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--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Before we get to the show, a friendly reminder to brush your teeth from Quip Electric Toothbrushes. The Quip Electric Toothbrush starts at $25. You get a refill pack for free right now if you go to getquip.com slash explained and purchase a Quip Electric Toothbrush. That is G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Thursday, April 11th, 2019. Today's date will be remembered by generations in Sudan. It's the day the people toppled a tyrant. After months of mass protests and sit-ins, the military stepped in and removed President Omar al-Bashir from power today. Tomorrow is uncertain, but today is history.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Earlier this year, we covered the protests in Sudan, and today we're bringing you that coverage again to explain how we got to this moment.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Usually, when we call up journalists on the show, they're making time for us between deadlines. Then there's Reem Abbas. I was out today and I was coming home in a taxi and we were hit by tear gas and it was really bad. So it took me some time to recover. Tear gas is not nice.
--:-- Reem Abbas: I'm a reporter in Khartoum, Sudan, and my country's in a state of turmoil right now. I have a baby, actually, so I'm worried about, you know, leaving the house with her because of the tear gas, because of the protests. I'm worried about getting arrested as a journalist, but my worries are minimal compared to other people.
--:-- Reem Abbas: I mean, this has been what's happening for the last few weeks, that there's a protest everywhere. Familiar slogans from the Arab Spring are now echoing across Sudan. Peaceful, peaceful, they cry. Their hands were raised and empty of weapons.
--:-- Reem Abbas: It's like the most significant protest movement in Sudan. The message to all the world that the people were killed in Sudan, they were not killed because they did anything wrong. The people were going out peacefully to say no to this cruel system.
--:-- Reem Abbas: It's all over the country. I mean, there are protests in villages I've never even heard of before in my life. And it's just, it's ongoing, you know, and you feel that so many people are taking part of it.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Yes, we've had like big protest movements in 2012 and 2013, but it's not like, this is nothing like it. You feel that everyone is taking part, everyone is talking about it, is becoming part of the popular culture.
--:-- Reem Abbas: I mean, I've seen a number of videos of like weddings where people are actually saying they're dancing to the music and they're saying the slogan, the main slogan of the protest, which is Which means Fall, fall, fall It should just fall basically, like this government should just fall, it should go
--:-- Reem Abbas: There are so many new songs talking about this revolution what people are calling a revolution. People are having this slogan on T-shirts. They're having it everywhere.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Like in Sudan, we have henna. Like we do the henna art for women. Like they do it on their hands. And people are writing this slogan instead of, you know, flowers or something.
--:-- Reem Abbas: And did the protests start in Khartoum and then make their way out? Or did it start elsewhere?
--:-- Reem Abbas: The protests did not start in Khartoum, actually. The protests started in Adbara. It's a river Nile state, about 400 kilometers outside Khartoum. Then it came to the capital in Khartoum. And then it just spread to so many different cities around Sudan.
--:-- Reem Abbas: So Sudan has 18 states and 15 states have witnessed protests.
--:-- Reem Abbas: How did these protests start? Just the general situation in Sudan. I mean, 2018 was a very tough year. I mean, you go to the bank, there's no money in the bank. The ATMs are empty. They don't give you your salary or your savings.
--:-- Reem Abbas: We've had fuel shortages and bread queues. So sometimes you don't find bread. You also have to queue for hours sometimes. So I think generally life has been very, very difficult.
--:-- Reem Abbas: And the government has been saying that, you know, we're going to do this, we're going to do that to fix the situation. But the government is really not able to do any kind of reform because it's a very corrupt regime.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Sudan is a very rich country, but the money is going into their pockets, you know. So people are just frustrated. They're angry. They feel that this government has been ruling for 30 years and Sudan is just constantly at war and people are constantly struggling.
--:-- Reem Abbas: But as you say this has been a situation that been ongoing for decades with war and economic hardship So was there sort of a spark to these protests
--:-- Reem Abbas: The country has not been stable for the last few years especially since South Sudan separated The country just split And it was a big deal politically because you know I mean, it's not easy for any country to just split and people felt really angry.
--:-- Reem Abbas: And then also economically, you know, South Sudan took away 75 percent of Sudan's revenue. So things just continued to go downhill. And then just corruption scandal after corruption scandal. So it's just an accumulation of grievances that just kind of exploded.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Who exactly is protesting? Who are these people?
--:-- Reem Abbas: The demography of the protest is very interesting because in Sudan we have, we've had mass migration. Men between the ages of 25 to 40 is not really there. So you see that there's so many women who are joining the protest because I think women are really bearing the brunt of the repression of this government.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Lubna Hussein smiles as she leaves a courtroom in Sudan. Supporters shouted freedom after a judge spared the journalist a whipping for the crime of wearing trousers in public. And they're the ones also suffering economically because, you know, we have a lot of women-headed families. Women are really struggling.
--:-- Reem Abbas: But you also see, like, older people joining the protests. And how has the government reacted? arresting people. More than 40 have been killed. The media has been censored. A number of newspapers have been confiscated on a daily basis or they have been prohibited from printing.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Correspondents for international media outlets have been... Their press accreditation has been revoked. They have called the protesters infiltrators, agents. They have really showed a lot of, I would say, brutality towards the peaceful protesters.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Is there any sense that President al-Bashir, who's been around for a long time, might view this as a sign that it's time to go, a popular uprising?
--:-- Reem Abbas: Nope. He doesn't. I mean, he said that if anyone wants me gone, they should come and contest with me in the 2020 elections, which doesn't make any sense because, I mean, the last elections and the election in 2010 were rigged, you know, so obviously it's not a fair game.
--:-- Reem Abbas: He sees this as, you know, those are just a bunch of infiltrators. And I'm just going to basically crack down on the protest movement and it will stop and they will just go away.
--:-- Reem Abbas: How about other countries in the region? Has anyone else weighed in?
--:-- Reem Abbas: Well, I feel that, I mean, many people in Sudan feel that they're alone in this, you know, because, I mean, there are a lot of like regional politics involved. The Gulf countries, We feel that they don't really support the protest movement and they would support Bashir, even though he did go to Qatar a few days ago and he did not get any money from them.
--:-- Reem Abbas: He wanted a grant, basically, to fix the economic situation. So, yeah, we feel that the international community does not mind the status quo in Sudan. They just feel that any protest could lead to instability and it could lead to a Syria, you know, Libya-like situation.
--:-- Reem Abbas: And we feel that this is a, I mean, I personally feel that this is a very lazy analysis. And this should not be how the international community thinks that things will end up, basically.
--:-- Reem Abbas: So what do you think the international community should do? I mean, I think the people have spoken that they don't want this government, that they want a real democracy, that they want justice for the people killed by this government in conflicts, in the protest movement, and so on.
--:-- Reem Abbas: And I think their voices should be heard and that the will of the people is above everything, basically.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Reem, you know, you just got tear gassed. You talked about being fearful for your baby daughter. What's it like being a journalist covering all of this in Sudan right now? Are you afraid at all?
--:-- Reem Abbas: I would say it's definitely very draining because you just feel that you're only able to write and say so much when people are really dying and people are suffering from this protest movement.
--:-- Reem Abbas: There are people in detention. Even journalists are actually in detention right now. Some of them have been in detention for a few weeks. So you feel a lot of fear.
--:-- Reem Abbas: It's very difficult to really speak your mind and not self-censor when you feel that you're really at risk because you're trying to speak your mind and you're trying to cover what's happening on the ground.
--:-- Reem Abbas: Sometimes I personally feel like I don't even want to write about this and I don't want to cover what's happening. But then I just have to remind myself that this is a responsibility and this is what I signed up for.
--:-- Reem Abbas: How's your baby doing?
--:-- Reem Abbas: Oh, she's good. Do you need to go tend to your baby?
--:-- Reem Abbas: Yeah, okay. Babies come before journalism. Yes. Yes they do
--:-- [Sound of a gentle toothbrush]
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Reem Abbas is a freelance journalist working in Khartoum Sudan Coming up, Sudan's long struggle to find peace.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Some time ago, Carl Maynard at CarlNard tweeted at me, Hey, at Ramos for a big at today underscore explained fan here. Hi. By chance, do you have any at get quip referral codes laying around thinking about switching to quip? Thanks, Carl.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Here's the thing, Carl. You don't need quip referral codes. You just need to go to getquip.com slash explain. That's why we're always plugging G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explain.
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--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Adate Akwe, you're a director at Amnesty International based here in Washington, D.C. What do people need to know to fully understand the weight of these protests in Sudan right now?
--:-- Adote Akwe: You know, the country has had a long history of instability and authoritarian governments, unfortunately, since independence in 1956.
--:-- Adote Akwe: Since Sudan's modern borders were drawn up by the British last century, it has been very much a country of two halves. In the north, you have more of a northern Arabic population, and of course the language is Arabic, and the religion is predominantly Muslim.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And in the southern part of the country, in what is now South Sudan, and you have a more animist and Christian-based population.
--:-- Adote Akwe: But the other major factor, I think, is that the country has had conflict and civil war since 1972 with intermittent breaks.
--:-- Adote Akwe: So Bashir is a former military general of the Sudanese army. The farmer's son from the Arabic north rose to the rank of colonel. By 1989, he was able to lead a bloodless coup with Sudan swamped in its second civil war.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And he is part of a military coalition that is very much bent on establishing a Sharia Islamic state in Sudan. Bashir began by brandishing a Koran and a Kalashnikov and put Sudan on a path to radical Islamic reform.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And General Bashir sort of consolidates his power. And General Bashir is unfortunately also infamous because he oversaw the genocide in Darfur.
--:-- Adote Akwe: In the early 2000s, Darfur was a province or region of the country where you had resistance movements and you had armed resistance groups that were trying also to sort of break free of the control of Khartoum and also try to address economic and political marginalization.
--:-- Adote Akwe: The Sudanese government adopted its usual tactics of scorched earth policies. They destroyed villages. They extrajudicially executed people. They deployed informal militias known as the Janjaweed, who were like a shock troop that really were not officially in the command and control lines of the Sudanese government, but were clearly allied and were being supplied in terms of weapons.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And so you had the official army doing abuses and you had this militia doing abuses. And eventually it created a humanitarian crisis. An estimated 300,000 people have died in Darfur since conflict erupted.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And a further 3 million have been made homeless, who have either fled over the border to refugee camps in Chad or live in the tens of camps in Darfur itself.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And the international community said, what's going on in Darfur? and under the Bush administration, General Colin Powell made the declaration that it was genocide.
--:-- Adote Akwe: We concluded, I concluded, that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility and that genocide may still be occurring.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And that genocide triggered the most comprehensive list of sanctions that were imposed in the Sudanese economy that contributed to the economic crisis that the economy is in right now.
--:-- Adote Akwe: Even though they were eventually lifted? They were eventually lifted in the dying days of the Obama administration.
--:-- Adote Akwe: Why were the sanctions lifted then?
--:-- Adote Akwe: I think the Obama administration had been frustrated by the very slow implementation of reforms by the Sudanese government And I think that there were voices inside the administration that said that, you know, there are two ways to encourage behavior. One is through incentives and the other one is through punitive measures.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And they weren't seeing enough, quote unquote, progress. Perhaps it was time to use incentives.
--:-- Adote Akwe: Sudan, though, will remain on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. So as the relationship between the two countries improves, there's still more work to be done.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And Bashir is also indicted by the International Criminal Court. The court accuses Omar al-Bashir of masterminding attempts to wipe out African tribes in Darfur with a campaign of murder, rape and deportation.
--:-- Adote Akwe: We are charging al-Bashir with three counts of genocide, five of crime against humanity and two of war crimes. and issues as it does when it indicts someone, arrest warrants.
--:-- Adote Akwe: If General Bashir travels to a particular country, any country that has signed up to be a party to the International Criminal Court is supposed to turn him over. He has defied these warrants and traveled to quite a few countries to basically show that the ICC doesn't have the ability to arrest him.
--:-- Adote Akwe: How has this genocidal war criminal who, through his acts of war, tanked his own economy for over a decade managed to hold on to power?
--:-- Adote Akwe: You know, when I was coming over here, out of curiosity, I looked at the last Department of State human rights report, which is an annual exercise done by the Democracy Human Rights Bureau in state.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And I'm just going to read just a little because this will give you a clearer understanding that this is a totalitarian, vicious, abusive government that is committing abuses. Please.
--:-- Adote Akwe: They quote, The most significant abuses included killings, torture, beatings, rape, and other cruel or inhuman treatment or punishment of detainees and prisoners, arbitrary detention by security forces, harsh life-threatening conditions in prisons, and restrictions on freedom of expression, press, assembly, association, religion, movement, intimidation.
--:-- Adote Akwe: It's a fairly bleak and very harsh assessment, And it mirrors the kinds of assessments that groups like Amnesty International, as well as Human Rights Watch and others.
--:-- Adote Akwe: This is a regime that has maintained control because it has effectively controlled and intimidated and killed and detained any form of dissent or opposition.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And it has been able to do that by virtue of being able to export its oil. It has concessions and contracts with a number of countries, including China. that are more interested in the steady supply of oil and therefore will not allow or will block any kind of international coordinated effort to put pressure on Sudan to reform.
--:-- Adote Akwe: And so what you have is a repressive regime that has all the tools at its disposal of power, and it's basically been able to stay in power because of that.
--:-- Adote Akwe: That report from the State Department, This history you've recounted, it makes Sudan sound like such a forgotten, bleak place. And yet there's so much hope right now. There are protests and songs and celebrations in the street.
--:-- Adote Akwe: You know, when 2019 began, I don't think anyone would have seen this protest continuing at this level. People do have the resolve to fight for their survival. And maybe we've reached that point in Sudan.
--:-- Adote Akwe: and you never know what incident could trigger something else and perhaps even change the equation and level the playing field.
--:-- Adote Akwe: What we do know is that the international community has to re-engage. It has to apply more pressure for restraint and also for accountability.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Adote Akwe is a Deputy Director of Advocacy and Government Relations with Amnesty International USA. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Thanks to Quip for supporting the show today. The Quip electric toothbrush starts at $25. Your first refill pack is free if you buy a Quip electric toothbrush right now at getquip.com slash explained.
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