21st November, 2013
A Christian lawyer helping to promote religious freedom in Sudan has fled the country after authorities threatened to kill him if he failed to report to them every day, the attorney told Morning Star News.
As Sudan prepares to draft a new constitution, personnel from Sudan”s National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) in Khartoum this year questioned the lawyer, Nahmia Ibrahim Omer Shaloka, about conducting training on religious freedom and reconciliation in Sudan, he said.
After security officials arrested him at his home in Khartoum on 27th May and seized his documents, laptop and Internet modem, they interrogated him for eight hours, he said.
“While in custody, they interrogated me about many things, including workshops I conducted on freedom of religion in Sudan,” Mr Shaloka said.
If he failed to report to their office on a daily basis, the NISS officials threatened to “get rid” of him, he said. Later in the year, he managed to flee to another country, where the now destitute Christian from the Nuba Mountains has few options but feels that is life is in less jeopardy.
“I knew it would be bad if I had returned back to them,” Mr Shaloka said.
As a rights worker for a Christian organisation, Mr Shaloka had been collaborating with other civil society groups urging Sudan to include religious freedom provisions in the constitution to replace the Interim National Constitution that grew out of the 2005 peace agreement with southern Sudan.
The interim constitution upholds sharia (Islamic law) as a source of legislation, and the laws and policies of the government favor Islam, according to the US Department of State. If sharia is further entrenched in the Sudanese constitution, Christians fear they and people of other faiths will lose all religious and many other civil rights.
How and when the new constitution will be formulated is a matter of deep uncertainty.
Christian institutions formerly owned by or associated with southern Sudanese Christians have already faced months of seizure or destruction at the hands of authorities influenced by Islamist elements. Among them is a Catholic school that authorities confiscated on the claim that its ownership can be traced to southern Sudanese who lost citizenship rights following the secession of South Sudan on 9th July, 2011.
Authorities from Khartoum”s Karary District – north of Omdurman District, where the church is located – first forcefully entered Comboni School more than a year ago, confiscating the building on 5th August, 2012 on the claim that it belonged to South Sudanese who were no longer citizens.
“We were so surprised to learn that some people are determined to seize the school and make many students go without school,” said a school official.
The school produced documents showing it belonged not to South Sudanese but to the Khartoum Diocese of the Catholic Church and made several appeals to Khartoum state officials and the Court of Appeal. That court ruled on 26th March, however, that the school belonged to South Sudanese.
The Khartoum state minister of education subsequently determined that the school was owned by the Catholic Church, not South Sudanese, and school officials on 14th May instructed the Karary District officials to turn the property over to them. The Karary officials refused based on the court”s refusal to acknowledge ownership by the Catholic Church.
“We would like to assert that the school belongs to the Catholic Church,” the school official said.
