Scottish Catholic Observer

Bishop Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala of Tombura-Yambio speaks of the war torn jungles of Southern Sudan

Bishop Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala of Tombura-Yambio in Sudan does not have his troubles to seek. With a diocese of 800,000 living in poverty, the aftermath of a brutal war and attacks from guerrilla groups to contend with, life is hard in his land.

He came to the UK last month to make an urgent plea to help ensure it does not become harder.

In January Sudan will hold a referendum (pictured) on whether the largely Christian South of the country should secede from the Muslim North, as a result tensions are escalating and he fears war may come again.

“I am here to ring the bell of alarm,” Bishop Kussala said. “If efforts are not made both on our side and by the international community war may well come again.

“In the north the government of Sudan does not like separation, even though they signed up to having a referendum in the peace deal at the end of the war in 2005. Even the president has said he will not accept the separation of the country.”

The intransigence of the Muslim government worries the bishop and other Christians in the South who fear force may be used if the people’s vote is not to the government’s liking.

“We have suffered and we continue to suffer but the tension is building and it scares us. We want the help of the international community to draw attention to this situation, for the Catholic community to join us in payer for a peaceful outcome. We wish everyone would use any influence that they have to make our case heard to their elected representatives. Britain will chair the security council from December so any pressure you can apply may help us.”

The bishop explained he does not believe the Sudanese government had taken the promise of a referendum on the future of the South seriously until now.

“The government in northern Sudan has not done much to promote unity, human rights, the rule of law, the removal of Islamic law and there has been no development of running water and other basic functions in the south,” he said.

“They never took seriously the referendum… never thought the Christians would go, now they want to secede and the government doesn’t want to let them. I am not a pessimistic person but the way I see it, if there’s not outside pressure we could go back to war and that would be disastrous, it would be a war of Christian versus Muslim, and southerners in north identified by religion, or their colour and could be annihilated.”

By putting pressure for a free election now, he believes the international community can stop the far higher human and financial cost of war.

“It will be far cheaper to spend minimum effort now to stop war, and make the government restrained in their actions,” he said.

Even if it does not come to war there is much tension between Christians and Muslims in the bishop’s country.

“The type of Islam in Sudan is an Islam of survival,” he said. “It came in with foreigners who wanted to get hold of the country and used their religion to defend themselves, almost in a colonial way.

“The day after the British left in 1956 the Sudanese Government went to the Arab league to register Sudan as an Arab country but we are in the  heart of Africa! The government has also long campaigned with the slogan ‘one country, one religion, one people’ and that promotes Arab Muslim culture at the expense of Christians.”

This he believes has created a culture where if a Christian accidentally knocks a Muslim it can be treated as an attack on the whole government.

Another problem the bishop faces is that the government sees the Catholic Church as a foreign entity.

“They forced the church to register as an NGO, so you can be kicked out, we cannot build churches and have lost many other privileges,” he said. “Things such as this have made, the relationship between Muslims and Christians very sour. In Khartoum I feel like a foreigner, I can feel an obvious hatred for Christians there.”

“Further many Christians from the south were displaced to north during the long civil war and have kept in the refugee camps there ever since,’ the bishop added.

“If you were moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh and then forced to stay in a camp for 20 years, not given any land or allowed to return would you still call yourself Scottish?” he asked by way of illustration.

Despite all this he said ‘among the ordinary people the relationship is still good, but with the government, not so much.’

Amid the growing tensions the bishop’s community faces vicious attacks from the Lord’s resistance Army, who often attack the people of his diocese.

“They are originally from Uganda, but now they are people from many countries, who are bandits and they attack and abduct my people. Just yesterday I heard that another attack had killed eight people with many more abducted,” he said.

“They are a time bomb and a huge challenge for us to deal with.”

“They also have support as they have new weapons and satellite phones and we wonder where they get these things from but they keep coming and we receive no help from the government.”

Despite such massive challenges, the bishop is hugely grateful for the help he has received from ACN and Scottish Catholics.

“I want to acknowledge and thank Aid to Church in Need for giving me the opportunity to come here to the Catholic community and thank you for helping us,” he said.

“The prayers and donations have made a real difference to our lives.”

Fr Michael Shields offers insight into life in the physical and spiritually cold and barren tundra of Siberia

Fr Michael Shields’ vocation has led him from one cold place to another. A native of Alaska, he has lived in Magadan, Siberia for the past 16 years. In a dangerous and inhospitable land, he lives a pastoral life very different to that of Scottish parish priests.

“What you have to understand is Russia is huge,” he said. “It takes seven and a half days to travel across it by train, my diocese is the largest in the world, the size of America and the closest priest to me is 800 miles away. And it’s a place where there has been terrible suffering.”

Fr Shields first went to Russia in 1989. “With Perestroika in 1989 the borders opened,” he recalled. “Magadan had preciously been a closed city, a military city, that foreigners were not allowed into. Once that was lifted there were friendship flights from Anchorage Alaska and my bishop, who ordained me, wanted me to go there.

Magadan was the site of one of the largest Soviet prison camps and Mass had never been publicly celebrated there.

“I preached the first Mass in Magadan in December 1989 and met people who knew absolutely nothing about Christianity, but I also met one woman who asked for Confession as she hadn’t seen a priest in 20 years,” Fr Shields said. “So we realised that in this place—and throughout far east Siberia—there were Christians… We realised these were people who suffered greatly in past, but kept their faith.

“My bishop promised to send me a priest to start a Catholic community there. The first priest he sent left after three years because it was too cold, but I’m from Alaska and 40 below is 40 below so I went back in 1994 and have been there ever since.”

Siberia is a place where there has been almost unimaginable suffering, something which Fr Shields has helped to publicise in his book Martyrs of Magadan, produced in association with Aid to the Church in Need, in which survivors of the infamous Soviet Gulag prison camps in Siberia told him their stories of persecution and survival.

“There was terrible Communist repression, and when I met the people featured in the book it took a number of years to gain their trust because the fear was still present in their hearts,” he added. “They didn’t know what would happen if they spoke out. It’s something that’s still not really recorded in the history books, how many people suffered in the camps and died in the camps, they think maybe a million died at Magadan, but no one is sure.”

It was the chance to live with those who have suffered so much that drew Fr Shields back to Russia.

“I went back to live and die there, to enter into their suffering and look for this hope of Christ that comes from the blood of the martyrs,” he said. “Magadan is called the Golthgotha of Russia, so it’s stories are so important to get to the outside world.”

This legacy of suffering has left a vast array of social problems, something he must fight against every day.

“Life is cheap in the missions, you find elderly treated poorly, a huge abortion rate—Russia’s is highest in the world other than China,” he said. “For every ten births there are 13 abortions. The average number of abortions for women is five to 10 in their lifetime.”

To the question of how to change this culture of death into one of life he says simply ‘one child at a time.’ With support from ACN he has set up a number of centres that take in pregnant women who face huge social pressure to have abortions. Despite the horrors he sees chinks of light.

“The biggest problem Russia has is demographics,” he explained. “They are losing 800 million people a year through abortion and their population is due to shrink by a third by 2050. This fear is leading the government to change abortion policy. They now have ‘couple days’ where couples are encouraged to stay home. Cities are beginning to have weeks without abortion…babies are being born.”

Another huge social problem in Russia is alcoholism. “The average life expectancy of a man in Russian is 58 and a lot of that is down to alcohol,” he said. “My parish is very small, 250 people and everyone affected by alcoholism. We encourage AA which is a very new movement in Russian but that’s very difficult because they are not trained to trust each other because of the past and AA is built on trust.”

Although his work, and that of other Catholics, can make a difference, Fr Shields believes the bulk of the work must be done by the Orthodox Church. “The Catholic Church in Russia is small so my prayer is that the Orthodox Church takes lead in evangelising and reforming Russian culture,” he said “Two of the most humble, prayerful men I’ve met in my life were an orthodox bishop and an orthodox monk.”

He strongly believes that relations between Catholic and Orthodox (pictured) have improved. “Pope Benedict has made a big difference, he and the Patriarch know each other well,” he said. “More generally people here still look at the Catholic Church as a sect, we would be a sect of over a billion but there is still a fear of us.”

Fear, he believes, is still at the heart of Russian life. “Communist society was built on fratricide, people betraying each other to the state,” he reflected. “There is not one person in my parish that hasn’t had a relative in the camps. So there is still great fear here and it’s hard for them to respond truly to the message of the Gospel while they still have that fear. It will be at least a generation before that happens.

“My mother said to me: ‘I pray for the conversion of Russia but never knew my son would go there,’” he said. “But prayer is the most important thing people can do for Russia. It may no longer be night there, but it is still early morning dawn and there is much darkness yet around.”