The U.S. State Department has named the strife-torn Darfur region of Sudan as the site of the world's worst assault on human rights in 2006.
A government report issued today blamed the Muslim regime in Khartoum and a government-backed Muslim militia for murdering 200,000 Sudanese -- and displacing more than 2.5 million over the last four years.
Michael Cromartie, vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), isn't surprised.
"Darfur is one of the worst places in the world today," he said. "Genocide and torture have occurred, people are starving and dying. The government is doing very little to stop the violence."
The USCIRF will meet on Wednesday to draw up its own list of violators.
Sudan first came to the world's attention in the '90s when the government allowed Muslim fundamentalists to sell Christians into slavery, crucify them, and starve them to death. Once the two sides agreed to a truce brokered by former U.S. Sen. John Danforth, the persecution moved to the western province of Darfur.
Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, said the media and the secular world missed what was happening then in Southern Sudan -- just as it is missing what's going on in Darfur today.
In the '90s, Khartoum tried to impose Islamic fundamentalism on Christians.
"The South rebelled because the government was trying to impose Shariah law, and Khartoum responded with a jihad on the South -- and they called it a jihad," Shea said. "In those days, nobody in the U.S. government knew what a jihad was -- but we know now, after 9/11."
Shea, who is also a USCIRF commissioner, said Muslim regimes like the one in Khartoum are increasingly waging war on those who oppose them.
"Assaults on religious freedom are on the rise because a radical form of Islam is on the rise," Shea said. "This is a form that is violently intolerant of other religions and other interpretations of Islam."
Bill Saunders, human rights counsel for the Family Research Council, said religious freedom is also under assault when Marxists control the government.
"In regimes where religious freedom is not recognized as a societal good, it really is under assault," he said. "Often the victims are Christians -- not always, but often."
Cromartie said the Communists in North Korea might be worse than Sudan.
"North Korea is one of the most repressive, brutal human rights violators in the world, if not number one,” he said.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
To learn more about assaults on religious freedom worldwide, you can visit the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Web site.
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