WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: The War in Sudan

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

This week we discuss the civil war that has been tearing apart the country of Sudan for almost a year now. Tune in to hear about the hoops Jillian had to jump through to find any information, Garrett's retelling of Sudan's long, complicated history on a time crunch, and to find out if Jillian and Garrett can name a single city in Africa. 

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.1.7 FM where we examine the truth disparity between what's on social media and what's actually true. I'm Jillian Parks. And I'm Gary Gulesby. And today we are talking about war. Hard pivot from Jojo Siwa. Yeah, but maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe there's something there. Yeah, maybe there's something there. Maybe Jojo Siwa is going to start a war. I really hope I'm wrong on that one. But we're talking about the civil war happening in Sudan. I will say, I think it's stupid that the term for it is civil war.

I understand civilians. I understand that that's like... But there's nothing civil going on here. When I think civil, I think like polite and nice. And this is not polite nor nice. It's actually really... By the war standards, it's very not polite and nice. Exactly.

So we need to find a different word. I hope the UN listens to our show. They don't. And I don't even think they're in charge of calling it Civil War. I think I just picked an arbitrary organization. Awesome. We're going to get right into it because I feel like you have a lot to say about this. I just have a feeling of charge.

I do. But I'm very curious to know if social media had anything to say about it because I did a little pre-polling of just like men on the street. Do we even know that this is happening? And most people were like, oh, you mean when they split between Northern Sudan and South Sudan? And I was, and I'm like, no, there's another civil war that started. It's happening right now. Just in regular Sudan. And people are like, what?

Yes. So actually, I'll get into that, starting us off, nice and strong. I will say that there are people on social media talking about it. There are a lot of people who have made it their entire page's goal to get people talking about the war happening in Sudan. The problem is either those videos are being suppressed, which I actually don't think is happening, because those videos have, some of the more popular videos do have upwards of 100,000 views. Sometimes in the mid, the more median level is like 20,000 to 40,000 views. And then of course there are videos that flop because there's videos on every topic that are going to flop.

But I don't think they're being suppressed. I truly think people use social media as a. distraction from real life. And so when they get content that talks about real issues that are stressful and that there's nothing they can really do about it, the immediate thing that they do is just scroll past it. They don't really interact with it. And when I say they, I mean me and the people that you polled, I'm sure there are people with this information coming to their for you pages on TikTok or it's coming up on their TikTok. Nope, what's the other one? Twitter. Their Twitter feed. but those are people that interact with stuff like this.

I don't use social media that way, and I don't think most people use social media that way. And so in order to get to this content, I had to look up what's going on in Sedan. Like I had to be interested enough to take the extra step because this is not stuff that's going to come up naturally for me. But when you do look it up, there is a good bit that does come up. The first stuff that comes up is the very imminent war

that's happening right now. But there actually is some stuff about the North and South split as well that I didn't watch because I don't care and I don't want to know and I'm not a history major and it doesn't like unless I'm taking a test on it, I don't really care to know that sort of thing. Which maybe that's not awesome, but that's just the truth. And that's what we all have to do in an information economy is decide what things we actually want to intake and what things we don't because there's too much to take all of it in. Okay. So where social media starts, like as in most popular, is the stuff that's being posted right now. And the stuff that's being posted right now is stuff basically saying we're almost a year into this war in sedan and people aren't paying attention to it. Please pay attention to it. It's basically spreading awareness. And that is like the bulk of the information you'll get right now if you look it up. If you look up more specific keywords, but like what is going on, what is happening, then you will actually get into the history. And so here is the history I found.

I'm excited for you to tell me, I'm wrong. It starts on social media, at least, mostly in 2019. I know like five years ago. That is five years ago. Yeah, 2019 is when it starts for social media. And it was with the overthrow of their dictator, Omar. Mar al-Bashir. I don't think I'm saying any of these right.

Most of you guys I watched, well, I watched people pronounce them and they have a really awesome accent that makes it sound correct. And mine is Americanized. So just bear with me if you are more fluent. It was apparently a nonviolent revolution that deposed their 30-year dictator and instead put in place a transitional council made up of. military leaders and civilians and the goal of this council was to eventually switch over to a civilian-led government and the military portion of that government did what people are calling a coup and they

took over and deposed the civilian part of that government and basically took it over for themselves the two people that are the main people of interest seem to be Burhan and Hemetian Burhan seems to represent the SAF, the Sudanese armed forces, and Hamedi seems to represent RSF, which is the rapid support forces. I guess these two groups were at odds before that, but then they like came together maybe. I'm not really sure. You'll have to fill in the gaps there. And they were working together against the Sudanese people. So they like took out the civilians and they were working together in the government.

And of course, as somebody may assume, they ended up being in odds with each other because they were fighting for that ultimate seat. Because one of them was more like president. One of them was more vice president adjacent. I don't know if those were their terms. I just know that that was the imbalance and somebody wasn't happy about it. So on April 5th, 2023, they, as far as I know started fighting, social media doesn't like, like, like. their groups, RSF or S-A-F. Man, that's hard. They don't like either, but they particularly don't like RSF. R-S-F seems to be the group that is doing more of the, like, bombing and killing civilians,

burning towns, raiding, looting, a lot of sexual violence against women, that sort of thing. And SAF is the one, is the group with UN recognition. They're the ones that are apparently legitimate. it. We'll see if that's, I don't know, I'm interested to see. Some of that was very good. Some of it was very wrong, but some of it was surprisingly good. Awesome. Okay. Basically, what people have been saying is that there's less and less press attention, but there's actually more and more international strategic attention. So even if we on social media aren't really paying attention, like, apparently this is something that's getting attention from other countries. The SAF, apparently, has the people the countries on their side from what i gathered maybe there's more maybe there's

less but from when i gathered were egypt turkey saudi arabia and then lightly iran and then on the rsf sides it's uae russia chad kenya libya and yemen um those were the two that's about right groups cool um and then it's just basically all of that information was from tic talk from people taking the time to explain in a minute and a half what they think is going on. And I watched like four, and that's what I was able to gauge from them. Twitter is a little bit less helpful in terms of explaining what's going on, but there's a lot of stats.

And I'm going to share just the most popular stats. And then I'm going to hand it over to you and we're going to see what you think. Basically, the biggest one would be that this is the world's largest hunger crisis at the time because there are 18 million Sudanese people that are facing acute hunger. 18 million is a big number there and that 200,000 people will die in the coming weeks if nothing's done about this. It's from malnutrition, not even from like the actual fighting of war, but from like resources being very scarce and the rating and the displacement. Displacement is also a huge issue with over 10 million individuals being displaced from their homes. and that obviously causing a lot of instability in that region.

Yeah, those were the big stats. Another thing that's interesting is that this conflict is typically brought up in response to people talking about free Palestine. Like if people are saying free Palestine, if you do find your way onto this side of TikTok, it is going to typically be because the comments in those free Palestine videos are like, why aren't you talking about Sudan? Why aren't you talking about Congo?

And then a couple other places. But Sudan and Congo were the two that people were bringing up the most. So for those of you who are just tuning in and confused about what I'm talking about, this is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Garrett Gulesby. And we're talking about the Civil War. Well, the not so civil, but we already debated the terms.

Debated, we were in agreement. We already talked about the terms. And we're talking about the war Exactly. In the fact that's happening in one country against each other and they're fighting like brothers. But angry, angry brothers. But it doesn't even seem to be like side against side. It really seems to be like civilians against two military groups, you know?

Kind of. Kind of. I don't know. Take it away. I'm going about what's going on right now and then kind of how we got here. Because that is a very long story. It actually, just for, I'll throw this out there, you can trace this conflict back to stuff that started in the 1980s.

So, yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the players here. We have Hamadon de Gallo Hamedi, all right? So we talked about him. I'm definitely saying that wrong. But he is the leader of the RSF and Abdel Fatah al-Baron, who leads the SAF. And the SAF is Sudan's legitimate government military.

The RSF is rapid support forces. They were initially, they were originally formed under the name the Janjaweed. They were an Arab paramilitary group that was sent to the Darfur region of Sudan to essentially put down rebellions that were happening under the rule of Omar al-Bashir, our dictator friend, who ruled for about 30 years. So he formed this paramilitary group, sent them off to go quash rebellions. They did horrible, horrible things, killed a lot of civilian people. people and were known particularly for just rounding up villages of men and killing all of them so that none of them could join the rebellion. So that's who these guys are. They became the RSF and then started working together jointly with the SAF. And then eventually the, it sounded like from what you were saying that it was like these two groups against the people, initially that wasn't really true and that still is not entirely the case.

So initially these two groups actually worked for the people to remove Omar al-Bashir. So the people were calling for a democratic government and these two military leaders said, okay, we'll take care of him, we'll oust him. And then they formed a council that was like, you mentioned this, but it was part civilian and part military. I believe it was seven civilians and five military leaders on this council. So the idea was that that council was going to be the transitional government until they could institute a legitimate democracy in Sudan. The problem is that the chairman and the basically vice chairman of the council were these two guys. Baran was made the chairman and Hamedi was the vice chairman, second guy in charge.

And then they, you know, they start all these negotiations about democracy. And it actually initially didn't go super poorly. But where things went awry is that there started to, you know, they started to, you know, to be discussions about how they were going to merge the SAF and the RSF and make them one, you know, United Military. And Hametti, the RSF guy said, well, let's do it gradually over 10 years. And then, Baran said, let's do it in two years. They couldn't agree on that. And essentially, from there, it escalated to full-blown war, the war that we have. And again, one of the one of the things that I heard you say that I'm thinking, okay, that was kind of the reverse of

what is actually the case, is that the RSF are in charge of a lot of the bombings and air strikes on civilian zones and everything like that. It's actually the case that the SAF owns the air. They have way more air power. And both sides have been accused of terrible, terrible atrocities to civilians. But bombings and air raids have mostly been the work of the SAF because they just have more robust control of the skies. Now, the kind of big no-no that the RSF is being accused of right now, it's ethnic cleansing, which is, you know, real bad. Yeah.

Anyway, the reason why Sudan is such a politically complicated place is because the lines that delineate the country were not drawn up according to ethnicity. They were, you know, for a long time, Britain and Egypt jointly ruled Sudan. And then when Sudan gained its independence in the 50s, they kind of just drew the territory lines how they felt like it should be drawn. And what they wound up doing is lumping in the north a huge group of Arab Muslim people with people in the South who are mostly animist Africans. Some of them are Christians. So they're just entirely different people groups and they're made to share a country. It turns out over the past couple decades, all the power in Sudan has pretty much been concentrated in the north.

So the South's been pretty marginalized. Anyway, that kind of is the lead up to where we are today. So we have two military leaders that have both won to lay claim to rule of Sudan. The RSF leader, Hametti, is actually trying to do a little bit more like political maneuvering on the world stage. So he did this whole tour around all of Africa and met with like all these leaders. And apparently he's a very personable guy and has kind of made a lot of allies. among other African countries. So if you were going to look at this war right now and say who's winning, the answer would

probably be Hamedi and the RSF. No way. Yes. Because they control, they don't control as much space, but the spaces that they control are arguably more valuable. So especially there's a region in South Central Sudan, not the country of South Sudan, but the south central part of the country of Sudan, that is sort of their, there's a region. bread basket and the RSF recently gained control of that area. And that's another reason why

keep hearing about the hunger crisis that's going on is that the RSF is an army of like 100,000 people. And the SAF is about 300,000. And that doesn't include all of the people that just are quickly willing to join and work for money to do their work. So you have these massive groups of men that need to be fed and mobilized and also aren't. not really controlled that well and are going into villages or going into towns and just looting and burning things really in the name of bettering their strategic positions and in the name of this war that they're fighting. And obviously who catches all of this in the end is a civilians. Their food stores, their homes get burned. You mentioned the number of people displaced.

It's like 10 million people. I was actually surprised. I think you mentioned 18 million people were at risk of starvation, it's actually a much higher number than that. It's really closer to 25 to 30 million people are at risk of food insecurity and starvation because of this conflict. Because Sudan especially, it's a very poor country and relies heavily on foreign aid, especially in a time of conflict like this, it would be relying super heavily on foreign aid. But both groups, the RSF and the SAF, are actually inhibiting the transatlantic. The transatlantic. The transatlantic the transport of foreign aid, food and resources, medicine, to refugee camps and to people that need it. So even if there was more help being sent in, there's no guarantee that it would be going to the place that it's supposed to go.

So there's a very convoluted and complicated conflict because Sudan has been at war in some way for like a long time with very little breaks. You know, shortly before this conflict, there was the conflict that gave us Sudan and South Sudan. civil war where the predominantly animist African South became its own country and took with it a lot of oil resources. So when that happened, that put an extra strain on northern Sudan. And that's kind of just compounding the issue that we're seeing today with the food insecurity because there's even less money in Sudan than there was before to help feed all these people. And that, again, piled on top of all of this for many years prior to this, the government is, you know, is taxing these people, is taking money from them. And basically none of it is being spent

on improving the people. Under the dictator Omar al-Bashir, 60 to 70 percent of the government budget was spent on his security. Oh my gosh. Yes. So you're talking 60 to 70 percent of government revenue that is, you know, going to be budgeted for government expenses, not getting spent on infrastructure. It's not getting spent on any kind of support plan, you know, any kind of Medicare type situation or, you know, food stamp type program. It's getting paid, it was getting used to protect this Omar fella who is now gone. And people are glad that he's gone. But is he alive? Is he alive? Is he alive still? Yes. He's still alive. Okay. Where's he at? Where do you put someone like that?

I actually don't know where he, where in the world he is at, but he's probably going to be offered up to basically every security council known to man for all of his crimes against humanity. And once all of his trials are done, I can't imagine that he's going to get to walk free. Pretty messy dude. Did some pretty bad stuff. You have to remember that the RSF who's fighting this war was created specifically to be his ethnic hitmen to wipe out the African population. in Sudan. So it's a pretty messy situation.

And there's no there's no positive spin for us, no happy ending? I can think of a positive spin here. Well, I mean people here's here's a little bit of a positive spin, I guess, is that there are other countries trying to mediate peace. I think that's something like it's not like the whole world is leaving them alone. I think the news is largely kind of leaving them alone. there isn't a lot on on the news or it really sounds like on social media too too much about it. You know, it's not the same, getting the same coverage as Israel and Palestine.

But that being said, on the diplomatic level, there are countries, the U.S. and the UAE and a few other countries around Sudan that are trying to get these two sides to sit down and talk. The other thing that just kind of an added layer to this is Hamedi and Iran have worked together for decades. They know each other. They're friends. Well, I don't know if they're friends now, but, you know, their personal acquaintances and know each other well. So getting them to sit down at a table and talk it out has been very difficult because of that fact, because they, my assumption is that they sort of, they think they know how the other will respond and that the only way out is going to be through. Yeah. All right. Well, it is a, it is a positive-ish spin. And I do appreciate your attempt there. Do you think we're ready to give it a grade, Garrett?

I think so. three, two, one. B plus, yeah. It did pretty good. I thought it did pretty good. I think I docked points because I had to really go look for it. And because of this fun anecdote that we will end the episode on, in the midst of scrolling through, you know, my keywords and whatever, finding what I could, there was a video where

a guy was on the street doing those stupid man on the street interviews that actually pissed me off. But his question was, could you, can you name a city, a city, not a country. a city in Africa and not a single person could. What? I can't name that many, but I can name like probably three. And I was just shocked that nobody can name any. And so because of that, I'm like, if these people can't even name cities in Africa, I really don't think they are the type to create an algorithm in such a way that they are getting this information.

Wow. All right. I hope that leaves you with lots to think about. Thanks so much for everybody who tuned in to this episode of the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 1.1.7 FM. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Garrett Goulsby. And we'll talk to you next week.