He also said that his government would not allow any American shipments to Yemen, and called on other Arab countries to boycott not only Israeli but also American trade in the region.

The Gaza conflict has several theaters. There is the Israeli war of genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza, which has killed over 18,000 people and wounded tens of thousands, the vast majority of them innocent noncombatants, and destroyed or damaged about half the region’s housing stock along with other essential infrastructure and buildings. It has also left the civilian population without sufficient food or water and exposed to deadly infectious diseases.

Then there is the tense Israeli-Lebanese border, where Israel has bombed from fighter jets and Hezbollah has fired rockets, necessitating the evacuation of some of northern Israel.

There have been Shiite militia attacks on US personnel in Syria and Iraq, with more threatened.

And then there is the really important Red Sea front, where the Houthi government has targeted commercial vessels it says are ferrying goods and supplies to Israel, though it seems also to be hitting just any old merchant ship. The Houthis are Zaydi Shiites and form part of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance to Israeli political dominance in the Levant and the occupation of the Palestinians. The Houthis survived an eight-year war with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, wealthy oil states allied with the United States that either recognize Israel (in the case of the UAE) or are considering it (the Saudis).

Yemen is a rugged country of impenetrable highlands and wildernesses. I’ve been there several times. The winding mountain roads outside Sanaa made me carsick. The Yemenis gave me khat for the nausea.

The country sits athwart the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the 20-mile-wide Bab al-Mandeb or Mandeb Straits through which traffic between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean passes. The UAE and its allies control the southern coast along the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, but the Houthis control some of the Red Sea coast and use their window on the sea to threaten shipping for their geopolitical purposes with drones, including Iran-made KAS-04 unmanned aerial vehicles. The Houthis have hit several container ships and a Norwegian oil tanker.

The Houthi government announced Saturday that it had launched a large number of drones toward the region of Eilat, Israel’s port city on the Gulf of Aqaba just off the Red Sea.

At the same time, the United States Central Command announced that its destroyers in the Red Sea had shot down 14 one-way attack drones.

The British Navy also weighed in, saying that a Sea Viper missile from the HMS Diamond had taken out a Houthi drone that threatened merchant shipping.

CBS News: “Houthis target ships in Red Sea, U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria face daily attacks”

As a result of the ongoing Houthi drone attacks on freighters, some of the world’s biggest and most important shipping corporations have announced that they will avoid the Red Sea and the Suez Canal for now. They are not only fleeing danger but also the dramatically spiking cost of insuring any vessels that ply those waters. The companies include Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), whose MSC PALATIUM III freighter was taken out of commission by a Houthi drone attack on Friday. They also include CMA CGM of France, Maersk of Denmark, and Hapag-Lloyd of Germany, according to the BBC.

Israeli shipping costs have shot up over 250%, and some insurers are refusing to insure their vessels.

The US plan to form a naval task force to escort container ships and protect them from the drones won’t work, because it won’t push down insurance costs. They could try to strike the Houthis, but 8 years of Saudi and UAE bombing of them did no good, so I wouldn’t hold my breath that lashing out would be effective. Moreover, the Biden administration doesn’t want the Gaza conflict to spread throughout the region and further destabilize it.

Some 10 percent of world trade goes through the Suez Canal on 17,000 ships a year. Nowadays, about 12% of the petroleum shipped by tanker goes through the Suez Canal, along with Liquefied Natural Gas shipments. These ships will now have to go around the Cape of Good Hope and skirt the west coast of Africa, adding over 10,000 nautical miles (over 12,000 landlubber miles) and 8 to 10 days to the journey, with all the consequent extra expenses of fuel and provisions. The shipping companies will be hurt by this change, as well as the countries along the Red Sea such as Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. The detour will contribute to supply chain shortages and cause an increase in the price of imported goods for many countries in Europe.

( Tomdispatch.com) – Various versions of the aphorism “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” have been making the rounds ever since the rise of U.S. imperialism in the late 1800s. The quip (which, despite legend, appears not to be attributable to Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, or any other famous person) has proven all too accurate when the war in question directly involves American troops. When, however, non-U.S. combatants and civilians suffer and die from conflicts relatively unrelated to Washington’s “strategic interests,” our media outlets tend to avert their eyes, aid agencies get stingy, and Americans learn no geography whatsoever. Oh, and given this country’s power and position on this planet, millions suffer the consequences of that neglect.     

Terror Days in Khartoum

Let’s start with Sudan. A civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) is now dragging into its seventh month with no end in sight. Since the conflict erupted, Washington has issued only a few token calls for the fighting there to end, while providing insufficient aid to desperate millions of Sudanese. The assistance that did go out has proven microscopic compared to the vast quantities of humanitarian, economic, and military aid our government has poured into similarly war-torn Ukraine.

In the first five months of brutal fighting in Sudan, 5,000 civilian deaths and injuries to at least 12,000 more were reported — and those were both considered significant underestimates. Meanwhile, more than a million people have fled that country, while a staggering 7.1 million have been displaced in their own land. According to the International Office of Migration, that represents “the highest [number] of any internally displaced population in the world, including Syria, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Human Rights Watch reports that “over 20 million people, 42% of Sudan’s population, face acute food insecurity and 6 million are just a step away from famine.” 

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Try to take that in for a moment and wonder, while you’re at it, why you’ve heard so desperately little (or nothing at all!) about such an immense human tragedy. Worse yet, the Sudanese people are hardly the only ones being treated shabbily by Uncle Sam and other governments of the rich North while suffering deadly deprivation. Sudan is, in fact, at the center of a region stretching from the Middle East deep into Africa in which countries suffering some of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies are largely being ignored by the Global North.

Given the near vacuum of news on the Sudan conflict in our media, we contacted Hadeel Mohamed, an educator we know who fled Sudan for neighboring Egypt, but is still in frequent contact with her neighbors who stayed behind in the capital city, Khartoum. We asked her for an update on what people still living there were telling her they were enduring after six months of unending civil war.

Every house in their neighborhood, she’s heard, has been looted by combatants. In the process, her friends and neighbors say that they’ve experienced “terror days when their houses were being invaded or even re-invaded to see if there’s anything left.”

“When it starts to get dark outside,” she told us, “that’s scariest, because you never know who’s going to come in and attack.” If female household members are there, what grim fates are they likely to suffer? And she adds, “If you have males in the house, are they going to be abducted and what’s going to happen to them?”

We asked whether atrocities were being committed by both the Sudanese Army and the RSF? “Yeah, both sides,” she responded. “Listen, I’m not validating any side, but when you’re in war, you really don’t know who’s coming at you or who’s a threat to you. So, everyone is seen as a threat.” And that, she adds, leads the combatants to act violently toward the civilians who’ve stayed behind.

Food is especially scarce in Khartoum, because travel in and out of the city is so dangerous for the usual suppliers and, as Hadeel points out, “Most of the stores have been looted, but in certain areas, some bread and other food is available for a few hours per day per week. There’s no fixed schedule, though.” Worse yet, wherever there’s active fighting, electricity and water supplies are normally cut off. “Some people can have electricity for weeks, while others will not have it for weeks.” Some engineers have bravely remained in Khartoum trying to keep power and water supplies flowing, but it’s often a hopeless task.

“People are on such unstable ground,” Hadeel concludes. “They really don’t know when their next food supplies are going to come in or when they’re going to be able to refill their water.” They have to watch for opportunities to slip outside in relative safety to “find something to keep them and their neighbors going.”

And what exactly has been Washington’s response to this ongoing horror? Well, the State Department issued a toothless admonishment that the army and RSF “must comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law, including obligations related to the protection of civilians.” And that was about it, other than ineffective sanctions applied to the leader of the RSF. Meanwhile, international efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting have collapsed, and humanitarian aid efforts have been hopelessly bogged down. Anyway, who has time for Sudan when arming and backing the Ukrainians has the attention of everyone who matters in the United States?

“Severe, Extreme, or Catastrophic Conditions”

Mind you, that paucity of interest is anything but unique to the crisis in Sudan. For example, U.N. World Food Program (WFP) Director Cindy McCain recently told ABC’s This Week that there isn’t enough food-assistance money for desperate Afghanistan, filled with starving people, to “even get through October.” In addition, the WFP has had to cut food aid to other countries in desperate need, including Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Jordan, Palestine, South Sudan, Somalia, and Syria. As for explaining that shortfall, McCain was blunt, blaming the rush of rich nations of the Global North to support Ukraine which, she says, “has sucked the oxygen out of the room.”

Typically, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that its famine-prevention program for war-ravaged Yemen is now receiving just 30% of the funds it needs, putting millions of Yemenis at risk. OCHA points to the peril facing Fatima, a 60-year-old woman living in the village of Al-Juranah. The program supplies her family with wheat, peas, and oil, but delivery is sporadic, a reality about which Fatima is all too matter-of-fact. “We receive a sack of wheat,” she says, “and sometimes we get only half a sack. They also give us roasted peas and oil. If this support stops, we will starve to death.” And sadly enough, that support is now anything but guaranteed.

Two years after a ceasefire in that brutal civil war fed by Saudi Arabia (with U.S. support), a conflict that received only the scantiest media coverage in this country, more than half of Yemenis — 17 million people — are food insecure. U.N. forecasters predict that without massive intervention, a quarter of those people will experience “acute food insecurity” by year’s end, with three-quarters of them reaching “crisis levels of hunger.” Such massive intervention is decidedly not in the cards, however, and the continuing neglect is having horrific consequences. National Public Radio’s Fatma Tanis did, in fact, report on this from a Yemeni hospital in August:

“We head next to the intensive care unit for newborns, often born with complications because of malnutrition. As we enter, a nurse pulls a sheet over a baby who just died. The parents aren’t here. Often, families use all their resources to bring their child to the hospital but can’t afford to return again. So the hospital has to take care of burials too, without them.”

The people of Syria are similarly striving to recover from the civil war that erupted in 2011 and was finally put on hold with a 2020 ceasefire, but only after a full decade of ferocious warfare and terrible suffering. Like the Sudanese and Yemenis, they remain largely unnoticed and uncovered these days in the American media. In addition to extreme water shortages, a catastrophic 55% of Syrians are officially in the crisis phase of acute food insecurity. In late 2022, OCHA reported that “severe, extreme, or catastrophic conditions” were affecting 69% — yes, you read that right! — of the country’s population. Furthermore,

“Basic services and other critical infrastructure are on the brink of collapse… Over 58 percent of households interviewed reported accessing only between three to eight hours of electricity per day, while almost seven million people only had access to their primary water source between two and seven days per month in June.”

Is the world paying attention? In one respect, Syria is more fortunate than Sudan or Yemen, enjoying its very own annual conference of donor nations. At this June’s conference, hosted by the European Union, donors pledged an increase in total aid, but the amount still fell $800 million short of what the U.N. was seeking for that country. Worse yet, just before the conference kicked off, the World Food Program announced that it would cut food aid to almost half of Syria’s 5.5 million current recipients just when they’re most in need.   

The Democratic Republic of Congo, another country in deep distress, finds itself in the global spotlight, but not for the suffering its people are experiencing. Its huge deposits of cobalt, copper, and other mineral elements essential to future renewable-energy economies have finally brought it some attention. However, the Global North, transfixed by those priceless minerals, has remained remarkably blind to the wave of human misery now sweeping the Congo.

Last month, Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, just back from a trip there, told Democracy Now, “It’s the worst hunger catastrophe on Earth. Nowhere else in the world is there more than 25 million people experiencing violence, hunger, disease, neglect. And nowhere in the world is there such a small international response to help, to aid, to end all of this suffering.”

As in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, hunger and war have gone hand-in-hand in the Congo. Today, Egelend said, an almost unbelievable 150 or so armed groups vie for power in the cobalt-rich eastern part of the country. In the early 2000s, cobalt was valued for its role in mobile phones and laptops. The stakes are far higher now, with vastly larger quantities required to produce the lithium-ion batteries essential to the development of sprawling new power grids and a vast global fleet of electric vehicles.

Collateral damage radiating from the Congo’s ongoing violence includes a hunger crisis, an epidemic of sexual assault by combatants on tens of thousands of civilian women, and so much more. The U.N. sought $2.3 billion in humanitarian assistance for the Congo in 2023. It has, however, only received a measly one-third of that sum, enough to help just one of every 18 people now in desperate need.

On Democracy Now!, Egeland put his finger on the terrible calculations of global economics and diplomacy: “Congo is not ignored by those who want to extract the riches of that place. It is ignored by the rest of the world… As humanity, we’re really, really failing Congo now, because it’s not Ukraine, it’s not the Middle East.”

As a refugee from Sudan, Hadeel Mohamed worries every day about these kinds of terrible calculations being made in the North. As she puts it,

“This war has really opened our eyes to a lot of things. Although we saw the news of what’s happening in Yemen and Syria, and all these countries where wars erupted, we never really understood the depth of it. A worry of ours is that what’s happening to Syrian refugees is going to happen to Sudanese refugees… where your prospects are not going to mean anything… where you’re limited in your work transactions, you’re limited in your educational abilities.”

Because organizations like the U.N. and the International Red Cross were activated “quite late” in Sudan, she points out, some who fled the country, especially youth, “started forming groups to help people cross borders to get out, to find jobs, and to raise funds for food and water aid for those still in Sudan.” Hadeel herself is involved in such efforts. “But progress is a bit slow, because we’re still trying to rebuild our own lives in parallel.”

“If the war is not contained in Khartoum,” she adds, “the chances of it spreading are very high and we’ve seen a lot of spreading recently, whether it’s in Port Sudan or Madani or surrounding cities.” Violence has been raging for months in the Darfur region of western Sudan as well. The conflict could also be significantly prolonged by the desire of both sides to control northeastern Sudan’s vast gold deposits, which play a role analogous to that of cobalt in the Congo.

With no relief in sight, says Hadeel, the people of Khartoum, understand that lacking true humanitarian aid, “you really come back to more of community-based aid. With our limited resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up to take care of each other.” Nevertheless, for refugees, “there are only two possible outcomes here: either you go back and fight for your country and potentially die or you go on living and establishing yourself outside of Sudan.”

Meanwhile, on the Outskirts of Democracy…

Tyranny, civil war, systemic breakdown — it can’t happen here, right? Or can it? We privileged folk in the United States may still think we live in a democracy, but so many of us don’t. In truth, the 140 million poor and low-wage folks, Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous, along with about one-third of White people, live on the outskirts of our “democracy.” Like the people of Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, they dream of being in a country where there’s equality and justice, and where democracy, while not complete, is at least not dying.

The United States never was, and by the looks of it, now has little chance of becoming a truly pluralistic, multiracial democratic system. If we were, we’d be spending every free hour raising hell to make sure the possibility of democracy doesn’t die in next year’s election. The media are replete with dystopian scenarios of its end and the rise of Trumpistan. We’re scared shirtless about that, too, and it’s a gut punch to realize that, if we had a truly functioning democracy, there’d be no way it could be toppled by a single guy like Donald Trump.

Ask a Sudanese or a Syrian or an Egyptian or an Afghan what it’s like to live under autocracy. Then ask marginalized Americans what it’s like to live on the outskirts of democracy. For the latter, democracy is like Sudan’s gold and the Congo’s cobalt. There may be a lot of it, but very few get any.

Copyright 2023 Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox    

Tomdispatch.com

( Middle East Monitor ) – One of the most pressing issues of the 21st century is the management and allocation of the limited freshwater resources in the world. Since an important number of those water resources are trans-boundary, crossing the political boundaries of more than one nation, the complexity of the problem has increased over the years. In dealing with trans-boundary water disputes, riparian states such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Sudan mostly prefer water diplomacy mechanisms that involve the processes and institutions through which the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another.

States’ claim of sovereignty

On the one hand, states have been the main actors in shaping trans-boundary water policies and conducting water diplomacy throughout the last few decades of water disputes. On the other hand, international organisations, international non-governmental organisations and science-policy initiatives joined the water diplomacy processes as new actors, with the coming of issues of scarcity, pollution and the sharing of water resources in order to take the attention of the international community. With the participation of these actors in water diplomacy, new approaches related to the management of trans-boundary water resources, for example, the sharing of benefits such as energy, food and services to be obtained from water resources instead of sharing water resources per se, have been developed.

With the increase in the use of trans-boundary rivers for consumption purposes, such as the expansion of irrigation since the last quarter of the 19th century, many states have claimed mutual sovereignty and rights of use over trans-boundary water resources. As a result of these discourses and actions, a series of international customary law principles have been adopted. The riparian states of trans-boundary waters have signed numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements, protocols and memoranda of understanding on the use, management and sharing of these resources. In other words, treaty (written) and customary (unwritten) international water principles of law, as well as traditional diplomatic methods, have been developed by the states as the main tools for resolving disputes regarding trans-boundary waters.

Trans-boundary water disputes in Middle East

The Middle East is regarded as one of the most challenged regions in terms of trans-boundary surface and groundwater resources management and allocation between two or more countries. In addition to the constraints of natural water resources, the region suffers from an abundance of issues that compound water security, including a rapidly growing and displaced population, uneven economic development, limited amount of water supply that is irregularly distributed, the negative impacts of climate change and variability and poor water management and allocation practices both within and between states. Some 60 per cent of the water in the region flows across international borders, complicating resource management. The geopolitical importance of the region and the conflicts that arise have consequently resulted in aggravating the usual problems of using water in a variety of settings in the Nile or Euphrates-Tigris river basins.

Nile River dispute

The Nile basin is considered one of the world’s hydro-political hotspots, and much has been debated in academic and policy circles about the likelihood of interstate conflict between the Nile countries. In the late 1920s, colonial water-sharing agreements were concluded in the Nile basin under the full control of Great Britain. Following the wave of independence in Africa in the 1950s, all upstream riparians declared void those agreements, including the most important one, namely the 1929 Nile Water Agreement, which was later replaced by the still legally binding 1959 Agreement for the Full Utilisation of the Nile Waters, under which the two riparians agreed to share the waters in proportions of 75 per cent and 25 per cent for Egypt and 25 per cent for Sudan, respectively. The 1959 agreement has never been accepted by any of the upstream riparians, causing recurring tensions and disputes over water. Moreover, tensions in the Nile basin waters were often raised by political rhetoric, particularly between the Egyptian and Ethiopian leadership. Egypt, so heavily dependent on the Nile waters, has used its military might and hegemonic status to warn the upper riparians, primarily Ethiopia, not to undertake any projects that would risk Egypt’s share of the Nile.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Al Jazeera English: “Will Ethiopia compromise on its Grand Renaissance Dam? | Inside Story

Challenging this historical status quo, in March 2011, the Ethiopian government announced plans to construct a hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, namely the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which is planned to generate 6,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity, becoming Africa’s largest power plant. Concerns have been raised over the dam’s impact on Egypt. Tensions over the dam increased in May 2011, when Ethiopia temporarily diverted the flow of the Blue Nile as part of the construction process.

After exchanges of harsh rhetoric between the heads of state, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Ethiopia met and agreed to hold further talks on the construction of the dam. Hence, the water dispute in the Nile basin was intimately related to unfair clauses in the historical bilateral sharing agreements. Additionally, the increasing ability and desire of the upstream states, namely Ethiopia, to challenge Egypt’s status as a hydro-hegemon and the overall status quo constitute contemporary reasons for tensions over water. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was established in 1999 to find sustainable technical, institutional, legal and political solutions to the hydro-political challenges centred on a river embedded in regional geopolitical complexity.

Tigris-Euphrates basin

Trans-boundary water issues started to be a part of regional politics when the three major riparian states, namely Turkiye, Syria and Iraq, introduced major water and land resource development projects in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. In this context, large-scale dams and irrigation systems were initiated in the early 1960s. Owing to the competitive nature of these uncoordinated national water development projects, disagreements over trans-boundary water uses surfaced, and the riparian states opted for diplomatic negotiations to deal with their disagreements. As the national water development projects progressed, incompatibilities between water supply and demand occurred throughout the river basin. Even though no hot conflict was reported among the riparian states concerning water sharing, the sporadic technical negotiations could not prepare the ground for a comprehensive treaty on equitable and effective trans-boundary water management in the basin.

In the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the riparian states preferred water diplomacy mechanisms, namely diplomatic negotiations, to resolve the crises. Most of the crises were related to Iraq’s concerns regarding the impact of the construction and filling of the dams in Turkiye and Syria. Thus, diplomats and technocrats from the 3 countries met several times, although on an irregular basis, to exchange information concerning the technical details of the construction and the filling of the dams. In the period between the 1960s and the 1990s, the riparian states were too rigid in their position, emphasizing their absolute water rights over the rivers. With the emergence of a conducive overall political environment in the early 2000s, state representatives adopted a more needs-based approach by concluding a series of memoranda of understanding on the protection of the environment, water quality management, water efficiency, drought management and flood protection, with a view to addressing the adverse effects of climate change.

On the other hand, in the early 1980s, the riparian states in the Tigris-Euphrates basin managed to establish the institutional framework of the Joint Technical Committee (JTC), whose members included participants from all three riparian states. However, the riparian states did not agree to give the JTC clear and commonly agreed-upon functions. On the contrary, the states continued unilateral and uncoordinated water and land development projects, and the JTC meetings did not make an effective contribution to the settlement of the trans-boundary water dispute. It also did not provide a platform for delineating the priorities and needs of the co-riparians as a basis for addressing regional water problems.

Water diplomacy mechanisms, particularly at the trans-boundary level, have been introduced in the Tigris-Euphrates basin with the aim of reaching agreeable solutions between parties that have diverging interests as well as competing water development schemes. With the help of formal institutions like the JTC, high-level water diplomacy frameworks, water-sharing protocols and memoranda of understanding, the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another. Although these institutions may not have been effective most of the time in terms of the protection and efficient use and management of water and other related resources, they served to place trans-boundary water issues within a legitimate and peaceful realm, rather than mixing them with potentially conflict-laden issues, such as border security and territorial disputes, which might otherwise escalate into hot confrontations. However, there still does not exist a multilateral treaty regime involving all of the stakeholders concerned, including civil society organisations and private companies in energy, agriculture and the environment, as well as relevant development-related sectors, for the effective and equitable use and management of trans-boundary waters in the basin.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The plane stopped in midair and plummeted down. Video showed the jet spiraling towards the ground, with one wing missing and smoke pouring from the fuselage shortly before erupting into a fireball. The crash left the charred and mangled remnants of 10 people found in the debris. The 62-year-old Prigozhin was identified by a missing part of his finger, an injury sustained while he served time in a penal colony. The identification was made certain via DNA testing.

Accompanying Prigozhin on the doomed flight were Wagner’s top commander Dmitry Utkin — the neo-Nazi sympathizer, who named the group “Wagner” after Hitler’s favorite composer. Besides crew members, the dead included Wagner logistics and security head Valery Chekalov and four key lieutenants. Currently, it is not known why these high-ranking Wagner leaders, normally exceedingly careful about their security, were all on the same flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg, where Wagner is headquartered.

The death of Wagner’s central leadership decapitates the group and disrupts Wagner’s ability to reverse the effects of the Kremlin’s campaign to subsume the mercenary organization into Russia’s regular army. Prigozhin’s violent demise also raises questions, for Putin, about securing the valuable alliances Wagner secured in the Mideast and Africa as well as control of Prigozhin’s global financial empire.

Despite these challenges, it was surprising that Putin tolerated Prigozhin so long after he apparently painted a target on his own back by launching a rebellion with the stated aim of knocking out Moscow’s military leadership. Prigozhin called them “mentally ill scumbags,” who had led Russia to disaster in Ukraine. Wagner’s leader even questioned the basis of the war. The organization’s gunners brought down Russian helicopters and a military surveillance plane, reportedly killing 13. As the world watched, Prigozhin posed the most dramatic challenge to Putin’s rule in decades.

Within hours the revolt was defused: the Kremlin announced an end to the mutiny, whereby Wagner soldiers — many were criminals who fought on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine, the Mideast, and Africa — would escape punitive measures and Prigozhin would leave for Belarus without facing prosecution, his security guaranteed. Most, including President Biden, thought this was laughable, saying, “If I were he, I would be careful what I ate.” Prigozhin signed his own death warrant if he believed in the security “guarantee” or Putin’s equally absurd “word of honor.”

But, in the aftermath of the aborted insurrection, Prigozhin appeared unfazed. Putin met with him in Moscow. He soon appeared in St. Petersburg, at a forum for African leaders. Two weeks ago from somewhere in Africa, a video showed Prigozhin dressed in camouflage, holding an assault rifle, cheering the coup in Niger, and offering Wagner’s help.

“Prigozhin was scrambling to salvage his business empire from Kremlin control in the days before his death,” said a Business Insider story. Prigozhin found himself in a race with the Kremlin, which was at the same time trying to win over Wagner clients and have them deal directly with Russian officials instead of him.

Prigozhin’s continued posturing haunted Putin, who promoted himself as the omnipotent tsar. “Putin destroyed a whole propaganda narrative he himself had constructed,” an anonymous Russian official said. “It looked extremely humiliating. First, he got himself into a war he couldn’t win, and, when he inevitably encountered difficulties, he tried to find a cheap solution by allowing for the creation of an army of criminals — and then that army ended up turning against him.” Prigozhin cracked Putin’s shaky mystique.

Many Russians wondered how Prigozhin had been able to get away with such a brazen affront to Putin without consequence. Kremlin critic Bill Browder, a businessman with years of experience in Russia, said “Putin never forgives and never forgets. He looked like a humiliated weakling with Prigozhin running around without a care in the world after the mutiny. The dramatic assassination will cement Putin’s authority.”

Putin broke his silence about the plane crash last Thursday, some 24 hours after it happened. He described Mr. Prigozhin as a “talented man” with a “complicated fate.” Putin revealed that his personal ties with Prigozhin dated back to the early 1990s, and he acknowledged for the first time that he had personally asked Mr. Prigozhin to carry out tasks on his behalf. “He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results.”

Unlike the long list of people who have been shot, hanged, poisoned, and pushed out of windows because they criticized and undermined Putin, Prigozhin — until his mutiny — supported Putin, even helped create him. His arc of success was legendary: a crude and ambitious hustler like Putin, Prigozhin rose from convict to wiener salesman to warlord.

His ascension included a string of restaurants and a lucrative catering business that supplied food to Russian schools [until a 2019 dysentery scandal] as well as billion dollar, no-bid contracts to feed the Russian army and the Kremlin, earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef.” Prigozhin later joked that “Putin’s butcher” would be more appropriate.

Wagner was born when the Russian state needed a deniable shadow force of mercenaries. On behalf of Putin’s agenda, Prigozhin built Wagner shortly after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. A year later, Wagner was secretly part of Russia’s military surge into Syria. Prigozhin’s paramilitary protected Syria’s oil fields and, as compensation, received a slice of Syria’s petrodollars.

As long as Putin controlled Prigozhin, Wagner was allowed to grow, reaching an estimated 50,000 fighters at its peak. Prigozhin’s personal fortune swelled too, elevating him to billionaire status: Wagner’s corporate soldiers plundered diamonds, gold, oil, and gas from countries in which they operated. Killing with impunity, Wagner fighters were accused of numerous war crimes. In one incident, Wagner men were captured on video beheading, dismembering, and incinerating a Syrian man.

Prigozhin also created the Internet Research Agency that became the notorious hub for bogus social media accounts, fake news, propaganda, and efforts to disrupt elections all over the world, including helping the con-man insurrectionist become U.S. president. Indicted in the Mueller investigation, Prigozhin basked in the accusations. “We have interfered, we are interfering and we will continue to interfere,” he said in 2022. The FBI put Prigozhin on its most-wanted list to Prigozhin’s amusement.

In Ukraine, Wagner achieved the only Russian victory so far this year. Aiding a flailing Russian war operation starved for personnel, Prigozhin recruited convicts, who fought the long, horrible battle of Bakhmut. 20,000 poorly trained Russian soldiers died in that months-long siege, thanks to military tactics so wasteful of human life — sending suicidal wave after wave against Ukrainian defenses — that they were described as the “meat grinder.”

Becoming a global media figure, the shaven-headed Prigozhin — speaking in rough, often obscene language — projected a savage, even deranged image. Prigozhin may have believed his own hype when he decided to launch his rebellion. He tacitly endorsed a video showing the murder, with a sledgehammer, of a Wagner defector. “A dog’s death for a dog,” Prigozhin said in a statement at the time. Known as “zeroing out,” the Wagner punishment for desertion or retreat is death.

Accusations of war crimes follow Wagner wherever its fighters go. “In mid-April 2023, two alleged former prisoners and Wagner fighters detailed atrocities committed against civilians and combatants in Bakhmut.” These allegations included terrorism, political assassinations, and the use of rape as a weapon of war as well as the execution of 70 Wagner soldiers for disobeying orders.

In early 2023, the United Nations called for investigations into possible war crimes by government forces and Wagner Group units in Mali. In designating Wagner a “transnational criminal organization” in January, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Wagner-related businesses and accused Wagner personnel of engaging “in an ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity, including mass executions, rape, child abductions, and physical abuse in the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Mali.”

Ignoring such accusations as well as his own war crimes, Putin viewed Prigozhin as a useful opportunist with a ruthless streak and sent his guns-for-hire private military company across the Middle East and Africa to bolster Russian interests often in vicious fashion. Wagner is vital to understanding the Kremlin’s emerging global strategy.

Blatant imperialists and Putin’s shadowy enforcers, Wagner backed shaky foreign governments in Syria, Libya, the Sudan, Mali, and the Central African Republic among others and nailed down mineral rights and other concessions, enriching Prigozhin in side deals. Corporate soldiers of corruption, “Wagner is nothing more than an organized crime group sanctioned by the Russian government,” wrote The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

Wagner has perfected a blueprint for state capture in the Central African Republic (CAR), according to a report in The Sentry. Titled “Architects of Terror,” the paper details Wagner efforts to amass military power, secure access to precious minerals — gold and diamonds — and subdue the population with terror. As Richard Engel says in his NBC documentary Blood and Gold, “They are stealing money from the poorest people on earth.” Recent reports even question the agency of the CAR government, calling it a “zombie” host to Russian interests. Wagner’s role in Libya and Sudan has been equally sinister.

An elaborate Wagner scheme to plunder Sudan’s riches was reported by CNN: “Russia has colluded with Sudan’s beleaguered military leadership, enabling billions of dollars in gold to bypass the Sudanese state and to deprive the poverty-stricken country of hundreds of millions in state revenue.” Wagner actively supported Sudan’s 2021 military coup which overthrew a transitional civilian government, dealing a devastating blow to the Sudanese pro-democracy movement. Despite another coup that removed Wagner ally and Sudan president Omar al-Bashir, companies linked to Prigozhin maintain de-facto control of gold-mining interests there.

In Sudan’s neighbor Libya, Wagner has fought in the civil war, where it allied with the Libyan National Army (LNA), led by Marshall Khalifa Haftar, who has been fighting against the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). The Wagner Group has provided security, training, artillery, snipers, and landmines to the LNA, as well as participating in combat operations. Its activates are closely tied to oil and gas resources affiliated with Prigozhin companies.

The Wagner boss established one of the world’s most mysterious and complicated corporate organizations across Africa, which included enterprises in media, logistics, mining, cinema, and catering in addition to his mercenary activities, according to an investigation by the Dossier Center. It remains unclear what is going to happen to the sprawling network now that its leader is dead.

After Prigozhin’s mutiny, the Kremlin moved to defuse his power and curtail his business empire. His contract for feeding the Russian army was canceled. Putin dissolved the Internet Research Agency, but did not shut down Wagner. Russian officials have indicated to Syria, Libya, and Sudan that they want Russian involvement to continue, suggesting that Wagner fighters could come under the Defense Ministry. The assassination of Wagner’s top leadership was likely the final step to eliminate Wagner as an independent organization, according to The Institute for the Study of War.

The Kremlin was pushing to dismantle Wagner’s presence in the Middle East and Africa, by forming new private military companies (PMCs) from existing Wagner personnel. Putin may have decided that Wagner personnel had reached a point where they were sufficiently more interested in payments and deployments with these new PMCs than their continued loyalty to Prigozhin and that he could safely kill Prigozhin without Wagner recriminations.  

Prigozhin never turned his nascent popularity into a coherent movement. Public mourning for him is subdued rather than a national outpouring of grief. The remaining Wagner commanders will grasp the lesson of Prigozhin’s murder — he shouldn’t have launched the rebellion or he shouldn’t have halted it. In any case, Wagner relinquished much of its vast arsenal of heavy weaponry to the defense ministry, and its fighters are now scattered across Belarus, Russia, the Mideast and Africa. In short, an immediate revolt, in Prigozhin’s memory, is unlikely.

Putin needed time to secure Kremlin control of Wagner’s complicated empire so Prigozhin survived for two months before his elimination. In Africa, for instance, Russia sought to reassure leaders who relied on Wagner for security that the firm will continue to operate under Putin’s control. As the Kremlin sought to untangle itself from the once-loyal warlord, it has also become clear that Prigozhin was the glue holding together a splintered kingdom and that it could all collapse.

“Wagner’s – and Moscow’s – clout in Africa may eclipse because of the rising influence of China and other core members of the now-expanding BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) bloc,” said Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch. “Russia’s sway in Africa will weaken irrespective of personalities at the helm of Wagner.”

Beyond wanting to control his far-flung financial realm, Putin’s spectacular public liquidation of Prigozhin is an attempt to reassert his dominance in retaliation for the humiliation that the Wagner Group’s armed rebellion caused him. He needed to exact ostentatious revenge against Prigozhin not only to prove that he is not a weak leader, but also to instill fear in Russian élite, and send a message to Russian oligarchs: No measure of effectiveness and accomplishment can shield an individual from repercussions when they breach Putin’s loyalty.

Though Putin may have frightened the élite into obedience, they all know, if they didn’t already, that his claims of a pardon or forgiveness can’t be trusted. “Never before has someone so central to Russia’s ruling establishment been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination,” said Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst. “This is a rather harsh precedent.”

The plane crash came on the same day that General Sergei Surovikin, known as “General Armageddon,” — a former top commander in Ukraine who was reportedly linked to Prigozhin — was dismissed from his post as commander of Russia’s air force. The Russian élite, whether in government, military, or business, can’t help but notice that it’s neither profitable nor safe to challenge Putin’s official hierarchy. Still, eliminating top generals and blowing up a dependable mercenary leader are not the actions of a confident, efficient, stable autocracy amidst an ongoing war.

The outcome of the Ukraine war will be crucial to Putin’s continued status. Thanks to Surovikin, Russian defenses have surpassed expectations against Ukraine’s counter-offensive. If this unfortunate trend continues and Ukraine’s summer campaign fails to reclaim significant Russian-occupied land, Putin’s authority will likely endure. However, if Russian defenses falter, especially near Crimea, Putin’s legitimacy could weaken even more than from the challenge of Prigozhin.

UN, Donors Should Scale-Up Support in Sudan, Neighboring Chad

Laetitia Bader

Director, Horn of Africa

 

( Human Rights Watch ) – Nusra and Khadija share the bond of being cousins and of living in the same small town in West Darfur. Now they share a darker bond: both survivors of sexual violence in the conflict in Sudan.

Human Rights Watch researchers spoke with the cousins in eastern Chad, while documenting abuses against dozens of survivors of atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militia in Sudan’s West Darfur town of El Geneina.

Nusra and Khadija, both in their twenties, told us that they were raped – three weeks apart – when RSF fighters and Arab militiamen searched house-to-house for men, boys, and weapons in the predominantly ethnic Massalit neighborhoods of El Geneina. We are using pseudonyms to protect their identities.

While Human Rights Watch and other organizations have reported on the killing of Massalit men by RSF forces and Arab militia in West Darfur, much less has been documented about the targeting of women and girls for sexual violence.

Rights monitors have reported on dozens of cases of rape in El Geneina between May and late June. Sudan has a long and distressing history of sexual violence against women and girls during armed conflict that has never been addressed. Sudanese authorities and allied militias used rape and sexual violence as deliberate strategies against Darfur’s non-Arab communities in the early 2000s and since.

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Nusra described the RSF and militia’s raid on her house. “He [RSF member] said I would have to lie down. I said, ‘I won’t give myself to you.…’ He put the gun to my head. Then he raped me.”

An aid worker who also fled to Chad said some survivors accessed emergency support, but the widespread attacks on health care, including massive looting of health facilities, have severely restricted access to time-sensitive treatments.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Al Jazeera English: “Sudan conflict at 100 days: Thousands killed, millions displaced”

The cousins are living in a makeshift settlement in eastern Chad where assistance for survivors is severely limited. Both struggle with horrible physical, mental, and emotional scars. “Until two days ago I wasn’t able to get out of bed,” Nusra said six weeks after being attacked.

Khadija, a single parent of three young children, told us, “I can’t be pregnant again, please help me find a solution.” We referred her to the main medical center in the camp; a few days later she found out she was pregnant. Khadija needed the reproductive care that should be guaranteed to survivors in crisis situations known as the Minimum Initial Service Package.

The United Nations Security Council, which has largely failed to respond to the armed conflict that broke out in Sudan in April, should urgently call for a briefing by the special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict. The council should impose the UN’s Darfur sanctions regime on the commanders of the men who raped Khadija and Nusra.

Donors should provide more resources to ensure that survivors in Darfur and eastern Chad receive meaningful care, including emergency care, longer-term psychosocial and other health care, and help should they want to seek redress against those responsible.

The world should no longer be comfortable ignoring the physical and mental burden facing Nusra, Khadija, and countless other survivors in Sudan.

Via Human Rights Watch

It’s been devastating, even if no one’s paying attention.

Three months of fighting in Sudan between the army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) has left at least 3,000 people dead and wounded at least 6,000 more. Over two million people have been displaced within the country, while another 700,000 have fled to neighboring nations. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of the health facilities in Khartoum, the capital, and other combat zones are now out of service, so the numbers of dead and injured are believed to be far higher than recorded, and bodies have been rotting for days in the streets of the capital, as well as in the towns and villages of the Darfur region.

Almost all foreign nationals, including diplomats and embassy staff, are long gone and so, according to Al Jazeera, hundreds or thousands of Sudanese who had visa applications pending have instead found themselves marooned in the crossfire with their passports locked away inside now-abandoned embassies. In the Darfur region, according to non-Arab tribal leaders, the RSF and local Arab militias have been carrying out mass killings, raping women and girls, and looting and burning homes and hospitals. Earlier this month, United Nations humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told the Associated Press, “If I were Sudanese, I’d find it hard to imagine that this isn’t a civil war… of the most brutal kind.”

According to the United Nations, half the country’s population, a record 25 million people, is now in need of humanitarian aid. And worse yet, half of those are children, many of whom were in dire need even before this war broke out. Tragically, global warming will only compound their misery. Among 185 nations ranked by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, Sudan is considered the sixth most susceptible to harm from climate change.

Heat waves, drought, and flooding are projected to become ever more frequent and intense as the atmosphere above Sudan warms further. This summer war and weather have been converging in strikingly deadly ways. With cloudless skies, water and electricity services largely knocked out, and daily temperature highs in the capital recently ranging from 109° to 111° Fahrenheit, the misery is only intensifying. Meanwhile, in the Darfur region and across the border in eastern Chad, the season of torrential rains is about to begin. The country director for Concern Worldwide in Chad says that many of the quarter-million Sudanese refugees there “are living in makeshift tents made from sticks and any material they can find, which means they are not protected from the heavy rains. The situation is catastrophic.”

This Conflict Will Not Be Televised

Among the refugees from this war are some of our own relatives and in-laws, part of an extended Indian-Sudanese family who have lived in Khartoum all their lives. In May, they fled the escalating violence, some via a perilous, hair-raising 500-mile road trip across the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan. There, they caught a ship across the Red Sea to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Their goal, as they informed us in June through voice messages, was Egypt — so far, the most common destination for Sudanese refugees over the past three months. And mind you, desperate as they may be, our relatives are in a far less perilous situation than people fleeing the Darfur region for Chad. Still, they are leaving behind a life built up over decades, without knowing if they will ever be able to return to Khartoum.

And here — for us — is a disturbing reality. We’ve had to do a lot of searching to find significant information in the U.S. major media about the struggle in Sudan, no less the plight of its refugees — though recently there were finally substantive reports at NPR and in the Washington Post. Still, the contrast with 16 months of breathless, daily, top-of-the-hour reporting on the Ukraine war and the millions of people it’s displaced has been striking indeed.

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There’s a major difference as well between Washington’s responses to each of those wars. Before the fighting broke out in Sudan, the country had about 30% fewer people living in need of humanitarian assistance than Ukraine. Now, it has almost 50% more than Ukraine. Given those relative needs, U.S. humanitarian aid to Sudan in Fiscal Year 2023 ($536 million) was not all that skimpy compared with the humanitarian aid going to Ukraine ($605 million). — not, at least, until you add in the $49 billion in military aid Washington has been sending to Kyiv — 80 times the civilian aid, to which has only recently been added fundamentally anti-humanitarian cluster bombs. In the past year, in other words, Ukraine got 13% more humanitarian aid than Sudan but 93 times more total aid when you count war assistance.

And the U.S. is not alone. The entire world is lagging badly in its response to the humanitarian tragedy in Sudan. William Carter of the Norwegian Refugee Council recently lamented, “I haven’t seen it treated with urgency. It’s not ignorance; it’s a case of apathy.” Admittedly, conditions in Sudan and Chad make aid delivery difficult now, but Western powers, Carter pointed out, are simply “not willing to stick their necks out.”

Sidelining Civilians, Coddling Generals

Washington has assisted Ukraine massively since the war there began. In contrast, its actions in the months leading up to Sudan’s current conflict were not only ineffective but may even have made war more likely.

Some background: Four years ago, a popular uprising overthrew the country’s longtime autocratic president, Omar al-Bashir. A Sovereignty Council was formed to negotiate a transition to democracy. Susan Page, who served as the first U.S. ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan, has written that the council’s designation as a “civilian-led transitional government” was “always a bit of a fig leaf,” given that its membership included more military officials than civilians. The transition was even led by military officials, including the two men who command the forces now locked in battle, Sudanese army chief General Abdel-Fattah Burhan and General Mohamed Hamdan, who leads the RSF paramilitary group.

After two years of obstructing the work of the Sovereignty Council, that odd duo joined forces in an October 2021 coup and took control of Sudan. The negotiations over a democratic transition, mediated by the United States, Great Britain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia nonetheless went on for another 18 months, while those generals continued to stonewall. According to Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, the generals even stooped to outright extortion, hinting that if they didn’t get full backing from the West, they’d create a fresh migration crisis in Europe by kicking out hundreds of thousands of their fellow Sudanese and sending them northward. Still, last February, with military-civilian negotiations bogged down, Coons remained hopeful, writing,

“The Sudanese people… are not backing down in the defense of their political gains. Even in the face of persistent killings, sexual violence, and arrests by the regime, a massive, nationwide pro-democracy movement has for months maintained nonviolent street protests. The determination these thousands of people have shown as they risk their lives against heavily armed security forces should serve as a reminder the world over of how precious democracy truly is.”

Coons urged the Biden administration to throw its weight behind the pro-democracy movement, with sanctions that would hit the military leaders hard while sparing civil society: “A modern, comprehensive set of sanctions on the coup leaders and their networks,” he wrote, “will disrupt the military’s revenue streams and their grip on power, creating an opening for the nation’s nascent democracy movement to grow.” As is now painfully obvious, Biden didn’t take Coons’s advice and, six weeks later, the shooting started.

In an article published soon after the outbreak of fighting, Edward Wong and three colleagues at the New York Times reported that some of the people who played a part in the negotiations told them “the Biden administration, rather than empowering civilian leaders, prioritized working with the two rival generals,” even after they’d seized power in that coup. A high-level government adviser assured the Times that senior American diplomats “made the mistake of coddling the generals, accepting their irrational demands, and treating them as natural political actors. This fed their lust for power and their illusion of legitimacy.”

“A Critical Puzzle Piece”

The broad lack of concern for the Sudanese people in the U.S. and other rich countries also contrasts sharply with the intense geopolitical interest in Sudan of certain regional powers. Mohammad Salami of the International Institute for Global Strategic Analysis observes that Washington’s Persian Gulf allies have big plans for Sudan, thanks to its strategically important Red Sea coastline, its wealth in mineral resources, and its potential for tourism and agricultural production. (We can’t help wondering if they’re taking into account the degree to which its farming may, in the future, be clobbered by climate change.) Looking ahead, Salami writes, “The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have long-term plans for Africa, and for Sudan as their gateway to it.” 

Until the recent chaos began, Sudan had also been a gateway for refugees from Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa. Writing less than three weeks into the Sudan conflict, MSNBC columnist Nayyera Haq observed that many of the people then fleeing the country were, in fact, repeat refugees, having fled previous conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, among other places. As Western diplomats and embassy staff across Khartoum rushed for the exits (echoes of Kabul and Kandahar two summers ago!), Haq concluded,

“Sudan, once considered a far-off nation, is now a critical puzzle piece in this era of great power competition among global economies. As boundaries continue to blur because of technology and climate change, forced migration is more common: millions flee north from Latin America to the U.S., from Syria to Europe, and now across East Africa. But the same countries eager to extract oil and minerals from Africa are quick to shut down, only watching out for their own as Sudan devolves into chaos.”

Sudan is indeed rich in mineral resources that span the alphabet: aluminum, chromium, cobalt, iron, manganese, nickel, rare earths, silver, and zinc. All of those are important to the world’s renewable energy and battery industries. But Sudan’s biggest source of wealth lies in its gold deposits. The gold-mining industry is largely owned by a Russian-Sudanese joint venture headquartered in the northeast of the country. The wealth it’s generated hasn’t benefited the Sudanese people. Before the recent chaos, in fact, it was being split by the military regime, the Russian government, and none other than the infamous warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, which had been managing the joint venture’s gold-mining and processing operations since 2017. And Wagner being Wagner, they also have now taken sides in Sudan’s war, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, by providing surface-to-air missiles to the RSF paramilitary forces.

Unworthy Victims

The paucity of attention paid to civilian victims of the conflict in Sudan compared to Ukrainian civilians brings to mind the contrast between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims drawn by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. They contrasted the extensive mass-media coverage of the 1984 murder of a Polish priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, during the Cold War with the lack of the same when it came to more than two dozen priests and other religious people slaughtered by governments and death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in those years., Having been murdered by agents of a Communist government. Popieluszko was regarded as worthy of attention in the American media of the time, while his counterparts slaughtered by Central American governments allied with the U.S. weren’t. In a similar fashion, white Europeans now being killed, wounded, or rendered homeless by Russian troops are victims worthy of media attention, while Sudanese facing similar fates aren’t.

To be fair, a previous horrific conflict that gripped Sudan’s Darfur region from 2003 to 2008 did receive significant coverage in the Western media thanks to a convergence of unusual circumstances. The chief among them: the massive attention it received from celebrities of the time, including Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Lady Gaga, and Mia Farrow. Sudan’s media appeal of 15 years ago was, however, an exception to the rules of this world of ours. Today, such celebrities and the media seem to be gripped by a kind of compassion fatigue. 

Of course, like most Americans, we were paying no attention whatsoever to developments in Sudan before the fighting started — and before we learned that our own kinfolk were in danger. Now, what choice do we have but to keep up with the latest developments?

For weeks, our relatives were in limbo, trying to reach Egypt. Some were already in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but stuck there. Others had made it to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We were by then in touch and they acknowledged that they were “better off than most,” meaning they weren’t being pinned down in a deadly 110° war zone without passports, electricity, or running water, nor were they, like so many Sudanese, trapped in squalid refugee camps.

Only the other day, we finally learned that they had arrived safely in Egypt. Back in Khartoum they’d operated a small school, and they’re now hoping, if they can work their way through Cairo’s bureaucracy, that, as one of them put it, “Next year, Inshallah, we can start our school here, if we are still here and still war-driven.” Their futures have indeed been driven by war into a hard-to-imagine future. As one put it, “Nothing seems to be settling down in Sudan anytime soon.”    

Sadly, their assessment seems all too accurate. Since April, at least 10 ceasefires between the army and that paramilitary outfit have broken down more or less instantly. In mid-July, leaders of the six countries bordering Sudan met, in the impressive-sounding words of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, to formulate “an executive action plan to reach a comprehensive solution to the Sudanese crisis.”

Not so surprisingly, though, no such plan has yet emerged. Given its resources and its geographical centrality, an assortment of richer, stronger countries all want a piece of Sudan, but none of those plans include the war’s victims. To make matters worse, in this war (as in others to come), climate disruption will be a “threat multiplier.” Worse yet, as long as our media fails to see the Sudanese conflict or, more importantly, the Sudanese people as worthy of extensive reporting, the realities of the ongoing war there will continue to lie somewhere beyond the horizon.

Copyright 2023 Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox

Those which are operational, said the union, are threatened with closure as a result of the lack of medical personnel, medical supplies, water and electricity.

“A number of attacks have taken place on hospitals and medical staff recently, including the attack on Friday on the staff from the Doctors Without Borders NGO,” said the union. “They were beaten while they were delivering medical aid to the Turkish hospital south of Khartoum, their vehicle was looted, and the organisation’s driver was arrested.”

Nineteen hospitals have been bombed since the beginning of the fighting in April, and 22 have been forcibly evacuated. The union confirmed that all health facilities are still out of service in the city of El Geneina, in West Darfur state.

The army and the RSF accuse each other of starting the fighting in April, and of committing violations during a series of ceasefires. More than 3,000 people have been killed in the fighting, most of them civilians. Around 3 million have been displaced internally or made refugees in one of the poorest countries in the world, according to the Sudanese Ministry of Health and the UN.

Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

From yearning to escape Khartoum to longing for its embrace

Translated byMariam A.

Translated byRaseef22

Read this post in عربي

 

This piece was first published by Raseef22 and was written by Mohammad Najeddine.  An edited version is republished here, under a content-sharing agreement.

( Globalvoices.org ) – I never imagined that I would long for Khartoum one day, despite being the one who had incessantly complained about feeling trapped between its two Niles, unable to break free. The city’s towering walls are tightly constructed, almost suggesting that journalism and politics are “centralized crafts” tailored solely for the city, while the surrounding regions were mere recipients without the power to influence or make an impact.

Despite my occasional travels to the surrounding regions for social and work-related reasons, it was only a few weeks ago that I embarked on my first journey as a displaced person. Fleeing with my family, carrying small-sized bags and personal belongings, I left behind my house and a depleted old car, along with some meagre household items, all of which have been left to the chaos of senseless wars and thousands of escaped prison inmates.

My relentless efforts failed in convincing my family to leave me behind, to continue my trouble-seeking profession and my duty to guard the house. Every conversation ended with a phrase reminiscent of military leaders in Hollywood war movies: “We will depart together, leaving no one behind.”

As the echos of gunfire and artillery drew nearer to our home near the Halfaya Bridge that connects Khartoum and Omdurman, a prime target for the warring factions, the final decision was made: “We will all leave.” We were fully aware that the road is fraught with dangers, requiring us to traverse the blazing Khartoum from its northernmost point to its southern end before reaching the state of Gezira.

The journey

Khartoum. Screenshot from ‘Sudan’s conflict, explained’ by Vox, May 23, 2023. Fair use.

We distributed canned food and leftover vegetables from our home to a few neighbors who chose to stay behind, despite a significant decline in food supplies and the severed access to drinking water. We asked them to keep an eye on our house as much as they could. My wife recited verses from the Qura’an, seeking protection and hoping it would still stand tall when we return.

After bidding our farewells, we embarked on a journey on foot towards the bridge, which had transformed into a hub for evacuating residents out of the capital, a stark departure from what we had always known it for: a center for transporting passengers between the cities of the capital: Bahri, Omdurman, and Khartoum.

 

Amidst the chaos and the frantic rush, alongside hundreds of others seeking to flee, we managed to secure three seats on a passenger bus bound for Madani, the capital of Gezira State.

Our foremost challenge at that moment was to pay the cost of the journey. The banking system had stopped, rendering it impossible to access the modest savings that remained from my March salary, which had evaporated between Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr.

Following a prolonged discussion, my wife reluctantly sold our wedding ring, rejecting the notion of selling my phone or laptop, both of which were indispensable for my work and communication with the outside world.

The ticket price for the journey to Madani skyrocketed to SDG 30,000 (50 USD) a significant increase from the previous cost of SDG 3,000 to 4,000 (5 to 6.6 USD) until 14 April. The vehicle owners justified the price hike by citing fuel scarcity and unsafe roads. However, all the passengers knew that this was the “business of crises.”

The exchange rate for the 1 dollar reached SDG 600 in official bank transactions on Thursday, April 13, only 48 hours before the outbreak of the war.

The bus, alongside dozens of public and private vehicles, maneuvered through the asphalt side roads within the city of Bahri. The streets were littered with burnt cars and bloated corpses. Hemedeti‘s soldiers could be seen wandering on foot or riding in armored vehicles.

As we traveled, we observed the desolate streets of Al-Halfaia and Shambat, devoid of any signs of life, except for a few passersby. Fear was palpable on their faces as they focused on securing water for their families because the damage had affected water and electricity networks.

The most harrowing sight I witnessed, even darker than the war itself, was when we traversed the industrial area that housed prominent local factories and branches of commercial banks. Widespread looting and extensive destruction had ravaged the area, leaving behind a landscape of utter chaos and despair.

As the fires continued to rage, we witnessed cars, motorcycles, carts, and people — men, women, and children — scrambling to carry whatever they could. Belongings, furniture, cooking gas cylinders, and even empty barrels were hoarded in the absence of any government presence and amidst an unprecedented state of chaos.

It is undeniable that Sudan has endured a significant depletion of food and medicine supplies. Essential grain mills have been destroyed, and food production factories are out of service. It is highly probable that owners of these establishments will refrain from reopening them, fearing additional losses due to the military’s reckless actions and fascist criminal behavior that has unfolded.

As we ventured into the region east of the Nile, we encountered a heavy presence of Rapid Support Forces (RSF) patrolling the main streets. Surprisingly, a number of citizens moved about, visiting bakeries and shops as if it were an ordinary day.

Throughout the journey, there was a notable absence of government or army presence. We only saw the RSF and their checkpoints set up on the main roads. The checkpoints displayed a significant level of leniency, merely inquiring about the drivers’ destinations before allowing them to pass. At least that was the case during our passage. However, horror stories circulated about incidents of car thefts, stolen phones, and even killings occurring at security checkpoints.

When we arrived in Soba, southeast of the capital, we met the last military presence. RSF vehicles were positioned at the entrance of the city’s main bridge over the Blue Nile. A deep sense of joy washed over us, akin to the joy that one can imagine engulfed members of the US diplomatic mission upon leaving Iranian airspace during their successful escape from the occupied US embassy in Tehran in the 1980s.

A glimmer of hope

We left Khartoum in search of security, but we were burdened with profound concerns for the future of a nation shaped by the military, where criminals and profiteers roam freely.

The grim image etched into our minds remains unrelieved, even with the sight of villagers gathering between the states of Khartoum and Gezira.  They selflessly distributed food and drinks to those fleeing the war, offering their homes, especially to those lacking money or relatives outside the capital.

State crises

Sudanese states, including Gezira, are witnessing a notable influx of migrants from Khartoum, resulting in a substantial rise in apartment and housing prices. This situation has created fertile ground for opportunistic brokers who seek to profit from the plight of displaced individuals.

Brokers have also made an appearance in the fuel and commodity trade, queuing up with their vehicles at operational stations to buy gasoline, a strategic commodity, for less than SDG 3,000 (5 USD) per gallon only to sell it on the black market for SDG 30,000 (50 USD). As a result, transportation fares have surged within the region and between states. Furthermore, all food products have experienced a substantial price hike in the markets due to growing demand and limited supply.

The issues extend beyond the economic realm, with a severe shortage of electricity and frequent disruptions in the internet network.

Love despite all the ruin

Previously, I had yearned to escape Khartoum, burdened by the overwhelming presence of armies and armed factions. The city’s population was brimming with politicians, looters, thieves, and crisis merchants. However, now I find myself longing to return to it, driven by nothing more than the realization that I love this city, even in its recent state of ruin.

 

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Via Globalvoices.org

Written byرصيف 22

Translated byMariam A.

Translated byRaseef22

Watching and hearing the horrifying reports of violence and savagery in Sudan, those of us working to end violence against women and girls immediately become concerned about how it will inevitably spill over into sexual violence. As recently as July 5, a report from the UN highlighted the “conflict-related sexual violence against internally displaced and refugee women and girls forced to flee for their lives”.

Since fighting broke out in Khartoum and spread across the country in April, the reports emerging from Sudan have been shocking. In mid-June, Reliefweb reported: “Since April 15, the number of people in need of gender-based violence services in Sudan has increased by over 1 million to 4.2 million people.”

As noted in the UN report, those most vulnerable are the internally displaced moving to try and cross borders. Humanitarian agencies are struggling to respond.

On June 9 alone the UN reported 12 verifiable instants of sexual violence affecting 37 women. Three of these cases involved young girls.

The full picture of this current surge in extreme violence against women and girls is likely to be even more horrific. Adjaratou Ndiaye, the UN Women representative in Sudan, has reported that in Darfur, western Sudan – where the Janjaweed militia that was to become the Rapid Support Force (RSF) involved in the current conflict developed – mass rapes are once again being committed.

And both sides – the government-backed Sudan Armed Forces and the RSF – are involved in these atrocities against women.

Gendered identity

This violence against women in war is in some ways an extension of Sudan’s patriarchal social structure. It’s vital to understand the gendered dimension of Sudan’s social and political structures, which leave women and girls largely powerless outside the home and subservient within it.

Sudanese national identity is highly gendered, shaped by a discourse that draws heavily on an ideal of women as exemplars of culture and morality.

Symbols of women as mothers and nurturers are central to the moral fabric of Sudanese society and indeed to its stability. Strict gender codes exist to ensure women conform to this role and violence is thereby seen as legitimate.

Until the regime of Omar al-Bashir was overturned in 2019, Sudanese women were subject to strict codes of conduct and dress. The Public Order Act of 1996 imposed conservative Islamic social codes which restricted women’s movement, work and study. Women could be imprisoned or flogged for seemingly trivial transgressions – such as wearing western-style jeans.

Women building power

Despite this history of gender inequality in Sudan, there is a rich history of women’s activism and a network of women’s organisations who work at a grass-roots level to empower women and girls. This often undocumented dimension to Sudanese society needs to be recognised internationally and supported as a critical mechanism in countering the rising levels of violence against women and girls.

Change to the underpinning norms that sanction and excuse violence against women can only effectively be challenged by women themselves. Women and girls need to be supported as change agents and not reduced to passive victims. The growing women’s movement in Sudan is important in this process.

The iconic image that emerged from the 2019 revolution that toppled al-Bashir was of Alaa Salah, a 22-year-old student, who became known as Sudan’s statue of liberty.

But groups of women meeting in each others homes had been at the forefront of the movement that toppled al-Bashir. Sudanese Women in Civic and Political Groups – or Mansam as they became known – gave a voice and image to the many women who wanted to challenge the entrenched patriarchy in Sudan.

Meanwhile, a growing network of young female Sudanese writers is challenging gender stereotypes for a growing audience, both inside and outside the country. But they too have to combat the patriarchal attitudes that pervade the country’s publishing industry and many choose to publish their books abroad initially.

“There is a patriarchal mentality that prevails throughout Sudanese society, and an extremely high sensitivity toward what female authors are writing about, especially when it seemingly contradicts societal values,” Ann el-Safi – who lives and writes between the UAE and Canada – told Words Without Borders in 2020.

Her sentiments were echoed by veteran novelist and cultural critic Zeinab Belail who said: “Writing about sex or religion is still forbidden for women. There are red lines that as a female writer you’re not even meant to approach. To do so brands you a heretic, a rogue, someone who has no appreciation for literature.”

Tragedy at Ahfad

The Ahfad University for Women – a private, non-sectarian university in Omdurnam, close to the capital Khartoum – was founded in 1966, with the aim of raising generations of women to assume social leadership.

The university has more than 5,000 students and offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees to PhD level. As its website states:

The university’s philosophy is to prepare women to assume greater roles in their families and communities, and in the nation as a whole. To that end, the university enrols women from all over Sudan and prepares them to be proactive change agents and leaders.

But there were recent reports not of the destruction of the campus during the violence, accompanied by the rapes of young female students as they hid, terrified in their dormitories. This was depressingly predictable.

The Ahfad University campus has been destroyed by militia groups. The lack of respect afforded to women and their human rights in general is yet again reflected in the brutal realities of conflict.

Tamsin Bradley, Professor of International Development Studies, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.