HEAD BURIED IN HIS HANDS, EIGHT-YEAR-OLD DAN YIEY’S ENTIRE WORLD CHANGED THE DAY HE SAW HIS COUSIN AND HIS FRIEND KILLED BY GUNFIRE FROM A HELICOPTER GUNSHIP AS THEY FLED TOWARD THE RIVER IN SOUTHERN SUDAN.

Thirty-two (32). That’s the number of wars taking place in our world today. Civil wars. Cross-border wars. Wars for territory, for control of resources, over politics and religion. And, as we go to press, the possibility of war between the U.S. and Iraq looms large.

280 wars were waged between 1945 and 2000. Some 24 million people lost their lives in these conflagrations – 90 percent of them civilians, mostly women and children. Of the more than 35 million refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide, more than 80% have been uprooted by war or civil strife. Some 28 million of the uprooted are women and children. In today’s wars, an estimated 300,000 children aged 7-17 are serving as soldiers. Dan Yiey is not one of them.

Born in the aftermath of World War II, Church World Service knows well the terrible cost of modern warfare, especially to the most vulnerable. We’ll look here at some of the places where CWS and its partners are seeking to be instruments of peace in our war torn world.

Sudan suffers from one of the world’s longest running civil wars – 35 of the last 46 years – as well as ongoing tribal conflicts. The civil war is fueled by religious, ethnic, and political differences between the country’s northern and southern populations, and by the ruling North’s scorched earth policy designed to make way for further oil exploration and extraction in the South. More than two million Sudanese have died, and more than five million are currently uprooted. Because the Sudan tragedy draws little attention from Western media, it is churches and non-governmental organizations that have been at the forefront of humanitarian and peacemaking efforts.

CWS partner in the South, The New Sudan Council of Churches, NSCC, has initiated an innovative People-to-People Peace Process that brings together local chiefs, traditional leaders, women, and youth in a particular area to address past grievances and look to new opportunities for regional ethnic reconciliation. In areas where the gatherings have been held, inter-ethnic fighting has largely ceased – abductions and raids have stopped, most captured women and children have been freed, and trade between ethnic groups has resumed. Complementary to the peacemaking process, CWS is working through the Sudan Council of Churches, SCC, in the North to help to improve the health and nutrition of some of the 4.5 million internally displaced Sudanese, providing emergency supplies to recently uprooted people, and supporting SCC-developed programs to educate and train women, foster new income-generating projects, and promote critical interfaith dialogue.

Here in the U.S., CWS is urging Christians to contact President Bush and ask him to support peace in Sudan, especially the July 2002 Machakos Protocol, which provides a framework for moving the peace process forward.