Hello and welcome to the UK column today I'm delighted to be
joined by ESA Bloomy ESA is professor of Asian and Middle
East Studies at Stockholm University Institute of Turkish
Studies in in Sweden and welcome to the programme ESA.
I, I want to talk today about Sudan, the situation Sudan,
which is about as grim as it gets, I think pretty unpleasant
war conflict going on there since April 2023.
Well, as we'll discuss, no doubt it's something that's actually
been going on for a lot longer than that.
But the latest iteration, at least for a couple of years now,
aside from, you know, the occasional UK government press
release, which never gets any coverage in the mainstream
press, most people in the UK at least know almost nothing about
this conflict that's going on without any major media coverage
in this country at all. So although we have talked about
it several times in UK column news, I can't say that we are
particularly familiar with the with the detail of it.
So I suppose my first question is, is this a civil war?
It's being described as a civil war, or is it another conflict
which is being driven by external forces?
Yes, it's the latter. Much of Africa and neighbouring
countries like Yemen especially, are the unfortunate target of
rival, sometimes corporate therefore private.
But they they they form useful unions, alliances with actual
states with still the ability to borrow lots of money and buy
lots of weapons or make them themselves and deliver them to
era areas where natural resources of Africa are highly
coveted. Strategic pressure points that
will allow for access to other regions are targeted.
So unfortunately Sudan, just like many of its neighbours,
especially to the South, with the Democratic Republic of Congo
being perhaps the most notorious with Rwanda being a close
second. They are all been targeted since
the end of the Cold War, at least for plunder and chaos is
an actual wonderful context and condition to actually realise
very profitable plunder of natural resources.
I mean, Sudan has been in a country of interest to the
British Empire for many for a very long time.
And of course, Kitchener, Khartoum, this is all something
which is part of British history.
Is this just the latest iteration of that same colonial
project? Indeed, it was actually Muhammad
Ali, the soldier of of Ottoman association, who successfully
expanded Egypt's influence deep into the tropical areas of East
Africa, Central Africa in the 1820s.
Eighteen 30s already and one of the primary reasons was open up
trade from Central Africa to the Mediterranean Red Sea, as well
as more importantly, secure access to gold in Sudan in those
days was much like West Africa, considered to be the equivalent
of California and other places where gold was highly it was
accessible and and considerable profits could be made from
mining. Now that's one one way of
understanding the development of Sudan's connection to Egypt and
how the British would inherit that when they occupied Egypt in
the 1880s. And unfortunately, the kind of
calculations that come with thinking about these areas are
primarily political, economic as opposed to moral or interest in
the quite very complex cultural checkerboard, if you will, of
the of the peoples who live in these like difficult areas of,
of Africa. So yes, the British still have
an interest through their their own kind of proxies, although
it's there are multiple layers of separation now between those
who are really responsible for all of this and the ones who are
actually being blamed for it. So if we can maybe get into that
in more detail about who are actually the primary foreign
actors at the moment. But let's not forget ever that
whether it's the UAE or Turkey or our other players out there,
that they are still deeply connected to the North Atlantic
Empire that have emerged in the 19th century.
Yes. So do you think this is, is this
conflict sort of as a result of Chinese and and Russian
interests in this, in this area? And you know, on, on one side
and the other side, we've got British players like the Tony
Blair Foundation, Institute, whatever you want to call it
these days, very, very interested in this.
But also the European Union viewing North Africa, the Sahel
region right across the the southern area of the Sahara,
right across the Horn of Africa as being its southern
neighbourhood and and an area of its interests and influence.
My goodness, yeah. I mean, there's so many things
that come into play here. You mentioned Russia, which
especially private military capacities since the end of the
Cold War, they were out and provided services for various
dictatorships. I mean, Yugoslavian forces also
had a certain expertise and delivered and offered in
neighbouring Zaire. In those days it was called
Zaire military forces that helped shore up national armies.
Sudan, If we can go back maybe to the end of the Cold War,
where political Islam really starts to play an important
sedative role in subduing potentially very dangerous
regional actors. Who like Muammar Gaddafi for
instance, who had long been in the neighbouring Chad, which is
an important part of this story. What's happening in Sudan had
been involved in influencing and expanding Libya's influence in
this anti colonial struggle that cut across much of Africa since
the obviously the beginning of the ninth of the 20th century
and use of political slum in with the man named Turabi Hassan
Turabi became notoriously connected to these Muslim
Brotherhood outfits that started to spread and gain influence
throughout the Middle East and the Arabic speaking world in
sometimes obvious connections with what was happening in
Turkey. The rise of Erdogan first as a
mayor of Istanbul and then becomes this kind of shining
star of of political Islam and a kind of a realliance if you
realignment of the Islamic world in relation to North Atlantic
world. And Turabi became this kind of
useful target for at least media LED campaigns against political
Islam where in fact there was actually deep partnerships.
We know that the the armed forces that were being used by
and funded and trained by the CIA and MI 6 around the world
did find safe haven also in Sudan during the 1990s, even
though periodically would be again a useful justification for
the war on terrorism. You know that Khartoum was
attacked by American forces at some point and notoriously the
hospital or factory building producing generic drugs was hit,
But that initiated or signalled to us that Sudan's oil wealth,
Sudan's potential for mining. But more importantly, again,
it's it's geographic location, the Red Sea, the the Nile rivers
that were going to converge in Khartoum and continued to be a
big Geo strategic issue. And there were already in the
90s recognition that with the end of the regime in Ethiopia,
that Ethiopia and Eritrea, which divided Somalia, which would see
a process of disintegration, that Sudan was more or less
following the same track. Where it would became clear that
like Yemen, like Iraq, like Libya, breaking up these larger
amalgamated territories into zones of conflict, of chaos
would make it easier for determining or dictating the way
these regions would be integrated into the global
economy moving forward. And unfortunately, Sudan would
first be on the radar screen, if you will, through this, right.
I think still Sudanese capable Sudanese resistance to this
process. Now it would be undermined by
political Islam, the relationship that political
Islam had in the narrative of as far as the British and the
Americans were concerned. So a lot of capacity, violent
capacities was brought to Sudan that led to civil war or
conflict between rival factions. As opportunities that were
opened up, South Sudan was encouraged to pursue war of
independence, which was ultimately secured with the
incredible violence in the interim period leading to the
crisis in Darfur in the early 2000, where I think many of your
listeners in the UK or elsewhere are probably remember.
Still, it was a legitimate humanitarian disaster which
pitted Muammar Gaddafi's forces who wanted to secure, protect,
chat, their partners in Chad, against these encroachments of
now increasingly Gulf countries with their Muslim Brotherhood
assets. To take over the enterprise of
steering the Muslim world into the direction of cohabitating
comfortably with globalisation, with neoliberalism.
And again, a lot of principled peoples around the world,
including Sudan, had a very articulate stand against that
process. They were not happy seeing a
potentially very rich independent country being
parcelled out, its assets being privatised as being demanded by
international agencies and development groups tied to the
United States, Britain, the UN, etcetera, the IMF.
So sadly much what we see the kind of playbook elsewhere in
the world, it's playing itself out in Sudan.
And the consequences are large parts of this vast country had
been parcelled off. Warlords were rewarded with
diplomatic recognition. They found secondary support
from countries that seemingly were at odds with each other.
But if you actually go for deeper into their connections in
the global political economy, they actually share common
patrons, Israel, the United States, Britain.
So Turkey, Qatar seemingly at odds and in rivals against the
UAE, Saudi Arabia and who are playing the kind of leaders of
these proxy wars in place like Sudan are actually in other ways
very well connected to the same usual suspects, if you will.
And unfortunately, when the Russians and the Chinese get
involved, their weapons, their soldiers, their know how they
are not very effectively able to demonstrate a separation from
this process either. They are implicated in this
violence and and it becomes in the media, it becomes in the
scholarship, classic example of Africans killing each other,
right. So civil war, that's the
narrative as it's been played out in elsewhere, but it is in
fact an invasion of global capital using various means to
disaggregate countries that could have very easily steered
their way after the Cold War into being independent, wealthy,
self sustaining society. And unfortunately for Sudan,
it's like Ethiopia, like the Horn of Africa, like Yemen, very
rich countries, a lot of its territory started to get
privatised and sold off, especially to investment firms
attached to sovereign wealth funds that were simply providing
the kind of capital, if you will, for this process of
globalisation, of forcing Sudanese to surrender their
sovereignty to global capital. Yeah, use the term political
Islam. There are a number of times.
Could you just say a little bit more about that?
And are are you talking about the influence of Muslim
Brotherhood or Boko Haram and and Chad and Niger and so on?
Is that is this all part of that same process?
Yes, we we lose again. We get distracted by seeing
jihadist takfiri groups as somehow a threat to Western
stability, where in fact they work and work in tandem with
agencies that see them as auxiliaries for otherwise what
would be necessarily overt invasions.
So again, while there were NATO plates dropping bombs in Libya,
it was actually these kinds of forces that were doing the heavy
lifting of killing and and taking over territories.
And the same would be applied in northern Nigeria, in Burkina
Faso, Niger, Mali, even though now there's been a response to
that misfit efforts by the peoples of the silo region to
try to reorganise and defend themselves from these tools of
Western imperialism, in Sudan, they have not, they have not
been able to escape that. And so again, the personalities
that sometimes are very articulate like this, Hassan
Turabi has long been marked as someone who actually stood on
principle against globalisation, against westernisation and is
supposedly steering their societies towards traditional
values basing based on something called Sharia law.
But they are simply just cookie cutter characters that have been
created and and are marketed as easy targets for justifying
heavy investment in destroying these societies.
They you cannot distinguish them from the origins which are again
intermediaries like Saudi Arabia or Qatar.
But if you just look deeper at the how Saudi Arabia and Qatar
are entirely serviceable to larger global capital interest,
then it's it's hard to see what happened to Sudan in two in
1990s and 2000s as anything but a manufactured externally
manufactured very quickly rapidly decline the security
situation for the peoples of Sudan.
Again, people get a little confused in Sudan.
They got confused, they they became partisans in these so
called ideological battles. Sudanese are very well educated,
they speak, they have Khartoum University.
I actually visited in 1993 this country and very, very
impressive society who are well represented around the world and
they had their responses. They had something called
neighbourhood resistance committees by the thousands
throughout Sudan organising fermenting kind of civic
resistance to this structural transformation of their country.
But they were always pushed aside and brutalised by militant
groups who were functionally armed by the security forces of
Sudan or supported by intelligence agencies from
abroad. And again, just simply in the
kind of discourse about the Middle East, about the Islamic
world in Sudan, this became easily just marketed as simple
conflict between Islamists and or between ethnic groups, Arabs,
between Arabs and Africans. And it's just not that easy.
And so political Islam became one of those animating forces
that force people to have into certain corners, if you will,
and became actually even more divided amongst themselves.
While there was desperate efforts by various intellectual
not Sudanese nationalists are saying let's not fall into this
trap. And again, you see this, this
personality of people resisting globalisation throughout the
world, but they have been regularly supplanted and pushed
aside by not only the violent militias and forces that
actually have the arms, but by the way we talk about these
conflicts. So it's not a civil, It was not
a civil war. It is not a civil war per SE.
At least its origins was not one conflict between Sudanese
entirely, even though they're the ones who are dying for the
last 30 years. Yeah, if if we if we look at a a
sort of standard narrative of what's going on there with the
the civil war supposed to involve Sudanese armed forces on
one side and with the Rapid Support Forces, which is
supposed to be a paramilitary force.
And and the Janjaweed Coalition has mentioned as well.
I mean, I have no real understanding of of who is whom
here and who's supported by which foreign influence.
So could you just say a little bit about who the main players
are in in in the conflict in Sudan and and who is supporting
them? Right.
So this process of of seeing Sudan break apart and outsiders
encouraging the separation of South Sudan, which supposedly
culturally were either animists or Christian, and that led to it
was already in the Cold War. There was kind of factions being
armed at that stage. Again, it's connected to what's
happening in Rwanda and Uganda and DRC.
But the struggle by the Sudanese government in Khartoum to try to
preserve the borders of Sudan before and throughout the 2000s
was in in many ways steered by a coalition including this to Rabi
figure that I mentioned before Muslim Brotherhood fiercely anti
communist. So if you put that into the
context of the late Cold War Hudico Islam is a mobilising
force. It was also seen as one is to
explaining why the central government in Sudan in Khartoum
was so violent against Southern Sudanese.
And that's why Southern Sudanese separation was necessary.
And one of the ways that the Sudanese government over the
throughout the 1990s and 2000s in their attempt to try to keep
Southern Sudan, where 80% of the oil of Sudan is based and
probably a lots of its gold as well.
That they would have to resort to mobilising forces that were
outside of the military itself in order to protect the the
formal government from accusations of war crimes or or
seeing maybe what kind of formal efforts to shut down their
operations in what was clearly in some circles in the West
trying to mobilise evangelical Christianity as a kind of cause
celebrity sport. That South Sudan needed
separation. So what happened is that we
started to see militias emerging and the Janjaweeds were by
design fanatical Islamic takfiri types who were to pursue the
ethnic purification and the removal of problematic non Arab,
non Muslim populations along the borders of South Sudan and Chad.
And so the Janjaweeds emerged in this context.
And one of the key actors and partners of this process we just
solved, by the way, in The Hague the the the charging of war
crimes by one of the leaders of the Janjaweed.
It was just yesterday, I believe, or two days ago.
What was his name? I can't remember now his name?
Who's Rahman? Abdul Rahman, who was just now
charged for war crimes. But his primary partner on the
ground was this Muhammad Davallo or Emmetti, who had now
inherited this old operations at Khartoum government and the
official military had harvested to conduct military actions in
Brave unprofessional ways. Let's just say just a very
brutal regime of violence against targeted populations
that led to the what we call we can call a genocide in Darfur in
the early 2000s. They were able to secure,
however, that part of Sudan from being separated to being to
create a separate ethnic state as was on call often in Western
circles at the time. But it also helped create kind
of structural dynamic that allows his Hemeti to become now
a kingmaker in larger Sudan. Omar Boshif who's was notorious
and became the kind of again poster child for how the West
will intervene and try to halt Islamic fundamentalism as it's
as it's manifested in the Khartoum government.
Sudan will be become part of the larger problem.
There will be collective efforts in international community to
isolate Omar Bashir's government but again they they will be able
to avoid and circumvent some of the restrictions on their
military capacity by maintaining these militias that seem to
operate independent of the state.
And accordingly there will be money funnelled and and supply
chains will be opened up to provide his Hemeti with the
capacity to be a major player in Sudanese politics.
To the extent today actually leads to along with his
sometimes partner Bohan, who is now currently the general
leading the so called Sudanese official Sudanese army and they
recognised the Sudanese government.
They worked together to assured that the popular revolution that
was happening on the streets throughout Sudan.
After a great deal of fatigue and a very well organised, as I
mentioned, there were these neighbourhood committees being
established throughout Sudan kind of doing what was happening
elsewhere in the Arab Spring in 2010 two 1011.
So this was manifesting in 2018, two, 1019 and much like
elsewhere, Muslim Brotherhood, Takshiri type groups mobilising
if necessary, ethnic politics, language, politics, a suppress,
a popular uprising against Omar Bashir, He will be replaced by a
now recognised coalition that would bring this Burhan and
Himmati together. And that's where we were at
2020, 2019-2020. And over the next couple of
years, these two groups start to separate.
They start to take conflicting claims over who actually has
authority and who has the right to claim to be representative of
the official Sudanese government.
And they're all the privileges that come with that, negotiating
for loans, getting access to the key infrastructure assets that
still remained. There would still be the open
question about the pipelines that would connect South Sudan's
oil with the Red Sea and international markets.
So that was all up for grabs. And that's when you start to see
new opportunities for taking sides, supporting both now
clearly delineated factions inside this coalition, which
again functioned to suppress real popular revolution in Sudan
to actually see let Sudan, Sudanese taking control of their
destiny again. Again, very articulate.
We can even say with sometimes a Marxist critique of Sudan's
relations with the larger world informing how these popular
communities were demanding for a representative government, but
that was not going to be allowed by the international community.
And So what it becomes is then who is going to represent the
international compete community's interests in Sudan.
And it's these two basically warlords and their loyal or
relatively loyal armies around them.
And that leads to what we call the RSF.
This is the Hemeti, the old Janjaweeds kind of militias that
worked in partnership with Khartoum throughout the 2000s.
It is now virtually taking over the Western Sudan where all the
gold mines are. It has received a great deal of
part of support from let's say spin offs of the Wagner Group
that has established itself as a kind of protection agency for
mining operations in Central African Republic and elsewhere
throughout Africa. And more importantly, the main,
let's say market, if you will, for this blood gold that's being
plundered from Western Sudan and that's the gold market in Dubai.
And it's become now an editorious connection between
RSF or Hemeti and the UAE is becoming kind of the the useful
target, if you will, for explaining how this war works,
how this horrible situation Sudan works, that it's the UA ES
role in sustaining the RSF. While in the meantime, Turkey,
Qatar, perhaps Israel, which I by the way, had signed an
agreement first with Omar Bashir and then with this Burhan in
2020 to normalise relations akin to what happened with Bahrain
and and the UAE around the same time under the late Trump.
First, the Trump administration. So that that element is comes
into play here as well. But today we're supposedly
seeing an enduring war that burst out in Khartoum itself in
2023 with the RSF this Hemeti militia for a while at least
occupying Khartoum, forcing the recognised government to move
operations to Port Sudan and continuing with this war of of
plunder in western Sudan with the so called government of of
Sudan now in Port Sudan. The city of Port Sudan on the
Red Sea just in May, I think it was March, April, May of what
are able to re secure Khartoum of 2025 and the city is
destroyed. And much of the possibility of
let's say making Sudan, whatever remains of Sudan a functional
country is virtually impossible as long as this rivalry
continues and it continues to be fed with weapons coming from
China, from UAE. The Chinese drones are usually
and other kind of sophisticated anti aircraft weapons are coming
through the UAE which are then shipped to Chad or to Central
African Republic and then transported by land.
Even though there is de facto central international
communities oversight condemning these operations, pricing
embargoes on the companies that are involved often directly
connected by family to Amethi based in the UAE or based in
Uganda or Rwanda, which is also one of those destabilising
forces in in Africa, which requires another requires
another episode. I think.
I'm sorry for your audience. It's very complicated.
It sounds like I'm just running off in all kinds of directions,
but that's it. It's it would not be fair to
just say it's a simple proxy war, But it that's what how it's
become, at least at the this phase now where it's impossible
to talk about Sudan in in many circles because of the
conflicted interest of those who are supposedly intervening to
try to stop this war. And if we actually again push
ourselves to see who's actually at the very end responsible for
all this, it's those who are claim claim to now having the
exclusive right to determine how this war ends.
And there's the very simple fact that they don't want to see this
war end. There's just so much wealth
being plundered from Sudan at the moment, much like what we
see elsewhere in the in, in Africa and and parts of the
Middle East. There's not going to be a
resolution because the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, the UAE, Russia, China, they all have their very
specific interests at play here that have nothing to do with
strategically, you know, defying, if you will, and, and
challenging arrivals. It's more seeing access to the
assets that are being plundered and having maybe a greater,
let's say, piece of the, of this Sudanese pie that's rapidly
being torn away and eaten up by global capitalism.
So that's, that's how I don't know if I if that's a
satisfactory way of explaining what's happening between the so
called Sudanese forces and the RSF.
But just now in the last couple of weeks, it's gotten more
worse, even more so because when it's the rainy season, there's,
it's very hard to actually have ground battles in Sudan at the
moment. At least in the western Darfur
area. There's the city of Al Fasha,
which is the main city of Darfur, which is under siege now
for I think 500 plus days, 300, four, 100,000 people are stuck
there dying, starving. The 14,000,000 Sudanese are now
categorically under the radar of of possible starvation,
suffering from hunger. And now the drones, the warfare
that is becoming more and more a, a, a quality of life in many,
many parts of the world, whether it be in Eurasia or in Africa
has now become a feature of the war in Sudan where drones are
being flown into cities and destroying infrastructure.
In Port Sudan, the so called capital of of the RSF, this
Hemeti, UAE backed Hemeti was syphoning off much of the gold.
His capital Naila is also been attacked by drones that have
been provided by Erdogan's son in law by Rakhtar's company.
So the same kind of weaponry that is being marketed as a new
kind of warfare in Gaza or in the eastern Ukraine is now being
used to great effect, great destructive effect in places
like Sudan. So that's where we're at.
And yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, look, I was just
going to comment on on, you know, how hard it is for people
to to understand all the all the names that are being given out
here. I mean, I, I grew up.
He's in, in Northern Ireland and even that relatively simple
conflict was, was very difficult for people that are outside the
country to, to really get to grips with.
So, so I'm, you know, I'm also struggling somewhat with all the
players now what I'd what I'd like to get an idea of, because
the British government insists that no British arms or weaponry
goes to Sudan, that that's banned.
The question is, are British or European or United States or how
much weaponry from from our military industrial complex is
going through these Middle Eastern countries to contribute
to to that side of the conflict? Again, I think there's there's
many layers of separation now. I think that what the UK and US
are doing are providing the kind of the infrastructure of
diplomacy of, of maintaining and securing the narrative about
what's going on in Sudan as opposed to the actual mechanics
of the war itself. You know, the, the technical
side. And the ones who are actually
fighting these wars are from the region itself or from Turkey,
UAE, Russia. So those whose those populations
who are have been scattered by events after the Cold War ended
have found no new niches, new roles to play with manpower
being come coming from countries that have historically trained
their civilians in in some shape or form in military.
UAE doesn't really have a functioning army per SE, but it
does have the means to actually recruit actively from overseas.
We know the RSF, for instance, Amethi sent thousands of his
fighters several years ago to Yemen, for instance.
They also helped shore up the government in east Libya on
behalf of the UAE and their allies in that war that that
happened since the fall of Gaddafi.
So the manpower is provided to the large extent in from Chad,
Sudan itself, from Colombia, from other countries that seem
to have become as a, as a kind of development model providing,
availing their men to fight in wars around the world.
Then unfortunately it includes Russians and Ukrainians.
They're part of the story. The technicians who are perhaps
flying the drones are actually coming from the UAE and from
Turkey. The the last rate series of air
battles taking place with drones saw the death of technicians who
were Turkish and Emirati members of Emirati and Turkish military
services. So that makes it an interesting
way of answering your question that it's it's not arms coming
from Lockheed Martin or the equivalent BASF.
These are not, I mean, those are too expensive.
I think for this kind of war. This is a war of machine guns,
some grenades, rocket propelled grenades and relatively cheap
drones that are made in in Turkey in maybe there's some now
factories in the Gulf, we don't know, made in China.
And they make their way into these theatres just like the old
AK47 used to do that. But the CIAMI MI6 there again,
their allies in the region are more than happy to pay for those
weapons. But the ones who are going to be
dying are the ones who are hired as guns for hire or even not
even guns for hire, but just to survive, to eat.
We saw that throughout the wars in 1990s in West Africa that
kids would be armed and they would be more than willing to
kill because they that's the only way they could eat because
they were orphaned. And Sudanese has produced the
wars, the violence in East Africa and the Horn of Africa
has produced millions of such kinds of people who have no
other means but to kill in order to or you know.
Be avail themselves to kill in order for them to survive.
That's their now. It's a very rational,
unfortunately it's a very rational decision that people
are making who have again no families anymore or they have
families and they have to feed. So how are you going to do that
when your country is in complete turned upside down so you don't
need boots on the ground. There may be again some
technical there are certain CIA and MI 6 assets are on the
ground observing all of this as well as are.
They just observing or are they well?
Maybe they are. They're also helping,
facilitating the and directing the way the conflict is being
fought. That's it's.
But I think they're, again, they have been able to separate
themselves a little bit by way of having these other regional
actors take the lion's share of the responsibility from media,
academic focus to the actual practical dying in these fields.
So Turkish technicians, Emirati technicians are the ones now
being killed alongside those that they are supporting these
local regional fighters. So, but the, the, the
responsibility still lies in Washington, in London for sure.
If but that's how these wars unfortunately are so
successfully Blair and those types that separate themselves
so neatly, right? The war in Gaza is a war of
empire, but we are going to focus on personalities like
Netanyahu is almost exclusively responsible for Hamas, where in
fact this, as we can see with Trump's marketing, the the
future development of a destroyed refugee compound.
I mean this this if you really push it, This is the kind of
nature of disaster capitalism. I, I don't like to use this this
woman's phrase, but this is very much the working model since the
end of the Cold War. And unfortunately Sudan has been
sucked into this logic. And even though the Sudanese by
the vast majority had a response to this, but they were never
allowed to pursue democratically their their demands for
autonomy, for independence. And just so that we're
absolutely clear about this, I mean, you've, you've talked
about Russia and China's contribution to this.
But is it the case that in fact the, the Belt and Rd initiative
hasn't contributed to, to solving this problem in any way
up to this point? Or is is it the case that that
that actually that is the the the potential way out of this at
the end of the day? Well, the pipelines that for
instance, Kenya, which funded by Chinese finance that will
eventually spirit South Sudan's oil, not through Sudan, but
through Kenya, that one could look at it in a positive way.
But it's also kind of functioning in, in very much the
same ways that I was just in very great detail explaining
what was happening to these countries.
I mean, I mean building infrastructure to access Dr CS
minerals, whether it be done by way of Chinese financing and
Chinese expertise or development agencies that were in the back
pocket in historically with the United States or Britain results
in the same thing. The plunder of these countries
with very little positive coming to nothing positive for the
populations who are suffering from the environmental
destruction from often the, the, the lion's share of the wealth
just being exported out to international markets.
So the, the, in the end, the, the end result is the same.
They, there's there are these new demands on raw materials
that find their way out in the international markets,
regardless if it's done through a Beltway that's funded by
Chinese working class savings or by Wall Street.
And there are people who are going to die on on on either end
of that. There's nothing has been
resolved with DRC. No one's intervened to stop the
war in Yemen or in Sudan or in or in Ethiopia, even though they
supposedly BRICS countries are invested in in at least that as
a way. It's as it's marketed as an
alternative to what has been long recognised as a fundamental
problem with Western capital trying to secure the very same
assets that are now availed. Because the heavy lifting has
been taken over by the savings of Chinese middle class who have
been built up since the 1980s, Nineteen 90s thanks to Europe's
and America's infrastructure moving to China.
So all of our Apple phones and all this technology that we're
using to talk to each other now, which is now made by brilliant
hard working people, has resulted in a huge pool of money
that does the work of empire in. It's just in different terms and
sadly weapons from China are killing people from Sudan, just
like weapons from Israel or Turkey or BASF, and no one's put
a stop to that. And So what do you think it's
going to take to get a stop to, I mean, is this, is this a
matter of of general populations understanding even that this is
happening and being willing to to provide some kind of
opposition or how do you see this ending?
Well, vast majority of Sudanese understood this from the very
beginning and again, their efforts to organise and
peacefully or maybe not even peacefully, but to secure
independence from this juggernaut of globalisation was
suppressed by the very violent factor factions who are now at
war with each other. How this is going to stop?
It's not going to stop because the Donald Trump's
administration or Tony Blair's think tank comes and saves the
day. That's not going to happen
because they're not interested in seeing the end of this war or
any other war. What's going to stop it
unfortunately is going to be the exhaustion of the people
themselves or that one of the factions actually is able to
secure ultimately a military victory.
But the very fact that if you again, supposed rivals in the
region, Turkey and Qatar versus Saudi Arabia and UAE, the very
fact that all these countries have American military bases
means that they all and they all help supply Israel during their
their very particular war against indigenous peoples to
secure resources to change the dynamics of, of Palestine.
They're all serving in the end, a larger enterprise that has
unfortunately, since the Cold War, become quite very clear
that it's, it's, it's a, it's a race to the end in which a very
small percentage of the people in the world have absolute
authority over our lives through their technology, through their
laws, and more importantly, have absolute control over the
natural resources and the wealth that these resources produce for
them. And again, wealth equals power.
They have more money than they can ever need.
But the, the, the way that this wealth is accumulated actually
destroys societies who have until today been able to at
least put some kind of brake on this process that we've been
monitoring for the last two hundred, 250 years.
So societies like Yemen, like Sudan, in parts of Eastern
Africa, Horn of Africa who have and have incredibly
sophisticated understanding of how their with their place in
the world and they've been articulating resistance to this.
They have been destroyed by these various tactics and
unfortunate that implicates everyone who benefits from the
plunder of Africa, not just the usual suspects that we like to
highlight in our own neighbourhood.
But this is a global phenomenon. And everyone who's seeing gold
or oil, buying that oil and gold or the cobalt, they're all
responsible for this. Not unfortunately.
And who's going to take the blame?
UAE, Turkey, you know that that's Israel.
Those are, again, I think a misdirection of our our, our
focus of, of critique and we ultimately need to stop our own
City of London, Wall Street, Shanghai people who are
profiting from this. I think that's a good place to
leave it for today, he said. Lumi, thank you very much for
joining me today. I would really love to, to, to
follow up with this and, and look at other areas in, in Sahel
and that are experiencing not perhaps not the same scale, but
certainly insurgencies of their own and, and understand this,
this region a lot better. Because obviously all the focus
is on Eastern Europe and, and the Middle East at the moment,
but it's not the only problem. So thank you very much for
joining me today. Thank you, Mike.
Thank you very much.