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A Perspective on Peace

By Jamie Callaway

In August Canon Benjamin Musoke-Lubega and I represented Trinity at a Peace Conference in Juba, Sudan. This was the third Peace Conference in two years, funded by Trinity grants to the Episcopal Church in Sudan (ECS). Sudan is a vast country that sits below Egypt and above Uganda. In the colonial period the country Sudan cobbled together the Arab, Muslim north and the African, Christian south out of Egypt’s insistence that the headwaters of the Nile River stay under Arab control.

Since independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956 there has been almost continuous civil war fueled by the radical Islam imposed by the Arab government in Khartoum requiring that all children have Arab names and schooling in Arabic. This chain of suffering was only broken with the Comprehensive Peace agreement in 2005, brokered significantly by the United States. The CPA calls for a referendum by January 9, 2011 to determine if Sudan remain a single country or will split in two. As conflict has risen with the approaching referendum, The Episcopal Church of Sudan has held these Peace Conferences to seek internal mediation and stability by bringing together traditional leaders, chiefs, from the differing tribes having disputes.

The first two Peace Conferences were focused on mediating local disputes. But we discovered that this third conference in August was quite different.

This time the Peace conference drew local chiefs from the northern part of South Sudan, which included many Muslims, who actually gathered during the Ramadan fast. And, this time the focus was not on local conflicts but on the coming referendum fast approaching in January. From the perspective of the recent Peace Conference, when there is strife the question is, how do we see those on the other side, or do we see them at all?