Sudan’s foreign minister, a hardcore Islamist with a long history of orchestrating mass atrocities and other crimes against humanity, has been invited to attend the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC on Thursday, February 4.
The National Prayer Breakfast is an annual event hosted by members of the United States Congress and organized on their behalf by The Fellowship Foundation. Religious and political leaders from around the world are invited to the breakfast, also known as the “Presidential Prayer Breakfast,” since the President of the United States is always in attendance. Reportedly, in addition to foreign minister Ali Ahmed Karti, the U.S. State Department has invited Dr. Ibrahim Ghandur, the deputy chairman of the National Congress Party – Sudan’s ruling political party – to the breakfast.
Sudanese and American activists will gather outside the event’s Washington Hilton location at 9:00 a.m. to protest the inclusion of these representatives of Sudan’s genocidal government as attendees are exiting the hotel. They have also created an online petition to the National Prayer Breakfast’s 2015 co-chairs, Senators Robert Casey (D-PA) and Roger Wicker (R-MS), along with Fellowship Foundation leader, Douglas Coe, urging that the invitation to Karti be rescinded.
Ali Ahmed Karti is well known by Sudanese and South Sudanese alike. He first attained notoriety in the early 1990’s as the commander of the Popular Defense Force (PDF), the Islamist militia tasked by Sudan’s National Islamic Front regime with raiding South Sudanese villages and taking women and children as slaves. The PDF went on to assist the murderous Janjaweed, the Arab militia used by the Sudanese government in Khartoum to commit genocide in the western Sudan region of Darfur.
Today Karti and the other top leaders of Sudan’s National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime, including Sudan President Omar al Bashir, preside over ongoing genocidal war in the country’s Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State. Karti committed to cleansing those regions of the black African indigenous groups through over three years of ongoing aerial bombardment, scorched earth campaigns, and the banning of international food aid. In addition, the foreign minister is accused of instigating the slaughter of hundreds of Darfurian refugees sheltering in Bentiu, South Sudan during an attack by rebels under the leadership of South Sudan’s former vice president, Riek Machar.
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Remembrance of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide is one of the themes of this year’s prayer breakfast. Perhaps the breakfast organizers don’t realize that the massacred Armenians share a common enemy with the marginalized Sudanese people groups. Inviting officials of what is arguably the world’s most genocidal regime to the National Prayer Breakfast is an insult to the victims of that genocide as well as to the millions of victims of religious, racial, and ethnic genocide in Sudan and South Sudan.
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