Cardinal sees hope amid horror of African nightmare
Feb 22, 2006
'THE men had their ears cut off - cut right into the skull. One said he had been stripped and beaten. Another had also had his lips cut off, you could see the scars. He told me stories of other people who had had their lips padlocked. Man's inhumanity to man is quite startling."
(Scotsman, 20-Feb-06) Cardinal Keith O'Brien's frank and graphic response when asked what hit him hardest during a recent visit to Sudan brings home the horrific abuses suffered by thousands of people in the war-ravaged African country.
It is more than six months since the Archbishop of Edinburgh and leader of Scotland's Roman Catholics joined the 250,000 people who marched through the capital on the Make Poverty History protest, delivering a rousing speech on behalf of everyone there, and warning the G8 leaders that "we have no intention of being accomplices in barbarity."
Addressing a joint Christian church service in a stadium outside the South Darfur capital of Nyala four weeks ago, he told a 2000-strong gathering of Sudanese people "you are not forgotten - there were a quarter of a million people in Edinburgh shouting Make Poverty History".
But he admits that when faced with the reality of life in Sudan for those people, his message of hope rang a little hollow. Sudan was not among the countries whose debts G8 leaders pledged to wipe out.
And the Cardinal's thoughts as he looked into the traumatised eyes of the mutilated victims of the greatest humanitarian disaster in the world - as it has been described by the UN - were that the demonstrations back in Edinburgh had all been for nothing.
"There was that feeling of 'what good had been done?'" he says, sitting in his comfortable Morningside house - a world away from the grim conditions in the vast, arid homeless camps which countless Sudanese have been forced to live in for years.
While the outspoken Cardinal says his visit was "humanitarian, not political", he has returned with a new rallying call for those in positions of power in Scotland, at Westminster and around the world.
"Bad enough, surely, to be hungry and thirsty, to be denied education and proper medical facilities, to have been raped, tortured and sent home as a 'postcard' to one's own tribe from the perpetrators," he says. "But to be utterly and completely ignored by the rest of the world - surely we can do more for these, our forgotten sisters and brothers?"
Cardinal O'Brien visited Sudan with Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (Sciaf) chief executive Paul Chitnis to see how the £650,000 donated to help people in the war-ravaged country by churchgoers, schools and others, many in Edinburgh, has been spent. He adds: "Since my appointment as Cardinal I have visited several African countries, including Rwanda, the Congo and Nigeria, but I have never witnessed such dire poverty.
"People live in shacks which are simply a couple of posts and the sort of cardboard boxes that we would have our TVs packed in, and that is luxury, to them to have that shelter keeping out the sand which blows everywhere.
"In one camp outside the Sudanese capital Khartoum, called Jabarona, which literally means 'forced away', one family invited me into their shack. The husband, William, told me he was earning the equivalent of £2 a day, which he used to feed himself, his wife, Madelina, and their three young children.
"He was a gatekeeper at the camp's church compound and he told me that that was a good wage compared to other people. It is tragic."
TWO million people who fled for their lives after violence escalated in 2003 have been returning since a fragile peace agreement was struck between the Sudanese government and rebels last year. But many have no homes to go back to, leaving them no choice but to join the hordes living in camps - some as big as a "large Scottish town" - starving and thirsty, with no access to clean water or proper healthcare.
But the Cardinal believes there is hope, with projects run by Sciaf and other charities providing crucial help to people whose lives remain devastated by the war.
He says: "I saw women getting their hair done and their feet painted by hairdressers who are also trained psychologists.
"It is only when they get a woman's confidence when they are washing her hair that they can get her to communicate and reveal something of what has happened to her. These women have suffered multiple rapes, but under Sudanese law marital infidelity is a crime. Women also need four witnesses in any allegation of rape, and eight if the witnesses are women too."
Temporary health centres run by Sciaf are filled with babies suffering malnutrition. The vulnerable children are also offered vaccinations to help protect them from diseases which pose a constant threat.
"As someone said to me in one of the camps, there would be no life above ground without Sciaf and other agencies here in our country," the Cardinal adds.
In the Cardinal's study lies a copy of Geldof in Africa, sent to the religious leader when he returned from Sudan by Chancellor Gordon Brown. The Cardinal says: "He sent the book to me with a handwritten letter saying that he has been impressed and moved by the accounts of my visit and he would do his best to help. I saw that as a sign of hope that he will continue his campaign on behalf of the Third World."
Cardinal sees hope amid horror of African nightmare