Today, Explained - The new war in Sudan

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Foreign powers are arming and funding opposing military leaders in Sudan, who are now battling for control of the country. It’s just the latest in a line of civil conflicts worldwide that are trending longer and more complex. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Noel King. In this episode of Today, Explained, we misstated the relationship between the German composer Richard Wagner and Adolf Hitler. Rather than Wagner professing Nazi sympathies, as our guest suggested, Hitler was instead a fan of Wagner. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was just literally a nightmare. One minute you're leading a normal life, looking forward to do normal mundane things, going to work, you know, going about your business. And then the next day, literally the sky just feels like it's falling. Shama Madibo is trapped in Khartoum, Sudan, where two military leaders are fighting for control. Constant, constant bombing, shelling, shooting. It just turned into a mad town in like a blink of an eye. You went to sleep and it was calm and you woke up and it was a madhouse. A madhouse now, but Sudan seemed really close to being a democracy.

In 2019, Sudanese people threw out a vicious dictator, Omar al-Bashir. Two years later, two generals staged a coup, kind of ending everyone's hopes for democracy. Now those two generals are fighting each other in the streets. Also, several countries that are not Sudan have involved themselves in Sudan's new war. This is every bit as Byzantine as it sounds, and we're going to explain it coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The internet is going in and out in Sudan. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The internet is going in and out in Sudan. It's almost impossible to reach anyone there for any extended period of time. And so we called Naima El-Bagr. She is CNN's chief international correspondent. And she's Sudanese. She has family in Sudan.

And she's covered the country for many, many years. In essence, this is a fight for dominance between the head of the army, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the head of a paramilitary force, Commander Mohammed Hamdan Dagalou, also known as Himmati. They were erstwhile rivals that were brought together under al-Bashir, the former dictator of Sudan. Burhan says he was one of the military figures who told Bashir to step down. General Burhan became the head of the transitional

sovereign council that was supposed to be part of a transition to democracy for the people of Sudan. His opponents say he's instead put the military firmly in charge. Commander Dagaloh Hameddi became his deputy. Much of Hemadty's power is derived from his dreaded RSF paramilitary, which he formed after taking up arms in the war in Darfur. I am a simple Bedouin man who grew up on the sidelines of Sudan. I didn't get anything from my country except violence. The two military powers joined forces to overthrow their civilian partners in government. And that's kind of been this stalemate since October 2021.

They have been under a huge degree of international pressure in the last seven or eight months to do a deal, to go back to the negotiating table and to restart this stillbirth democratic process for the people of Sudan. But at the heart of this current conflict between them is who gets to be that senior partner in any partnership with the civilian powers in Sudan.

So the army wants the rapid support forces, given that it is a paramilitary group, it is a militia, and an auxiliary force all the way back to the dark days of the Darfur conflict, an auxiliary force to the Sudanese army to come under the commander of the Sudanese army. The rapid support forces in Hemekti have bigger aspirations and bigger ambitions, and they want to be a standalone force, essentially setting up the rapid support force as equivalent to the naval forces, the army, the intelligence forces, essentially setting up Hometi to move forward with whatever future ambition he has.

That's where the rivalry stems from. Why and how did they begin fighting? I'm looking at Khartoum, and this is urban warfare. These two men have to know how catastrophic this neighborhoods. And it was because that is where the RSF had garrisoned themselves. embedded themselves, enmeshed themselves in the civilian infrastructure, the architecture of these neighborhoods where people live, you know, clearly ahead of a day like this where if and when it becomes untenable in their relationship with that with the army or this their aspirations to be the dominant partner in Sudan become too difficult to quash, that then you are essentially fighting in neighborhoods. You're fighting in and around civilian homes.

What are you hearing from civilians? It's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying. A lot of these neighborhoods, for instance, Khartoum too, is right in the center of Khartoum. It's one of the most affluent, oldest neighborhoods in Khartoum. And RSF offices, RSF senior officers bought houses. They bought a lot of expensive real estate. So you have what is one of the most shishy neighborhoods in Khartoum and in Sudan that has become this site of street-by-street fighting. I spoke to one of my cousins and she said that she was looking through the window and she could see RSF fighters. People had been told that they had to vacate their homes. My other cousins were sheltering on the ground with their children. Bullets were flying into people's front yards.

I mean, when they described to you street by street warfare, I think almost in our heads, it's very kind of Hollywood. It's very kind of computer game. And you imagine people sheltering behind their high walls and then these armed men going at it. But actually, there is no protection when they're street by street fighting. You are caught in the gunfire, you are caught in the aerial bombardment, an artillery shell fell the house behind ours. You know, there is nothing to really hide behind in these kind of situations. These are two military men fighting it out over a city, over a country. Does either of these men have the upper hand militarily?

It's currently very difficult to say. You know, it's been claim and counterclaim. What we do know is just in terms of the makeup of their forces, why this has been so protracted. Although on paper, the military, you know, there's no official kind of numbers for how big Sudan's armed forces are. But they're 210, 220,000 strong. But during Darfur, and for instance, during the conflict in Chad, which Sudan was involved with, the RSF acted essentially as a de facto infantry for the Sudanese army. They are better trained, better equipped. Himeti has paid for Wagner to train his men. He has very sophisticated weaponry.

It's very difficult to call a winner here because this is also, the RSF, a force that is much more battle-hardened, that was implicated in horrific human rights violations in Darfur and in other parts of Sudan. And so they're not bound by the same laws of engagement that whatever we think of the Sudanese army and its involvement with the 30-year dictatorship of Bashir or its involvement more recently in partnership with the RSF, they still trained as a professional army. Officers still have to study at the defense college, right? There are still certain confines that constrain them, that do not constrain the RSF. You've mentioned the Wagner Group a couple of times. For people who might not know, what is the Wagner Group or the Wagner Group? So I pronounce it Wagner because the neo-Nazi who founded it was inspired by the composer Wagner's professed Nazi sympathies.

So it gives you a sense of who they are, even just by telling that little story, right? Just a quick note, composer Richard Wagner was not a fan of Hitler's. Rather, Hitler was a fan of Wagner's. They are a Russian proxy militia heavily involved in Russia's fighting in Ukraine, and for years have essentially acted as this forward vanguard of Russia's push into Africa, their vanguard in the Central African Republic. Alongside the army of the Central African Republic,

we can now see white men with masks. As per a defence agreement with Moscow, thousands of Russian soldiers arrived in the Central African Republic, mercenaries working for the Wagner Group. They were involved with the exploitation of Sudanese gold. We had an investigation last year into Wagner's exploitation of Sudan's gold to fund Russia's war in Ukraine.

And it was done via the relationship with Hamedi and the RSF with senior armed forces officers. Do you blame Russia for the death of democracy here in Sudan? Definitely. Russia carries the majority of the blame for the still birthing of Sudan's democracy. The main man that we were able to identify as Putin's man, Russia's man, Wagner's man in Sudan, was Hamedi.

And we see that kind of malevolence that's being spread, not just in Sudan, but across Africa via Wagner that allows Putin and Russian officialdom to essentially kind of keep their hands clean and profess that they stand at a distance. It hasn't really worked in terms of sheltering them from sanctions. Wagner and Prokosin and their arm in Sudan was sanctioned by the U.S. It was also recently sanctioned after an investigation by the European Council. So it's a very thin veil of subterfuge. Wagner is a Russia proxy. Who else is involved here? Which other countries are either in Sudan right now or watching Sudan, maybe with the intent of going in or sending their own proxies? Hamedi has set himself up as an individual statesman.

So he travels back and forth to the Emirates. He travels back and forth to Russia. Parallel to that is Burhan and the Sudanese army's relationship with Saudi Arabia. They were the main forces on the Saudi side of the Saudi-Emirati coalition. So you have these Gulf powerhouses supporting their preferred strongman in terms of the ways that Hamedi and Burhan were able to carry out that counter-coup against the will of the Sudanese people. But fundamentally, the responsibility falls on the military for partnering with Hameddi. It falls on the international community and the United States specifically,

because so many people within the civilian movement have said to us that they were ringing alarm bells, that they were contacting the State Department for months, telling them that they were concerned that this conflict, this impasse between the RSF and the army over who got to be the big boy at the big table, was going to spill over into bloodshed on the streets of Sudan. And the US did not move quickly enough to exert sufficient pressure. And so these same international powers, the United States included, who have rushed to evacuate their diplomatic personnel, are the same international powers who did not act and are currently not acting in the kind of way that Sudan needs them to. Before the fighting in Sudan started, an editor at The Economist began looking into the shape that wars are taking these days.

The complexity, the foreign involvement, the death tolls. And he thinks that Sudan is one piece in a much bigger story about a new kind of war. That's coming up. Thank you. software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. Robert Guest is a deputy editor at The Economist, and he recently wrote that what's happening in Sudan is not just happening in Sudan. Complex conflicts with many countries involved and no end in sight have become more common, he writes, and globally we might be moving backward. Robert looked into why that is. So the average ongoing conflict in the mid-1980s had been raging for about 13 years. By 2021, that figure had risen to 20. You can look at what's going on in Sudan as an outbreak of a fresh civil war,

or you can say it's kind of a continuation of an on-and-off war that they've had since independence in 1956. It's very difficult to pin down a single big picture takeaway on what's happening with civil conflicts across the world. But Robert wrote that the number of these conflicts is increasing and that they're getting longer and that they're getting worse. I asked him why they're getting worse. There's a few big reasons that we've identified. One is complexity, including foreign meddling. Now there's a culture of impunity and criminality. Another is climate change. And a final one is religious extremism.

All right, let's walk through these one by one, starting with foreign meddling. Back in 1991, at the end of the Cold War, only 4% of civil wars in the world involved significant foreign forces. But by 2021, that had risen 12-fold to 48%. The war in Yemen is a few years shy of a decade. An internal conflict that intensified when Saudi Arabia invaded.

We're also seeing that even when foreign forces aren't involved, conflicts are getting more complex. There are more belligerent groups involved. And that means it's harder to make peace because you don't just have to come up with a compromise at the end that's satisfying to two groups. You have to satisfy all of them. And if even one of them doesn't like it, they can go back to fighting. You also write about what you call a culture of impunity and criminoding. So when you see Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, brazenly violating the UN's founding charter by invading Ukraine, kidnapping children, that sends out a very strong signal that to a lot of people, to a lot of

powers, important powers in the world, might make right. And that emboldens smaller bullies elsewhere. But there's also the financial incentives that you're seeing in conflict. Most civil conflicts are taking place in very corrupt countries where control of government is an opportunity for individuals to get very rich. And that means it's something they'll fight for. It's something that they will kill for. That's very clearly part of what's going on in Sudan. And finally, you're seeing that for the soldiers involved, very often they have very few good job opportunities other than fighting. And fighting is one of the most lucrative ones. If you've got a gun, you can take things. You can take people's cattle. You can rape people.

There's an incentive to keep fighting that comes from the fact that for many of the young men doing it, it is a more lucrative lifestyle than any other they can imagine. As I was reading your piece, I thought about Liberia's civil war. The siege of Monrovia was brutal. Scores of Taylor's young boys died crossing the swamps leading into the city. I thought about Darfur, where I worked. The rebel Sudan Liberation Army says seven civilians were killed when Sudanese military forces used helicopters to raid Darfuri villages. I thought about Democratic Republic of Congo, where I've also worked. In late August, dissident General Laurent Nkunda and the Congolese army

clashed in towns and villages across North Kivu province. Was there ever really a global norm? Was there ever a global norm that everyone abided by all the time? No, of course not. But was there a period before this decade when, by and large, more countries and more actors did abide by it? Yes, I think there was. I mean, just the numbers of how many more people are fleeing their homes, how many more people are getting killed, and how little respect actual superpowers are paying to global norms suggests that something has shifted. I mean, it's not something you can measure very easily, but I think there has been a shift.

So when the civil war broke out in Liberia, there were a number of actors there who were very clearly not abiding by any kind of norms at all. But that war was ended because the kind of intervention that you got from the outside was essentially America and then subsequently UN peacekeeping saying, no, you can't do this. It's time to stop. The pleas of ordinary Liberians were finally answered in August 2003, when troops from the international community arrived to oust Charles Taylor. By October, a massive UN peacekeeping mission was in place and a peace accord signed. We're not seeing that at the moment. We're in an age where the attempts to make peace in Congo are much weaker, where America has pulled out of Afghanistan and left it to fall apart. I mean, the biggest violation, clearly, is Vladimir Putin

trying to invade and seize the territory of another sovereign country. That's something we really haven't seen very much of since World War II. Tell me about how climate change is playing into this. So climate change doesn't cause wars, but it does make them more likely. So the most obvious way is the weather gets worse, it gets drier, you lose rain. Farmers find that they can't keep their cattle alive

or they can't grow their crops, and so they move. And quite often they move in quite large numbers into areas that traditionally belong to other ethnic groups who may not be very friendly towards them. That can lead to a lot of clashes. One NGO looked at just one region within one country in the Sahel, it was Mali, and they found 70 conflicts in that area. And this is not people, you know, arguing with each other on Twitter, this is people killing each other. 70 conflicts, mostly over land, grazing rights, water, those kinds of things. Without the presence of state authorities, all tensions between farmers and herders are resurfacing. When animals are left to roam, disputes often erupt over grazing areas,

there's constant conflict. That creates a base level of instability, a base level of men with guns running around. And that creates an opportunity for rebel forces to collect them together, and particularly in the Sahel, for jihadists. France and its European allies are fighting a war in Mali. The country is the epicenter of jihadist terror in the Sahel region. This is where religious extremism plays in. Yes. So since the Arab Spring, you've seen a flowering, if that's the right word,

of ultra-extreme jihadist groups, principally. So you have the ones that are affiliates of Al-Qaeda, and then later the ones that are affiliates of Islamic State. And they're more or less competing to see who can make the bolder claims about setting up a new kingdom of justice, about overthrowing the states that exist, which are often quite predatory states. They've created this extraordinary degree of instability right across parts of Africa, also the Middle East. You're seeing coups in a lot of places. A lot of these countries are becoming ungovernable. You look at Burkina Faso. The African nation of Burkina Faso has had another shakeup in its government because the military

leader who took power in a coup earlier this year has now himself been ousted in a second coup. The government probably controls no more than about 40% of the country. I guess he can't complain, right? Yeah, what is he going to say? What gave you the idea that you could just, oh, oh, yeah. What are some of the things that have to be done if we want to get out of these devastating cyclical conflicts? There's a lot of reasonably effective ideas for how to end wars.

You find a respected mediator. You start unofficial talks long before the belligerents are prepared to meet publicly. That worked in Northern Ireland and South Africa. You include more women and civil society groups in the peace process. We've seen in places where that's happened, the peace is more likely to stick. Of course, it's very hard to tease out cause and effect there. I mean, is that because the kinds of belligerents who include women and civil society groups in peace talks are less brutal and intransigent than the ones who don't. It's a little bit hard to say, but certainly that does help get more voices involved.

Do you see any of this happening in Sudan right now? Sudan is very confused right now. They've had various attempts at truces, none of which have worked. The two guys in charge, it's a zero-sum problem for them. They're not thinking, what's good for the country? They're both thinking, how do I remain alive and rich? And they both decided that the answer to that is that they should be in charge of the whole country. Miles Bryan produced today's show and Matthew Collette edited. Fact-checking was a team effort led by Laura Bullard.

Michael Rayfield and Paul Robert Mounsey engineered. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.