I feel like I have seen better analysis of this elsewhere. In a nutshell, it is not simply a civil war. Regional actors are involved as a proxy war: Saudi Arabia against the UAE, for example (who are also having a proxy war in Yemen). And Egypt against Ethiopia. The wikipedia article covers some of the complexity:
It’s not getting much attention because the UAE is allied with the US against Iran. If you listen to their mouthpieces on the news you’re going to hear nothing but glowing praise for the US attacks on Iran and statements about the Iranian campaign against civilian targets in the UAE. I don’t think the US government has much stomach to go against the UAE. And it’s a sad commentary on what the people who control the executive and the legislative are about that they speak about Sudan not at all.
I appreciate your feedback and understand your criticism. I'll be sure to add more detail in future analyses. My main goal was to draw attention to this matter.
I almost commented before realizing I hadn't RTFA and deleting my draft in shame.
Having read it, how are UAE and the Saudis opposing each other in this proxy war while being nearly joined at the hip in their actual neighborhood? Your article was informative and I learned from reading it but this whole dynamic still makes zero sense to me. They don't talk? Maybe it makes zero sense to anyone.
This war is not even known about by the general public. The question is why not? I believe the actors of the war nobody hates or loves outside of Africa. Nobody knows them. If it would be Americans, Chinese, Israelis, or Russians involved, the war would be in the news.
“The world” is very complicit in supporting Israel’s genocide. It also has effects like stripping the rights of citizens in countries whose governments support Israel. That’s why people care.
It isn't a genocide for that matter. I always was projection by their detractors and it is getting old really. We have attacks on synagogues all over the world and we had protests on the day after Israel got attacked.
I don't like the government of Israel either, but I think the loudest critics are simply poor morons and uneducated fools at this point. Worse enough that some leaders of certain countries give into this primitive populism.
Yes, it doesn't really quack at all and you cannot explain these points away. There would be peace in Gaza today if it didn't invade Israel to slaughter civilians.
This is heartbreaking. Is there a place where I can donate? Will it help in anyway?
Edit: Thank you for your responses. Ended up donating to Doctors without borders. Hope it reaches someone. I was going to say humans are really just wild animals but then i thought that would be a disrespect to wild animals.
Dont wanne be the devils advocate here, but reality is that even if you find something "looking legit" in terms of donation, especially in such regions the most money will be "lost" halfway, and even if some will reach the destination it is more than rare that it will even help to benefit those suffering, and not land in the pockets of a few "in power" or just used to buy more weapons to kill more people.....
Yes helping is a good thing, tho reality is its not as "easy" as transfer some money. Tho respecting your good intentions
That's overly cynical. Donating to local warlords / psuedogovernment actors can be sketchy. Donating to e.g., UNICEF is much more likely to produce good results for refugees, especially children and mothers.
I'm not aware of where to send money to stop wars - it's likely to have the opposite effect, sadly.
Even donations to organisations such as UNICEF often end up in the wrong hands.
Lets go for the optimistic scenario in which UNICEF will only take a very small portion for the "processing" and really deliver lets say food and medical supplies to the region. Those warloard will simply come and take it away from those citizens and provide to their armies. Theres nothing those citizens can do against it.
Do i wish it would be different? Absolutely. But sadly the world doesn't work as i would wish it to.
I'm not sure where you get your assumptions from, but UNICEF works in camps and outposts that people come to, often in safer areas to treat refugees and establish aid stations. They don't catapult money/food/water into warring nations and call it a wash.
UNICEF also works on a permissioned basis: They wait until they are asked, and so they often work in countries neighboring crisis centers, where it is much safer anyway. They are constantly negotiating to be "asked", yes, but this is through diplomatic ties. UNICEF works with refugees mostly, not in war zones. For famine/disease intervention, they are at ground zero, but again with permission.
And UNICEF's overhead is low - they are efficient, considering they sometimes have to establish, e.g., their own refueling station networks, cold storage logistics, flight controllers, etc. Often, powerful industrialists in the target nations provide significant help - or at least I know of one case of this.
I'm close to UNICEF, or was, so I got sneak peaks into some of the problems they deal with. I assure you, "processing" is not a revenue stream for them.
You're thinking of the breast cancer scams. UNICEF is not a charity, they're a logistics organization with nation-state level resources. When Amazon can do it cheaper - they use Amazon. No organization is perfect, but this one is good.
I was approached on the street by a girl working for a marketing company, wanting me to start a subscription for $20 a month to Save the Children which I think is a pretty well regarded charity. We hit it off and met up later and I asked her about the job. For each person who signs up, she would get about $60. So that's the first three months of my subscription in her pocket. Furthermore, her employer would fly them around the country, staying about 2 weeks in a city, living in hotels and expenses paid. This girl did not even have a home, she lived permanently in hotels paid for by her employer. And of course the employer needs some profit on top, so I'd estimate that's at least like 3-6 more months of my subscription going towards her employer/expenses.
I wonder how many more of these private companies exist to just siphon off these donation streams? The charity itself may be efficient, but how many private companies provide goods and services to them for a healthy profit?
1) group charities as "charities" when large "nonprofit / ngo" term is more suitable.
2) assume that wasteful _free_ money to a charity makes the charity less good. If a third party takes 90% of the money they raise and gives 10% to the charity, then that's free money for the charity. It's deceptive, and they are cutting a huge profit on the back of the good work the charity does, but that does not mean they are complicit, necessarily. The charity would have to sue that third party company to shut them down, and for what? Do reduce their own project budgets and also lose the money?
The third party is working with the charity(or ngo or whatever). The charity is essentially paying them for marketing, using a huge chunk of the money people think they're giving to charity. The charity is complicit in this deception, and the third party presents themselves as volunteers "Hello, I'm with Save the Children, we do bla bla bla look at this picture of a starving child would you be interested in helping us by giving money every month to give this starving child a better life?"
They don't tell you they're paid to be there. They don't tell you the first year of payments goes directly to a private company.
I looked up Save the Children in some charity index thing a while back and it was listed as something like 94% of the money they receive goes to the stated cause which I doubt includes these marketing costs. You could say this is still worth it because they increase the amount of money the charity receives even if a lot of it goes to the company. But it doesn't seem right to me, not when they deceive people this way.
The charities sign a contract with the third parties unfortunately - eg they have permission from the charity.
Here in Europe oxfam for example uses some of these private companies and they get the first year of donations and from the 2nd year it goes to oxfam itself.
Apparently the average person cancels donations after 2,5 years so for a zero marketing budget (for oxfam) they make 1.5 year x your donation.
When I first found out I was disgusted and some majors in countries in Europe have tried to ban such "paid charity workers"... (They tend to operate near train stations etc.
I'm a member of an organization that collects money for Sudanese soup kitchens and hospitals in affected areas (https://sound-of-sudan.org/) , and I know a few other organizations that indirectly support such campaigns (e.g. https://sudfa-media.com/). Being personally acquainted with people, who spend much of their time, energy and last-but-not-least their own money on such activities, your claim makes me slightly angry.
> such regions the most money will be "lost" halfway
Please elaborate and don't lump all "regions" in with each other. My personal impression is that the combination of the community kitchen movement (which has its roots in the failed Sudanese revolution) and money transfers to mobile phones makes it relatively transparent where one's money goes and what it achieves. I'm not in the US, but I have no doubt that money donated to an organization like the Sudanese American Medical Association (https://sama-sd.org/about-us/finances/) largely reaches the people that need it.
> Those warloard will simply come and take it away from those citizens and provide to their armies.
I can assure you none of use would send money to hospitals or community kitchens, if this was likely to happen. What makes you think so?
So, let me first of all clear up one thing. I did not, and never intended to, degrade anyone who actually tries to make a difference. If you read my original comment, you can see that I clearly state that I respect the wish to help. I also state that I wish the world were a "better" place where things work the way we would like them to—but reality has too often proven otherwise. Also, while I will try to fully address your points, the totality of this problem is too complex and has too many factors to incorporate every variable; therefore, at some point, we have to refer to "grouping." I think you will understand what I mean by that.
When I referred to "such regions," I was personally referring to a combination of factors: infrastructure, supply chain consistency, reliability, and the general political situation. In this case, I would argue that poor infrastructure impacts transport and storage control when it comes to shipments. Supply chain consistency (even with organizations like UNICEF) is often not guaranteed; local partners change frequently, often influenced by the local situation, making it nearly impossible in some regions to maintain trusted chains. Reliability suffers because of these factors—when it is hard to maintain trusted partners, the problem persists. As for the political situation, I don’t believe I need to elaborate further.
So, when I say "such regions," I mean areas that fit this basic pattern. While not a perfect comparison, a notable example of this is when food supplies sent for civilians are intercepted by local armed groups. The supplies might reach the target location, but they do not always feed the people they were intended for. As you work in this area, you likely know this is not an isolated occurrence.
I am also not from the US, and I cannot speak specifically to the Sudanese American Medical Association. If they are truly creating change, that is a great thing, and everyone is free to donate to them. You will not see me advocating against donating to them.
Regarding your question on why I think you would send aid even if diversion was likely: I don't believe you would willingly fund "warlords." Rather, I believe that in high-risk regions, the intent of the donor doesn't always control the reality on the ground. My skepticism isn't a critique of your virtue or your specific organization, but a reaction to a historical pattern of aid diversion in volatile zones. You do this work because you believe the collected money will reach its destination and will not be abused, and I respect that you follow your beliefs for the "greater good."
You seem to be a good person doing important work, and to do that, you need to believe in the efficacy of your mission.
How exactly would one go about doing that? Their major exports are fossil fuels, and chemicals derived from fossil fuels such as fertilizers. Few of those exports go to the USA.
It's a very simplistic and radical point of view that doesn't take into account the reality of the world we live in. It also doesn't take into account the intricacies of foreign politics and seems to assume that the gulf states are the only bad actors here. Finally "gulf states" is a catch-all so big that it's borderline funny. (What did Bahrain do?)
You know being against slavery used to be considered radical, right?
If it’s so simplistic how about you explain why it’s so important for Saudi Arabia to perpetuate a genocide in order to acquire gold.
And how about you explain how it’s okay to be economically linked to that type of behavior by proxy. I’m assuming you have some kind of expertise in this subject matter as opposed to just vomiting up whatever the neoliberal talking head “experts” tell you to believe.
My comments always get downvoted. HN has more duplicate accounts / bot activity than you would think and they’re primarily used for sentiment suppression. Specifically anti imperialist / anti capitalist sentiment.
Anti imperialist and anti capitalist sentiment gets downvoted here without a doubt. I think the idea that it's bots and not, say, a community that has self selected mostly into people who are pro imperialist and pro capitalist is perhaps an extraordinary claim.
For context: SAF is backed by Saudis/Qatar/Egypt/Iran/Russia and RSF is backed by UAE/Libya/Ethiopia/Chad/previously Wagner but Russia switched sides.
The US and others have pushed for negotiations but the competing interests by the gulf states, russia, and other african countries have complicated things.
You're right, I underweighted that. The Abraham Accords logic sits underneath the whole US posture toward the UAE and I should have named it directly. The piece treats it as part of the "economic interests" frame but that's too abstract.
Concretely: the US has tied its Gulf diplomacy, arms sales, and regional security architecture to the normalization framework, and the UAE is the pivot. Calling out UAE arms transfers to the RSF would mean fracturing that, which nobody in Washington wants to do, Biden administration included.
On the second point I'd be more cautious. There were signals after the Iran escalation that Abu Dhabi was getting nervous about regional entanglement, and some reporting suggested a partial cooling on RSF support. But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed, and the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet. The incentive structure to keep hedging via Hemedti is still intact as long as the RSF controls Darfur and the gold flows.
Fair catch on the Accords piece though, that's a gap.
"But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed"
Sure, as I understand it, it is mainly structured around flights and spread out over several logistics lines and already partly shadowed by turned-off transponders and so on. Disturbances at sea are unlikely to affect this.
However, there has already been squawks from the UAE about having to turn to the renminbi to clear oil sales and the like. China is not particularly fond of the RSF and has had good relations with the sudanese state since the fifties. Choking the Hormuz is likely to make this relation and stability in Sudan even more important to China.
More medium term the UAE now has incentive to go look for partners besides the US and Israel. At the moment they try not to, but this is highly likely to change, especially since money is pouring out eastwards from the emirates and to win it back they would need friends that seem stable in the long term, like they did until their remote and nearby allies started beating on one of their largest neighbours.
"the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet"
That "yet" does a rather hefty deadlift. The UAE has begged the US to shield them from the ICC but as I understand it, it did not result in a clear and reliable response. Perhaps they count on the US to do for them what they've done for Israel, but since the US put all their efforts into protecting Israel during this latest iranian response and left their other allies in the region to help themselves, I kind of doubt that this can last.
Russia has an interest in the gold, but I don't think they care whether it comes to them from the RSF or the state, and they are more dependent on China than the UAE. In a pinch I'd wager they would support stability as long as the gold keeps flowing and China is happy.
Edit: Personally I believe the US to be so deficient in short-term memory that they can't manage the relations to other West Asia states than Israel with any form for strategic reliability. They might promise the UAE a dollar swap line, do a press conference about it, and then forget to actually open one, or give it to them and then a few weeks later pull the plug on it because budget reasons or whatever.
Your comment is heavily downvoted because, especially the first sentence, seems AI generated. Was this comment AI generated? HN is for human discussions
Is anyone stopping any of the genocides around the world? Governments and citizenry are engaged in many attempts to wholly eradicate cultures and minorities. Sometimes fast, like Israel attempting to eradicate Palestinians. Sometimes they are slow, like the barriers put into place against indigenous communities after generations of genocide against them.
It's not new either. Sudan, Uyghers, Rohingya, Yazidi, Armenians, Hutus, Tutsi, Bengalis, Cambodians. The world has stood by and not intervened in many of these. Heck, Palantir just posted that they believe some cultures should be eliminated in the United States.
"The world" cares about some more than others. That's why the plight of the Palestinians is daily on the news, while that of the Yazidis or Druze is not.
Maybe read better news? I've been hearing about the Yazidi through reporting on the YPJ/YPG since circa 2015.
But I think theres multiple factors happening. One is scale. Millions of Palestinians are currently experiencing displacement, bombings, and settler colonialism.
Thats a large group of people. Multiple times the size of the Yazidi or Druze populations.
There's also the scale of the conflict and the weapons deployed. Israel deployed somewhere around 80,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza. Thats more explosives than were deployed in World War 2. Add in evidence of white phosphorus being deployed, and the scale of the devastation is newsworthy.
And I think access to communication is different, people care about what they can see. Footage of Gaza is readily available and terrible to behold.
Finally, and I'm not pleased about this one, I think many in the west excuse behavior of some countries because they have racist ideas about those countries. Like, many Americans probably expect developing nations to have atrocities, but then look at Israel and go, "I thought this was supposed to be a model democracy! We aren't supposed to do genocide!" (Of course this idea is nonsense, developed countries have done genocide many many times, but I think it does drive news cycles.)
I had compassion for Ukrainians weaponized against me here on this site (you are racist, you only care about white people, etc). Many now days use/express compassion as a weapon/political tool.
And you will be held as responsible for exploiting the country if you do actually manage to end the conflict and bring about positive economic change.
People don't understand that it takes generations to train a populace to work in a functioning economy. Sudan would probably need 25 years of colonization before you had competent Sudanese to run all parts of a modern economy. You can't just go in, stop the fighting, and then walk away. People just revert to the same conditions that led to war in the first place. So you end up with 25 years of being held responsible (by the world and by the local population), for every single bump in the totally mangled war-torn road to recovery. No thanks.
Can you? When our economic system's only driver is "extracting wealth", can we actually develop a country without it? The extraction of wealth isn't some unfortunate byproduct, it's a central cog in the machine of what makes it operate. Money is invested for returns.
You two are using different definitions for "can". You are using it in the "is it probable or realistic to expect it" sense and the parent poster is using it in the "is it mechanically possible" sense.
I think it's possible to imagine a way in which a country could be delivered money and expertise to develop with no expectation of return on investment. (One needs only read conquest of bread to see I'm not alone in believing such a thing is mechanically possible.)
No, not really. Developing the country is effectively a service being performed, and a wildly expensive one at that. Never mind the high instability greatly increasing the risk of investment. And the ROI is likely decades in the future, during which time any tyrant can come to power and seize all your stuff for their state.
So if the people of Sudan wanted to buy "country rebuilding service", the only way they could finance the loan to pay for that would be by offering their resources to skilled foreign enterprises to convert to usable resources. Then run the risk numbers and you get a crazy interest rate, that will last decades.
If all goes well, Sudan gets a functioning society with a skilled workforce, the foreign players get a nice ROI and made whole for the service they performed, and everyone comes away happy.
The problem is, that places like this are so chronically unstable, and the people so in tune with living in unstable, that it is practically guaranteed to go sideways.
One of the underpinning core beliefs of anarchist theory is "wellbeing for all". Every human deserves the best conditions we can collectively give each other, and we should all be working not for our individual enrichment, but for the enrichment of us all.
Some people genuinely believe that helping others get bigger quality of life is more important than helping themselves get rich. It's not impossible to believe that such a community, if it grew large enough, would extend that belief to spaces like factories and workforces.
It's a great idea that never works. Never. Inevitably you end up with people who do the absolute bare minimum to qualify for "the communal take" and a small cadre of power players who carry many multiples of their weight. Eventually the strong players get sick of carrying, and the whole thing collapses.
You can have pockets of like minded individuals who understand the give and take, happy communes (which also seem to inevitably collapse, but I digress), however it is comically naive and foolish to think that it can scale to a societal default. Unless you start killing all the detractors and dead weights. Which is where it often goes...I'll stick with an economic democracy based system (people independently vote with their dollars for what they like/want).
It's hard to say if it never works if all you know is greed and incompetence
> Inevitably you end up with people who do the absolute bare minimum to qualify for "the communal take" and a small cadre of power players who carry many multiples of their weight. Eventually the strong players get sick of carrying, and the whole thing collapses.
What are you citing from? It seems like you're just describing our current model of society rather than the one you say you're criticizing
I've fed and housed people for decades, provided transportation, donated skills, and rehabilitated wild lands. The people who receive the benefits from that didn't do anything to get them. They simply needed them. If I have extra and you need some, you can have some. Simple as.
Most people want to contribute, pay it forward, or give in their own way. Almost no one wants to do nothing to give back. (Usually, the people who do are the people who have been stepped on their whole lives, and by receiving aid it buys them a chance to rest. Once they've rested, they tend to help out where they can.)
I guess I'm going to believe my decades of lived experience with mutual aid over some stranger telling me things I've observed sustaining themselves are impossible.
But you don't address the core problem which is "How do you handle the people faking (often even faking out themselves!) the need for selfish gain?" and "How do you handle the people who see others lying for gain, and they themselves convert from the helpers to the helped"?
Most people just sweep this under the rug, because it is an obvious and fatal flaw in the system. It's also ideologically uncomfortable that powerless people (have nots) can be just as shitty and morally awry as powerful people (haves).
The world shouldn't be a place devoid of charity and helping out those who need it. In fact it's critical to maximizing society for everyone. But building a system with those ideals being the center pillar is backwards, because it puts the rewards before the work. A side spoke of support? Sure. But the center framework? Doesn't work, and there are ample examples, because every kid votes to get cookies first with the promise of eating their veggies later.
It's really important to differentiate mutual aid from charity. They are very different.
Mutual aid is about building community and then sharing your excess with that community. My extra food is not going to random humans, but rather to people I know. Maybe not well, but we know each other. Charity goes out to strangers. You are giving something away, but not building community. Charity doesn't build resiliency, imo, the same way mutual aid does.
I eat the same food I'm serving alongside the people I'm feeding. This is precisely to build that community - I'm not just a faceless person, I'm someone they know.
And how do I cope with people taking more than their fair share? You accept inefficiency. I cannot tell you how many times I've watched someone take food, and immediately walk to the trash and throw it away. Feels bad, but I've got more to share, and because that's a member of my community and not a stranger I can ask them, "Hey, what's up, bud? Didn't like the food, or...?"
And when someone goes to take a huge pile of food, they often look around and realize, "Wait, all the other folks nearby need this food too. Maybe I'll just take a few, because I know who I'm leaving an empty table for."
But you know what? It's really pretty rare. I've seen it, usually when new people show up, or when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, but whats much more common is people looking at each other and going, "You got enough, brother? Can you share? Sure, let me grab one for you."
You are accurately describing difficulties with charity, imo, though others might disagree with me on that of that. Add community to it, and the calculus changes quite substantially.
The problem is that communities are grossly inefficient.
Look at what happened when big box stores came to local communities. "We are a community" goes out the window when walmart milk is 30% cheaper than Mom and Pop milk. Why? Because massive centralized operations are inherently more efficient, and they can leverage that efficiency to offer the lowest prices. And people on the whole will always, always, always, shop for the best deal.
Look, I'm someone who spends weeks every year in Vermont, which is the last place in the US that still has "community" focused living (if you have never been, it would be magical for you). No big box stores, no strip malls, no franchise chains, all local farms, local businesses.
But you know what the truth is? They are all dead broke with stagnant industry and a total dependence on outsiders bringing in money to keep their "community living" theme park alive.
Inefficient, probably, but remember that you are operating within a system where people need to shop for a deal. There are other systems one can consider. And don't think of community as a single local place, but rather multiple interlocking sets of people. I'll give an example.
One of my communities is farmers. Farmers get paid ~$7 for a bushel of grain (~50lbs). Those same grains can cost $5/lb at the grocery store. When I buy from the farmer, we've settled on a rate of $18/bushel, or <$0.50 per pound. I turn around and feed people for free with this. 50lbs of barley or wheat or whatever is an enormous amount of food, and $20 is a cost I can absorb every few months.
So, now two communities that I'm a part of benefit - the farmers earn more for their product, the hungry eat for free. The farmer community doesn't have to know the hungry community. And the only financial input is purchasing the grain for FAR less than retail, and without every middleman taking a cut.
Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread hypothesizes that if we gave the farmer everything they needed to farm and live comfortably, the farmer would give away the grain. If the grain was free, we'd have people make bread and feed others for free. (This part is at least partially true, because I know I do it, and I'm not the only one who does.)
People like making stuff. People like sharing.
I'm trying to find an in to a biodiesel community, to see if I cannot connect them as well, benefiting the farmer community and giving food and material to the biodiesel community. Haven't connected there yet.
Don't think of this as small town isolationism, but rather a distributed system of syndicates producing and sharing their excess with others who have a use for the excess. Makerspaces on a grand scale, with the resources of many, many people.
>everything they needed to farm and live comfortably
We discovered long ago that farmers in Brazil have much much lower standards for "live comfortably", because they don't have first world neighbors swimming in a first world life.
Most people aren't aware that Bernie (once again back at Vermont, heh) was/is (I'm sure he still is, but definitely hides it for obvious reasons) an ardent supporter of tariffs. Knee cap the Brazilian farmers so American farmers can charge more and "live comfortably".
Which is nice, but ultimately is just nationalistic hypocrisy. People are forced to pay more for food so that they can artificially hold up farmers in the US. That might feel good, but on a humanitarian level, it's crippling to Brazilian farmers who are just as human as American ones. Export the economic loss to poorer countries...how first world
Well, ok so we can erase the hypocrisy and flatten the global economic terrain. But then we are all living like the farmers in Brazil, an upgrade for many billions and a massive downgrade for maybe a billion.
Very noble, but good luck getting anyone in the first world to actually vote for that.
Yep. You described a state I'd like - lower quality of life for some, massive increase for nearly everyone else.
But you are also right, the people with power aren't ever going to vote for that.
So I focus on my scale. I'm not here to change the world, I'm not here to run a campaign to change the world. I help a few dozen people, I talk about it openly but don't judge others for disagreeing.
And over time, people sometimes decide to get involved in their communities. I stopped charging rent because I read about someone else stopping charging rent. N-count of 2, but maybe someone will read what I did and stop charging rent and we'll go to n-count 3.
Again, it seems like you're describing capitalism. We can only carry parasites for so long before people realize they contribute nothing to society. One must work to earn their bread! Most of us on this forum distinctly do not
They finance projects with terms that drive business to Chinese companies. The Congo gets a highway. A Chinese construction company makes a buck. The financiers make a buck. Business relationships are created and the people who get the highway use that highway to import Chinese goods.
That's how it's supposed to work, when it works. I'm sure it's gotten better with time.
The congo is basically the worst possible example you could have found for this—china notoriously doesn't invest in local infrastructure. There are literally hundreds of better examples across africa and south and central america and central asia and southeast asia.
Clearly they don't. They don't tend to occupy other countries, not outside of immediate territorial claims like Tibet (if you think that constitutes an "other" country)
Ok, I HAD to create an account to respond to this one.
Like 99.99% of this continent, Sudan was under colonial rule. And it lasted nearly sixty years if you only count the British one (The Ottomans had a sting earlier).
Now I do fancy myself anti-imperialist, but even I cannot deny that the Brits did all that. They established systems, trained generations of locals, and left a decent seed for a competent state and economy. But still, here we are!
One could argue that this “intervention” was itself a cause of this civil war. Stitching a country out of completely different -and perhaps even incompatible- racial and ethnic elements a great deal of which don’t even recognise any political borders, leave one dictated by an outsider, wasn’t exactly going to end any other way.
Personally, while I do believe the Brits share the blame, I don’t assign them much of it. This hellhole had been ruled by its people for 68 years now, during which we’ve repeated the same weak democracy-junta cycle three times (four if you count the last transitional gov). The ability to notice patterns is like entry-level human skill…
Are you under the impression that Sudan was not under British colonial rule for ~50-60 years? This completely wrecked their economy and political structures, with the British intentionally causing divides between ethnic groups in Sudan and Egypt.
And are you seriously claiming that this was a good thing? Is this some crazy new neo-conservative take about the West being the only block that can be "civilized"?
I don't think this was the British. (Not to apologize for them - they certainly made things worse, not better.) Sudan sits on a historical chattel slavery route that stretches back to Roman times. It's hallmarked by the Northern population raiding the south, along racial lines.
I'm not arguing saying the British are solely responsible (I'm not sure who is most responsible). But the point is that the parent's claim that colonization would solve political issues in Sudan is ridiculous.
Sudan was under British rule and Cyprus was under British rule at the same time. Outcome is vastly different. The Brits brought civilisation and made Cyprus what it is, enabling its current prosperity (only difference between Cyprus and Greece is that Cyprus was a British colony and Greece wasn't). Somehow it didn't happen in Sudan.
And no it's not because they handled locals differently. They didn't care about locals. Colonialism is about exploiting territory, not population - locals, for colonialists, just "happen to be there" and are usually an obstacle or annoyance rather than a resource to exploit.
Cyprus is an island. That changes a lot of the dynamics. Also Cyprus has the support of its big brother Greece, which the Greek majority Cypriots wanted to unite with. Sudan had no such partner, because the Egyptian rulers aligned themselves with the British.
I hope you can see that Greece is the key differentiating factor here. Any other argument is disingenuous. Not to mention the racist attitudes of the British empire, that saw Greek Cypriots as a "civilized" nation compared to Sudan.
"Support" of Greece - that was withdrawn when it was critically needed - resulted in the biggest disaster of our history, 1974 invasion. Greece only brought instability here and it was a much poorer and much more chaotic place to begin with, it couldn't do better even if it wished.
I'm not saying the Greece-Cyprus relationship is totally good in every way, but compare it to Egypt-Sudan. I hope you can see how the differences in geopolitics advantage Cyprus when compared to Sudan.
Let's say that all of the problems in Sudan are the fault of British colonialism. (I don't think that's completely correct but just for the sake of argument.) The British are gone and not coming back in any significant numbers. Now what? What is the solution?
A typical British colonial strategy was to ally with a minority ethnic group. The formerly downtrodden minority group now got to be the leaders, but, being the minority, they would stay dependent on the British, else the majority would rise up and kill them. In the post colonial world unfortunately that is what happened in a number of cases.
"25 years of colonization" is doing some pretty heavy lifting.
The reason why there are no competent Sudanese to run the country is specifically because colonizers went in and destroyed all of the home-grown institutions Sudan had and replaced them with ones locals didn't trust, but were more legible to the colonizers. This is why decolonization has been a failure in some countries: removing the boot doesn't help after you've smashed someone's face in.
The countries that did benefit from decolonization had a unique pattern to them: they all had lacking or inadequate institutions before they were colonized. But colonizers don't build infrastructure for free, and the people being colonized know that. Colonial infrastructure tends to only be good for the needs of the colonizers' resource extraction industries. That's what puts distrust into the heart of the people in those countries in the first place, and why the success stories are rare.
You are correct that some sort of political force needs to be put in place to serve as a functioning institution in Sudan. However, colonial powers are very bad at doing that, because it's easier and cheaper to just smash and grab.
This is just a lazy argument: polities build their infrastructure also based on resource extraction, but from that economic opportunities follow, so people and communities gather around them making infrastructure also useful for them. It's like saying roman roads were bad because built by the empire, when even after centuries it fell, they were used by the locals. The problem is that there was no know-how passage, not that said infrastructures exist, and if anything they are still useful to them.
I’m surprised you’re being so polite. The parent just called for colonization of a region that has been colonized by proxy for some time now. In fact current events are a direct result of said colonization.
> Colonizing only helps the colonizers, not the indigenous population.
I am not sure that this statement is completely true in all cases.
Take for example the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean. Romans tended to win their wars because they had superior organization - they could field more armies, and equip those armies, better than their adversaries, even if their adversaries had better commanders (eg Hannibal).
Once conquered by the Romans, the indigenous population got access to all the benefits of being part of Rome's 'empire' - access to what was then one of the largest trade network, the roads, the aqueducts, the Roman legal system...
I do believe, although, not being a professional historian I have the humility to admit my belief could be wrong, than overall being conquered by the Romans led to an overall increase in living standards for the local population.
Or consider the brutal conquest of what is now Mexico by the Spanish.
We rightly remember the conquistadors as being incredibly violent and oppressive, but if large swaths of the local population chose to join them in their assault on the Aztec empire, it may have been because the Aztecs were even more violent - indeed, if my understanding of Aztec culture is correct, the Aztec religion required a human sacrifice every day to ensure that the sun would rise.
Compared to that, arguably even the Spanish Inquisition is a step up.
Finally, consider that the practice of slavery in what is now Algeria ended only in 1830, when the French colonized it. Now you can accuse the French colonizers of being vicious brutes (and you'd have a lot of evidence to support that claim), but... at least they weren't enslaving anyone.
Of course, this last point makes a value judgement that basically boils down to "slavery is always bad", if you have a value system where "some things, including colonization/colonial/imperialist violence are worse than slavery, then you can safely discount it ^_^
What made the Israel-Palestine conflict profitable for influencers (initially on both sides, I’d guess mostly on the pro-Palestinian side now) before the Iran War that doesn’t apply to Sudan?
There are large groups of people have very strongly negative opinions about one side or the other in Israel-Palestine.
Only a tiny fraction of people in Europe or North America could point to Sudan on the map. And even fewer could explain the differences between the factions involved. There’s no simple good-guys-vs-bad-guys rhetoric that’s easy to join.
I mean, the RSF is very clearly the bad guys in this conflict. The reason there is no coverage is that there is widespread agreement on this point, and western govts aren't directly funding the bad guys as is the case with Israel.
How did you manage to make a civil war in sudan about a european conflict? Neither plays much role at all compared to the gulf states and eritrea/ethiopia.
America hands out military aid to Israel. Coupons that can be redeemed for weapons with American manufacturers. It’s a subsidy to Israel and to American military primes. This comes to billions each year.
That’s one government though. I can’t think of any other western government funding Israel in a similar way.
Germany, Great Britain, Finland, many other European partners.
They are purchasing military equipment from Israel, funding their development. Many European institutions also have investments in Israel. And arms used in the Palestinian genocide are being produced in European countries.
It's not just a commercial relationship, Israel is dependent on US subsidies and European trade to fund its war effort, and Europe has shown itself to be very slow at reacting to the genocide.
Effectively Europes stance is funding the genocide. Whether a lawyer would consider this funding is besides the point. I think there are very concrete ways to argue that what Europe does would constitute funding, but I don't particularly care about that semantic argument. The main point is that Europes actions support the genocide.
From moral perspective, the same entities (UAE, Qatar) who have done the most to raise the profile of the I/P conflict with funds and media campaigns are directly funding and sending weapons to the parties responsible for the genocide in Sudan.
Which has much clearer properties of "genocide" than the I/P war, and killed 3 times as many people in the same timeframe despite having far more primitive and less powerful weaponry involved.
>> In the first three days of the capture, at least 6,000 killings were documented. 4,400 inside the city. 1,600 more along escape routes. The UN writes explicitly that the actual death toll from the week-long offensive was “undoubtedly significantly higher”. The governor of Darfur spoke of 27,000 killed in the first three days alone. The Khartoum-based think tank Confluence Advisory estimated 100,000. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab assessed that of the 250,000 civilians remaining in the city, nearly all had been killed, died, been displaced, or were in hiding.
>> RSF fighters, according to survivor testimony, said things like “Is there anyone Zaghawa here? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all” and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur”. Men and boys under 50 were specifically targeted, killed or abducted. Women and girls of the Zaghawa and Fur communities were systematically raped, often in groups, sometimes for hours or days. Those perceived as Arab were often spared.”
> the same entities (UAE, Qatar) who have done the most to raise the profile of the I/P conflict with funds and media campaigns
Israel and its MSM media outlets in the west are the only people “raising the profile” of the colonization of Palestine. Every US politician promotes Israel to the point where they can hardly be said to represent American citizens. That is why people in the west stand against Zionism. It has nothing to do with Qatari boogeymen.
Where did influencers come from? They didn't perpetrate the indiscriminate slaughter of an entire people. They certainly didn't cause this war. And when has reporting on a genocide ever brought about its conclusion? maybe you could argue this about the bosnian genocide....?
On the flip side you've either been propagandized to find the slaughter of civilians acceptable ("they were warned!", "they sympathize anyway", etc, etc) or you're doing the propagandizing yourself. Maybe towards yourself, so that you can continue to believe that your defense of said genocide is the right thing.
I mean the share of civilians killed in the war (by Israel) is over 80 percent of the total casualties. That is worse than the rate in WW2. In Ukraine it's under 5%.
I deplore current Israeli policies, but Ukraine isn't disguising its war fighters as civilians like Hamas is, which is an important qualifier to your numbers.
But Russia is doing exactly that systematically for years now, disguising as civilians. I'm also pretty sure Hamas isn't disguising themselves as children, who make up the largest share of the civilian victims.
They do claim everyone under the age of 18 to be a "child", which I know is the UN definition, but is pretty absurd in this situation with Hamas fighters of 15, 16, and 17 years of age being very common.
Someone said that Russia has conducted its invasion in a way as to keep civilian casualties to only 5% of Ukrainian casualties. In evaluating that number, it is relevant that Russia's task is made easier by Ukraine's adherence to the widely accepted principle that a war fighter should wear the uniform of the side he is fighting for.
In contrast, for the purposes of this thread, it is irrelevant that "Russia is doing exactly that systematically for years now, disguising as civilians" (to quote you).
This isn't a contest to see how many negative things we can say about the Russians or the Israelis. Or at least that is not a coversation I would be interested in.
I think Israel's actions since Oct 2023 have been deplorable and disgusting. But that doesn't mean I am interested in no nuance at all in discussing how deplorable and disgusting.
I don't see how that's relevant, nor why such a distinction matters in such an asymmetric conflict where international law clearly allows for violent resistance to occupation.
Ok, so now you just actually called for genocide. And by that logic all US citizens that are not Native Americans are valid targets in another genocide. Of course, since the UK has been re-invaded many times, all UK citizens are now valid targets for genocide. The palestinian arabs were also invaders according to this logic, so also valid targets for your proposed genocide. Etc. etc. You're calling for genocide of everyone.
Palestinian muslim arabs are 20% of Israels population. Remind me how many percent of Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, are Jewish?
This is the worst genocide ever. They even have representation in Knesset. They serve in the IDF.
I can tell you are unable to approach this topic rationally.
No one made the claim this is the worse genocide ever. It does not need to rise to that bar to be a genocide. Your hyperbole is not a good faith effort to discuss the topic. And the whataboutism is a deflection. Genocide is bad everywhere it's occurring. Right now it's occurring in many places, one of which is within Israel/Palestine. If you believe it's also happening elsewhere, we should condemn those as well, not absolve the actions of Netanyahu.
> Your hyperbole is not a good faith effort to discuss the topic
I mean.. I think the same about your continued use of the word "genocide" in this war. Israel is fighting a war with human shields being explicitly used basically 100% of the time. Hamas fires missiles from inside refugee camps, and shooting AKs from behind children. Hamas is committing a war crime almost every time they attack at all.
They built a tunnel system that could house their entire civilian population, but if a civilian tried to take shelter Hamas shoots them. Civilian casualties was always the goal for Hamas, because the west is predictably fooled by it.
Israel has deployed more explosive munitions by tonnage on the Gaza Strip than were deployed in the entirety of world war 2. In an area smaller than Seattle, with four times the density of civilians and a huge proportion of children.
They've deployed white phosphorous. There are IDF soldiers on record saying they've shot children waiting in line for aid, because they drifted inches over the "do not step past this line" mark. Sde Teiman is a torture camp.
Hamas is evil, but you can fight evil without those things. I condemn Hamas, but "they did a war crime" is not a justification for total violence of any type as retribution.
And what about tolerance of settlers in the West Bank? The removal of journalists? The killing of aid workers? It's not just the Gaza Strip (though what's there is truly beyond the pale.)
I was wrong. Let me fix that. (Edit: I cannot edit it now.) I misread that statistic and I was incorrect. That said, 70,000 tonnes is 70 kilotonnes, not 0.7. You are correct, 70 kilotonnes is smaller than 3,000.
70 kilotonnes is roughly twice the tonnage of the nukes dropped on Japan, or roughly equal to the tonnage dropped by Germany on the UK (including during the Blitz and V2 rocket payloads).
Yea, makes sense doesn't it? Israel is fighting an almost completely subterranean enemy. Comparing tonnage to a war where the enemy was above ground is silly.
It does not apply. Many vocal Westerners don't find an enemy of their enemy (the USA way to capitalism or to imperialism or pick your -ism) in Sudan so there are no votes to gain, careers to foster, people to gather in protests. "The enemy of my enemy is not my friend but at least is the enemy of my enemy" effect is totally lacking. Who do you protest against? Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran? As a public figure said in my country about the protests for Gaza, "we protest against our government."
Israel’s genocide has nothing to do with “influencers” and everything to do with stealing land. The “profit” is Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and the whole of Palestine post-Balfour Agreement. Some blue check on Twitter does not register.
What are you even talking about. There was and still is much more money to be made on the pro-Israel side. Which media magnates have ever sided with Palestinians again? Virtually all the propaganda money goes to defending the actions of Israel in the Middle East.
And the thing that motivated so much grassroot support for Palestinians was the West's total material and moral support to the Zionist project, while the genocide in Sudan is much more indirectly related to the West.
> There was and still is much more money to be made on the pro-Israel side
Has anyone actually measured this? If I were to create two sock-puppet AI-content accounts and let them loose on social media, I'd guess I'd be monetising at a multiple with the pro-Palestinian one. It's just the more-mainstream position in today's media environment across the aisle.
I really don't want to dive in this rabbithole, but Israel and its allies are very present online and spend obscene amounts of money to buy influencers, politicians and media. The video of Netanyahou repeating "TikTok, TikTok, TikTok" to sponsored influencers in a seminar comes to mind. And now Ellison, a notorious Zionist, straight up bought the platform to align it with his ideas. There is nothing even remotely comparable happening on the other side.
Based on platform revenue though, certainly pro-Palestinian content must be generating more organic clicks and views, seeing how this conflict has become a 90-10 issue among liberals. But that's not where the lion share of profits are made. Certainly, if I was a morally bankrupt influencer/politician/journalist, I know which side I'd pick to maximize my income.
This reads like a bad parody of the Soviet "west = bad" trope. Big wide brush strokes, painting ALL Europeans as somehow enabling this when it was only a few players and likely no real European peoples made decisions beyond a few powerful people. Buffoonish thinking.
It is a colony of the west. The UK started it, a lot of Russians took over, and it is an island of Europeans in the middle east, displacing peoples that have been living there for thousands of years.
Which is made even more clear by the colonialist behaviour of the settlers.
> displacing peoples that have been living there for thousands of years
Islam hasn't even existed that long. And the Arab conquest of the area is after islam was founded. Jews on the other hand have been living there for thousands of years.
> Which is made even more clear by the colonialist behaviour of the settlers
As opposed to...? The colonialist behavior of the muslims in the area are much worse, they just don't have the military competence to pull off their goals. So yea, I don't think settler violence is reasonable obviously, and Israel does in fact prosecute them sometimes. Hamas though? They celebrate murder always.
After a few hundred years historical injustices move down the priority list. France isn't seeking reparations from Italy for the conquest of Gaul, for example.
> After a few hundred years historical injustices move down the priority list
I'm actually curious for you to expand on this.
It's broadly, I think, my view. And it's been a reason I've come to disregard pretty much all historical claims to land in the Middle East, focussing on the quality of life of the people alive today where they are over where they or their ancestors were at some arbitrary point in the past.
But that largely erupts from me drawing my line between the living and the dead. (International lawyers would draw it at the end of WWII.) How do you draw yours?
I'd phrase it as 99% of Westerners feeling that they have no interests at stake. Whether that's literal money, or physical resources (say, rare earth mines), or transportation routes (say, a route out of the Persian Gulf), or meaningful ties to a side in the war (either "I know them" or "they look like somebody I care about" feelings). Plus - talking about Sudan on social media looks like an opportunity to score zero cred, while slowly burning your own relevance.
Let's be honest. If someone did send in the troops to restore order, people would be screaming "How dare you invade a sovereign country" or "You're only doing this because you want oil" or "The President wants to make Sudan the 51st state" or "You're wasting money and soldiers' lives messing around in a place most of us can't even put on a map" or "You're just doing whatever the Jews tell you to do."
There are other countries and coalitions in the world that aren't the United States. Humanity fought and ended wars for thousands of years before the United States ever existed.
Most of the countries and coalitions you're alluding to have no functional militaries or actual interest in doing something about the war. They do strongly condemn.
It's really hard to cry victim about others misrepresenting Trump's motives for the Iran war as oil, oil, oil when the US did in fact launch a military attack on a country - within the last six months - where the subsequent negotiated agreement on oil rights was quite literally described by the White House press secretary as "the president’s control of Venezuela’s oil" [1] and just a few weeks later the president held a public, televised conference with Chevron and ExxonMobil executives in the White House where he pitched them on investing in the Venezuelan oil industry [2]
A. Our tactics would constitute an invasion
B. We would try to seize oil or other natural resources while we were there.
C. The president would literally say something like this on national television.
No one is saying the US should send troops to Sudan. But it has made the situation for civilians much much worse by gutting USAID, and it could flex its might to force diplomatic solutions to end the fighting, but it's not.
If Sudan had oil though, we'd probably have already see the US militarily involved.
Exactly this, the same "The Guardian" that routinely complains that any western/US military intervention in Africa is "western colonialism" is now begging for western/US military intervention.
Typical example:
> Colonialism in Africa is still alive and well
> Today’s waves of migration are a direct result of Britain’s disastrous intervention in the ousting and killing of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
> The current situation is down to the failure of western powers, particularly the US and British governments, who feel they’re the custodians of almighty power and believed could do as they wished in Africa without any blowback.
I do not know who it is "we", but Trump is certainly NOT trying to stop sending soldiers abroad. Instead, it is using them to attack Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, boats on the see cause killing is fun and to threaten Greenland. Iran is completely pointless and expensive war in particular. Also, pressuring Ukraine to give up more territory then Russia took is NOT "stopping to mess in other peoples affairs" either.
Also, what Vance is doing in Europe is not "stopping to mess in other peoples affairs" but instead "meddling into politics trying to make far right happen".
Trade war with Canada and numerous attempts to "punish" other countries for prosecuting corruption are also meddling.
The Europeans want us out of Europe. So maybe we should go. I think that seems mutually agreeable. Let them slaughter each other again and we can come stop it and pick up the pieces. Again.
Of course Ukraine is a US affair. Only look at who is benefiting when Europe stops getting cheap gas from Russia.
Also the tariffs that Trump imposed are just laughable and have no connection to reality. Do you honestly believe that the EU was imposing tariffs to the US to the tune of 39%?!
The EU bans US chicken and has a quota for US beef. We let you sell at a premium rather than ban you. Don’t act as if that’s somehow worse, but I think you could convince Trump that bans are better than tariffs if you like.
Russia/Ukraine is a Europe-internal matter. Soon we will be out of it and the Europeans can solve their own wars. Uncivilized people. You leave them alone for a few years and massive warfare. No doubt you’re prepping the concentration camps again and we’ll have to stop genocide again. But I guess you gotta let them do it first. It’s not our business.
Which international peacekeepers? They have to come from somewhere. How would they be armed? Would they have artillery and air support or small arms only? What would the rules of engagement be?
What a silly, low-effort comment. It's always sad to see that level of arrogant ignorance on HN.
There haven't been many examples of international peacekeepers imposing peace by force. In the few cases where peacekeeping missions sort of worked usually the warring parties already had some sort of truce or at least the major fighting had stopped. Where there was no peace to keep, the international peacekeepers have been ineffective. Sometimes they even ended up becoming victims themselves due to restrictive RoE and lack of firepower.
The reality is that only the USA and maybe France has the expeditionary military capability including tactical air power necessary to execute a mission like this. No other country is in a position to even try. And I wouldn't want to see American lives wasted trying to impose peace in Sudan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80...
EDIT: This is what I am thinking of: https://youtu.be/bpH37vGoRJc