Read Sudan: A Novel for Free Online Page B

jeeps carrying green-uniformed soldiers, rumbling motorcycles, black stretch-limousines with tinted windows, horse-drawn carts, buzzing mopeds and bicycles all clawed their way forward in the traffic war below.
    Ron could see a large white sandstone mosque on a busy corner three blocks away, with the spike of a minaret reaching into the cloudless sky. The muezzin proclaimed azan, summoning the faithful to Dhuhr, the midday prayer. The crowd of men streaming into the building had traffic snarled for blocks in both directions.
    “What is this?”
    Ron glanced over his shoulder at the photo Olford held up.
    “A young man I ran into in the Mangalatore Refugee Camp near Kajo Keji, about ten miles north of the Ugandan border.” He pictured the camp—14,000 people living in mud and straw huts surrounded by plots of limp, leaning corn.
    “When the militia raided his village, they tortured him. To finish the job, they tied him down and burned a log on his stomach. Amazingly, he lived through it. His father was the ranking Episcopalian bishop in the region. The militia chopped the man’s head off in front of his family.”
    Ron turned toward Olford and leaned back against the window sill.
    “Being an Episcopalian bishop in southern Sudan is like walking around with a Shoot me! sign taped to your forehead. There are a good portion of animists and traditionalists mixed in, but most of the people I’ve run into in the south are Christians of some flavor.”
    “I got a quote from Lieutenant Gen. Omar Bashir’s office I plan to use in a piece I’m working on,” Olford said.
    Bashir was the Sudanese army general who had staged a military coup in 1989 that overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Sadeq al-Mahdi. Al-Bashir had immediately banned all political parties, dissolved Parliament and allied himself with radical clerics in the National Islamic Front. Two years later, al-Bashir implemented strict Sharia law throughout Sudan—for Christians and animists who predominated in the south as well as for Muslims in the north. The law was enforced by Muslim judges and a newly created Public Order Police.
    In 1993, al-Bashir was appointed president, and within a decade, he was an annual contender on the Ten Worst Living Dictators List compiled by Freedom House, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders.
    “Bashir says he intends to accomplish something neither we British nor the Egyptians were able to do, unite northern and southern Sudan. And do you know how he intends to do that?” Olford answered his own question before Ron had a chance. “By Islamizing the whole country.”
    Olford wasn’t saying anything Ron didn’t already know, but he enjoyed the accent so he let the Brit talk.
    “I’m serious—the bloke’s dead set on it. In his radio address last week, he said that within a couple of years, he intends to see every man, woman and child in the whole country facing Mecca five times a day to pray—whether they like it or not!”
    Olford’s lips twisted in a rueful smile. “And if they’re Christians or animists and they choose ‘or not,’ he’ll starve them to death or kill them outright.”
    Olford’s words triggered images in Ron’s mind so powerful they took his breath away, and he stared at the floor for a few moments before he spoke.
    “I was there, just twenty-seven years old, my first job as a freelancer.” His voice was not much louder than a whisper. “I was in Cape Town when apartheid fell. I shot pictures of the prison cells where they tortured Mandela’s followers; I talked to the survivors. It was the same year the Hutus butchered eight hundred thousand people in a hundred days in Rwanda, and I covered that, too.”
    He raised his head and looked into Olford’s eyes. “I’ve seen it, Rupert. What’s happening right now in southern Sudan is just as bad.”
    There was silence between them. Olford scrambled to grasp the magnitude of what Ron had said. Oh, he