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.