Is the EU Financing Genocide in Sudan?

Update on the Worst Aid Project in the World:

Yasir Arman, the main opposition leader in Sudan, alleges that EU money to support “migration management” in Sudan is actually being used to arm the Janjaweed Forces that carried out the genocide in Darfur.

"We received specific and detailed information about a plan drawn by Omar El Bashir and his security apparatus to finance the Janjaweed Forces, reconstituted as the Rapid Response Force, from funds provided to Sudan by the EU, especially funds from the German Government and technical support from the Italian Government.

This plan is under the direct supervision, control, and command of the Presidency of The Republic. It is executed by the National Intelligence and Security Service, of which the Rapid response force is part.

This devilish plan, which was hatched and implemented over the past three months, has put the Rapid Response Force in charge of guarding Sudan borders with the false intention of curbing immigration to Europe, stopping human trafficking, and fighting terrorism. The goal is to link these forces to European interests through what is called “The Khartoum Process” to stop human trafficking. The objective is to ultimately add international legitimacy to the Janjaweed Force and hide its crimes against humanity and the killings of Sudanese civilians, but under European Countries’ and the international community blessings.

So far this plan has already been put into action and was widely covered in the media. The Commander of the Rapid Response Force has held several press conferences and meetings where he claimed the loss of over one hundred and fifty (150) trucks while carrying out its border control duties at the Libyan and Egyptian borders. He did not give details of the forces he was fighting, the times and locations of these fights, or images to support his claim.

The timing of all of this is planned in such a way to receive more funds from Europe to buy more military equipment while it is still the rainy season to prepare for using them during the coming dry season in conflict zones. This means more killing of civilians, especially in the three conflict zones. It is clear that the Government of Sudan is aiming to fund its wars against its own people with European money and support from the international community.

These Janjaweed Forces have attacked and committed atrocities against civilians from Sudan and neighboring countries at the Sudanese Egyptian and Libyan borders. We therefore urge the EU to be aware of this plot and to stop funding these forces because that amounts to supporting genocide and prolonging the suffering of the people of Sudan.

We call upon our offices in Europe and in the United States to raise and highlight this issue in the European and the British Houses of Parliament and in the American Congress by officially writing to these bodies since this is a matter of great urgency. We also call upon all Sudanese people and Sudanese activists inside and outside of Sudan to give great importance to this matter, which supports the continuation of genocide in Sudan. We also draw the attention of the ICC that this issue relates to wars against humanity in Sudan.

It is strange that, lately, the Rapid Response Force (Janjaweed) started talking about fighting terrorism and it is expecting to receive American funding after it guaranteed the flow of European funds.

It is worth-mentioning that the Janjaweed force was the primary source of terrorism in Sudan. We must not forget that it was originally formed for the sole purpose of ethnic cleansing in Dar Fur, and over the years it has committed atrocities against Sudanese civilians all over the country, including many women rape cases in Dar Fur, which was well documented. The Janjaweed was recently reconstituted from Janjaweed to Rapid Response Force and got attached to the Sudan National Intelligence and Security Service to hide its past and give it legitimacy, hoping that we will forget its criminal past.

We are confident that the European and the world public opinion will not be caught off guard while General Bashir implements this criminal plot."

HT: John Ashworth

Struggling for the right words… contender for absolute worst ‘aid’ project in the world

Der Spiegel reports… the EU is planning to provide training, equipment, and DETENTION CAMPS to the government of Sudan, which is led by a wanted war criminal, in order that they can prevent human beings from crossing the border out of Sudan in the direction of Europe. The project is to be coordinated by the German development agency GIZ. Wow I feel sorry for the idealists at GIZ who signed up in order to help people, and now they’re building detention facilities for war criminals.

"The ambassadors of the 28 European Union member states had agreed to secrecy. "Under no circumstances" should the public learn what was said at the talks that took place on March 23rd … Europe wants to send cameras, scanners and servers for registering refugees to the Sudanese regime in addition to training their border police and assisting with the construction of two camps with detention rooms for migrants."

Let’s recap that arrest warrant for the wanted, at large, alleged war criminal who is the President of Sudan, the man we are apparently hoping to pay to do our dirty work:

"Charged, as an indirect (co) perpetrator, with ten counts of crimes: five counts of crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape: two counts of war crimes: intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking part in hostilities, and pillaging; three counts of genocide: by killing, by causing serious bodily or mental harm, and by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the groups’s physical destruction, allegedly committed at least between 2003 and 2008 in Darfur, Sudan.” (my emphasis)

I mean, certainly you can criticise things like sanctions and aid conditionality, but is there any point at which we might consider it to be a bad idea to do business with this government? Is there any moral threshold here? Does Sudan need to get to be charged with 4 counts of genocide before we stop giving them stuff? Is only 5 counts of crimes against humanity not quite enough??

Note that the arrest warrant refers only to Darfur, ignoring all the other confirmed bombings of civilian and humanitarian targets by military forces in South Sudan and the Nuba Mountains, ignoring deliberately destroying crops during a famine, and ignoring the reports of slavery and child soldiers in Northern/Central Sudan.

I despair.

ht: John Ashworth

The State of the Game between Juba and Khartoum

I continue to be fascinated by the nature of the strategic interaction between Juba and Khartoum, without really pretending to understand it very well. As it turns out, Juba's strategy seems to be push ahead with a Kenya pipeline whilst resuming export through North Sudan in the meantime, to give them an alternative option. So what is Khartoum's optimal response to such a move?

A friend suggests that Khartoum's strategy is to continue to create chaos in Jonglei (South Sudan) in order to disrupt future exploration, knowing that a Kenyan pipeline would not be economically viable without further discoveries.

I thought I'd also email someone who is an actual game theory expert, who makes the interesting point that - a little counter-intuitively - it may actually be in Khartoum's interest to encourage the development of a Kenya pipeline, as a way of credibly committing themselves to continued future cooperation on mutually favourable terms.

Paraphrasing the words of the great philosopher Sting, “If Someone Does Not Trust You, Set Them Free“.

The oil deal

I haven't read any coverage yet, so I've just had a quick skim of the actual agreement (available here, HT: Nicki Kindersley). 

As a reminder, pre-agreement North Sudan wanted to charge half of the value of the oil, or around $36 a barrel. South Sudan wanted to pay $1 a barrel. 

It looks like there is a 

- processing fee - $1.60 per barrel

- transportation fee - $8.40 per barrel for one oilfield and $6.50 for the other

- transit fee - $1 per barrel

so a total of $11 or $9.10

plus a Transitional Financial Arrangement (payoff) of an additional $15 per barrel until a total of $3.028 billion has been paid (at production of 180,000 barrels per day this would take just over 3 years).

So - whilst this seems like a good deal for North Sudan in the short run and a good deal for South Sudan in the long run, my main concern is the hold-up problem. What is stopping North Sudan ripping up the agreement in 3 years, demanding a higher cut, and just confiscating oil (again). Here is Tony Venables from Oxford in a paper on these issues;

Even if the purchaser and investor entered an agreement before the investment is undertaken, ex post the purchaser may act opportunistically, breaking the agreement and only offering a lower price ... 

The hold-up problem between states is radically more severe than that within countries because the whole domain of international law is fragile: essentially, the concept of national sovereignty constitutes a barrier to the enforcement of any contract entered into by states.

Thoughts?

War and Peace

Presidents Bashir and Salva Kiir met in Addis yesterday to finalise a peace deal.

Just two days earlier, Sudanese planes airdropped supplies, possibly weapons, to an anti-government militia deep within South Sudan. UN troops provided confirmation that planes dropped packages in the area. The Small Arms Survey also confirm the pattern through 2009-2012 of Chinese-made arms being supplied (in contravention of a UN embargo) by Sudan to militia in Darfur and South Sudan. 

Either Bashir is not serious, or perhaps more likely, he is not in control.

Social safety net bleg

A friend writes;

Do you know any good, short reads on “social safety nets”?

The context for this is that the South Sudan oil shut-down made all the donors panic and want to divert lots of development programming back to humanitarian programming. All of the advice to the government in response has been to continue to focus on building government systems so that they are stronger and more funds can flow through them when the oil is turned back on.

I think there can and should be a stronger response on the humanitarian side as well, that is institutionalised. Every year, there are going to be parts of South Sudan that are food insecure, even if just due to bad rains or floods. So we need a sustainable system that can address these needs, and to ensure households don’t become chronically food insecure, not the current system of panicked international fund-raising and dumping tonnes of food aid on the problem every year.

So do you know a good, short briefing paper that summarises country experiences and evidence on these sorts of programmes?

I second all of that. So - any suggestions?

Is a little balance too much to ask?

Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive and demonstrating a heavy bias, but I feel a bit like the mainstream media's coverage of South Sudan's first birthday was a pretty unrelenting torrent of negativity. As ever, John Ashworth puts it well;

I have deliberately refrained from circulating articles about the first anniversary of South Sudan's independence because, quite frankly, I think most of them are rubbish. They buy in to and reinforce the international community's current negativity about South Sudan, a negativity which stems from a lack of understanding of the hopes and aspirations of the people and the actions of their government in the face of intransigence and aggression (military, political and economic) from their northern neighbour.

I would be the first to call for more criticism and scrutiny of the Government of South Sudan, but can't we have just a little balance on their first birthday celebrations? And where has all the criticism been for the past 7 years since the peace agreement?

• Non-oil revenue has increased 250 percent since July 2011 (Aggrey Tisa Sabuni, economic advisor to the President of the Republic of South Sudan). 

• Child and infant mortality are down 20% since the peace agreement (Erin Polich). 

• Frankly, many people are happy to have survived a year without Khartoum invading (Gill Lusk, Africa Confidential)

There has also been almost no reflection on the state of the North, on what specifically the Juba government should be doing better, or on what the international community should be doing better (for instance, have the American or any European governments responded to Salva Kiir's letter requesting assistance in retrieving the stolen funds which are held in American and European banks?).

99 problems, but Bashir ain't one

Daniel Kahneman wrote his new book, a popular exposition of the behavioural economics research that won him a Nobel Prize, in part because he thought that popularizing some of the core concepts and allowing them to enter our vocabulary might improve the quality of our thinking and our public debate. Quite sadly I feel much the same about a lot of the basic concepts in economics and statistics that have been around a lot longer than behavioural economics. For instance, the core of impact evaluation; the counterfactual. Imagine what would have happened if the event we are examining had not happened. So let's imagine for a second what would be happening in South Sudan if there had not been independence. Peace and prosperity? New schools, roads, and hospitals? There are a couple of approaches we might use to think about what would have happened. We could look at the history of South Sudan pre-independence. We could look at all of the sterling development initiatives led by indicted war criminal Bashir in the South between 1989 and 2005. All of the schools and hospitals that he built. Or we could look at some of the people still living in the North. Perhaps those who have fled their homes to hide in caves from Bashir's bombers. Or the 100,000 who have fled to the South from Blue Nile. The counterfactual for South Sudan is not flowers and kittens, it is rule by a man wanted for five counts of crimes against humanity; murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape. Happy Birthday South Sudan. 

Why South Sudan is winning the oil pipeline stand-off with Khartoum

Adam Hyde has a new piece up arguing that it's time for the international community to increase the pressure on South Sudan's leaders to make a deal on oil with Khartoum.

I'm still not convinced that it has to be Juba to blink first. Look at the reaction to austerity; Sudanese students are protesting against the regime in Khartoum. South Sudanese students are collecting money to send to the SPLA. Communities around the South are donating cows to the SPLA.

I want a deal as much as anyone, but I want a deal that is fair, one that is closer to the $1 a barrel it actually costs to run a pipeline than the $36 a barrel that Khartoum wants to charge - half of all revenues.

Sudan Links

Or rather, John Asworth's Sudan links:

1. An important statement from the UN recognising that the basis for demarcating the border is the 1956 border, not the current de facto border that Khartoum has been pushing as a basis for negotiation.

2. "Has the AU become a pawn in the hands of the Khartoum regime?" A question apparently on the lips of many South Sudanese.

3. An excellent open letter from South Sudanese to Salva Kiir on corruption. Really well written. Members of the international community concerned about corruption might want to start here.

4. The Budget Speech. Including details on financing plans. Of a total SSP 6.4 billion budget, 10% is expected to come from domestic non-oil revenues, 15% from reserves, 15% from domestic borrowing, and the remaining 60% from yet to be negotiated international loans and oil/mineral concessions. So, er, good luck with that (and let's really hope that Khartoum will be pressured into making a fair deal on oil soon).

The Khartoum regime is the obstacle to peace in Sudan

International observers often underestimate the extent to which the Islamist military regime in Khartoum is the single most important obstacle to peace in and between the two Sudans. South Sudanese (and the people from Darfur, Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile, Abyei, eastern Sudan, Nubia in the far north, and indeed ordinary citizens all over Sudan) know the nature of the regime with which they are dealing, which is why they are circumspect about negotiations and steadfast in their military resistance. To point at weaknesses, failures and even abuses by any or all of these parties misses the point that they all feel they are locked in a life or death struggle with a ruthless, sophisticated, patient and very clever adversary (an adversary, incidentally, which can and does run rings around most western politicians, diplomats and analysts).

--John Ashworth

Fuel protests coming in Khartoum?

The Sudanese Minister of Finance Ali Mahmoud told parliamentarians on Wednesday that the austerity measures the government is currently applying are a reflection of the level of “bankruptcy” in state coffers.

In a related context, a Sudanese political analyst has predicted that the ending of fuel subsidies will almost certainly lead to a popular uprising. 

According to Omer Abdel Aziz, a professor of political sciences, there is a likelihood of 95 percent that the decision will spark a popular uprising when it comes into effect. 

Sudanese opposition parties have already vowed to protest against the ending of fuel subsidies.

Sudan Tribune

The size of the fuel subsidy about to be cut in Sudan is $2 billion a year. To put that in context, with a population of about 35 million people, the subsidy is roughly the same size as the one the government tried to cut recently in Nigeria, which was $8 billion a year across 158 million people. The abrupt removal of the subsidy in Nigeria led to widespread protest.

I really don't think it is at all clear that the Southern leadership is facing any more popular pressure than the Northern leadership over the economic implications of the oil shutdown. Hopefully a demilitarized border zone would allow an oil deal to be made.

Also told that a deal on demilitarized border zone not out of question at next round of talks, starting next week #Sudan
— Alan Boswell (@alanboswell) June 15, 2025

South Sudan oil revenue shutdown starting to bite

Here's the latest inflation figures for South Sudan from last Friday - prices jumped 30% between April and May.

I'd be interested to see the figures for Northern Sudan, but last time I checked the Northern stats agency had a much longer delay on releases.

I don't think its necessarily clear yet that the South is feeling the pressure any more than the North (though I'm open to persuasion). In any case, I'm still hopeful that as both sides gradually run out of options (boosting tiny non-oil collections, begging corrupt elites to give back the money they stole...) they will be forced to make that deal and get production going again.

War we can believe in?

Andrew Natsios, a former US envoy to Sudan and former administrator of USAID called on Friday for the US to arm South Sudan with anti-aircraft weapons.

We need only make sure that, for the North, attacking the South is a little bit harder than shooting fish in a barrel.

Maybe providing weaponry inherently built for self-defence is something that a few more people can get on board with than bombing Sudan's air bases or all-out war?

Douglas Johnson on international engagement in Sudan

Douglas Johnson literally wrote the book on the "The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars," which is considered to be the most authoritative account. 

Writing about Abyei, in May last year, he said;

The international community — particularly the United Nations and the United States — have been spectacularly ineffective in getting the Sudanese government to honor its own agreements.

...

To prevent the Abyei crisis from igniting other conflicts, the international community must stop pretending that both sides are equally at fault. Carrots haven’t worked. Washington will need to wield sticks, such as canceling debt relief talks or suspending normalization of diplomatic relations, if Sudan does not withdraw its forces quickly. But ultimately, Washington has limited leverage over the Sudanese government, having reduced both its diplomatic and economic ties during the civil war. 

The key player will be China.

There was a time though when Washington did have leverage over the Sudanese government, which it used to help broker the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

In early 2002 Khartoum was frightened of being bombed by the U.S. It had been bombed once before, and with its past support for Osama bin Laden, world opinion was against it [Douglas Johnson, again].

Just saying.  

Sudan Links Roundup

Maybe South Sudan isn't losing the PR war after all. Though their taking of Heglig brought international condemnation, at least it brought some attention.

“The government of Sudan has never stopped bombing our innocent civil population even after signing Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). They have continued to do so and indeed intensified air attacks in August 2011 after South Sudan officially became an independent state but the international community has never come out to condemn them," Kiir said on Friday. 

And so Mark Tran from the Guardian just took a trip to Juba,

and there have been a few other "backlash" pieces, including;

Armin Rosen in the The New Republic

by assigning equal blame for the conflict, the Obama administration handed a strategic victory to the same regime in Khartoum responsible for the worst atrocities during the Darfur conflict, while alienating Washington’s Western-leaning partners in Juba. 

Baroness Cox on the Today Programme calling for Britain to impose diplomatic sanctions on Khartoum, saying that

"Khartoum is the major perpetrator of aggression"

and the President of Samaritan's Purse goes as far as calling for military intervention to destroy the runways used by SAF bombers (via @Laurenist);

Now I am asking [the US President] and his administration to do something that may sound unusual for a preacher of the Gospel. I am asking him to use our Air Force to destroy Mr. Bashir’s airstrips - the airstrips his military uses to launch bombers that carry out daily attacks in the Nuba Mountains. The Nuba people don’t want American soldiers - they can fight for themselves. They just want to be free. But they have no defense against bombs dropping from the sky on their villages, schools and hospitals.

Meanwhile Western diplomats have continued to be a little less than diplomatic about Juba in coversation with journalists;

1.   
   BBCAndrewH Arrived in Juba, South Sudan. Gloomy western diplomats blaming "smug, incompetent" govt for leading country towards war and economic chaos. 27 Apr 2025 from web
2. this quote was generated by twtQuote  
   

I'll leave the last word to the President of the "smug, incompetent" government in Juba;

"The Security Council of the United Nations and the international community including the African union and the Arab league has never come out to condemn and hold Sudanese government in Khartoum, particularly President Bashir and his groups responsible for atrocities they have committed against the people of South Sudan and the three areas," he said. 

"They only come out to condemn us when we react to aggression by the Sudanese government within our territories," president Kiir told a crowd with placards calling for immediate border demarcation.

The people of South Sudan and North Sudan deserve better than the pathetic pandering by the international community to a thuggish murderous Khartoum government.

Market failure

Sudanese first Vice-President Ali Osman Mohammad Taha asked the parliament last week to amend laws in order to allow execution of anyone found guilty of smuggling food to South Sudan.

Sudan's heterodox economic strategy to boost its floundering economy by executing exporters. 

Bombing "regrettable but inevitable"

ODI held an interesting event today with several Sudanese officials in Khartoum, which I managed to follow a bit of on twitter. 

Dr Mutrif Siddiq, a former Humanitarian Affairs Minister in the Khartoum government stated that bombing of civilians had been "regrettable but inevitable" and taken place during war. Which is interesting when there has been bombing of civilians for over a decade, and that the method of bombing is almost be definition illegal according to international humanitarian law because it is so inaccurate, and so unable to have any kind of targeting on military forces rather than civilians.

And for a bit of light relief, we heard that "Sudan is one of the few countries that is recording progress in development," (awkwardly timed to coincide with recent IMF estimates for a 7.3% reduction in GDP in 2012) and that "no one has been forced to accept a governor, etc from the center" (apart from in, ahem, Blue Nile, where the democratically elected governor was kicked out for being a bit too dark skinned).

The Orwellian double-speak from the Khartoum regime is incredible.

1. hpg_odi Baroness Cox of APG on Sudan asks Khartoum panel: How do you justify aerial bombardments of civilians in the Nuba mountain? #Khartoumcalling 26 Apr 2025 from web
2. LizFordGuardian Pressed on aerial bombing, Siddiq says it's 'regrettable but inevitable' that bombing occured #khartoumcalling #globaldev 26 Apr 2025 from web
3. LizFordGuardian Bombing was necessary as 'sometimes forces take refuge in villages neighbouring our borders' #khartoumcalling #globaldev 26 Apr 2025 from web
4. hpg_odi "It during war" says Dr Mutrif on aerial bombardments #Khartoumcalling #Sudan #SouthSudan 26 Apr 2025 from web
5. LizFordGuardian 'Sudan is one of the few countries that is recording progress in development fields' says Siddiq #khartoumcalling #globaldev 26 Apr 2025 from web
6. hpg_odi Dr Mutrif: "no one has been forced to accept an appointed governer, etc from the center" #Khartoumcalling 26 Apr 2025 from web
7. this quote was generated by twtQuote
   

Why is media coverage of the Sudan conflict so biased?

Eric Reeves argues that it is about Abyei and a lack of attention to (recent) history:

Some of the confusion in international reporting comes from a failure to follow the course of the dispute over the Abyei border region, which Khartoum seized a year ago. Following Khartoum’s military assault on Abyei town in May 2008, the southern leadership---convinced that the matter could not be resolved militarily---concluded that "final and binding" arbitration of the Abyei border issue was essential, and succeeded in bringing the matter before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in the Hague. Though in many ways unfavorable to Juba, the PCA ruling was nonetheless accepted. Khartoum’s land grab last year flouted the court’s "final and binding" ruling, issued in July 2009, which defined the area in which the critical Abyei self-determination referendum was to be held. This abrogation of a key protocol called into serious question Khartoum’s commitment to honor the CPA.

Any other ideas?

Don't get me wrong, Sudan is complicated. I have trouble keeping track of all of the issues.

His conclusion is pretty depressing reading:

If there is to be a chance of peace, the factitious parceling out of equal blame to Juba and Khartoum must end. To be sure, the odds of changing this decades-long pattern seem exceedingly small next to the likelihood of war 

... 

In all likelihood, none of these measures [required for peace] will be taken, with Khartoum’s obduracy used to justify diplomatic fecklessness. But the responsibility for that war will not be Khartoum’s alone. It will be shared by the international leaders who chose the expedient route, even with millions of lives at risk.

Video: Blue Nile Civilians Describe Attacks, Abuses

Human Rights Watch has been interviewing refugees from Blue Nile who have escaped to South Sudan.

They took the baby and she said: "I am breastfeeding my baby." 

They said: "You don't believe in Allah. You are Malik's people who don't believe in Allah... you are not able to take care of your baby." 

And they just shot her with a machine gun.

I'm really not an expert on these matters, but that one sounds a bit like you might describe it as a war crime?

HT: John Ashworth