WCC Urged to Intervene for the Suffering in Sudan Together on Holy Ground WCC Urged to Intervene for the Suffering in Sudan Delegates to the eighth assembly heard several impassioned pleas for the World Council of Churches to take action on behalf of the suffering people of Sudan. For most of the country's history since its independence over 40 years ago, it has been ravaged by civil war. The major divide is between the largely Muslim North, where the government in Khartoum has implemented Islamic law, and the largely Christian or animist South. But as the war has dragged on, ethnic and factional infighting has compounded the suffering of the people of the South. Human-rights observers accuse Sudan's government of using torture and a revived slave trade to subdue the southern Sudanese.
Relief agencies claim the regime is creating severe famine in the South by blocking food shipments.
A Roman Catholic bishop from Sudan begged the WCC to support foreign intervention in his war-ravaged country similar to that mounted in other international trouble spots of recent years. A week after Bishop Taban returned to Sudan, the WCC received word that 14 bombs had exploded in the town of Narus near the cathedral he serves. The bishop was not hurt, but six other people were said to have been killed and 14 seriously wounded. Some 1.5 million people have died in Sudan's civil war since 1983, according to Barnaba Benjamin, an official of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement for Southern Africa. Another 5 million have been forced to flee their homes.