Sudan prepares for independence on Saturday

South Sudan on Saturday is set to become the world’s newest nation, when it officially became independent of the Khartoum government. The event is the culmination of a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil war between Sudan's Arab-dominated north and mainly Christian and animist south.

The Catholic Church in South Sudan held a nine-day prayer initiative for nation building in the lead up to independence. Catholic leaders have been at the forefront in efforts to unify the new country.
“The Churches are the only institutions really that cut across these tribal and ethnic divisions, and also the social divisions,” says Rob Rees, the programme officer for Sudan at the British Catholic-Aid agency CAFOD.

“If you take the Catholic Bishops Conference, for example, there are nine principle ethnic groups that are represented by the bishops,” he told Vatican Radio. “The bishops all get along with each other, obviously! They can demonstrate that unity between the different ethnic groups is possible.”

Reese said the bishops will also be an important check on the government in a country with few civil institutions.

“The fact that they represent South Sudan as an entity puts them in a position of being able to monitor and where necessary to challenge the nascent government of South Sudan, to ensure that the needs of the poorer people, the people out in the rural areas particularly, are addressed within government policy,” he said. “It is going to take some courage on behalf of the Church leaders to that, but it is going to be a vital role for them to play, because if they don’t do it there isn’t any other organizational structure that can do it.”

Listen to the full interview by Charles Collins with Rob Rees: