In Sudan, amid a growing humanitarian crisis caused by a year-long and ongoing war, neighbourhood organizations have stepped in as first responders, and to lead the call for peace.
In this episode of 'Don't Call Me Resilient', Nisrin Elamin, Assistant Professor of Anthropolgy and African Studies at the University of Toronto, paints a grim picture of life in Sudan today. She says the current war, which exploded on April 15, 2023, is devastating both rural and urban communities. Elamin also identifies small pockets of hope. In the absence of a properly functioning government and looming famine, grassroots groups are stepping in to help people survive.
Since last April, Sudanese people in both rural and urban areas have been caught in the middle of a violent conflict between two warring military regimes - the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
Human rights groups say the RSF and allied militias are responsible for large-scale massacres targeting specific ethnic groups in the capital Khartoum and the region of Darfur.
As a result of the war, more than 10 million people have been displaced from their homes, making Sudan home to the largest displacement of people in the world. A new report by a Dutch think tank says that if no changes occur on the ground, 2.5 million Sudanese people could die of famine by September.
Elamin explains how the current war is part of a long legacy of corrupt military rule and land dispossession that have plagued Sudan since its independence from British rule in 1956.
She also urges Canadians to pay attention to Canada's possible role in Sudan's war. "This is big business," she says. In fact, she says Canadians are likely complicit in most wars occurring in 2024. "We are complicit...through our pension funds, our university endowments, some of our personal investments. This is big business. I think a lot of people aren't paying attention to what's happening in Sudan because they feel like it's so far removed and it has nothing to do with them. But that is a lie. It does, and it might be closer than you think it is. "
Credits
Associate producer, Ateqah Khaki and freelance associate producer, Latifa Abdin are co-producers of this episode. Other team members include: Jennifer Moroz (consulting producer) and Krish Dineshkumar (sound designer).
THIS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT
PULL QUOTE
Nisrin Elamin: The message that I would want to send to Canadian listeners is that we are complicit, most likely, in all wars that are occurring in 2024, through our pension funds, our university endowments. Some of our personal investments. War and border violence, right?
This is big business. That is one thing to recognize because I think a lot of people aren't paying attention to what's happening in Sudan because they feel like it's so far removed it has nothing to do with them. But that is a lie. It does. And it might be closer than you think it is.
INTRO
Vinita Srivastava: The ongoing war in Sudan is one of the worst, if not the worst, humanitarian crisis today.
Since last April, Sudanese people, in both rural and urban areas, have been caught in the middle of a violent conflict between two warring military regimes. They are the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, and the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF. Human rights groups say the RSF and allied militias are responsible for large scale massacres, targeting specific ethnic groups.
In Khartoum and Darfur. And a new report by a Dutch think tank says that if no changes occur on the ground, 2. 5 million Sudanese people could die of famine by September. At the same time, over 9 million people have been displaced from their homes. Today's guest says these devastating circumstances are part of a long legacy of corrupt military rule and land dispossession that have plagued Sudan since its independence from British rule in 1956.
My guest is Nisrin Elamin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work looks at the connection between land, race, belonging, and empire making in Sudan. She's currently working on a book on farmers resistance in the central part of the country.
Nisrin says that along with the strife in Sudan, a new type of resistance has taken hold as well. That resistance grew out of the Arab Spring, as well as the grassroots uprising that toppled the regime of long time dictator Omar al Bashir in 2019. Nisrin is a member of the Canadian Sudanese diaspora with families still living in Sudan.
And she's here to help explain some of the main issues underway in Sudan today and also point to some ways the international community may be able to get involved.
INTERVIEW
Vinita Srivastava: Nisrin, thank you so much for joining us today.
Nisrin Elamin: Thank you so much for having me and for covering what is currently happening in Sudan.
Vinita Srivastava: Let's jump right into it. This past April was the one year mark of the war in Sudan, meaning that violence broke out in Sudan's capital last year. You were there with your daughter and your parents, visiting family in Khartoum, Sudan's capital.
Can you share a little bit about what happened to you then, and how you got out?
Nisrin Elamin: So last April 14th, we had just arrived in Sudan. The purpose of the trip was for me to do some research for my book. And to introduce my three year old to her Sudanese family. And it was the middle of Ramadan. So the night before, April 15th, we had this beautiful iftar dinner at my aunt's house and my daughter got to meet some of her grandmas and grandpas, my uncles and aunts and some of her cousins.
And we went to bed filled with love and having reconnected with our family for me after so many years. And then we woke up to gunshots and explosions and missiles being essentially dropped on us. We were sort of in the epicenter of the conflict. Essentially what happened on April 15th is that the military coup regime, which grabbed power in October of 2021, imploded essentially with two factions of the military coup regime, the rapid support forces on the one hand and the army on the other, vying for both economic and political control of the country.
And we'd seen tensions between these two groups that were essentially sharing power and who had orchestrated the coup together for several months,
Vinita Srivastava: Several months before April, you saw signs of this happening.
Nisrin Elamin: There had always been tensions from the very beginning when they assumed power, but nobody expected it to manifest itself this way.
Just a couple of days before we were walking along the Nile and we actually saw some RSF soldiers kind of patrolling the Nile and harassing some youth who were swimming during the kind of hot hours of Ramadan with their Kalashnikovs over their shoulders. And so there was definitely tension. And I remember talking to my father about how nervous they seemed.
For the most part, nobody expected Khartoum to become the epicenter of this fighting, in part because we've had many, many wars in Sudan that have killed millions of people. But the center of the country, the kind of center of power, the capital, has for the most part been spared the kind of intense violence that people in Sudan's so called peripheries like Darfur and now independent South Sudan, to the Nuba Mountains, eastern Sudan, other parts of the country that are marginalized have been experiencing for decades.
That's what was exceptional or different about this war. It's not the state violence itself, but rather where it's happening and that it's kind of expanded. And quickly, we also saw the supply chain kind of collapse. I remember the first couple days of the war, I was trying to get some food for my daughter.
And most of the neighborhood stores had completely run out of food. So very early on, there was a shortage of food and people were really relying on each other, including on the existing resistance committees, which we'll talk about later, to kind of source food, to help each other evacuate, to help each other keep safe, to even help each other, you know, charge phones and get water because immediately once the war started, water was cut, electricity was cut.
And for some people in Sudan, that hasn't actually been turned back on.
Vinita Srivastava: Electricity, internet, wifi, all of that, it's not available at the moment.
Nisrin Elamin: At the moment, no. I mean, since February, there's been a complete internet and as a result, phone blackout. I haven't been able to get in touch with many family members.
The exception is some people have access to Starlink, it's expensive. You have to usually purchase it from the RSF, but that's pretty much it. And that's key because one of the main ways the diaspora has been able to Is through the internet, through this banking app. And even in the beginning of the war, it was extremely expensive to actually evacuate, costing thousands of dollars to get on a bus to get to Cairo.
We didn't have that money at the time. And so we essentially just took public transportation, different kinds of buses. We had evacuated briefly to the South of Khartoum to my father's village. And from there we took multiple public buses to Akbara and from there took another bus to Port Sudan where we were evacuated along with thousands of other foreign nationals to Saudi Arabia by the Saudi Arabian governments on a ship.
I, I'm a newly naturalized U. S. citizen. My daughter was born in the U. S., so she has a U. S. passport, but my parents do not. And it took a lot of negotiation for me to actually get them out. And many of my relatives who tried to get out in the same way were denied that privilege.
So, it's Sudanese people, including my own family, to leave the country, even though Sudan borders seven countries. The borders have only tightened. People have resorted to paying smugglers to get in. Because the visa processing is taking months, and there's no water, there's no humanitarian aid.
Vinita Srivastava: International humanitarian aid also left at that time.
Nisrin Elamin: Exactly. The public bus we were on trailed a UN convoy of mostly diplomats and international aid workers that evacuated on the same ship that we were on, and on ships before and after us. And one of the things that was really striking to me was that these ships were arriving to evacuate foreign nationals.
And yet none of them had food or medicine. That is really when the sort of international aid community should have been activated, right? Their aid networks should have been immediately shipping in food and medicines. And that didn't really start happening until months later. As they evacuated, I actually thought to myself, how are these people going to get back in?
The military coup regime has imploded and is fighting itself. There are some international aid agencies. that are operating like Médecins Sans Frontières and the Norwegian Refugee Council. But they're actually few and far between. It's not nearly the robust kind of international aid response that you might expect given the humanitarian catastrophe that you outlined in the beginning.
Vinita Srivastava: I'm sorry that you went through that and I'm sorry that you had to deal with that with your parents and your daughter.
Nisrin Elamin: I would say, I mean, it's nothing in comparison to what the rest of my family has been going through since last April. The majority of my family remains in Sudan. We're currently trying to evacuate my 98 year old aunt.
She has asthma and needs medication. And there's an acute food shortage, and we can't communicate with her, so we've been having trouble getting her out. My story is actually not very representative of what Sudanese, those holding Sudanese passports, I've had to deal with since April, whether they're still in the country or have been able to leave to Egypt or Uganda or elsewhere.
Vinita Srivastava: You painted a little bit of a picture. You said the phone lines are down, there's no internet unless you have a Starlink. What are some of the other things that everyday people are having to deal with right now?
Nisrin Elamin: People in my own family and community have been displaced once, twice, three, four times. We've had to move from one place to the other.
And it's actually quite incredible to hear that strangers have taken them in at each juncture. Either that or emergency response rooms, which again we'll talk about a little bit later, have converted defunct schools into shelters to house people. But just to kind of give you a bit of a sense, I mean, I know numbers don't tell the full story, but as you mentioned, there are now 45 million Sudanese who are caught up in this senseless war.
25 million of them are at the brink of starvation in a country that not only could easily feed itself, it has fed itself and has been the breadbasket of the region. And so there's been actually a deliberate attack on also the agricultural infrastructure, particularly in the area that my family's from in the Jazeera, where the rapid support forces have attacked farming infrastructure and prevented people from farming.
People aren't able to feed themselves in the same way that they would have previously been able to. We've also had 19 million children that are out of school, all the universities and schools have shut down. People haven't earned a living for the most part since April 15th, so they're entirely reliant on mutual aid, each other and family members in the diaspora.
But that means that there's a bit of a class dimension to this war in the sense that those people who have relatives outside of the country are more able to manage some of the hardships than others.
Vinita Srivastava: I know you're talking about how numbers don't tell a story because every time you're talking about this, I think about our own lives, you know, a year without working or groceries, not having enough food.
These are small dramas, but they become really big. You also talk about these pockets of hope. People are helping each other along the way. All of these things are happening. And I definitely want to get to that idea of how civil society has responded to that. Just before we get to that, I also want to Take a really large step back for anybody who's entering into this conversation of Sudan who may not really understand what's happening.
Maybe let's just break it down a little bit if you could. Who are the major players and what are they fighting about?
Nisrin Elamin: Let me just start briefly with a historical note, just so that people get that context as well. Really, it's the 19th century that best explains maybe how we got here today.
Vinita Srivastava: You say 19th century because you're talking about colonialism.
The current situation is best defined by What the colonialists left behind.
Nisrin Elamin: Yes, yes, exactly. If we were going to start at independence, which is 1956, we were under Anglo Egyptian rule. And Britain's parting gift to Sudan at independence was an economy that was dependent on the extraction of cash crops, like cotton and a kind of political system that really relied on the exploitation of farmers to finance this kind of export oriented economy. And this political system was occupied by elites from the north and center, primarily sort of Arab identified and Nubian elites, who inherited this export oriented economy and developed it into a war economy that would allow them to continue extracting profits from the agricultural sector in order to fund It's repressive campaigns against any form of grievances and resistance against the state.
So, South Sudan, It was actually governed separately during colonialism and then subsumed as a quasi internal colony into the state of Sudan with northern and central elites at its helm. And so immediately, southern Sudanese leaders began demanding political representation, economic development, and other kinds of legitimate demands from the government.
And instead of the state responding. They brutally repressed these demands, and that sparked the first Sudanese civil war, even before Sudan officially became independent. And it eventually gave rise to the Southern People's Liberation Movement, an army that kind of fought in resistance to the state's brutal repression.
This anecdote that I was going to mention is that these 300 striking farmers, they were killed in 1956 because they went on strike. to protest to demand a higher share of profits as cotton prices were plummeting. And so instead of the government negotiating with them, they killed and kind of suffocated these farmers in a detention cell.
In a place just south of the capital, the Sudanese state repressed them because they were threatening the kind of capitalist labor relations that were allowing the Sudanese state to continue extracting profits and to repress any type of resistance against them. It's important to understand that history here is not only context, but it's also the framework for understanding the long history of state violence against particularly marginalized non Arab communities in Sudan.
Certainly under the al Bashir regime, but even before then, especially towards marginalized groups who had similar demands because they were not represented in governments.
Vinita Srivastava: You talk about marginalized groups and also you're saying non Arab, and we're talking about race and identity. How does identity factor into this when we're talking about a very diverse country?
Nisrin Elamin: Right, yes, Sudan is a, an incredibly diverse, multilingual, multiracial, multi ethnic country. And what happened from independence to the present is that we've had this kind of monocultural, mono religious, ethno nationalist project imposed on an incredibly diverse country by state elites. And that has manifested itself in very violent ways, as we saw in Darfur beginning in 2003.
Where instead of the government responding to legitimate grievances around the lack of economic development and demands around political representation, they instead fueled a war between Arab identified nomadic herders and sedentary black non Arab communities, where they armed the herding communities against the farming communities, and that sparked a genocide.
Vinita Srivastava: That's like a two, the 2003 genocide. Yes. Genocide.
Nisrin Elamin: Exactly. It started in 2003. And it really never ended. I mean, the violence went through various phases, it displaced half the population of Darfur, but it never really ended. And even during this war, as brutal and violent as the war has been in the center of the country where I experienced this war, it has been even more brutal and more targeted in Darfur, where we've seen a kind of continuation of the ethnic cleansing campaigns and genocidal violence that we saw at the height of the genocide 2003.
Vinita Srivastava: That's the west of the country.
Nisrin Elamin: Yes, so Darfur is western Sudan. It's about the size of Texas. It has millions of inhabitants. I think what a lot of people don't know is that there are mining companies, including some registered here in Canada, that are implicated in the genocide in Darfur.
It's not clear how many people have been killed, but there's hundreds and thousands are said to have been murdered. So I ultimately see the, the April 15th war that started last year as in some ways a long war coming to Khartoum, because the roots of this violence were never really dealt with. There was no accountability for the war crimes that were committed during these long wars, which kind of brings me to the revolution in December of 2018, which in some ways was challenging.
This long history of state violence and the fact that there had been no accountability to deal with the root causes of the violence that we've been talking about.
Vinita Srivastava: Before 2018, there was 20 years of, you know, iron fisted rule that was kind of thrown over.
Nisrin Elamin: In December of 2018, you saw rural demands for land reform and economic justice converge with these decade old struggles for self determination in Sudan, kind of explode into a revolution.
And it's key here to note that this revolution started with a in the peripheries before it came to the capital and it was less kind of middle class led and less urban. And I think that's partly what made it so powerful. So it started in various cities before converging in a kind of sit in in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum and through its kind of popular force, they say close to a million people in the capital coming from all parts of the country that overthrew dictator Omar Hassan al Bashir after 30 years in power.
And that popular revolution, the backbone of it was the neighborhood resistance committees, of which there are currently 8, 000 across the country, but also professional associations under an umbrella called the Sudanese Professionals Association, which had been mobilizing around a minimum wage. There were also working class labor unions, feminists and youth formations, the kind of grassroots civil society that has really resisted NGO ization and opposition party politics.
Vinita Srivastava: You're talking about these resistance committees. Let's just define that for a minute. What is a resistance committee? What are some of the roles that they play?
Nisrin Elamin: So the resistance committees are kind of neighborhood based, consensus based formations that emerged around 2013 or so. You know, a lot of people say that Sudan was a latecomer to the Arab Spring, but that's actually not true.
We had massive protests and resistance in 2011, 2016. And it's really in 2013 when people were mobilizing against IMF recommended austerity measures. And in the midst of a financial crisis, the resistance committees emerged. As the main mobilizing force against these protests.
Vinita Srivastava: Arab Spring was around 2011, 2012, 2013.
It was the uprising in Middle East, Northern Africa. Those are the regions that participated in Arab Spring and it was partly about resistance to these austerity measures that weren't working. And as a result, you're saying that these committees were born out of that time.
Nisrin Elamin: Exactly, exactly. And besides mobilizing these protests, they've also really been filling a void left by more or less absent civilian and service providing state.
So they've been organizing around the provision of water and electricity services. They were one of the main groups that organized around flood relief efforts, around COVID prevention, around, you know, school cleanups and mosque repairs, and also against government land grabs, which is something I study.
So they've really been. Mobilizing in the absence of a state, I would say, to take care of people at the neighborhood level, and they're coordinated. They have sort of coordinating committees or bodies to which they elect representatives, so they're connected on some level at the sort of regional and state level as well, but they are at the same time a reflection of the sort of political class behind it.
So each neighborhood committee does differ in their politics on some level based on kind of region, location. The resistance committee of a working class neighborhood is going to be quite different from the resistance committee in an elite neighborhood in Khartoum. And that's going to be different from one in rural Darfur, you know, but they do exist across the country, including in rural areas.
They are the main backbone of the revolution, but you also have other working class unions and farmers unions in particular that have been mobilizing at this time that are also critical to this kind of resistance that I'm describing and that sometimes get overshadowed by the resistance committees.
Vinita Srivastava: When I type in resistance Sudan, you don't hear necessarily about the unions. I don't necessarily see a lot about that.
Nisrin Elamin: Yeah. And I mean, some of this has to do with the fact that the al Bashir regime early on really cracked down on trade unions. And that's partly why the resistance committees have developed into an extremely organized structure that is very decentralized, that has a kind of horizontal leadership structure, which has made it much more difficult for the state to kind of repress targets and dismantle. Right.
And they've laid out revolutionary charters in 2021 that really provide a blueprint for what the way forward should look like in terms of a transition to civilian rule, but also what a popular democracy from the bottom up should look like. And then we saw in October of 2021, a coup happened coordinated by the leader of the rapid support forces, whose name is Hamiti, and the leader of the army, whose name is Al Burhan.
And it was after that coup, the resistance committees and other grassroots kind of organizations organized massive protests against the coup. And the UN then came in to negotiate. We're kind of legitimizing Al Burhan and Hamidty during these negotiations and basically did not center the demands of the resistance committees who are calling for no negotiations, no partnership, and no legitimacy with the coup regime leaders.
And instead, the international community kind of framed them as potential reformists that could get us closer to civilian rule, when in fact they've demonstrated over and over again that they're actually not capable of that. In fact, they're both war criminals that are responsible for war crimes that span decades.
And I think that lack of accountability and the sort of international diplomacy as a sort of counter revolutionary tool in a way, right, as a way of making sure that the revolution does not run its course is what paved the way for this war. So when in April the coup regime imploded, you saw al Burhan and Hamidty and their kind of allied militias They're now really fighting for economic and political control of the country.
The R. S. F. controls most of the illicit gold trade in the country and stock trade, and that gold gets funneled through the markets of the U. A. E. The U. A. E. before the war was one of Sudan's largest trading partners, and it also gets sold to Russia, and that's one of the ways that they're financing their war effort.
So that's on the R. S. F. side. On the army side, Al Burhan has close ties to Egypt Sisi, so they're getting support from Egypt. Recent reports have also suggested that Iran and Ukraine have started supporting the army, presumably to kind of challenge the power of their rivals, right, Russia and the UAE. The UAE in particular has been trying to gain access to the Red Sea through a port deal signed in 2022 that would undermine the national port and give them more access to what's coming in and out of the country.
You also have the RSF having been legitimized by something called the Khartoum process in 2014 by the European Union, a process to which they're trying to kind of externalize their border to the area between Sudan and Libya. They funded the al Bashir regime and the RSF specifically to militarize that border and to keep East Africans from getting into Libya.
The RSF and army have both sent troops to fight in the war on Yemen on the Saudi coalition's behalf. So here you see all these kind of external actors.
Vinita Srivastava: This is going to be maybe a very ignorant question, but what's the relationship between this idea of assistance or international aid? Is there something that, is there some relationship there that can work?
How can the international community support resistance committees?
Nisrin Elamin: I think they don't get asked that question enough, so that's part of the problem. I think the other problem is that there have been so many peace tracks, different negotiations happening, some happening in Jeddah under the U. S. and Saudi leadership, some in Egypt, and they're not coordinated and none of them brought all of the actors to the table.
There is a civilian bloc that has been active in some of these negotiations, but they don't represent the resistance committees. The resistance committees are really who represent the vast majority of people in Sudan. And I also think that the international community needs to put pressure on those external actors, in particular the UAE, to stop funding the RSF.
We need the UAE to stop funding the RSF. If the UAE wanted to stop this war tomorrow by basically turning off the funding faucet, If they couldn't stop it, they would certainly de escalate it significantly. And I think that's really important. I mean, the RSF and the army, particularly the RSF, are now one of the biggest employers in Sudan.
And part of the reason they're being able to recruit so many people is also because of the money that they're getting. That's, to me, key. And then also, people need to listen to the resistance committees. Even me, as a diaspora person, I often get asked how we get out of this war. And I always say, talk to the resistance committees.
They've been thinking about this for a very long time. They're the ones who have the most at stake here. As I said earlier, the international aid community is barely present on the ground. And it's the emergency response rooms that have emerged, modeled after the resistance committees, and led by many of its members, that are now operating in the middle of these intense war zones.
And they're the ones who are providing the kind of life saving support. They're running communal kitchens, they're driving ambulances, they're setting up ad hoc emergency clinics and rape crisis centers. The rapid support forces in particular have used sexual violence. Occupying people's homes as a weapon of war and kind of civilians as a human shield against bombardment of the army.
And the army is, for the most part, not protected people. They've failed to protect people. People are being massacred by the RSF and the army has not protected people. In fact, in some cases, they've bombed civilian areas and hospitals, killing people as well. It's really the emergency response rooms that are mobilizing through mutual aid to support people.
They've converted defunct schools into shelters. They're organizing learning activities for children. They have urban gardening projects. I'm part of the Sudan Solidarity Collective here in Toronto, and we've been fundraising for these emergency response rooms, specifically for the communal kitchens that are feeding families across the country.
And so it just goes to show, I mean, these are young people that should be Determining the future of Sudan and instead they're having to put out all of these fires and do emergency relief people who should be in college or in school, you know, I don't want to romanticize this because they're also being harassed and targeted and raped and imprisoned.
Vinita Srivastava: I think that's part of the danger. We want to always go towards that idea of hope. I don't want to over romanticize that at all. I really want to talk a little bit about your own research, which looks at another type of resistance in another arena, which is agriculture. And you're talking about a farmer's resistance.
You've spoken with many farmers in central Sudan, and I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what's happening there.
Nisrin Elamin: I study mostly Saudi and Emirati, but also domestic land grabs in central Sudan, which is in the Jazeera, which is the agricultural heartland of the country that until recently has mostly been spared the kind of intense violence that Darfurian farming communities have been facing now for decades.
And what I try to do is I try to situate These land grabs within a much longer history of land dispossession, colonial and post colonial, and also in our history of slavery as well. And so part of what I've been looking at is how the enclosure of lands and the theft of land by the state, using colonial land laws that are still on our books, created for the purpose of dispossessing small farmers.
In the early 2000s, there was a law passed that allowed the state to withdraw its extension services from small farmers. All the inputs they needed, like water, tractor support, other kinds of things to really farm and to make some type of profit. Those were withdrawn after 2005 and it really plunged a lot of small farmers into debt, who were then forced to sell their land to the government at a price way below market price.
And that really paved the way for these foreign and domestic large scale land grabs. A lot of Mainstream reports have framed the Gulf's interest in Sudanese land as being driven by food insecurity. And that's definitely part of the story. They don't have the kind of arable land and water resources to grow food, and in moments of crisis, that creates some type of anxiety for them.
At the same time, what my research reveals is that they're mostly turning this land into agribusiness farms, that grow animal fodder, crops that cows eat, that then gets exported to the Gulf to fuel their dairy industry. And what that's done is it's both decimated the environment and small scale production of subsistence crops like wheat and other kinds of grains and vegetables and so forth.
And it's also decimated the local dairy industry because they've flooded the market with Gulf produced dairy products. And that's decimated the kind of livelihoods of herders who have now become some of the RSF's most willing recruits. And that's something we don't often talk about. What I've seen over the last decade or so, what the people that I work with, the farmers, union organizers, et cetera, is that people have lost access to lands that used to grow subsistence crops.
As a result, Sudanese elites, along with their Gulf partners, have paved the way for massive food insecurity in a region that, as I said earlier, could easily now feed itself.
Vinita Srivastava: But you called it the breadbasket.
Nisrin Elamin: It used to be. I mean, when the experiment first started in the 70s with Gulf investment, Sudan was hailed as the breadbasket of the Middle East.
Sudan could easily feed itself in the region. There is no doubt about that. In the Dezira alone, it's a fertile delta that used to produce a lot of Britain's cotton. So I think that is something that People don't understand there's a purposeful destruction of the agricultural economy so that after this war, whenever it ends, there will be more opportunities for the Gulf in particular to acquire more and more land, to kind of undermine the ability of small scale farmers to not only feed themselves but to feed the country.
And there's been massive resistance against these land grabs organized not only by small farmers but also by agricultural workers Most of the labor is done by agricultural workers who are landless, many of whom come from war impacted areas of the country. And there's also a small community of people who come from northern Nigeria originally, but they're Sudanese, who came when the British opened the Jazeeda scheme, which is the largest centrally managed irrigation scheme in Sudan that was created for the British to extract cotton.
So they came as laborers and they stayed put. And so they too have been organizing for better working conditions and against these land grabs. And we see all kinds of resistance. From People going into the courts and trying to reclaim the land through legal advocacy, civil disobedience, people blocking the entrances of these farms, sabotaging some of the irrigation canals and equipment, herders cutting holes into the fences and allowing their animals to graze on them, and then the police has to come in and remove them.
I mean, all kinds of really vibrant forms of resistance, such that by the time the revolution started, if you were in rural Sudan, particularly in that area, you would have seen it coming.
Vinita Srivastava: Right, right. What you're saying is that there's no lack of awareness because there's no lack of participation in the resistance. It's coming from all different sectors, from the herders, to the union leaders, to the farmers. Sounds like it's coming from all different directions.
Nisrin Elamin: Yes. And I think that is why we really have to understand this war, not as a civil war, not as a proxy war, but as an internationalized counter revolutionary war.
During the transitional period, we saw some of the longest labor strikes in Sudan's history. We saw teachers unions in Darfur organized in a very powerful way. We saw port workers in Port Sudan organized against the sale of their port to different foreign bidders. We saw people organizing against the use of cyanide and other harmful chemicals in mining.
This was a time of kind of unprecedented civil disobedience and organizing. That is now being crushed as part of what's happening. The elites in power, whether it's the Sudanese elites or their foreign partners, don't want Sudan to be a sovereign, popular democracy. It goes against their own interests.
The Saudis and Emiratis, from my own calculations, and it's difficult to get this data, but I've calculated that they've invested about 27 billion over the last two decades in Sudanese land, infrastructure, and real estate. And they now control more Sudanese land than all of Sudan's large domestic investors combined.
Vinita Srivastava: Gulf Air Corporate Investments in Sudan.
Nisrin Elamin: Yes, while many of these farms are not fully operational, they've cordoned off the land, they've hired security to make sure nobody gets on it, essentially cutting off herding routes and undermining The rural livelihoods of Sudanese people and the vast majority of Sudanese, at least 70 percent or so, still rely on agriculture, at least partly, to make a living.
So this is having a devastating impact on us and for the UAE in particular to be the biggest actor in this war is not a coincidence.
Vinita Srivastava: Going back to the escalating war. I heard you mention the word complicit. We're not just talking about the Gulf Arab corporate investments, but Canadian and North American investments.
What can international communities or what can Canadians be doing to help?
Nisrin Elamin: North American complicity in Sudan is harder to trace because Sudan has been under sanctions for so long, right? So they can't actually legally operate in the country. Right. Although, I think there are lots of connections, whether it's through Gulf allies or through other kind of shell companies.
One thing we do know is that there is a Canadian PR company based in Montreal, they're called Dickens and Madsen, that has been representing the RSF. And they did so right after they orchestrated the Dune massacre to clean up their image. They are the ones that helped them strengthen their ties to Russian interests, I think that's one clear Canadian connection.
There are others, especially mining companies that were implicated before this war started. One of the important things to note is that some of the same weapons manufacturing, mining and PR companies that are implicated in the Congo, in Palestine, And probably in other places are likely also implicated in Sudan.
So I think one of the things that we need to start thinking about is how we connect our organizing and advocacy to basically call out a network of murderers on some level that are making profits off of our deaths. And they need to be called out. They need to be exposed wherever they are located, which is oftentimes their headquarters are near us.
The message that I would want to send to Canadian listeners is that we are complicit, most likely, in all wars that are occurring in 2024. Through our pension funds, our university endowments, some of our personal investments. War and border violence, right, this is big business. That is one thing to recognize because I think a lot of people aren't paying attention to what's happening in Sudan because they feel like it's so far removed it has nothing to do with them.
But that is a lie. It does, and it might be closer than you think it is. So that's one point. The other is that instead of supporting large international aid organizations, support the emergency response rooms on the ground. Your dollar will go so much further. Just as an example, $700 could feed 50 families one meal a day for a whole month.
What we're looking for right now are small monthly donors. You can go to sudansolidarity. com to support. If you have $5 to give, $10, $25, whatever it is, it'll go a long way in supporting the work of the emergency response rooms, and thereby strengthening the people who are the future of Sudan. I think right now in particular, all eyes should be on al Fasij in North Darfur, where there is an ongoing siege, people are being killed, and the, Al Fashr emergency response rooms have told us that it's an emergency situation, they need support, and the work that they're doing is life saving work.
I mean, this is one of the things that has come up in the higher level peace talks or negotiations is that they should be opening up corridors for humanitarian aid, and that hasn't really happened. There was a Paris conference that recently pledged about two billion, but it has not been received. And that also shows you priorities, that there's billions of dollars available To fight wars, but not to save people from them.
Vinita Srivastava: Thank you so much for your time, Nisrin.
Nisrin Elamin: Thank you for having me.
OUTRO
Vinita Srivastava: That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. You can reach us at dcmr@theconversation.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram at @dontcallmeresilientpodcast. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation. This episode was co-produced by freelance associate producer Latifa Abdin with assistance from associate producer Ateqah Khaki.
Krish Dineshkumar does our sound design and mixing. Our consulting producer is Jennifer Moroz. Lisa Varano is the managing editor of The Conversation Canada. And Scott White is the CEO. This series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava and Zaki Ibrahim wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast. The track is called Something in the Water.