The abandoned war: Why no one is stopping the genocide in Sudan(respublica.media) |
The abandoned war: Why no one is stopping the genocide in Sudan(respublica.media) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80...
EDIT: This is what I am thinking of: https://youtu.be/bpH37vGoRJc
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.
Yes helping is a good thing, tho reality is its not as "easy" as transfer some money. Tho respecting your good intentions
I'm not aware of where to send money to stop wars - it's likely to have the opposite effect, sadly.
The US and others have pushed for negotiations but the competing interests by the gulf states, russia, and other african countries have complicated things.
I hope this continues.
This might change due to the UAE not being very happy about the US dragging them into a regional war.
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.
It's grim out there.
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 guess no one care to be blant.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/trump-venezuela-oil-...
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.
If Sudan had oil though, we'd probably have already see the US militarily involved.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/01/colonialism-in...
It could have been more detailed, but then do could then rest of the article, and then it would've been too long.
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.
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.
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck......
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.
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.
Here's a good (not perfect) talk on the issue: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
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 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?
> 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?
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.
Are you having an "are we the baddies" moment?
But it's reductive to the extreme to
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?
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.
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.