Simon Deng, Leading Darfur Activist, to Ask, “What About the Christians of South Sudan?” on Fox News Tonight

“Who is the real enemy of Mohammed,” asks Simon Deng, an escaped slave from Sudan and leading human rights activist, “a child who names a teddy bear, or the one who is killing little Muhammed in Darfur?” Mr. Deng, whom I have interviewed for The New York Daily News and who is one of the leading Darfur activists in the U.S., will appear tonight (Friday) on FOX News’s Hannity & Colmes at 9pm and on MSNBC tomorrow morning at 10am.

Mr. Deng will discuss the Sudanese government’s abusive detention of Gillian Gibbons, a British schoolteacher, for creating a class exercise in which her 7-year old students chose the name Mohammed for a teddy bear. But he will also discuss the ongoing abuse of civilians in Darfur and the lesser known, equally egregious, and even more widespread abuse of Christians in South Sudan, 2 million of whom were slaughtered over the course of two decades before the Bush administration hammered out a Peace Treaty between Sudan’s North and South in 2005.

For now, the peace is holding, but the Islamist government in Khartoum continues abusing civilians in Darfur, and conditions are even worse, according to Mr. Deng, for the 4 million Christian refugees in the South. After recently visiting South Sudan, he estimated that at least 130,000 Christians there were in danger of imminent death, literally “starving and dying like flies under the trees,” due to Khartoum’s failure to rebuild the South following the forgotten two decades of war – some would say genocide – against the Christians there.

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on November 30, 2007 at 6:50 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: Africa, human-rights, Sudan. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>