In July, a Czech aid worker who spent over a year in a Sudan prison said that he counted his experience a ‘privilege’ because it enabled him to share his Christian faith with other prisoners.
Petr Jašek also praised the country’s ‘very courageous’ Christian minority. He said that two Sudanese Christians, who were arrested days after him, have been resettled in the US since their release in May 2017. A third has been released and remains in Sudan.
He added that, of those with whom he shared a cell during his incarceration, the ‘most cruel’ was a member of Islamic State who had attended school in London.
Mr Jašek spoke to World Watch Monitor while on a tour of churches in England and Wales organised by the charity Release International. During the meetings he encouraged audiences to pray for Christians in other countries who are targeted for their faith.
Comrades
Mr Jašek was accused of spying and imprisoned for 445 days, before being released.
He had been found guilty of espionage and waging war against the state (for which he could have been handed the death penalty) and sentenced to 24 years in jail. Two Sudanese Christians, Abdulmonem Abdumawla, a convert from Islam who translated for him, and the Revd Hassan Abduraheem Taour, who facilitated his visit, were each sentenced to 12 years in prison. A second pastor, the Revd Kuwa Shamal, initially avoided a jail sentence, but was later held in the same prison as Jašek and Taour for nine months. The two pastors belong to the Sudanese Church of Christ.
Never alone
In all, Jašek was imprisoned in five separate locations, and spent two extended periods in solitary confinement.
The first one lasted a month and a half, in a cell into which cold air was blasted sporadically. However, he said he ‘experienced a marvellous presence of the Lord. I was just walking around, praying and singing – that was the first time I could pray out loud and I could even start singing’. By the second one, which lasted three months, he had been given a Bible. He read it from cover to cover in three weeks, standing by the cell window each day to read it by daylight, and began writing reflections on it.
Preaching in prison
In hindsight, he said, this prepared him for six months of preaching in his last-but-one jail, a vast complex that could hold up to 10,000 inmates, where he was reunited with Taour, Shamal and Abdumawla. The two pastors preached in the prison chapel, which was the size of a 75-bed cell. ‘Initially maybe 25 to 30 people would come, but the number grew as we continued,’ he said. Services increased from twice to five times a week. ‘On Christmas Eve 2016 there were over 200 people there. On Christmas Day we had just over 300 people, including those on death row who had been let out to attend chapel. Many on death row became Christians. Twenty or so death-row prisoners became genuine Christians before they were executed.’
God chose the weak...
‘I would not consider myself brave or strong,’ he continued. ‘I went almost to the bottom of my physical and emotional strength, and I have the privilege of saying, together with the Apostle Paul: ‘When I am weak, then I am strong.
‘Even when I was with the Islamists [in the first prison] I still had the opportunity of sharing the gospel. When I was asked questions, I would always include the gospel in my answers.’
He praised Sudanese Christians as ‘very courageous’. When he and the three Sudanese Christians with whom he was tried were waiting for their first court appearance, Christians from the Nuba Mountains, where both pastors came from, travelled for several days, by a succession of buses, to support them in person.
