Pope Returns Home After Lecturing Sudan’s Rulers

VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II returned home Wednesday night from a grueling, eight-day African visit climaxed by a controversial stop in Sudan, where he lectured the hard-line rulers of a nation racked by war and famine on the “universal obligation” to foster human rights and religious tolerance.

Making his longest, most eventful trip since major surgery last summer, the pontiff, 72, brushed aside the concerns of aides and some local church officials to stop for nine hours en route home at the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

“In a multiracial and multicultural country, a strategy of confrontation can never bring peace and progress,” John Paul told Sudanese strongman Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir. “Only a legally guaranteed respect for human rights in a system of equal justice for all can create the right conditions for peaceful coexistence and cooperation in serving the common good.”

The Vatican has joined the United States, the United Nations and the European Community in denouncing human rights violations by a repressive Arab government dominated by Muslim fundamentalists who seek to impose Islamic law on the animist and Christian south of the country.

In the past decade, perhaps a million people have died in the south, where famine has accompanied the civil war.

Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro told reporters in Khartoum that the Pope’s remarks in defense of an oppressed people were John Paul’s strongest since his first visit as pontiff to Warsaw Pact Poland in 1979.

“At a time of growing awareness of the importance of respect for human rights as the basis of a just and peaceful world, the question of the respect due to minorities must be faced seriously, especially by political and religious leaders,” John Paul told the Sudanese general.

Saying he hoped it would help focus international attention on Sudan, John Paul added the Khartoum stop to visits in Benin and Uganda as a last-minute addition to his 10th African trip, despite reservations by Vatican aides about his safety. There were also protests among leaders of the 2-million-member Christian minority in Sudan, who feared that the papal visit might lend an air of credibility to a pariah government.

Representing Catholics in the south, Sudanese Bishop Paride Taban journeyed to Uganda to warn the Pope that in greeting government officials he would be shaking official hands “dripping with the blood of Sudanese Christians. . . . These are the same people who still practice slavery, capturing and selling African children.”

Sudanese bishops charge that Christians are specific targets for government repression. But the government denies the charge, and the uniformed Bashir told the Pope there is harmony in the country.

John Paul, though, pulled no punches in stressing to the Sudanese strongman the “universal obligation to understand and respect the variety and richness of other peoples, societies, cultures and religions.”

The sunburned pontiff told welcoming Catholics that he had come to Sudan to observe his “binding duty to encourage and strengthen the faith of my brothers and sisters wherever they are, and especially when that faith demands great courage and fidelity. When people are weak and poor and defenseless, I must raise my voice on their behalf.”

Meeting later with Bashir, after a visit with Sudanese priests and nuns in the Khartoum Catholic cathedral, John Paul underlined “the inalienable dignity of every human person irrespective of racial, ethnic, cultural or national origin or religious belief. . . . Minorities within a country have the right to exist, with their own language, culture and traditions, and the state is morally obliged to leave room for their identity and self-expression.”

It was near midnight Wednesday when John Paul, tired but seemingly healthy in the aftermath of last summer’s intestinal surgery, finally reached the Vatican. He has four more trips scheduled for this year, the next one to Albania in April.