Sudan’s Road to Social Justice Paved With Fear : Africa: Islamic leaders are imposing a new social order in a climate of intolerance, repression.

It didn’t happen in the usual way for Ezekiel Kutjok.

He wasn’t picked up in one of the national security forces’ ubiquitous Toyota Land Cruisers and driven to a safehouse on this city’s outskirts. He wasn’t beaten. He wasn’t tortured. He wasn’t interrogated, except for some questions about his meeting with southern Sudanese rebels in Nairobi.

Kutjok, secretary general of the Sudan Council of Churches and one of the Islamic fundamentalist government’s most taciturn critics, was simply invited one day to come to security headquarters. When he got there, after a brief meeting with an official, he was asked to wait.

He waited all that day, and when the day was over, he was told to come back the next morning at 8. He waited all that day too, seated in a chair in an empty room, until 4 p.m., when they told him to return the next morning to wait further.

This went on for 21 days.

Now, when people talk about human rights abuses committed by the government of Sudan, Kutjok has had a lot of time to think about it, and he isn’t quick to commit.

“Human rights: What does it involve?” he asked. “Is it freedom of movement? Freedom of religion? Does it have to do with equal education? Is it freedom of choice? What about the workplace? Must we ask ourselves how many people from the south of Sudan are working in the ministries? And in what positions, and why? Does it have to do with how Islamic Sharia law treats a non-Muslim?”

Kutjok doesn’t answer any of his own questions, not because he can’t but because he is unsure where to begin. In that respect, he is like thousands in this country with Africa’s strongest tradition of political activism.

The Sudanese are a people who, in a single century of their history, took to the streets to send a British occupation force and three dictators fleeing for their lives. Now their nation finds itself in the grip of an Islamic fundamentalist regime whose rallying call is social justice but whose primary instrument is fear.

Sudan, the largest country in Africa and one of its poorest, was supposed to be political Islam’s answer to underdevelopment and exploitation in the Third World, a model of what Muslim morality, hard work and self-sufficiency could mean for a struggling nation that rejected domination by the West.

But like its predecessor in Iran, Sudan, in the years since Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir seized power on behalf of an increasingly muscular Islamic fundamentalist movement in 1989, has seen its gains in political independence and increased agricultural production sadly offset by soaring inflation, high unemployment and acute political isolation.

And like the conservative Shiite Muslim mullahs who seized power in Iran a decade earlier, Sudan’s urbane, Western-educated Sunni Muslim Islamic leaders--though they came to Khartoum with a progressive vision of Islam--have been forced to impose their new social order in a hostile climate of intolerance and repression.

In a four-year siege of unexplained arrests, torture, “ethnic cleansing” of non-Muslims from western Sudan and a bloody and costly civil war against the Christian and animist south that has driven 4.5 million people from their homes, Sudan has come into the international spotlight in recent months as a possible sponsor of international terrorism when its most serious crimes are against its own people.

Many Sudanese find themselves now simply waiting for the Islamic dream to die.

“These people, I suppose, believe that, ultimately, they are going to make Sudan a great nation and America is going to go down the drain and we are going to replace them, because we are supported by God,” mused Gasim Badri, president of a private women’s university in Khartoum. “I don’t believe them. . . . They liberate the market in order to increase production, but how are you going to boost production with electricity failures and no food? When all the means of production are from outside--fertilizer, fuel, spare parts--and the world has cut us off? . . . These people are simply mad. They are hallucinating. They are believing somehow God is going to save them.”

Mohammed Ibrahim Noqd, head of the outlawed Communist Party in Sudan, also has much time for reflection. Like most opposition leaders, he is largely restricted to his own house, except for the time between 5 and 6 p.m. when he takes a walk, quietly followed by security officers.

“The fundamentalist totalitarian system is of our making. It belongs to us, the Communists,” he said. “We said that when you come to rule, to change not only your country but to create a new society, you need a totalitarian state. And when it is accompanied by a fundamentalist system, it is hell.”

In its annual report on human rights, the American government said the Sudanese government engaged in “inhuman” treatment of the non-Arab, non-Muslim southerners displaced by the civil war; attempted in the name of religious extremism to take total authority over Sudanese institutions and society; often resorted to arbitrary detention and torture in secret “ghost houses,” and last year summarily executed two American government employees, one European Community local worker and probably one United Nations employee.

International aid agencies say that, after months of cooperation, the Sudanese government is again blocking many deliveries of food and medicine to southern Sudanese stranded and in danger of starving in the south.

“The authorities seem to have a suspicion that all the humanitarian help that people are trying to bring is a new form of colonialism,” said Armin Kobel, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Sudan.

Moreover, foreign diplomats say the government appears to be preparing to use chemical weapons in the civil war against the south. According to diplomatic sources in Khartoum, 40 Sudanese soldiers were blinded in a training accident believed to involve chemical weapons in January, 1992, in the southern city of Wao.

Sudan’s Islamic leader, Hassan Turabi, considered a guru of sorts for Islamic movements throughout the Middle East and Africa and a proponent of a tolerant brand of Islam that recognizes women’s rights and moderation, has said that most reports of human rights abuses have been fabricated.

Other Sudanese leaders say the international community is selectively singling out Sudan for human rights violations while ignoring similar problems in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, allies of the West.

To drive the capital streets is to witness a parade of poverty, frustration and fear--in the market where no one can afford to buy the goods, in businesses where new import restrictions have virtually halted the flow of commerce, in the huge belt of slums that rings the city with displaced southerners.

For much of a generation, the last half-decade has marked the loss of hope in what, in the middle of Africa, would already have been troubled lives.

An estimated 20,000 people have lost their jobs in the army, police, civil service and government-owned companies in a 4-year-old purge aimed at replacing non-Muslims in key positions with Islamic front supporters.

It is Christians and other non-Muslims who have probably suffered the worst since the Islamic government came to power.

Though factional fighting within the Sudan People’s Liberation Army is obstructing many relief deliveries, aid agencies have also accused the government of withholding food from areas believed to be supporting southern rebels at a time when up to 700,000 people are in danger of starvation.

At least four churches and Christian cultural centers have been bulldozed in Khartoum in the last six months, and a number of priests expelled from southern cities. There have been many cases of security forces taking over church property in the south, and arrests and harassment of Christians such as Kutjok, of the Sudan Council of Churches, are common.