PROTEST FOR SUDAN: gather outside UAE Embassy, 1-2 Grosvenor Cres, London SW1 on Sunday 14 Jan at 12pm noon to show support for Sudan.
Happening tomorrow for anyone in London who wants to show support for #Sudan. #KeepEyesOnSudan https://t.co/lzajZ5NWic
— Munchkin (@BSonblast) January 14, 2024
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NOTE, this article doesn't mention or explain what Sudanese people want.
From AFP (Agence France-Presse)
By Bahira Amin
Dated Saturday, 6 January 2024; 10:54 am GMT - here is a copy in full:
Sudan paramilitary chief bids for legitimacy in Africa tour: analysts
Sudan's paramilitary chief spent the first months of the country's war in the shadows. Now he has emerged to embrace civilian politicians and tour African capitals in a bid for international legitimacy, analysts say.
Mohamed Hamdan Daglo -- commonly known as Hemeti -- commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) which the United States accused of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in Sudan's Darfur region during its war with the army.
The RSF has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, since April last year in the northeast African country where the US has also accused the army of war crimes.
Daglo had remained largely out of sight while Burhan emerged from a siege of military headquarters to make overseas trips and address the UN General Assembly as Sudan's de facto leader.
But since late December Daglo has been on his first wartime trip abroad, meeting government leaders in Uganda, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa and Rwanda.
It is part of a strategy analysts see as likely linked to the United Arab Emirates.
Daglo is "in the ascendancy," said veteran Sudan expert Alex de Waal.
So is the war's death toll, estimated conservatively at more than 12,190.
Clement Deshayes, a Sudan specialist at Sorbonne University in Paris, said Daglo had been "welcomed with the attributes of a head of state" on his visits.
The most important, said Deshayes, came in Addis Ababa where Daglo met with and embraced Sudan's former prime minister Abdalla Hamdok, who was placed under house arrest after an October 2021 coup orchestrated by Burhan and Daglo, then allies.
Their putsch derailed Sudan's fragile transition to democracy.
After a brief reinstatement, Hamdok resigned in January 2022 and fled for Abu Dhabi. He remains Sudan's foremost civilian politician and has reemerged as part of a new coalition known as Taqadum.
- 'Kiss the ring' -
In embracing Taqadum, Daglo was making "the single most important move that he could to gain legitimacy," said Andreas Krieg, a security studies expert at King's College London.
Although Burhan's administration continues to put out statements as the Sudanese government, the RSF controls the streets of the capital Khartoum, nearly all of the western Darfur region, and in December pressed deeper into Al-Jazira state, shattering one of the country's few remaining sanctuaries.
The United Nations says the violence is "imperiling regional stability", having unleashed the world's largest displacement crisis that has uprooted more than seven million people, including around 1.4 million who have crossed into neighbouring countries.
Daglo, a former camel and sheep trader, rose to prominence under Sudan's former strongman Omar al-Bashir who unleashed Janjaweed militias after an ethnic minority rebellion began in Darfur in 2003. The militia campaign led to war crimes charges against Bashir and others.
When security personnel attacked pro-democracy demonstrators in Khartoum in June 2019 after Bashir's overthrow, it was the RSF, descendants of the Janjaweed, that witnesses said were at the forefront of the bloodshed, killing at least 128 people.
However, Daglo's embrace of a civilian partner offers the chance to gain international legitimacy, particular from the West, analysts told AFP.
That, said Deshayes, was "despite the ethnic cleansing in Darfur (and) the systematic rape and looting in central Sudan and Darfur".
Kholood Khair, a Sudanese analyst, said rumours of a linkup between Hamdok and Daglo had been "rife even before the war" and were "kicked into overdrive" by the Addis meeting.
In videos of the Addis event, Hamdok and his fellow politicians line up to shake hands with Daglo, who wears a sharp suit instead of military fatigues.
"The optics of the meeting were that Hemeti is in charge," Khair told AFP, with Hemeti "holding court and them coming to him, taking turns to say hello and kiss the ring."
On social media, pro-democracy activists accused Hamdok of betraying civilians for political gain.
- The army isolated -
Hamdok has said he hopes for "an urgent meeting" with Burhan.
However, Cameron Hudson, an Africa expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the general was now "highly unlikely" to agree.
Burhan reacted with fury to Daglo's tour, accusing the host nations of "partnering in the murder of the Sudanese people".
That "is precisely the intent," Hudson told AFP.
"It will make the army look opposed to peace and paint Hemeti as the more reasonable and responsible party," he said.
Multiple analysts, including Krieg and Hudson, told AFP the strategy was probably not Daglo's alone and likely originated with the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE, analysts say, already supplies the RSF with munitions via neighbouring African countries -- a charge the UAE has denied.
Krieg said the UAE was "engineering a narrative whereby Hemeti comes out as a potential political leader", with "Taqadum as a legitimate civilian umbrella for the RSF as the security sector".
The army has grown "more and more isolated," said Deshayes, with its military defeats pushing even close ally Egypt away and Daglo now able to "start (peace) negotiations from a place of strength".
But at the same time, Burhan's alienation "will only confuse and complicate the situation and create more time and space for fighting to continue," said Hudson.
bur/bha/dcp/it
View original: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/sudan-paramilitary-chief-bids-legitimacy-105449551.html
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“The calls to get armed are not coming from the army. They’re mostly coming from civilians themselves,“ al-Sadig, told Al Jazeera. Sulieman Baldo, the founder of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker think tank, believes arming young men is irresponsible. “For me, these young recruits are really cannon fodder for ideological reasons,” he told Al Jazeera. “Sudan’s [political] Islamic movement is pushing for this kind of mobilisation in areas that are beyond the RSF’s control.” Read more.
Young men are grabbing weapons to fight with the army, defend their cities, raising fears of deepening ethnic conflict.
Sudanese military soldiers wave the Sudanese flag and hold up their weapons during the visit of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (not seen) in Heglig on April 23, 2012 [Reuters]
When the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) called on young men to enlist last June, Zakariya Issa* went to the nearest recruitment centre. He was one of thousands of young people who trained for 10 weeks in Wad Madani, a city just south of the capital Khartoum.
In September, he was deployed with 500 people to fight the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a group stronger than the army and backed by the United Arab Emirates. Many of his friends and peers were killed or wounded within a couple of weeks.
“I lost five of my friends,” Issa, 20, told Al Jazeera from Saudi Arabia, where he now lives. “They were more than friends. They were my brothers.”
The Sudanese army and allied groups are relying on young men with little or no military training to fight as foot soldiers against the RSF. Over the past week, recruitment has picked up across River Nile State since the RSF captured Wad Madani, Sudan’s second-largest city.
River Nile state is a traditionally privileged region that has produced many of the political and military elites in Sudan’s modern history. But now, army officers and figures from Sudan’s political Islamic movement, which ruled for 30 years under former autocratic president Omar al-Bashir, are calling on young men from this region to thwart the RSF.
New recruits told Al Jazeera that they are motivated to pick up weapons due to the risk that the RSF could attack their cities, loot their belongings and subject women to sexual violence.
Most view the RSF – which is primarily made up of tribal nomadic fighters from Sudan’s neglected province of Darfur – as invaders and occupiers. While the group has evicted thousands of people from their homes, army supporters are also exploiting ethnic undertones to recruit young men.
“I picked up a gun to defend myself, my ethnic group and my homeland,” said Yaser, 21, from Shendi, a city in River Nile State where thousands of people have reportedly picked up weapons in recent days.
“The RSF are not just at war with the army. They are at war with civilians,” he told Al Jazeera.
‘Cannon fodder’: Civilians arming themselves
After Wad Madani fell to the RSF, civilians across eastern and northern Sudan were devastated. The city was a haven for internally displaced people who fled Khartoum and surrounding towns earlier in the war. They are now on the move again.
“People mostly think that the army can’t protect them now,” said Suleiman al-Sadig,* a lawyer from Atbara, a city in River Nile State.
Recent RSF advances have compounded the panic. Photos and videos surfacing across social media show what appear to be children and young men arming themselves in River Nile State. According to residents and journalists, some of those recruits have gone to Wad Madani to fight the RSF, while others are staying behind in case of an attack.
The video from Al Matama shows SAF commanders arming kids/teens. At least they look like kids to me. This is both insane and negligent on so many levels. #KeepEyesOnSudan pic.twitter.com/JelIxVwdT6
— s🌻 (@justshayxo) December 21, 2023
“The calls to get armed are not coming from the army. They’re mostly coming from civilians themselves,“ al-Sadig, told Al Jazeera.
Sulieman Baldo, the founder of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker think tank, believes arming young men is irresponsible.
“For me, these young recruits are really cannon fodder for ideological reasons,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Sudan’s [political] Islamic movement is pushing for this kind of mobilisation in areas that are beyond the RSF’s control.”
In one photo on social media, which Al Jazeera could not independently verify, one of the young recruits is seen captured by the RSF and tied to the windshield of a car.
A former soldier, who is in close contact with officers in the army, added that new recruits are often the first people to die in battle.
“They have no combat or military background and they just carry weapons. They die quickly,” he told Al Jazeera.
Ethnic targeting
Over the last two decades, River Nile State has attracted many young men from Arab and non-Arab tribes in search of work and stability. Many were uprooted by the state-backed Arab tribal militias – later repackaged as the RSF – which crushed a mostly non-Arab rebellion in Darfur in 2003.
These young men are now being accused of spying on behalf of the RSF based on their ethnicity and tribal affiliations. According to local monitors, many have been arrested, tortured and even killed by military intelligence and by civilians carrying arms in northeastern cities.
On December 19, Zeinab Noon* spoke with her male cousins who are all between the ages of 16 and 20. They told her that they captured RSF spies in Shendi.
“[They said] they’re torturing them, so there is a sense of paranoia,” Noon, who lives outside of Sudan, told Al Jazeera. “I don’t think they know [for sure if they’re really spies].”
The Darfur Network for Human Rights (DNHR), a local monitoring group, said in a statement that these attacks are “linked to incitement to ethnic violence” in River Nile cities.
Jawhara Kanu, a Sudanese expert with the United States Institute for Peace, said that the ethnically targeted attacks risk pushing vulnerable people from Darfur and Kordofan, a province in central Sudan, into the arms of the RSF.
“These people are going to find themselves in a situation where they are going to be tortured [by parties aligned] with SAF unless they choose to join the RSF for protection.”
Ending the war
Despite growing calls to bear arms, some activists are pushing for an end to the war and for young men not to fight. So far, their efforts appear to be in vain, according to al-Sadig from Atbara.
He said that there was a protest held in his city on December 23. Young men were demanding that the governor arm them, so that they could defend their city and join the army in battles across the country.
RSF abuses in Wad Madani are also fuelling calls for mobilisation. More than 300,000 people are fleeing the city, mostly on foot. RSF fighters are also reportedly looting cars, hospitals, homes and markets, adding to a hunger crisis.
In one video circulating on social media and which Al Jazeera could not independently verify, an RSF fighter declares that it is “his right” to rape women in cities he conquers.
Al-Sadig says that news of abuses travels wide and is terrifying civilians in the River Nile region.
“Every single day, young men are being told by people in their community that the RSF is going to come and get you and that they will take your homes, kill your children and rape your women,” he told Al Jazeera.
Non-violent activists like al-Sadig hope that the war will stop soon. On December 22, local media reported that top army chief Abdel Fatah al-Burhan had agreed to sit down with RSF leader Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.
While an agreement could spare Sudan further bloodshed, al-Sadig is waiting to see where the RSF attacks next. He told Al Jazeera that he will pick up a weapon if he has to.
“I don’t want to pick up arms. But if the RSF targets my home, or my children or my wife, then of course I will defend them,” he said.
*Some names have been changed for safety reasons.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
View original: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/24/sudans-civilians-pick-up-arms-as-rsf-gains-and-army-stumbles
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From The Mail Online
Written by NIALL FERGUSON
Niall Ferguson is Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and columnist with Bloomberg Opinion
Dated: Saturday, 23 December 2023, 01:43 - here is a copy in full:
Why our world today is uncannily - and worryingly - like the one Jesus was born into 2,023 years ago
It happened during the reign of the first Roman emperor. A child was born in an obscure farm building in a Middle Eastern province of the empire.
All kinds of strange events occurred around the time of His birth, including a massacre of children, ordered by the Judean King Herod.
Along with some bewildered shepherds, three foreign 'magi' (wise men) found their way to the child's birthplace. But no one in the imperial capital Rome paid much attention.
This proved to be a mistake, as the birth of this child would ultimately transform the empire — and the world — for ever.
The story of Jesus's birth is rarely told with much attention to its historical context. But this year the circumstances of the time seem uncannily relevant. The Middle East is in just the kind of turmoil that had led the Romans to impose their imperial rule on Judaea.
And the United States is in just the kind of political crisis that led the Roman republic to become an empire under Augustus Caesar. In other surprising ways, too, what we are living through is similar to what the people of the early first century experienced.
Like our ancestors two millennia ago, we inhabit a distressing spiritual vacuum marked by pleasure seeking and unbridled consumerism.
Christianity, the old religion, has become hollow to us, even as we go through the motions of recollecting the story of Christ's birth.
Let's begin with the war in the Middle East, which I believe will ultimately lead the United States to send troops back into the region, despite the painful memories of the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation — which, in truth, are painful only for the families of the relatively small number of U.S. service personnel who were killed (3,519) or wounded (32,000) there. God bless them and their British counterparts this Christmas.
Most of us have strongly held but casually informed political opinions on the Middle East. On one side, supporters of Israel — not all of them Jews — regard it as obvious that Israel has a right to defend itself after the horrendous atrocities perpetrated against Israeli civilians by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) on October 7.
Supporters of the Palestinians, some of whom shamelessly celebrated those atrocities, insist that the Palestinian resistance is justified because of the wretched conditions in Gaza and the lack of Israeli commitment to a viable Palestinian state. Arguments about the issue will ruin many a family Christmas this year.
However, this debate about whose cause is more just — the Israelis' or the Palestinians' — misses the point.
The reality is that, in the 50 years since the last surprise attack on Israel on the Holy Day of Yom Kippur (October 6, 1973), it has proved impossible for Israel to find a peaceful modus vivendi with the Palestinians.
Israel made peace with Egypt at Camp David in 1978. It made peace with Jordan in 1994. It signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1995.
And, under the Abraham Accords of 2020-21, Israel normalised its relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
Indeed, it was about to reach a similar rapprochement with Saudi Arabia when the slaughter of the innocents happened on October 7, freezing if not killing the negotiations.
There are two obvious reasons why peace with the Palestinians has proved elusive. First, the Palestinian Authority established under the Oslo Accords has proved to be an oxymoron — it lacks any kind of authority.
Second, many Palestinians themselves have preferred the path of violence, turning to Hamas and other terrorist groups for leadership, apparently oblivious to Hamas's true character as a criminal racket.
While ordinary Gazans bear the brunt of Israel's war of retaliation, the Hamas mafiosi live in luxury in Qatar on the money sent to Gaza by naive international donors.
But there is a third explanation for the agony of the Holy Land, and that is geopolitical. The Abraham Accords were one of the diplomatic triumphs of Donald Trump's administration.
Yet Joe Biden decided to change course, opting to try to revive the obviously dead Iran nuclear deal, the 'Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action' of 2015.
That deal was President Barack Obama's attempt to induce the Islamic Republic of Iran to suspend — not to end — its nuclear weapons program in return for relief from U. S. sanctions.
It did nothing to prevent Iran using the money it received under the deal to finance terrorist organisations throughout the region, including not only Hamas and PIJ, but also Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
That was why Trump abandoned the nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions on Iran. It was why in 2020 he killed one of Iran's principal malefactors, Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The present crisis in the Middle East is, therefore, the result of a combination of Iranian aggression and American pusillanimity.
Consider the passivity with which Washington has reacted to a succession of Houthi attacks on U.S. bases in the region and, most recently, merchant shipping in the Red Sea.
Why send two aircraft-carrier strike groups to the region if you have no intention of using them for fear of 'escalating' the crisis?
However, the haplessness of the Biden administration's foreign policy is not the main reason why Trump is now narrowly the favourite to be the next president of the United States, though the perception that Biden is drifting into new 'forever wars' is playing its part.
The probability of Trump's re-election on November 5 next year is now, in my view, above 50 per cent. The prediction market agrees. So do most recent polls.
Despite his sea of legal troubles — and perhaps partly because of them — the former president is the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee, about 50 points ahead of Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.
And Trump is well placed to defeat Biden in a rerun of the 2020 contest, especially if you look at his polling leads in key swing states.
The crucial issue is not Biden's foreign policy flops. Nor is it his advanced age, though even a majority of Democratic voters admit that, at 81, he is too old to be president. The key issue is 'Bidenomics,' a term devised by the dotard president's handlers.
Objectively, by most conventional measures, the U.S. economy is in good shape — certainly in better shape than Britain's or Europe's. Unemployment is low (3.7 per cent). Inflation has come down substantially (to 3.1 per cent, compared with a peak of 9.1 per cent in June last year). The financial markets are rooting for interest-rate cuts next year.
But voters have still not forgiven the administration for the inflation they suffered last year. They also sense that a slowdown is coming, if not a recession — the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes.
As a consequence, Biden's polling on this key issue is terrible: on average, nearly 61 per cent of voters disapprove of his handling of the economy, and 65 per cent his handling of inflation. An even higher proportion (69 per cent) think the country is 'on the wrong track'.
Though he has not sunk as low as Jimmy Carter in 1979, Biden's position is uncomfortably similar to that of Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush at the same stages in their only presidential terms.
I do not entirely blame my fellow Americans for considering re-electing Trump. His first term was much better for the average U.S. household — who saw their real income surge 9 per cent before Covid struck, after 17 years of stagnation — than most elite media coverage would have you believe.
However, in view of all that has emerged about Trump's unconscionably reckless conduct between election night 2020 and the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, I fear that his return to the White House could mark the beginning of the end of the American republic and the first step towards an unconstitutional American empire.
And I worry that Trump will be able to justify overriding the constitution by pointing to both domestic and international emergencies.
At home, there will inevitably be 'mainly peaceful' (i.e. partly violent) protests in Democratic strongholds if Trump is declared the election winner.
Abroad, Trump will inherit a triple global crisis in Ukraine, Israel and potentially also Taiwan. Even if China's President Xi Jinping does not risk blockading the island he covets, it would not surprise me if Hezbollah opened a new front against Israel in the New Year.
Consider how the Roman republic died as the ruthless political operator Octavian — Julius Caesar's adopted son — asserted his power.
He became emperor by steps: first as one of the second triumvirate — an alliance between three rival statesmen, Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus, giving them absolute power; then as lifetime commander-in-chief (imperator), tribune and censor; and finally as 'princeps civitatis' (First Citizen) with the title 'Augustus'.
What made the Roman Empire possible — indeed, necessary — was the need to end a state of recurrent civil war at home and of geopolitical crisis abroad, especially in the Middle East, but also in central Europe — Rome's Ukraine was Germania — and even in unruly Britannia, conquered by the Romans after AD 43.
Augustus won power by ousting Lepidus and then defeating Mark Antony and his lover Queen Cleopatra and invading Egypt, which he subsequently annexed. It was Augustus, too, who incorporated Judaea, including Herod's kingdom, into the Empire. It was a Roman census that required Joseph and the pregnant Mary to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
And this brings me to the other major resemblance between our time and the time of Jesus's birth 2,023 years ago.
One reason why Donald Trump's return to power is now a possibility is that we in the West inhabit a moral and ethical wasteland. If we were still a truly Christian civilisation, Trump would stand no chance of becoming president again.
A people who were committed to the teachings of the Old and New Testaments would have no hesitation in identifying him as a serial violator of at least half the Ten Commandments and, therefore, morally unqualified to occupy the highest office in the republic.
Yet the U.S. today is only nominally a Christian country, in the sense that a majority of Americans still identify as Christians of one denomination or another.
According to survey data, both faith and observance have significantly declined in the 20 years since I have lived and worked there. In the 1990s, 90 per cent of Americans identified as Christians. It's now down to two-thirds. Weekly church attendance has also slumped.
In this respect, the U.S. is beginning to resemble England, where less than half the population (46.2 per cent) now say they are Christians. More than a third (37.2 per cent) say they have no religion, according to the 2021 census.
Like the people of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, we are almost entirely consumed by the pleasures and preoccupations of this world. One of many symptoms of our spiritual bankruptcy is the epidemic of mental ill-health sweeping the English-speaking world.
Another symptom is the slump in fertility rates as more and more couples opt to have just one child or no children at all.
Whatever people may say when they rationalise this decision to limit their reproduction below the replacement rate (to sustain the species), in truth the decision to restrict or forgo parenthood is an implicit expression of despair.
For there is no greater joy to be had in this world than that of bringing a baby into it. It is, I would argue, the ultimate affirmation of faith. Yes, we know that every child is doomed, as are we, to experience suffering and, inevitably, death.
And yet we know that the delights of life are worth all its trials and its inevitable end. A Christian knows that we humans are more than mere naked apes. We know that God made us 'in His image'.
It is, thus, no accident that at the heart of the Christian faith is the Nativity. The greatest story ever told begins with the birth of a baby boy, immaculately and divinely conceived, to a young Jewish woman.
And the story ends, not with His cruel crucifixion in Jerusalem, but with the conquest of the Roman Empire itself by the religion founded by Him — Christos, the Anointed One of the Lord God.
This Christmas, let us remind ourselves that His 2,000-year reign over the faithful began not only amid a Middle Eastern crisis, but also in the period of transition from republic to empire.
Dark days may lie ahead. It is some comfort, surely, that a saviour could be born at such a time.
View original: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12895595/world-today-uncannily-one-Jesus-born.html#comments
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Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, said to be Jesus's birthplace
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