A Place On The Map.(Sudan)(Brief Article)

Amateur videos seldom exert much impact on U.S. foreign policy--but the film Frank Wolf brought back from his recent visit to Africa was anything but a holiday travelogue. This January, while other Washingtonians were skiing in Utah or snorkeling in the Caribbean, the Republican congressman from Virginia toured African war zones, ending up in the shattered town of Yei, in southern Sudan. The brief tape opens with scenes of an airborne bombing that killed 19 civilians there late last year; then it talks about the 18-year war's total human cost. "It is now 2 million lives," says Bishop Paride Taban, a Roman Catholic cleric, in the video. "We don't know why the United States does not stop this live genocide... Is it because of our race? Because we are black?"

Landlocked, dirt poor and devastated by civil war, Sudan has never been a priority in Washington. When George W. Bush became president, it was widely assumed that the country's woes would count for less than ever. Bush had pilloried Bill Clinton for squandering American resources in remote lands with no clear relevance to U.S. vital interests. Nina Shea of Freedom House, a Washington-based human-rights group, describes Sudan as "the perfect example of a situation that candidate Bush indicated the United States would not become involved in."

Suddenly, though, Sudan has become a rallying point for some of the most influential Republicans in Congress, as well as senior Bush aides. The driving force is an unusual alliance of conservative Christians, social activists and veteran human-rights champions like Wolf, now coupled with the Congressional Black Caucus. Their coalition spans the American political, religious and racial spectrum and includes evangelist Billy Graham's son, Franklin, whose evangelical group operates a hospital in southern Sudan. Graham's people say the Khartoum government's planes have attacked their hospital seven times but have never succeeded in hitting it.

There's no shortage of ...