Sudan denies religious persecution in talks with US envoy

KHARTOUM, Aug 11 (AFP) — A government official denied religious persecution takes place in Sudan and stressed that destroyed churches are rebuilt in authorised locations, in talks here Monday with a US State Department human rights envoy.

Religious freedoms are “closely observed” in Sudan, Father Edy Ambrose told Michael Southwick, a US deputy assistant secretary.

Ambrose, head of the churches department at Sudan’s ministry of guidance and a member of a government human rights advisory council, denied the existence of “any sort of religious persecution” in Sudan.

The Christian official from southern Sudan said that “like mosques, churches demolished in unplanned sectors of a town are granted plots of land in planned areas to be rebuilt”, according to Fathi Khalil, another member of the council.

Khalil said he himself stressed in the meeting that “an anti-Sudan campaign is being launched in the Western media, either through sheer ignorance of the Sudan or as a deliberate act to distort the image of the Sudan.”

Sudanese officials “cannot deny the ocurrence of human rights abuses nor can anybody from any country deny human rights violations in his country”, the official added.

“I told him that there is an international impression that the US perpetrates the ugliest human rights violations in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Khalil told AFP.