Anglicans struggle to regain church headquarters in Khartoum

KHARTOUM, Feb 24, 2005 (Compass) — Nine months after the Anglican Church headquarters in Khartoum was sold out from under church officials and confiscated at gun point, the Arab company now claiming ownership of the headquarters and guesthouse has started making major renovations to the building.

A court-ordered injunction last June had forbidden Al-Ghazal Residence Enterprises from tampering with the property until its disputed ownership was resolved by the courts. Owned by a wealthy Sudanese Arab, the construction firm is a subsidiary of United Al Azra Company.

But representatives of the Episcopal Church of Sudan (ECS) passing by the premises in late November saw a flurry of activity on the premises, with trucks bringing in loads of sand, bricks and other building materials.

“When I went there on December 9,” ECS interim provincial secretary Rev. Enock Tombe told Compass, “I saw they were removing floor tiles and replacing them with new ones, changing the plumbing, putting metal frames around the windows and doors, and even extending the perimeter wall.”

The church’s attorney promptly filed objections against the renovations before the Khartoum Public Court of Judge El-Amin Mohammed Musa. Eventually, on February 6, the construction company’s lawyer responded with a written response to the court.

Company’s Lawyer Denies Wrongdoing Despite Evidence

While acknowledging the court injunction not to alter the property until the court ruled on ownership, the lawyer’s document obtained by Compass flatly denied that his clients were doing any maintenance work on the premises.

But when Compass visited the site on February 5, this correspondent saw and photographed a dozen or more workers visible in the courtyard, busily pushing wheelbarrows, shoveling piles of sand, and moving in and out of the building.

At a subsequent hearing on February 16, Judge El-Amin transferred the long-pending case to the jurisdiction of Judge Wahhabi Ibrahim, declaring that because this was a sensitive case which required “urgent action,” his own heavy caseload forced him to request another judge to handle it.

When the church plaintiffs met the new judge last week, he set March 15 for the next hearing, to give himself time to study the court file before hearing witnesses.

But meanwhile, the judge ordered a local civil engineer to examine the site and submit a report to the court on its physical status. According to the written report of Dr. Saad Fadul, dated February 19 and obtained by Compass today, the engineer found “extensive repairs both inside and outside the building” in progress, which he stated amounted to, in effect, “a complete renovation of the building.”

Church Surprised by Fraudulent Property Sale

Ownership of the building has been in dispute since May 20 of last year, when without warning armed security police forcibly evicted the church’s staff, forcing them to remove the entire contents of the building down to the carpets on the floor.

Police officers produced a court eviction order, declaring the building had been sold two months earlier to Ashraf Said Ahmed Hussein, owner of United Al Azra Company.

The transaction had been engineered by Gabriel Roric, a former government minister and defrocked Episcopalian bishop who represented himself to the court as the ECS archbishop responsible for the premises.

Although Roric had been named in the ownership papers as trustee over the property when it was purchased in 1993, he was dismissed from the Bishopric of Rumbek two years ago.

As a Christian bishop serving Khartoum’s Islamist government for more than 10 years, Roric proved an ongoing embarrassment to the church, which had requested him to resign his political position, return to his diocese in southern Sudan and hand over the guesthouse’s title deed to the diocese. He not only refused, but has since tried to form a rival Episcopal Church of Sudan under his own leadership.

The paper trail Roric left in wresting the guesthouse property from the church reveals a host of legal loopholes he failed to plug, however. Although the land office endorsed the property sale, there was no proper sales purchase document, and the signature on the new title deed allegedly representing the church was that of a Muslim.

Archbishop Intervenes

When initial news of the eviction went out internationally, Sudanese government officials downplayed the situation as an “internal church problem” misrepresented by ECS leaders.

But last month during a visit to Sudan by former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord George Carey, the thorny issue was raised directly with top Khartoum government officials.

Noting that this was his fourth trip to Sudan, Lord Carey mentioned in a face-to-face meeting with Sudanese First Vice President Ali Osman Taha that on his two previous visits, he had been lodged in the now disputed guesthouse.

After congratulating the vice president for signing Sudan’s historic peace agreement in early January to end 21 years of civil war between the north and south, Lord Carey asked Taha to intervene in the stalled church confiscation case.

On the same occasion, ECS Archbishop Joseph Marona presented the vice president with a letter reviewing the church’s dilemma in recovering its stolen property.

Copies of three documents were attached to Archbishop Marona’s January 18 letter, all indicating that members of the Khartoum government had been involved in the illegal sale of the guesthouse. In one, Roric actually announced his plans to reorganize the ECS under his own leadership on letterhead stationery of the ruling National Congress Party, with copies sent to a variety of government ministries.

This evidence alone, Marona declared, “can raise the valid question as to what extent the ruling party and indeed the Sudan government is involved in the process of destabilizing the ECS.”

Part of the worldwide Anglican communion, the ECS is the largest Christian church in Sudan with about five million members.