Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This message comes from NPR sponsor Mattress Firm. How do you sleep at night? Upgrade to the rest you deserve with Mattress Firm's premium selection of top brand mattresses. Get matched at Mattress Firm's semi-annual sale and clearance and sleep at night. What's the last sort of memory that you have of Sudan before you left? The sea. The last thing I saw of Sudan was the sea.
On April 15, 2023, Khulood Kheir woke up expecting the day to be like any other. It was just a normal Saturday, suddenly turned into sort of a nightmarish scenario. She was living in Khartoum, Sudan's capital. Deadly clashes erupting in the streets of the country's capital. And immediately we heard that there were shots being fired in the southern part of Khartoum. The shots grew closer and closer to her home.
The airport right at the center of town where I was living had very quickly become the epicenter of the conflict. Roads became impassable. Families couldn't reach each other. The fighting has already killed nearly 100 civilians since it began Saturday. Hundreds more are injured. It was chaos.
Those first few days of the war were gut-wrenching and absolutely horrific to go through. A humanitarian crisis. Military jets turned to the sky. Blackout. Shortages of water. Khulud and her family decided they needed to leave the country. But airports were shut down, and land routes were becoming more and more dangerous. So they looked to the sea for a way out.
The last thing I saw of Sudan was the sea. Khudud is one of over 2 million people who have fled Sudan since war broke out last year, a brutal conflict in which more than 16,000 have been killed.
That conflict has made Sudan home to the world's largest internal displacement crisis, 11 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom have had to leave their homes since the war began. There have been stories of sexual assault, sexual slavery, looting, home invasions. Sudan is also home to the world's largest hunger crisis,
with nearly 26 million people, more than half of Sudan's entire population, at risk of starving. But chances are you haven't heard much about this amidst all the headlines about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. And without, I think, the requisite global attention, the situation there will get infinitely worse.
Khulood runs a think tank, formerly based in Khartoum, called Confluence Advisory, that focuses on three policy areas, peace and security, economy, and governance. She says we should all be paying more attention to Sudan, not only because of the very serious humanitarian crisis, but also because what happens in Sudan doesn't stay in Sudan.
especially when it comes to the Red Sea, the sea Khulud and her family escaped on. Now the sea has become quite an important political football. Sudan borders the Red Sea, which sits between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
It connects Europe to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal, through which nearly 15% of world trade, including oil and natural gas exports, along with 30% of global container shipping, passes. Which means any disruption to that trade route could, for example, spell disaster for Europe's energy grid. It could also mean further instability in the Middle East and Africa.
You may remember hearing about the Red Sea in connection with the Houthi rebels earlier this year. Sudan is in northeast Africa, just above Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Chad lies to the west, Egypt to the north. The Nile River, which you might associate with Egypt, also runs through Sudan. In fact, the two main branches of the Nile meet in Khartoum.
So Sudan is a prime location for international trade. Which brings us back to the conflict today.
On the surface, this is a story about two warring military generals who are vying for power over Sudan, the latest in a long cycle of power struggles that have plagued the country for decades. But it's also a story with a vast web of international interests, a story tied to the U.S. war on terror, China's global rise, and Russia's war in Ukraine. I'm Randa Abdelfattah. And I'm Ramtin Arablui.
Coming up, we'll turn back the clock more than a century to untangle the complex web that put Sudan on the path to war and one of the biggest humanitarian crises in the world. Hi, this is Molly Noble calling from Inverness, California. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part One, Between the River and the Sea.
The Nile is the great melody that recurs throughout the whole opera. It is the life of the lands through which it flows. It is the cause of the war, the means by which we fight, the end at which we aim. Imagination should paint the river through every page in the story.
It's 1898, and a young British officer and war correspondent named Winston Churchill is traveling on the Nile River in Sudan, publishing dispatches of all he's seeing in London's Morning Post newspaper. Long before he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and led the Allied powers in a war against the Nazis, Churchill made a name for himself as a writer, with a book he wrote documenting an epic battle that took place in Sudan.
one of the final battles in a two-decade war that had been inspired by a man known as the Mahdi. I am the Mahdi, the expected one, and this is no boast. The Mahdi being this figure in Islamic cosmology who is like a messianic deliverer of Muslims from a kind of moral evil. The Mahdi proclaimed a holy war against the foreigners.
Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdullah, aka the Mahdi, was born in northern Sudan in 1843 and was the son of a shipbuilder. He claimed to be directly descended from the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
On his travels through the Sudanese countryside, the Mahdi observed the frustration of many people there. He blamed Sudan's neighbor to the north, Egypt, then governed by the Ottoman Empire, and the British crown, who would soon rule over the region. Sudan had for centuries been a place of many identities. It's got dozens and dozens of ethnic groups. It's got Christians, Muslims. It has a very old Jewish community.
But the arrival of the Mahdi signaled the dawn of a new era for Sudan, a decidedly Muslim one. He who does not believe will be purified with the sword.
And so the Mahdi and his army of Sudanese Islamic warriors went to war against Great Britain, which of course at the time was framing itself as this kind of shining beacon of Christian civilization. So why is Sudan important? Why was Churchill there? Why did Great Britain care about Sudan? Well, here's why. The Suez Canal.
The Suez Canal was opened in 1869 and connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. This made trade between Europe and Asia much easier, shortening the trip by nearly 5,000 miles.
And whoever controlled the waterways controlled the trade. Great Britain was very keen on keeping peace along the Nile at all costs. By the way, this is Christopher Townsall, associate professor of history at the University of Washington. Because if rebellion could happen in Sudan, what's stopping it from it happening potentially to the north?
in Egypt and disrupting again this vital trade lifeline through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. That concern still exists to this day. The result is at length achieved and the flags of England and Egypt wave unchallenged over the valley of the Nile.
In the battle along the Nile that Churchill both wrote about and participated in, the Mahdist army was decimated. Their swords were no match for Great Britain's machine guns. And after that, Sudan returned under the control of the British crown in Egypt. Khartoum became its capital, and Churchill's book, The River War, was published in 1899. As for the Mahdi, his legacy would live on long after he was gone.
For a century, from the 1880s until the 1980s, that name, al-Mahdi, was Sudanese political gold. Then in the 1980s, the Mahdi's great-grandson, Sadiq al-Mahdi, who was serving as prime minister of Sudan, was basically kicked out by Omar al-Bashir. Omar al-Bashir would become one of Sudan's most notorious dictators.
Omar al-Bashir is born during the colonial period in a small town in northern Sudan. In 1956, when he was 12 years old, the colonial period finally came to an end. A wave of decolonization was sweeping through the continent and new nations were being formed. Sudan was one of them.
Bashir joined this new nation's army as a young man. So he sees both action within Sudan and outside of Sudan. And while he was all forging a reputation for himself in the army, Sudan saw a number of military strongmen get overthrown. Sudan's history is extremely cyclical. It's almost depressingly cyclical.
It was a cycle of revolutions, coups, and wars. And there were a lot of them. On average, there was a coup attempt every five years.
But here's where things got tricky. Civilians seeking a more democratic system led the revolutions, but the military led the coups. That's because a precedent was set after the very first time civilians took to the streets in 1958. The fighting between the sort of civilian groups and political groups was very difficult to resolve, and so they asked the military to step in. Again, hudud khair. And really, I think that set the tone for a lot of the military's
sort of sense that it must engage, that it must take over power. These revolutions tended to bubble up around the same core issues: poverty, food scarcity, and regional ethnic and religious tensions.
Sudan is a huge country, which means that hundreds of miles outside of Khartoum, going in either direction, you had people who were technically Sudanese by nationality, but were on the margins of political and economic power. The north, where Khartoum is, had pretty much all the political and economic power.
When the British ruled over the region, they invested in developing the north but pretty much nowhere else in Sudan. The north is where the Nile River converges, where most of the trade was happening, and northern elites, who were mainly Arab and Muslim, were given all the positions in the colonial government. This setup basically continued even after independence, a political divide that many people also saw as a cultural one.
You had a lot of South Sudanese who felt like they were excluded from national power because southern Sudan had a far deeper history with Christian missionaries, right? That feeling of marginalization in the South would haunt Sudan for years to come.
The lack of attention paid to the South has festered, breaking out into an earlier rebellion and now a full-scale civil war. An estimated 2 million people face starvation in the southern Sudan war zone. By the late 1980s, the North and South were deadlocked in a violent civil war. And the political turmoil of a cycle of coups hadn't led to many positive changes for the people of Sudan.
Most were still very poor. And now, the country was facing a terrible famine. Western relief officials estimate that civil war and famine have killed more than a quarter of a million people in Sudan this year. Food is here used as a weapon. As for Ahmed al-Bashir...
He begins to align himself with the National Islamic Front, a political organization and the National Islamic Front's chief ideological figure, Hassan al-Tarabi. Tarabi had a very fundamentalist
kind of Islamic vision of what Sudan should be. A vision of embedding a strict interpretation of Sharia law into Sudan's diverse society and institutions. And the National Islamic Front gets into a conflict with then Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, who was in the process of trying to work with the South Sudanese to create a form of secular democracy
government within Sudan. That proposal ran counter to everything Tarabi had been pushing for. So Tarabi decided Sadiq and Mahdi needed to go. And he chose Omar al-Bashir to be his replacement. A coup overnight in Sudan. The government led by Sadiq al-Mahdi was overthrown by military... On June the 30th, 1989, Omar al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front took over power.
Some have said that Tarabi was the brains behind the coup and Bashir was the muscle. At a rally soon after, Bashir showed up with a Quran in one hand and an AK-47 in the other, vowing to, quote, "purge the enemies of the people and of the armed forces." Omar al-Bashir and the Islamists around him had what they called a civilizational project.
a civilizational project with the goal of making the North's Arab and Muslim identity the identity of all of Sudan.
A decision Bashir knew would fan the flames of resistance outside Khartoum. And he realized very quickly that he had to coup-proof his regime. To coup-proof his regime, he immediately got rid of secular officials and politicians who'd served in Sadiq al-Mahdi's government. He effectively created a system where the Sudanese armed forces became very top-heavy. Only the loyalists made it to the top and were rewarded. And
And he and Turabi invited people into the country who shared their vision, including Osama bin Laden.
Around the same time Bashir took power, Osama bin Laden had founded al-Qaeda. The United States has informed Sudan that it's been added to Washington's list of countries that sponsored terrorism. The designation makes Sudan ineligible for almost all U.S. aid. Sudan was under U.S. sanctions from 1993 onwards, partially because of Omar al-Bashir's government's hosting of Osama bin Laden.
And then later on in 1997, other sanctions were put in place by the U.S. With a deteriorating economy, an already poor Sudan became even poorer. And as life got harder for the average person, frustration grew with Bashir's civilization project. The cycle of coups seemed on the verge of repeating. To stay in power, Bashir would need to find some way to weather the storm. Coming up, Bashir finds a new protector.
This is Philip from Woodbury, Minnesota, and you're listening to True Line from NPR. At this point in the show, we want to take a moment and give you a big update in the world of NPR+. We're excited to announce that the full NPR Plus bundle option is now available to everyone in the United States.
NPR Plus includes more than 20 sponsor-free podcasts, with more on the way. Some shows have bonus episodes, others have archive access or early access, and the bundle also includes extra perks, like exclusive shows and discounts for the NPR Shop and NPR Wine Club.
The NPR Plus bundle is a better deal by design. You get all of the perks for one recurring donation of $8 a month or $96 a year. And more of your donation goes directly to support public media. So if you want to make a bigger impact and get more in return, visit plus.npr.org and select the bundle option today. That's plus.npr.org. And thank you to everyone who's already signed up.
Now, back to the show.
This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Sony Pictures Classics, presenting Kneecap, the riotous and mostly true story of three friends who start a rap group that creates a movement. In this fiercely original comedy that, according to the rap, obliterates the musical biopic, the group Kneecap star as themselves alongside Michael Fassbender, laying down a global rallying cry for the defense of native cultures and getting into plenty of trouble along the way. Kneecap is now playing only in theaters.
Support for NPR and the following message come from the Wallace Foundation, working to develop and share practices that can improve learning and enrichment for young people and the vitality of the arts for everyone. Ideas and information at wallacefoundation.org. Part 2. The Oil Curse A homesick sparrow perches on the heart's window. With longing eyes, it cranes out to glance at the houses, at the distant skies.
waiting for a cheerful morning with promises laden to land like a turban on the shoulder of the homeland. With each cool in a dark abyss we plunge. The heavy-footed junta besiege our songs. They agitate our ink-pot, confiscate its internal peace. They poison the cheerful spring and place their muzzles on everything.
What a pleasant dream they disfigure in the eyes of each mother, but they can't manage to silence us. Never. These are the words of Mahjoub Sharif, known to many in Sudan as the people's poet. Since Sudan's independence in 1956, he witnessed the hope of each revolution fade with each passing coup. And time after time, he took up the pen to express his frustrations.
The jail cell became his second home, a consequence of his vocal dissent. When Omar al-Bashir came to power, Sharif quickly landed himself back in prison. He wrote this poem of the sparrow longing for a brighter day. It seemed like maybe another revolution was on the horizon in the country. Like maybe the days of Bashir's rule were numbered. But then, Bashir hit the jackpot.
Oil, central asset of the Sudanese economy, north and south. So the oil started to flow in, in 1999. This is Ibrahim Al-Badawi. He's the managing director of the Economic Research Forum based in Cairo. The oil era from 2000 to 2011 changed the economy of Sudan very profoundly.
Oil had actually been discovered in Sudan decades earlier, but until the turn of the century, no one had been able to figure out how to get to it because of the seemingly unending war raging between the north and south of Sudan.
Most of the oil was actually at the border between north and south. Chevron, an American company, initially attempted to get the oil in the 1970s, but eventually suspended drilling after several of their workers were killed by southern separatist rebels. They pulled out entirely in the 1990s after the change in Sudan's leadership. Omar al-Bashir regime came to power.
In secret raids, whole villages have been burned, many left dead. Survivors claim these attacks are fueled by a modern-day gold rush in Sudan. They say the government is pursuing a bloody campaign to clear people from the oil fields. They were able actually to open discussions with the smaller companies in Malaysia and China. Companies that managed to unearth millions and millions of barrels of oil.
And so, you know, Sudan went from being a very poor country coming out of the tail end of one of the biggest famines the continent had seen in decades and the country under U.S. sanctions to a country of obscene wealth in the early 2000s.
It was an exciting time. The economy was booming, and Sudanese people who had left the country behind looking for opportunities elsewhere began to return home. It was exciting for Bashir too, because now he had the answer to his problem. He could pump money into his security apparatus and protect himself from any coups. And that's exactly what he did. Like, a lot of money.
Consistently, the national budget of Sudan would have 70 to 80 percent of state revenues going towards the security sector. It became a source for refueling institutionalized corruption. Wealth that really was not in any way, shape or form distributed equally or to those who need it most in what is known as Sudan's periphery regions. And so it became like an oil curse.
If we travel to Darfur in the early 2000s, a region to the very west, as large as the country of France, you have a land that was on the margins of economic power.
And so while they are struggling for basic sustenance, they are aware that in cartoon, you have people getting very rich. You see skyscrapers coming up in cartoon. Darfur was not seeing that. Some people in Darfur began to ask why. Unrest grew.
And that presented an opportunity for Bashir's former mentor, Hassan al-Turabi, who was quickly becoming one of his main political adversaries. Just around the time of the oil boom in Sudan, Bashir and Turabi had a difference of opinion and they parted ways.
That difference of opinion basically came down to this: Tarabi was alienating their Arab allies, inviting Sunni extremist groups into the country, and strategizing against the interests of rulers in the region. Bashir was losing patience with Tarabi's power plays. And when the oil money started flowing in, Bashir's North Star shifted. He was down to do business as long as it ensured his power.
So in 1999, Tarabi was cast out of government and thrown in prison. When he got out a couple years later, he was linked to rebellions in Darfur, an impoverished region on Sudan's western periphery with a large Arab Muslim presence and a strong tribal militia culture. There, he begins to incite people to rise up against Bashir.
2002 and 2003, the beginnings of the armed resistance in Darfur against Bashir's rule. To help put down the rebellion in Darfur, Bashir enlists two key men. You'll want to remember their names because they become really important to the story later on. The first was a top general in the Sudanese armed forces named Abd al-Fattah al-Burhan, or as he's often called, Burhan.
The other was an unexpected choice, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, or as most people know him, Hemeti. Hemeti was a camel raider. Hemeti was one of the leaders of an Arab militia group in Darfur called the Jenjawid. Jenjawid means devils on horseback. Devils on horseback. The first time Jenjawid came attack our village, they killed 16 people and burned the village completely.
and they forced children and women to leave the village. Burhan and Hameti were both put in charge of restoring order in Darfur by any means necessary, and the violence quickly reached horrific levels. They especially targeted people from non-Arab ethnic groups. Before long, the international community took notice. You might remember the Save Darfur fundraisers. We are charging al-Bashiri with three counts of
genocide, five of Kremlin's humanity and two of war crimes. It is for Bashir's crushing of the rebellion in Darfur in the early 2000s that he gets under the microscope of the International Criminal Court, right? Where he becomes the first incumbent head of state to be indicted for crimes against humanity.
This is the 21st century's first instance of genocide. An estimated 300,000 people are killed, entire towns destroyed, massive instances of sexual violence, millions of refugees. The International Criminal Court indictment casts Bashir as a pariah on the world stage.
But while it damaged Bashir's reputation and Sudan's negotiating power with other countries, it didn't spell the end of Bashir's rule. As Darfur received aid from international agencies, southern Sudan, which, remember, had been at war with the government in the north for decades, was gearing up for a historic vote to decide whether to secede and form its own nation. During the same time that a genocide had been taking place in Darfur,
International mediators, including the U.S., sought a resolution on the ongoing war with the South. In 2005, the civil war finally came to an end. And in January of 2011, the people of southern Sudan went to the polls to determine their future. Schoolchildren were singing at the parade ground in a mood of excitement and expectation.
This follows an overwhelming yes vote in January's referendum on independence. South Sudan becomes the world's newest nation in July of 2011. But here's the caveat. South Sudan sits on an ocean of oil. More than 75% of the oil is
And so the state of Sudan in the north
A sudden stop. Bashir recognized that he would need protection, not just from his enemies, but potentially from his allies too. But with money tight, he could no longer keep his security network as bloated as it had been. He would need a Praetorian guard to protect him.
A Praetorian guard. A personal bodyguard of sorts. Someone outside of the Sudanese military. Because remember, the military had been behind every other coup in the past. So he needed someone who worked in the shadows. Someone who had proven themselves already. So Bashir calls up that militia leader who helped him carry out a genocide in Darfur. Hemeti.
And in fact, he would call Hemeti, Hemaiti, which in Arabic means my protection. Suddenly, Hemeti found himself at the center of Sudan's web of power. And the militia he commanded, the Janjaweed, the so-called devils on horseback, were right there with him.
And Bashir's like, well, if I can basically subsume these Janjaweed from Darfur under my own purview, right, I can a protect myself from the Sudanese army, if ever the army, you know, wants to stage a coup. But it's also a kind of indirect way of keeping Darfur in his grip. Right.
But in return, Hemeti wanted the Janjaweed to become an official part of Bashir's government. And he wanted control over some of the gold mines in Darfur and other parts of the country. Bashir agreed. And the Janjaweed got a new name. He establishes it as the Rapid Support Forces in 2013.
The Rapid Support Forces, RSF, a paramilitary group that would work separately from the official Sudanese military, with its own power structure, its own trade networks, and its own leader, Hemeti. That really was one of the ways that Hemeti played the system and played Bashir effectively, vastly enriched himself and brought himself into the center. Of course, gold was their primary revenue maker.
Gold can be found all over Sudan, including Darfur. And although it has been mined in Sudan for centuries, it was now critical that they find and sell more of it, fast, to fill the economic void left behind by oil. It was also the thing keeping Hemeti and his RSF loyal to Bashir. It's obviously quite a Napoleonic ride. It's quite an astronomical feat.
But even then, with all those perks, Hemeti was keeping his options open. He quite clearly had political ambitions from the start. The economically struggling nation is emerging from decades of sanctions and isolation.
Opposition to Bashir was mounting in the ranks of the military and in the streets and villages of Sudan, where many people were struggling even to find bread to eat. Inflation is at over 300% and there is a shortage of basic goods. Coming up, after nearly 30 years, the cycle finally repeats itself. Sharia law! Sharia law!
This is David from Seattle, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Capella University. Capella's programs teach skills relevant to your career, so you can apply what you learn right away. See how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu.
This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify, the global commerce platform that helps you sell and show up exactly the way you want to. Customize your online store to your style. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash NPR.
This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Sony Pictures Classics, presenting Kneecap, the riotous and mostly true story of three friends who start a rap group that creates a movement. In this fiercely original comedy that, according to the rap, obliterates the musical biopic, the group Kneecap star as themselves alongside Michael Fassbender, laying down a global rallying cry for the defense of native cultures and getting into plenty of trouble along the way. Kneecap is now playing only in theaters.
The protests against Bashir started, unsurprisingly, in the peripheries. December 2018. The bread crisis sparked protests around the country when the government announced it planned to raise the price of a loaf from one Sudanese pound to three. A bunch of schoolchildren were protesting that their sandwiches at school were too expensive.
As they filed out of the cafeteria, they started to chant, no to hunger. They pounded on every classroom window they passed. And their ranks grew as they wound off the school campus and into the street. The government's response was swift and harsh. The government has been using live ammunition and tear gas to disperse the crowds. And very quickly that caught the hearts and minds of many, many people.
The protests spread throughout the country, and eventually it reached the capital, Khartoum. And at that point, there was no turning back. The protests themselves were full of singing and dancing, people creating art, others finding love. A mood of possibility was in the air. The revolution was a major surprise for all of us, but also a source of hope.
of pride that humbled my generation. We were really amazed about the courage and conviction of these rebellious youth. Demonstrators who've been met with live bullets and tear gas say they want President Omar al-Bashir's nearly 30-year reign to end. He says he's not going anywhere. The people have been patient for 30 years and we don't care. We will continue and we need a real government. At the beginning, things were very rosy.
And the army switched loyalty to the public, declared that it's actually going to support the revolution. Today, Sudan's military announced that al-Bashir had been arrested. Hamedi and General Burhan, as the kind of two most powerful military figures in the country, worked together to kick Bashir out.
He seized power in a military coup 30 years ago and today he was ousted by one. So effectively Bashir's primary protector, his Praetorian guard, had been the one to lead the coup against him. I'm so happy I can't express it. A new Sudan will be built. It's really a beautiful thing. Our lives are going to be changed. I think if April 11, 2019 could be
bottled up and sold throughout the world, it would be amazing. Everyone will now work for a better, united Sudan. So, in a word, hope. I arrived just one day earlier, before the massacre.
Two months after the triumphant moment of Bashir's fall, Ibrahim al-Badawi came to Khartoum. He was there to support protesters staging a sit-in outside the army's headquarters, demanding that Burhan and Hemeti cede power to a civilian-led government. There was heavy rains, so the person who was arranging for me to go called me to say, let us postpone it for tomorrow.
and tomorrow when that tragic event happened. A raid at dawn, where the protesters least expected it. We're being attacked by the rapid police forces and the police. It was really very devastating for all of us, especially for those of us who came from abroad in order to celebrate with this use. We have been shot right in front of the army and the army did nothing. There was a sense of
The Khartoum massacre in June 2019. Hameti's rapid support forces opened fire on civilian protesters, killing more than a hundred. Many more were beaten, raped, and violently detained. And the military, led by Burhan, watched it all happen, right on its doorstep.
This was the same military and the same RSF that had seemed so eager to support this democratic revolution a couple months earlier, to help the starving and impoverished and turn Bashir's 30-year-old rule over to the people. But now, Burhan and Hameti had turned on the Sudanese people. But then, shortly after, this triggered a massive outpouring of protests all over the country.
And so it became so difficult for the military junta to maintain their grip on power. And so eventually they were forced to negotiate with the leadership of the revolution. Ethiopia and the African Union stepped in to help Sudan set up a transitional government that would eventually hand off to a civilian elected administration, finally bringing true democracy to Sudan.
Both civilians and military officials were chosen to serve on the transition council. Burhan and Hamati each had a seat at the table. Ibrahim El-Badawi was part of the prime minister's cabinet as Sudan's new minister of finance and economic planning. Did you meet Hamati or El-Burhan? Oh yeah, of course, of course, because as a minister of finance...
We meet on a regular basis. Most of the time, I think we are in agreement about the importance of economic reforms and what have you. It helped that the U.S. and other Western powers lifted sanctions on the country. Opportunities were open to Sudan, big time. Debt relief, political openness, and so on. At first, that seemed to work for Burhan and Hemeti. But I do think, though, that they...
Reluctant partners who, in hindsight, he says, had never actually committed to the idea that the military would hand power back to civilians. Some Sudanese, they call it a creeping coup.
In 2021, with the country moving closer to the day when the military was supposed to hand control of the government off to civilians, Hemeti and Burhan decided their time had come. Sudan was moving toward democracy. But then today, the military arrested the transitional government's leaders and put the acting prime minister under house arrest. Burhan seized power. Hemeti was his number two in command. And as Sudan's prospects got worse...
Hemeti's only got better. During that time, you know, he was able to increase his holdings and his assets by bubbling up the seized assets of the Islamists, of the Bashir regime. And it was then that his ambitions started to overtake what he was given. Hemeti had enriched himself through gold mining in Darfur and other regions of the country. And on a parallel track, Burhan was amassing his own wealth and power using economic and military resources.
But even as Burhan and Hemeti appeared to be working together, the two men were on a collision course. Because there was one big thing they couldn't agree on. And this was the future role of the rapid support forces. The paramilitary force Hemeti still controlled. Whether the rapid support forces would be incorporated sooner or later into the army.
Burhan wanted it to be incorporated sooner, two years. Hemeti wanted it to be 10 years. It would obviously kind of protect him longer. Neither Burhan nor Hemeti was willing to budge. And that would put the country on a path to this tragedy. What happens in April 2023 is the beginning of the trauma and the hellscape.
In Sudan, the promise of democracy seems to have come apart. For nearly a week, two rival military groups have been fighting to control the country in the streets of Khartoum. By the time the war started on April 15th of 2023, it was sort of the death knell to an already deteriorating state. It's killed hundreds of civilians, trapped many more in a war zone, and closed well over half of the city's hospitals.
What we all around the world saw was street fighting in Khartoum itself. Planes on fire, jets flying over Khartoum. And then once the fighting broke out, it could never be stopped. Our experts all agreed that there are layers to this conflict. Layers that make it inaccurate, or at least incomplete, to refer to it as a civil war. The first layer? Power.
This is a war between the heirs of Bashir trying to inherit his power and resources. And they have been able to create alliances both domestically and in the international space that means that they are able to compete against each other in order to have absolute power in Sudan. Which brings us to the next layer, international allies who have an interest in Sudan's resources. Access to the Red Sea is a big one for the U.S. and China too.
And then there's gold. Sudan is Africa's third largest producer of the precious metal. And a lot of that gold is going to Russia. So as we know, Russia begins its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And after Russia's invasion, there are a bevy of sanctions levied against Russia, right?
More than 16,000 sanctions have been imposed on Russia since the war began. And Russia saw that coming. So it began to link its currency, the ruble, to gold. The idea was to shift the currency so the value of the ruble itself could become synonymous with that of gold. Thing is, that plan required a lot of gold. And that's where Sudan comes in. The Wagner Group has been documented to be responsible for
for basically securing the transfer of Sudanese gold to Russia in order to insulate it from the harmful effects of these Western sanctions. The Wagner Group, a state-funded private militia company in Russia, has been doing business with Hemeti and the RSF, who, remember, were giving control of gold mines in Darfur and other parts of Sudan.
And at the same time, the Russian government has been dealing with Burhan and the Sudanese army. Wait, so both sides are getting military equipment from Russia? Yes. Which sounds crazy, right? Russia has sort of figured out that there's actually very little incongruence in supporting both sides. Sudan has a multiple hundreds of miles long coast along the Red Sea. Where Russia has been trying to establish a naval base.
There's one more layer to this conflict, and it's the most tragic one. Khulood Kheir says both generals, Burhan and Hemeti, actually share a common enemy in this war, the people of Sudan, and the dream of democracy many have held for decades. It is a war against civilians. And so while they are fighting each other, they're also fighting the civilians of Sudan, who they recognize as the true change agents in the country.
And what's interesting about Sudan's history, that has such a long history of armed conflict, there's always been nonviolent action by a large proportion of different groups of Sudanese people that have brought down military dictatorships. The spirit of resistance that brought down Bashir in 2019, that feeling of hope that Christopher Townsall wishes we could have bottled up, that is the thing he says both Hemeti and Burhan are brutally attempting to erase.
They have blocked points of exit for civilians who want to leave. They have blocked points of entry for humanitarian aid. They are creating conditions where civilians will die. It is civilians who are making Sudan the world's largest humanitarian crisis.
I think one can acknowledge that Sudan's history of marginalization has led us to where we are in many ways. The story goes back to the late 1800s, the right of self-determination, to be sovereign, to be able to determine who and how you want to be in the world. I see this as yet another in a long wave of kind of struggles for democracy,
It's now the rainy season in Sudan. When the rain hits hot, sandy earth and vegetation, there is this really sort of aromatic smell. And it's so evocative of being in Sudan and just doesn't smell the same anywhere else when it rains. There's a sense of loss for a lot of people in Sudan. And that sense of grief is one that accompanies everything.
almost every Sydney's person I know.
I really hope that we're able to retain, after all of this, that thing that really binds us, I think, as a people. It's not our ethnicities, it's not our religion, it's not the fact that we eat the same food or share similar cultures. I think it's the fact that we all, so many of us, have a hope that Sudan will be better, and that's something that's very difficult to extinguish in people. ♪♪
That's it for this week's show. I'm Randab Dittfattah. I'm Ramteen Adab-Louie. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And... Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Nick Nevis. Sarah Wyman. Ying Tse. Kiana Pakliwan. Rachel Horowitz. Lina Muhammad. Irene Noguchi. And...
Thank you to Le'e Bilal and James Hyder for their voiceover work. And thanks to Al Jazeera and African News. Thanks also to Hannah Bava, Tara Neal, Johannes Durkee, Reese Walter, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. The episode was mixed by Gilly Moon.
Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...
We would love to hear from you. Send us a voicemail to 872-588-8805 and leave your name, where you're from, and say the line, you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. And tell us what you think of the show. We might even feature your voicemail in a future episode. That number, again, is 872-588-8805.
And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Capital One. With the Spark Cash Plus card, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase for your business. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus. Terms and conditions apply.
This message comes from NPR sponsor Betterment. Confusing eye contact with a mysterious stranger is never chill. But Betterment is the investing app that lets you be totally chill about your finances. Betterment.com. Investing involves risk. Performance is not guaranteed.
This message comes from NPR sponsor, Homes.com. The right agent can make or break your home search. That's why Homes.com provides an agent directory that details each agent's experience so you can find the right one and ultimately the right home. Homes.com. We've done your homework.