Breaking Down Sudan’s Struggle: What the World Is Missing

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“This war is not a civil war, it’s a counterrevolutionary war against civilians. It’s a war of military elites against the entire civilian population,” says Sudanese organizer Nisrin Elamin. Sudan is currently experiencing the largest mass displacement event in the world today. Thousands are dead and famine is “almost everywhere” in the country. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Elamin, organizer Yusra Khogali and host Kelly Hayes discuss the historical and political roots of the violence, how global powers are fueling the conflict and the revolutionary efforts of grassroots mutual aid networks on the ground. This episode unpacks what the world is missing about Sudan’s struggle and explains how you can act in solidarity with those fighting for their lives and their freedom.

Music by Son Monarcas & Isobel O’Connor

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about the crisis in Sudan, where thousands have been killed and 12 million people have been displaced by ongoing violence. According to the director-general of the World Health Organization, the people of Sudan are experiencing the largest displacement event in the world today, and starvation is “almost everywhere” in the country. Many people I’ve spoken with say they don’t understand what’s driving these conditions, who’s responsible, or what those of us living outside of Sudan can do about it. To help us unpack these dynamics, we will be joined today by Sudanese organizers Nisrin Elamin and Yusra Khogali. Nisrin and Yusra will break down some of the historical and political dynamics behind the violence committed by the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is a paramilitary force formerly operated by the government of Sudan. They will also highlight on-the-ground organizing efforts in Sudan, and explain how you can support the solidarity work that’s being coordinated in places like Canada and the United States. The pursuit of collective liberation should transcend borders, but that kind of transcendence requires knowledge and understanding. Right now, there are people in Sudan struggling for collective survival and liberation, and that’s work that we should all know about – and that we should all endeavor to support. By the end of this episode, I hope you’ll feel equipped to engage with that work and to spread the word about it.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Nisrin and Yusra, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Nisrin Elamin: Thank you so much for having us and for covering what’s happening in Sudan. We really appreciate it.

KH: I’m so grateful for the opportunity to talk with you both about what’s happening and to learn more about the important work you’re doing. I also want to ask, how are you both doing?

Yusra Khogali: I think that’s such a complicated question in this time. It feels like a very heavy and really challenging time to be Sudanese, to be Black in this moment. And I’m just hoping to use whatever tools that I have as an organizer to support and help any efforts that are relieving what is happening in Sudan, so it’s really tough. Day by day, it’s fighting a lot of despair and anguish, but I think I’m just leaning on the courageous resistance that is coming on the ground in Sudan to inspire and motivate me to continue and extend their work here in the diaspora.

NE: I think Yusra captured beautifully how I feel as well. I think I go between despair. A lot of my family is still in Sudan, and are just facing an uphill battle in terms of the escalating war on the ground, but also feeling very inspired by the mutual aid networks and the organizing, and relief efforts that we’re supporting on the ground that are led by Sudanese people, mostly volunteers. I try to discipline myself to really allow that to lead how I’m thinking about back home and to guide the organizing work that we’re trying to do in the Sudan Solidarity Collective.

KH: Well, I want to say how much I appreciate you making time for this conversation amid everything that’s happening.

Can you tell the audience a bit about yourselves and your work?

NE: My name is Nisrin Elamin. I’m originally from Sudan, and I teach at the University of Toronto in African Studies and Anthropology. And before becoming a reluctant academic, I spent many years as an educator and organizer in the US and in Tanzania, and my research reflects some of that. I research foreign, mostly Gulf Arab, but also domestic land grabs in Central Sudan where part of my family’s from, and also the many forms of resistance and local organizing that they’ve inspired among farmers and agricultural workers and so forth. The Saudis and Emiratis have invested billions in Sudanese land and infrastructure over the last 20 years or so, and they now control more Sudanese land than all of Sudan’s large domestic investors combined. And so some of this is relevant because the UN just declared a full-blown famine in parts of Sudan that are hardest hit by this war.

Half the population are said to be severely food insecure. And one of the few times that The New York Times covered Sudan as a feature story, we saw pictures of starving Sudanese children and their parents on the front page, and we’ve seen these images circulate, but they do so without any context or history. And in my own work, I ask how a country like Sudan that the Nile flows through that has immense agricultural potential that was once called the breadbasket of the Middle East and could easily feed itself, a country that under the British colonial rule, pulled the British cotton industry out of crisis, how so many people could then be at the brink of starvation. And I think the answer is that this man-made famine has been decades in the making and that neoliberal privatization policies recommended by the World Bank decimated the agricultural sector long before this war began.

And so I just wanted to mention that because I think now people are more dependent on food imports from the Gulf, from Asia and Europe. So when this war hit, it displaced millions of farmers off their land. The RSF, which is one of the warring factions, is destroying what’s left of Sudan’s agricultural infrastructure, looting storage facilities and stores and homes, and preventing people from planting, and both the Army and the RSF are obstructing aid and preventing it from getting to people. But that layers itself on top of a much longer process of extraction and dispossession that has benefited Sudanese elites and their international partners for a very long time.

And I just want to mention just a couple days ago I heard the BBC mention that six to 10 million Sudanese could die of disease and hunger by 2027 if things don’t change on the ground. A similar report was issued by a Dutch Institute last year saying 2.5 million Sudanese could die by September. And it’s true that there are people dying of starvation. A child is dying every two hours in the Zamzam Displacement Camp, which is in Darfur. But we haven’t seen the massive numbers of people dying because of this massive network of mutual aid networks that exists across the country led by many of the people who put their lives on the line during the revolution, which we’ll talk about later. So I just wanted to situate my research within that context.

YK: My name is Yusra Khogali. I am a grassroots and community organizer based in Toronto. In 2013, I had co-created the Black Lives Matter Toronto chapter to shift the current landscape of Canada by actively working to dismantle all forms of anti-Black racism. And in 2018, I had left the organization with a public critique of the group’s shifting values and leadership. I’ve also co-created the Black Liberation Collective here in Canada in 2015, which is also a Black student movement through its founding chapter at the University of Toronto that works to create the infrastructure for Black students to build power and eliminate anti-Black racism on and off campus. I’m currently an organizer with the Sudan Solidarity Collective, which aims to resource grassroots civil society formations at the front lines of relief efforts in the parts of Sudan that are being hardest hit by militarized conflict in the wake of this war. And when I’m not doing all that, I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Women and Gender Studies Department.

KH: I really appreciate all of the knowledge and experience that you’re both bringing to this conversation. Before we delve into the current crisis in Sudan, can you offer a bit of historical background in terms of what our listeners might need to know in order to understand what’s presently happening?

NE: So I won’t be able to do justice to all the historical roots of the current war in Sudan, but I think it’s important to situate it within a longer history of state violence, right? This war has colonial roots. It’s shaped by our history of slavery, which expanded when Sudan was under Ottoman rule in the 19th century. And then in 1956 when Sudan became independent, the British basically handed us an economy dependent on the extraction of cash crops like cotton and a political system which was reconfigured to serve the interests of a Nubian- and Arab-identified elite in Sudan’s north and center. And both of these systems developed at the expense of the masses in the south and other marginalized regions, but also of a rural farming population at the center who helped sustain this extractive export oriented economy. So as an example of this, the British vacated 800 administrative seats at independence. And by administrative, I mean civil servants, top army and police officials, agricultural scheme managers, etc., across the country of which Sudan’s new ruling elite allocated six to South Sudan, an area the size of Texas with the population of over 2.5 million. And that process facilitated and enshrined the systemic marginalization of other regions of the country as well, such as Darfur, Eastern Sudan, Kordofan, etc.

A year before independence, Sudan’s first civil war broke out partly because of this between South Sudanese demanding political representation, equitable resource distribution, and regional autonomy in reaction to the Sudanization process and the central government who had essentially subsumed the south as a quasi internal colony. And we can basically draw a straight line from the outbreak of this war in 1955, which over the decades and in its two phases killed over 2.5 million mostly South Sudanese civilians and displaced 4 million people from their land to the current war that arrived in the capital Khartoum on April 15th of last year, in the same way I would say that we can draw a straight line between the Nakba of 1948 to the genocidal violence the Israeli state is currently unleashing in Gaza. We also saw this play itself out in Darfur. Many of your listeners probably remember what happened in 2003, where a state-sanctioned campaign of genocidal violence led by the Janjaweed, which later became the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary force that became part of the security apparatus of the state, was carried out now 20 years ago, right?

Killing hundreds of thousands, wiping out entire villages of non-Arab farming communities and displacing millions of civilians from resource-rich land, which continues to be exploited to fuel this current war. This land has gold and uranium, etc. And this history is important because without it, we tend to exceptionalize the violence of this current war. When the Sudanese states, its army and paramilitary forces have always been extremely violent and extractive, and its violence has always targeted non-Arab communities more than Arab and Nubian communities. And what’s unique about this particular war is not the intensity of the violence, but its scale, right? Its geographic scale or reach. It’s impacted and displaced and killed people from parts of the country that hadn’t experienced this level of violence before, including people in my own family from the north and center who had largely been spared the intensity of the violence that people in Darfur experienced starting in 2003.

And I also think it’s important to frame and understand this war. This is the second maybe historical dimension here as a counter-revolutionary war, right? And to start the shorter history of this war during the December revolution of 2018 and 2019. And so to briefly recap that, in April of 2019, a powerful popular revolution ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir after 30 years in power after converging in a massive, almost million person sit-in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum. So people had gathered from all across the country to essentially demand, they had revolutionary demands that exceeded regime change. And the first demand was to oust the regime, which it managed to do. And then the sit-in remained in place for three months after al-Bashir was removed by the military because people’s demands exceeded calls for regime change. And because military elites from within al-Bashir’s inner circle, the same people that are now fighting for political and economic control of the country, had reclaimed power, right? Calling themselves the Transitional Military Council.

And it’s during this period that the counter-revolution began. The sit-in was brutally broken up through a massacre perpetrated by the same military elites. They killed over 120 people, including someone I personally know. The transitional government was formed in the aftermath of this massacre, and it was a power-sharing agreement between the military council and hand-picked civilian elites, many from the diaspora, who turned outward during this transition, who attempted to open Sudan up after decades of isolation due to Clinton-era sanctions that started in 1997 to international donor funding, and they largely ignored the revolutionary demands that were coming from the folks on the streets and the neighborhoods across the country, the people who are the backbone of the revolution, consisting of neighborhood resistance committees, of which there are close to 8,000 across the country, and I think Yusra is going to be talking more about them later, but they’re essentially these neighborhood consensus-based collectives that have been organizing around a number of issues for years. But the backbone also of the revolution consists also of independent farmer and labor unions, many of which I study in my research, professional associations, feminist organizations, youth and student formations, the kind of grassroots organizing groups that have largely resisted NGO-ization and formal opposition party politics.

And I’d say an example of the counter-revolutionary moves that were made by civilian elites was them signing the Abraham Accords during the transition, which is a normalization with Israel agreement, which was signed by Sudan in exchange for being dropped from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and the promise of over $1 billion in annual financing from the World Bank amidst massive opposition from the streets, right? Essentially, giving into pressure from the U.S. instead of heeding the demands of the revolutionaries on the streets.

And then in October of 2021, the army and the RSF staged the military coup derailing the transition to civilian rule, and that’s when we saw the UN facilitate peace talks led by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the U.K., who legitimized and propped up the coup leaders, [Abdel Fattah al-]Burhan, who’s the head of the army, and [Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as] “Hemedti,” who’s the head of the RSF, and they’re now fighting, they’re the two heads of the factions fighting this war. And these are both people who are responsible for war crimes that span decades. And these talks framed them as potential reformists that could lead us back onto the transition towards civilian rule rather than listening to the resistance committees who are calling for no negotiations, lone legitimacy, and no partnership with the military.

And this lack of accountability and Euro-American and Gulf diplomacy as a tool of empire, prioritizing stability over revolutionary demands, in part to protect their own interests, their own economic and political interests, is partly what paved the way, I think, for this war.

So all this to say that this war is not a civil war, it’s a counter-revolutionary war against civilians. It’s a war of military elites, the folks who grabbed power in a coup in 2021, against the entire civilian population of Sudan of 48 million. And I think that framing is important, right?

So I’ll just stop right there. I think hopefully I’ve given your listeners a bit of historical context to understand some of the roots of this war.

KH: Thank you so much for that history. Can you talk about what happened in April of 2023? Nisreen, I know you were in Sudan at that time. Can you talk about what you saw and experienced and what’s gone on since then?

NE: Sure. I always hesitate to talk about my own personal story because I don’t want to exceptionalize my experience as a quite privileged… I’m a newly naturalized U.S. citizen, and I was able to get out fairly early, like within the first weeks or months of the war.

But I was basically visiting my family in Sudan during Ramadan. I had brought my daughter, who’s three at the time, to meet her Sudanese family. And we woke up on April 15th to the sound of gunshots and missiles and the city up in flames. We were in the epicenter of the fighting because we lived quite close to the RSF’s headquarters, which is one of the warring factions.

And I think one of the things that I noticed immediately, besides the kind of fighting that we were surrounded by, the local stores had immediately run out of food. And so there were these very short ceasefires that usually happened around Maghrib when people were breaking their fasts, if you will, and I would go out in search of food, like fresh milk and eggs and things like that, mostly for my daughter. And everything, like food production, had immediately stopped and partly because the fuel stations had shut down and people weren’t getting any supplies.

And you know, we were of course, as I mentioned, immensely privileged to be able to get out even in comparison to most of my family who remain in Sudan, in part because of my U.S. passport and because of my daughter’s, and we had registered with the U.S. Embassy who promised to evacuate all of us. And I remember saying to my almost 90-year-old dad at the time, “Let’s not count on the Americans to get us out.” My parents are both not U.S. citizens, they’re green card-holders, which in cases like this, actually disqualifies you from the kinds of U.S. Embassy services, if you will, that would get us out.

And it ended up we were right. They sent us an email at eight in the morning a few weeks into the war and were like, “Meet us at this particular airport in two hours.” And even in times of when there wasn’t a war, that airport was about three hours away and there was no fuel, so there was no way for us to get out and to get there that quickly. And I should also mention that the route to Egypt, which is one of the routes that most people who were in Khartoum were taking at the time, was too expensive for us. It was about $1,000 a person. And so we risked it and took different forms of public transport through the city, and on the way, asked people for help and guidance and ended up in Port Sudan.

And I should mention that it’s really through, again, through mutual aid networks that we were able to safely get out of the city. And yeah, we ended up in Port Sudan where the Saudi Embassy had set up shop in this outdoor port area and there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people pleading for the Saudis to evacuate them. They had a ship that carried about 2,000 people and were basically getting everybody with a foreign passport out, including Yemenis, who had fled the Saudi coalition’s war on Yemen. And that didn’t include my parents at the time.

And so I begged for what felt like 12 hours for them to allow my parents to evacuate with us, and eventually, I was successful. And on that ship were hundreds of NGO workers with major international aid agencies that were never let back in. And so essentially what we saw was the international aid community evacuating with us, which is partly why very few of them are now operating on the ground.

And one of the things I kept thinking was this was a few weeks into the war already, there were massive food shortages, shortages of medicine, and that can somewhat be dated back to the fact that the U.S., in the ’90s, bombed one of the major medicine-producing factories in Sudan in response to Sudan, at the time, hosting Osama bin Laden. And so part of what I kept asking myself is, “Why had this massive ship not arrived with supplies and medicine and food and shelter materials?” The first such ship to arrive arrived months later.

And I also want to mention that while we were trying to evacuate, we met some British military personnel that were claiming that they were trying to evacuate their citizens, and by then, a British woman’s pleas for the embassy to evacuate her British grandparents had made the rounds on Twitter. They lived across the street from the embassy and the military evacuated its staff during that time, but they refused to evacuate or check in on these two elders. And the older man had gotten shot several times after trying to get some food for his wife. And then days later, after the U.K. Embassy had evacuated all of its staff, his wife actually died of starvation, and that was partly because they were not white, but they were hyphenated — Sudanese-British.

And the same British Embassy confiscated all the passports of Sudanese nationals that had applied for visas, took them to Nairobi, and then announced on social media that people could come pick up their passports in Kenya. Never mind that Kenya doesn’t border Sudan, that you cannot flee a country without a passport. The U.S. and French embassies simply shredded people’s passports, including those of their Sudanese staff members.

And so I mention all this to say that we really saw the kind of violence of borders at play in those days. Sudan borders seven countries, and all of them tightened their borders since this war began. Most Sudanese trying to get into Egypt right now are having to choose the smuggling route and paying thousands of dollars, and meanwhile, the Egyptian government is denying people the right to seek asylum at the border. Not only that, they’re actually using EU-funded security forces in a campaign of mass arrests and forcible deportations of Sudanese according to Amnesty International.

So yeah, I think that’s what I take away from this is that it’s incredibly difficult for the over 10 million people that have been displaced by this war to seek asylum, even though it should be a fundamental right, and we really see the kind of deadliness of borders in this moment, right?

KH: What have solidarity efforts inside and outside of Sudan looked like as people in Sudan have struggled to survive these conditions? Can you talk about the resistance committees that are organizing for collective survival and the people outside of Sudan who are supporting those efforts?

YK: The resistance committees are grassroots civil society actors that are composed of neighborhood-wide organizing collectives that are being led by youth, women, and working-class people who have been resisting military rule in Sudan for decades. The iterations of the resistance committees that we see today began crystallizing in 2012, but have an extended history that dates back to the ’90s, and they have been the frontline resistance responding to the humanitarian crises in Sudan caused by IMF [International Monetary Fund] austerity measures, and they’ve been providing relief from natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic before the war broke out.

The resistance committees orchestrated the December 2018 uprisings that Nisreen has just given context on which deposed the 30-year dictatorship and Islamist regime of Omar al-Bashir, and they’ve developed two critical revolutionary charters that offer a roadmap to form a government in Sudan built from the bottom up and guidelines that would help direct the work of the new government. They also have provided an astute political analysis of the historical problems of Sudan and examined the country’s economic crisis, underdevelopment, and conflict with the colonial and post-colonial underpinnings and the role of the ruling elite in Sudan.

The resistance committees… they demonstrate an example of a principled popular democracy and what that can look like. There are currently 8,000 resistance committees in Sudan, and they’re all operating under a horizontal and decentralized leadership, amplifying their respective neighborhood demands. Their revolutionary labor has continued today taking the shape of emergency response rooms, which are modeled, led, and composed of members of the resistance committees. These emergency response rooms are taking on the intense challenges and spearheading the humanitarian relief through mutual aid networks on the ground as this war rages on, filling the void of an absent international aid community and a civilian state. They’re organizing with deep and nuanced knowledge of the local geographic, political, and social landscape of Sudan, and have extensive social networks capable of mobilizing capacities and resources to respond to the needs in their neighborhoods, and also adjusting to its shifting character based on people who are evacuating or increasing in numbers due to being internally displaced.

To give a sense of the scale of their work, for example, there are currently 69 emergency response rooms in Khartoum only. Some of the work that they do is they lead access to water and food distribution through communal kitchens where Sudan faces the worst levels of acute food insecurity in its history with more than half of its population, 25.6 million people currently in acute hunger. These conditions are lethal to children under five years old, pregnant and nursing women, sick and elderly, and disabled people. They’re also leading provisions to access shelter by converting public spaces into them. This is in a context where people have had their neighborhoods, cities, villages that have been air-striked, burnt down, or looted by the warring factions. They are facilitating evacuation assistance and protection activities where more than 10.4 million people, including more than 4.6 million children, are displaced. They are conducting infrastructure repair and restoring public services such as damaged power lines, water maintenance and public transportation.

This is during the rainy season in June, that goes from June to September, which has caused heavy flooding that has continued to compound the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, damage infrastructure that affects road access, which therefore affects humanitarian assistance and evacuations and heightens the spread of diseases. They are sourcing fuel for ambulances, setting up emergency clinics, coordinating healthcare needs, and doing body retrieval and burial.

This is where most states… the health system is barely functional and essentially obsolete. And where cases of infectious diseases such as cholera, measles, dengue fever, tuberculosis, malaria and mycetoma are spreading. The lack of essential social services like water, sanitation, and hygiene are only intensifying these health emergencies and disease outbreaks. They are providing women’s support, which handles the cases of pregnant women, midwives, health needs and sexual violence. In just one campaign in Sudan, there has been a documentation of 377 cases of rape since the onset of this war, including 131 cases involving young girls.

They facilitate and organize learning activities for children where 19 million school-age children cannot continue their education in Sudan, and they are communicating conditions on the ground via social media, especially in a context where it is estimated that the death toll could be close to over 150,000 people.

The Sudan Solidarity Collective was formed in 2023 to create an avenue to support the relief efforts on the ground being spearheaded by the ERRs [emergency response rooms] that I’ve just mentioned. All of the funds go directly to Sudan with no strings attached and are up to the discretion of the ERRs to fulfill the needs of displaced and war-impacted civilians. We wanted to give support in ways that do not reproduce racial or ethnic hierarchies and power dynamics in various regions in Sudan and then respond both to the historical neglect and urgency of support as the war shifts and moves from state to state.

We are one of many diasporic mutual aid groups, such as SAPA, the Sudanese American Physicians Association, and Sunduq Al Sudan, doing this kind of transnational mutual aid work. The need is far greater than we can sustain. In the absence of an international aid community and the collapse of a civilian state, we are basically the financial aid for a whole country. And we are mainly working class people. We are not only supporting our families to escape the war and sustain their emergency basic needs and livelihoods, but we are also doing this while trying to maintain our own lives in the diaspora.

The needs extend to an outpouring of Sudanese people who have set up their own fundraisers in urgent need of medical care and evacuation support and those who have become newly landed refugees in the diaspora. It is such an overwhelming task, that has a severe mental health toll on the Sudanese community everywhere across this globe. That is just some of the work that we are doing to support from outside of Sudan and amplify and enhance and strengthen the support within Sudan.

KH: Thank you for that breakdown and for all of the work you’re doing. What do international efforts to address this crisis look like? Are there other nations whose governments are making the situation worse? Are there any countries that are doing anything useful or constructive? If not, what would a helpful international response look like?

NE: Yes, thank you for that question. So I think I’m going to start off with talking a little bit about the external actors in this war and the kind of harmful role that they’ve been playing. So as we mentioned before, basically, on April 15th, 2023, the military coup regime in Sudan kind of imploded, right, and split, with each military faction, the RSF on the one hand, the Army on the other, vying not only for political, but also, kind of economic control of the country. The trigger for this war is often reduced to a disagreement or kind of internal power struggle over security sector reform. The RSF was supposed to get absorbed into the Army, and there was a kind of disagreement over how long that process should take. But I think, as we’ve talked during this podcast, the root causes of this war are far more kind of structural and historical.

So on the one hand, we have the Rapid Support Forces, formerly known as the Janjaweed, largely responsible for the genocide in Darfur, led by General Hemedti and its allied militias, whose leaders control much of the livestock and most of the illicit gold trade in the country. Sudan is Africa’s third largest producer of gold. And the Emirates, as its kind of main trading partner, is now providing critical military support to the RSF as it extracts gold. And this gold basically gets funneled to the gold markets of the UAE, Dubai, et cetera, and sold to Russia and other countries. And so, I think it’s important here to mention that, were the UAE to cut its funding lifeline to the RSF, things would significantly change on the ground. And then, on the other hand, you have the Sudanese Armed Forces, the Army, and its allied Islamists, led by General Burhan, who control large sectors of Sudan’s economy, before the war, continue to, close to 200 companies in rubber, livestock, wheat, cement, real estate, gum arabic, which is I think Sudan is the largest producer of gum arabic. And it’s used in sodas and things like that. Pharmaceuticals and construction, and some of which are backed by gold financing.

And I would say one of its biggest allies is Egypt. It provides critical support to the Army, partly because of the relationship between Sisi and al-Burhan, and also, in an effort to protect its interests, with regard to the Nile River Basin and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which there’s kind of disputes over the level at which it should be filled and how that might impact Egypt’s access to water in its kind of agricultural regions. And evidence is also suggesting now that the Ukraine, Iran and Saudi Arabia have started supporting the Army, presumably in an attempt to challenge the power and wealth the UAE and Russia are accumulating through this war.

Human Rights Watch recently did an analysis of about 49 photos and videos culled from mostly social media, and they determined that the armed drones, drone jammers, the anti-tank guided missiles, the truck-mounted multi-barrel rocket launchers and mortar munitions used by both the Army and the RSF, since April of last year, are produced by companies registered in China, Iran, Russia, Serbia and the UAE. But given that the UAE is the main kind of support of the RSF, I should also mention that the US is the main kind of seller of weapons to the UAE. So while evidence hasn’t kind of emerged about this, there are certainly parts of weapons that are being used in this war that have been manufactured in North America. So yeah, in 2013, the Janjaweed were turned into the RSF by al-Bashir as part of a coup-proofing strategy against the Army. They were also legitimized by something called the Khartoum Process, in 2014, a process through which the European Union is attempting to externalize its border to the region between Sudan and Libya.

At the time, the European Union gave the al-Bashir regime 200 million, who then used the RSF to militarize the border and to basically start deporting and stemming the migration of East Africans into Europe. The RSF and the Army have both sent troops to fight in Yemen on the Saudi coalition’s behalf. And that kind of expanded their transnational networks of support. In 2022, so a year before this war started, the Emirati signed a 6 billion dollar port deal along the Red Sea. This is partly why many countries are interested in Sudan is its kind of strategic location along the Red Sea. We have a very long coast. And this deal was upended by the war, but it represents, I think, the UAE’s attempt to kind of undermine Sudan’s national port and to benefit from Sudan’s strategic location along the Red Sea.

It’s also tried to and has successfully bought up other kind of ports across the Horn of Africa, I think, in an attempt, again, to control networks of distribution and transport circuits of production as well. So that’s, I think, very briefly, some of the parts of the political economy of this war. I should say that, because of Euro-American sanctions against Sudan, European and North American countries are not as clearly active. But there are other ways in which these countries have had a negative impact, as I’ve mentioned before, through international diplomacy. But also, there’s a Canadian- based company led by an ex-Israeli military or intelligence officer called Dickens and Madson based in Montreal, that represented the RSF right after they perpetrated the massacres of the sit-in that I mentioned earlier. And they are actually the ones that helped the RSF kind of strengthen its relationship to the UAE, to elites in the Emirates and Russia.

And they’ve since stopped representing them, but there’s evidence to suggest that they’re still benefiting from that relationship in other ways. There’s also mining companies registered here in North America that have played a negative role during the civil war that I mentioned earlier, with South Sudan at the height of the civil war in the late nineties and kind of preceding the genocide in Darfur. Some of these mining oil companies that are now actually in court being charged for war crimes, essentially gave the Sudanese state money to clear its oil fields, escalating the war against civilians. And so, I think all of this, again, leads me to frame this war not as an internal struggle, power struggle, or proxy war, but as a kind of multi-scalar counterrevolutionary war that is meant to serve and protect the interests of Sudanese elites and their international partners and to preserve the kind of violent, extractive ethnonationalist Sudanese state that the revolution was partly trying to dismantle.

And I want to say that, while the proxy war framing is compelling, it tends to obscure the role that Sudanese state and business elites have played for decades in laying the foundation upon which this war is being waged. And it kind of minimizes their role in leading and sustaining it. So yeah, I think it’s important, again, to understand this war as a counterrevolutionary war, in part because the revolution was so powerful that it had the potential to kind of ripple across the continent and region. I know that comrades in Lebanon and Algeria and in Burkina Faso and elsewhere, who had their own kind of popular uprisings against the state, were looking to Sudan for support and inspiration. And that, I think, is partly why we see this kind of counter revolutionary war be so violent, that it’s partly trying to dismantle that potential. So in terms of international actors and their role, there have been various tracks for peace talks, right?

Some led by the African Union and IGAD [Intergovernmental Authority on Development], which is another kind of East African body, some led by Egypt, some led by the Saudis, the most recent led by the United States. And again, kind of trying to revive the Jeddah talks that were led by Saudi Arabia, but taking place in Geneva. None of these talks have led to anything, in part because peace has not been on the table. They’re mostly trying to negotiate around a ceasefire, and they continue to prop up and legitimize the war criminals that are leading this war, excluding non elite civilian actors, and in my view, really green lighting this war. And I think partly why this is happening is because Sudan, in its current state, right, at war, benefits a lot of these actors. I talked again about the investments that the Gulf States have already made in Sudan, that they’re trying to protect.

I think there’s a desire to prevent any type of revolutionary change in Sudan and a transition towards a kind of popular democracy from the ground up. So I don’t put much faith in the negotiations that are currently happening. I think what needs to happen is we need to be listening to the resistance committees and the revolutionary charters that they laid out, in terms of what the future holds. It’s quite bleak, obviously, but the first thing that needs to happen is the external actors that are fueling this war need to be held to account. They need to stop fueling this war. And so, my general political stance is for the rest of the world to take a more hands-off approach from Sudan, even though they’re partly what got us in this mess. But after a ceasefire is achieved, I would like to see all of these external actors just basically leave us alone and allow civilians on the ground who have been at the forefront of the revolution to kind of take the lead.

KH: Nisrin, you coauthored a piece called “In Sudan, the People’s Revolution Versus the Elite’s Counterrevolution.” Can you talk about some of the reporting you did for that piece, the challenges involved, and what insights people on the ground in Sudan have shared with you?

NE: Yes, that piece is published in Hammer & Hope. Part two is coming out in October. And basically, what motivated me, Sara Abbas and Rabab Elnaiem at the time was to really capture some non-elite voices of organizers who have been organizing now, some for decades, against the Sudanese state, who are either still in Sudan or in exile or displaced in neighboring countries. And so, we picked four people, some of whom have been involved in resistance committees. There’s a South Sudanese organizer, who’s now very active in leading mutual aid efforts across the border with South Sudan in a refugee camp. There is my good friend, Abdelraouf Omer, who’s a farm union organizer, who actually was on his way out of the Gezira, because the RSF had just kind of taken over and was essentially preventing people from farming, killing people who were attempting to go and farm. And it was getting very dangerous and unsustainable. So while he was on his way out, he first went to Asmara in Eritrea and then, flew to Uganda with his family. He was sending me voice notes, and this is all within the context of an internet blackout. And for the most part, for all of us living in a diaspora, it’s been very difficult to keep in touch with our families because of it. The phone lines are also not working. And so, he was sending us voice notes, scattered over several weeks, essentially laying out what he thinks has led up to this war, some of which I have already laid out, especially in relation to the way this famine has been decades in the making.

And I think all of this context is important, because it allows us to understand the state as a counterrevolutionary force and the external actors involved in this war as participating in the counterrevolution as well. So I’m going to stop there, just so we can get to the other questions. But for us, it was particularly important, because there have been very few non-elite voices in shaping the kind of narrative around what’s happening in Sudan in the international media space. In general, there’s been very, very little coverage given that this is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world and the largest displacement crisis in the world. We’ve seen very little coverage.

And again, it has to do with anti-Blackness. It has to do with the fact that there are lots of interests in maintaining instability in Sudan, right? And we wanted to elevate voices that have been directly impacted by this counter-revolutionary violence for a very long time.

KH: Despite the horrors unfolding in Sudan, we have not seen a mass movement of support in the United States in defense of the communities that are struggling and under siege. Do you think the public’s lack of understanding around the political dynamics in Sudan is a factor in that lack of mass solidarity? If so, what do people need to understand on a narrative level about this crisis?

YK: I think on one end, on the ground, there are severe security risks that are preventing the documentation of these atrocities being committed in this war. Sudanese people are being targeted across racial, ethnic, and gender lines and accused of being a part of each of the warring factions. And they also experience torture, arrest, sexual violence and death for documenting what is going on.

Those who are part of resistance committees or emergency response rooms are experiencing these heightened risks. And there’s also an attack on the infrastructure for internet connectivity. There are multiple blackouts that are happening, and there’s also looting and confiscation of phones and devices from people.

But still there is documentation that is finding its way on social media websites and ironically, by the militia also evidencing their war crimes themselves. In addition, when mainstream media does pick up what’s happening in Sudan, they are reducing it to a single story about Africa such as famine and starvation, or they’re simplifying the conflict by focusing on individual resistance as opposed to understanding how this revolution in Sudan is a collective effort.

And they’re missing the very crucial story, which is that the Sudanese revolution is what has also led to the counter-revolutionary response in the form of this war. On the other end, I think that there is a lot of anti-Black African racism and Islamophobia dictating whose lives are worthy of advocacy and mass consciousness in the West.

There also harmful stereotypes that are being made about people in the Global South, particularly in Africa, as always being in conflict, and that this war is a civil war between a nation who needs to sort themselves out. There’s an argument as well that the political history and the dynamics of this war are too complicated to understand, contributing to a very disturbing apathy when there are many forms of political education, including this conversation and so many others that are breaking it down in accessible ways.

I also want to mention that when the Black Lives Matter movement was active in the last years, Sudanese people were also on the front lines and co-creators of chapters all over North America. So a lot of the political analysis that came out of this movement was to transgress border regimes and advocate for Black lives in the Global South too.

But this is being evidenced as just theory and the use of buzzwords such as abolition and decolonization really needs to be interrogated because there are live examples of Black struggles in Sudan, Congo and Haiti, for example, who are really challenging the limitations of these concepts in these parts of the world.

In this political moment, we direly need to interrogate the concept of solidarity and our collective accountability to who is included in that and who is excluded in that and ask why. Then we should do something about it because it continues to be a problem of our time.

NE: I want to say that given what is happening in Gaza, I think there’s this kind of idea sometimes that, and it’s certainly being pushed by mainstream media commentators that part of the reason people aren’t paying attention to Sudan is because of what’s happening in Gaza. And I don’t think that’s true.

I mean, the war in Sudan precedes the genocide in Gaza by six months, and we didn’t get much coverage then. I think in fact, the movement in solidarity with Palestinians has opened up the space for people to want to know more about Sudan. I think partly what’s happening is that, again, it’s like what Yusra said, there’s a sense that there’s a sort of spectacle of death and famine and despair that is placed on us instead of understanding that this is a counter-revolutionary war.

And I think this is partly why I keep pushing this framing because it allows for more people to engage in solidarity with Sudanese people who continue — in my view, the revolution actually continues on the ground. The mutual aid networks are generally seen as a kind of non-political form of volunteerism, but they also, they grew out of the structure of the revolution.

And it’s because of them that our loved ones are able to survive in this moment to me, and they’re being targeted by both factions, as Yusra mentioned. And I think to me, these are the people that we need to be supporting. And we do see some of the international aid agencies, including USAID now, trying to get in to support groups on the ground.

And there’s a danger there, right, of co-opting, of sort of depoliticizing, of attaching strings to that kind of funding, which is why we in the diaspora are pushing for ordinary people like your listeners to consider becoming monthly donors, right? $10 a month makes a huge difference on the ground because you’re not only supporting relief here or charity, right?

You’re supporting the people that have been the backbone of the revolution and are fighting every day for the survival of the revolution and of their people. So I think that’s an important aspect of this, that we also as a diaspora, I think have in the past played, have sometimes taken up too much space in shaping what U.S. foreign policy or other kinds of interventions should look like vis-a-vis Sudan without taking guidance from people on the ground.

And that’s also partly what the collective is trying to do now, is to really make sure that anything we engage in terms of a solidarity campaign is to take guidance from people who are closer to what is happening on the ground. And so for me personally, one of the big ways in which people can stand in solidarity with Sudan is to pressure their countries to open up, to create refugee visas for Sudanese citizens.

Given that one out of eight [internally] displaced people in the world is Sudanese, it’s mind-boggling to me, that we have not seen a single country issue a refugee program or visa, a free expedited program for Sudanese refugees, including the U.S. and Canada has not done any of that.

So I think that’s one of the places that we can really push. And another is to sort of think about who are the external actors in this war and how can we pressure, how can we raise awareness about the sort of harmful, negative ways that these corporate and state elites are fueling this war.

KH: I know you have already mentioned some ways that people who are moved by what they’re hearing today can show support or get involved. Are there any other calls to action that you’d like to share with the audience today?

YK: I think Nisreen covered them so well, and if I was just to add to one more is that there is a dire need to amplify the awareness campaigns of what’s happening in Sudan. And I think that people can be in conversation with Sudanese people to collectively organize an interdisciplinary political education that also has critical media literacy skills and works to challenge the propaganda that is coming out of the warring factions in Sudan and the international government’s interventions in Sudan.

And it doesn’t matter where you are, whether you’re a social science student, humanities, you work in STEM and you have different intersections in your professional and artistic lives, there’s a way to critically take up what’s happening in Sudan and mobilize a community of like-minded people and also bring people to your spaces to also pull out different ways of siphoning knowledges from different knowledge systems and fields towards resolving this catastrophe that we are in.

And I think sharing a multi-pronged strategic alliance in terms of strategies of surviving militarized conflict, natural and climate disasters and widespread diseases that are coming out of this war can also help our organizing strategies to become more stronger, as well as drawing the links between how neocolonialism, racial capitalism, the military-industrial complex, extractivist forces and economies and the NGO-ization of resistance is being facilitated across different geographies.

We can make those connections and those links together to create and sustain and also activate an anti-imperialist, anti-war movement in the world today.

NE: I just wanted to add, Kelly, a couple of maybe resources for people too, who are interested in learning more about what is happening in Sudan. There is a really great magazine that is coming out of, I think it’s based in Kampala, called ATAR or A-T-A-R Magazine. It has issues in both Arabic and English. You can follow Sudan Tribune and Radio Dabanga online.

There is someone named Sara Al-Hassan who goes by BS on Blast on Instagram and Twitter, who is giving almost hourly, certainly daily updates on what is happening from a kind of anti-racist, I would say anti-capitalist perspective. And so those are some of the resources that I think people can use to educate themselves more.

I also wanted to say part of what I think why the revolution in Sudan captured people’s attention across the world, including in the quite sort of myopic U.S. left, is that it was so well organized, right? In the sense that it has these 8000 resistance committees that are, and a lot of the kind of working class unions and other grassroots organizing groups as its backbone that were doing not only … that weren’t only protesting the state, but also in many ways creating alternatives to it.

And I think that is something that I want people to take away from what is happening in Sudan, is that we are actually seeing the mutual aid networks on the ground prove to us that states, at least in their current formation, are obsolete, right? That the nation-state, certainly in the way that we see it in Sudan, but also North America, that we can function without them.

And I want to quote William C. Anderson who says, “Simply detaching ourselves from the state is not enough. We’re charged with growing our own survival programs, institutions, and survival economies as a means of building a revolutionary movement that can effectively challenge the state. We’ll have to be able to present masses of people with revolutionary options that can actually meet day-to-day needs like food, housing, and healthcare.”

Now, whether the emergency response rooms as a structure can kind of shield themselves from co-optation by NGOs and foreign state entities and kind of effectively challenge the state by presenting the masses with revolutionary options remains to be seen. And I think this is where people-to-people solidarity is important in also shielding them from some of those forces. But the volunteers who are running these aid efforts that Yusra talked about across the country are meeting the day-to-day needs of millions in the midst of unimaginable violence.

And they’re insisting on staying put, on living, on sustaining each other to live amidst the threat of death and sexual violence and torture. And I think that deserves recognition as a form of resistance against the state and the many forms of violence that it produces.

So I want, I think people to also look to Sudan not only as a place where there is despair and famine and just unimaginable violence, but also as inspiration for what the world could look like without violent border regimes and without violent, capitalist, extractive, ethno-national states, which I think we’re all trying to dismantle, or many of us at least trying to dismantle or challenge on some level.

So I kind of wanted to leave people with that, that in learning more about Sudan, I think you’ll also find some kind of kernels of inspiration and hope there.

KH: Thank you both so much. I am really, really grateful for your work and for the opportunity to learn from you today, as I’m sure our listeners are as well. So I just want to thank you so much for joining me in this conversation and for your time.

YK: Thank you for having us.

NE: Thank you so much, Kelly. We appreciate the opportunity.

[musical interlude]

KH: I am so grateful for the knowledge and opportunities to show support and solidarity that Nisrin and Yusra shared with us today. If you would like to host some conversations in your networks or in your communities around this crisis, or if you would like to support the solidarity efforts you heard about today, you can find links to educational resources and opportunities to donate in the show notes of this episode. I realize that this is an overwhelming time for many people, but I firmly believe that broadening our internationalist politics sharpens our analysis and makes us stronger. We can be thoughtful about how we expend our energy, and our resources, and resist the invisibilization of people whom the status quo would deem forgettable. That kind of resistance is fundamental to our collective survival, and to any hope of collective liberation. When we demand collective liberation, let’s make it clear that we mean everyone, regardless of borders, and when we say, “Black lives matter,” let’s make it clear that this includes the lives of Black people in Sudan.

I want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• The Sudan Solidarity Collective resources grassroots civil society formations at the frontlines of relief efforts in the ongoing war in Sudan. You can support their work here.
• Don’t forget to check out the piece Nisrin co-authored for Hammer & Hope: In Sudan, the People’s Revolution Versus the Elite’s Counterrevolution.
• To hear from Kelly between episodes, you can sign up for their newsletter, Organizing My Thoughts.

For more information about resistance committees:

• The Future of the Resistance Committees in Sudan by Sara Abbas and Shireen Akram-Boshar
• How mutual aid networks are powering Sudan’s humanitarian response by Rawh Nasir, Tom Rhodes, and Philip Kleinfeld

For more information about emergency response rooms:

• Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms Overview and Recommendations – SCCU Publication # 13

For more information about the humanitarian crisis in Sudan:

• Sudan Humanitarian Update – September 1, 2024 (OCHA)
• Over 370 rapes reported in Sudan ongoing conflict, including 131 against young girls
• Sudan: Situation Report – September 3, 2024 (OCHA)
• The world’s largest child displacement crisis is in Sudan by Brian Walsh
• War pushes Sudan toward famine by Marc Español
• My People are Stranded: Bearing Witness to the Struggle of Sudanese Refugees in Egypt by Wedad Osman
• For Sudanese Refugees, Egypt Is Barely a Refuge by Ela Yokes
• Inside Egypt’s secret scheme to detain and deport thousands of Sudanese refugees by Sara Creta and Nour Khalil.
• Sudanese returnees from Ethiopia: ‘The world is watching our suffering in silence’ by Awlala, Shahadi, and El Galabat
• Sudanese refugees trapped in Ethiopian forest call for ‘immediate evacuation’ by Augustine Passilly
• Uganda’s U-turn on refugee policy leaves Sudanese asylum seekers stranded by Richard Sultan
• Unable to survive in Egypt, refugees return to war-torn Sudan
• Sudanese refugees hiding in Ethiopian forest to escape bandits and militias by Mat Nashed
• Attacks leave Sudanese refugees stranded in Ethiopian forest by Nafisa Eltahir
• What’s happening in Sudan? All about the war and humanitarian crisis going mostly unnoticed by Nick Logan
• In the Shadow of Conflict: The Black Markets of Sudan’s War by Jawhratelkmal Kanu
• In the wake of the Sudan conflict, fuel and arms smuggling spike in Chad and the broader Sahel.
• ‘Humanitarian aid in Sudan is constantly being blocked by all the belligerents’

Other sources referenced in this episode:

• Fanning the Flames: Sudanese Warring Parties’ Access To New Foreign-Made Weapons and Equipment (Human Rights Watch)
• The Largest Displacement Crisis in the World: The Deteriorating Humanitarian Situation in Sudan by Mohamed El Tayeb
• Sudan quietly signs Abraham Accords weeks after Israel deal
• Millions go hungry as war and waves of ethnic killing disrupt food supply in Sudan
• Sudan: 2.5m people could die from hunger by September 2024, warns Dutch think tank