Transcript

Intro

Lucilla: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of radio alqantara. Today we are Deanna, Sara and Lucilla and we are joined by Sara Abbas. Sara, would you like to introduce yourself?

Sara: My name is Sara Abbas. I am Sudanese. I was born in Sudan and lived there until I was 12 and then we were forcibly exiled to the US and I have been in and out of Sudan in the years since. I'm a feminist, I do a lot of research. Most of my research has to do with Sudan actually. And one of the things I've been working on since the revolution started is looking at the sit -in spaces between 2019 and 2021, the areas that were occupied by protesters. I'm especially interested in how people imagine living together in these kinds of liberated spaces. So that's most of my interest right now. Thanks.

Lucilla: Thanks for making time, Sara. It's such a pleasure and I'm so glad that you could make it. We have invited you to radio alqantara because we would like to speak to you and hear from you about the situation in Sudan right now. For our listeners who might not be aware, in Sudan there is a war that began on the 15th of April in 2023 between the rapid support forces (RSF) and the Sudanese armed forces (SAF), that is the Sudanese military and a militia. And this is a war that follows a counter-revolutionary coup and before that a revolution that toppled Omar al -Bashir in 2019. And so, right now we don't get a lot of information about Sudan for a variety of reasons that we will maybe get into in the conversation.

We have heard slogans like "Free Sudan" and a lot of you listeners probably have heard that there is a war, but we want to go a bit in more depth about what is happening and also how activists are organizing against the war and what is happening on the ground. So Sara, the first question that we want to ask - a very general question to get into the topic - is if you can tell us a bit about what is happening in Sudan right now and also, since the issue of information is such a problem, what might be happening or to what extent can we even know everything that is happening in the country currently?

Sara Abbas: Thank you very much for the invitation. Yes, as you said, Lucila, this particular war, which started last year on April 15th, basically is an extension of decades and decades of war. Essentially, since Sudan's independence in the 1950s, there has been war in different regions.

This war in particular has engulfed many areas in the country, including the capital city. And so, because it has engulfed the capital city as well as had a very strong impact on state institutions because they are all concentrated in the center, in Khartoum. And so, for example, just to give a small example, there have been 19 million children in Sudan who have been out of school since April of last year. Essentially, there are no schools functioning in the country and the little education that is taking place is taking place through mutual care initiatives mostly. But most of the schools or many of the schools have been turned into shelters actually for the displaced.

The war, in terms of the humanitarian dimension of it, is quite devastating. It's close to 10 million people since April of last year who have been displaced. I think it's important to say here as well that many of those people have already been displaced in previous wars and conflicts in Sudan or through the destruction of rural livelihoods because of privatization, because of basically capitalist policy and because of state policy. But we have never seen displacement on this scale in Sudan before, even during the war in Darfur, which had begun in 2003.

Darfur is the westernmost region in Sudan, which has been targeted by the state from that period on. The war comes in the heels of a revolution, as Lucila mentioned, basically a mass civil uprising that began in December 2018, and which continued against military rule for a civilian state. It managed to bring down the regime of Omar al-Bashir, which had been in power for almost 30 years, but did not manage to remove the military from power. So, basically the military readjusted and also through, you know, Western backing, a peace agreement, a power sharing agreement was signed in 2019 between the military and the elite civilian opposition forces. A period followed that was called the transitional period. The idea was that it would be a transition to democratic rule, but the military again took power in a coup d'etat in October of 2021. And the interesting part, I think, is that the military took power in this coup, allied with the Rapid Support Forces, which is the militia that it is now fighting this war against. And so, they were allies up until pretty much very close to the point that the war started last

And the RSF are a militia that was made by al-Bashir, that was formed by al-Bashir in the 2000s as a way of kind of having a counter insurgency force on the cheap. So, a cheap way of putting down rebellions in different parts of the country. And it was formed out of the leftovers or the remnants of the Janjaweed militias which were involved in a genocidal war in Darfur, supplied, equipped by the government. They also acted as border guards, so they are very much implicated in European border policy, but I'll come back to that later. So on a humanitarian level, it's quite devastating. There's at least 1.5 million people who have crossed the Sudanese border into neighboring countries, which is also a crisis because there's a lot of violations as you know that happen at borders.

There's also a lot of violations that happen to refugees and this is particularly difficult because the neighborhood in which Sudan is, I mean you have Ethiopia on the one hand where there has been the Tigray genocidal war happening and where many Tigrayans including Tigrayan women and girls had sought refuge in Sudan. You have South Sudan which is deeply conflict affected. You have millions of South Sudanese refugees who had crossed into Sudan also to seek refuge. You have Chad next door, which has been hosting millions of Sudanese refugees for years and which is a very impoverished country. You have Libya also on the border and we know about Libya and the situation there. Basically what I'm trying to say is that it's very difficult situation because it's a situation where there's almost nowhere for people to find safety in the region now. I could also speak about Egypt, but Egypt is a slightly more complicated situation, but it is also an extremely difficult place also for refugees to be. There's currently a campaign of deportation of Sudanese refugees that is happening illegally, and with Sudanese and also some Syrians being picked up from the street and forcibly deported back. And again, Egypt is of course an ally of the European Union and receiving a lot of money for so -called migration control. So this essentially is the situation.

The war is, I think for what we are speaking about, it's important to mention that one of the features of this war has been a really intense campaign of sexual violence against women and girls. And this sexual violence involves things like rape, sexual assault, slavery, essentially kidnapping women and forcing them to work for some of these soldiers, kidnappings for ransom, so kidnapping women and girls and then asking for payments. Essentially, it's an incredibly hellish situation for women and girls in Sudan at the moment. And from a gender standpoint for many other groups, but in particular, I would like to mention young men because young men who are not affiliated with either the military or with the RSF are under constant pressure by both parties, under constant, basically, being accused of being working for the other side or being forcibly recruited into the militias or with people's economic situation being almost impossible. Some young men have also been forced or attracted to joining particularly the militia because there's just very few ways in which you can survive nowadays. So much of industry has shut down, so much of agriculture has shut down and people often flee from one state to another, but then when that state falls to the RSF, they are forced to flee again, which we see happening.

One last thing to say is that, you know, to go back to your question of what we don't know, I mean, Sudan is a country where for various reasons historically it's not, for example, connected to the internet as, you know, Egypt or Tunisia or Kenya. And this is always a struggle in terms of being able to have information come out. There's some incredibly brave citizen journalists and other journalists who have been trying to get the word out, even though in most cases they themselves have been displaced. There have been quite a few journalists, including women journalists who have been killed in the conflict.

And there's difficulty in getting information out, but there's also not that much interest in the information. And I think this quite important and we can talk also a little bit about why that might be. If we look at a city like El-Fasher, which is in north Darfur, this is a city that has faced decades of violence, just as Gaza has. This is a city that is very large. It's large, it's almost a million people that live there. And it has had, it has been under siege for weeks by the RSF. Something very similar to what is happening in Gaza. It's a siege of bombardment and starvation and a siege of basically closing down any routes that allow people to escape, bombing hospitals, bombing neighborhoods, bombing schools. And so if you look at the situation in El-Fasher, it is quite similar to Gaza, but there isn't almost any attention to it in the mainstream media or actually in the alternative media either.

Lucilla: Thank you, Sara. And yeah, I think you mentioned a lot of points that we will come back to in the conversation. And I also just want to say, as I told you before, we, you know, when we were talking about the questions to address, that we will have another episode where we can hopefully go in more depth about the situation at the border that we will talk to with a comrade of ours.

Sara: Thank you, Sara, for your explanation and words. And you mentioned the forms of violence against women. Can you also tell us more about their practice of resistance and self -organization? For example, how are women's and feminist organizations or collectives operating, if at all?

Sara Abbas: Yes, so they're definitely operating, but they are being forced to operate in different ways because of the situation, because for many feminists and women's activists, because of course not everyone takes on the word feminist, many of them are displaced themselves.

Historically, there have been many different streams of the women's movement in Sudan, although traditionally there was. If you look in the sort of Sudanese history books, there's very little written, but there are, for example, a few accounts of the women's movement from the sort of formal, what is considered the formal women's movement, which began in the 1950s with the Sudanese Women's Union at the eve of independence. It wasn't separate. It was very much embedded at that moment in the fight for independence from Egypt and from Britain. That women's movement has resisted different dictatorships over the years. But there have also been other forms of women's organizing over the years, as the kind of economy collapsed under a combination of things, under the regime's privatization policies, under the regime's corruption, but also under Western sanctions on Sudan in the 1990s. And as war displaced many women from areas outside the center of the country, which is the power base of the country ethnically and religiously and politically… Colonialism set up Khartoum and the regions around it as the kind of heart of Sudan and the rest of the country, particularly the South and the West, were always treated as places of extraction. And this actually predates colonialism.

Sudan has a history of colonialism, yes, but it also has a history of a slave trade into the Arab world. So as opposed to crossing the Atlantic, that slave trade went into the Arab region and that was a massive economy on which colonialism then later kind of built on its foundations. Between that, between colonialism and then the post-colonial policies of the states which continued this peripheralization policy of making these regions places where you extract, take resources, whether they be agricultural resources, which is what they used to be, but later it became oil and then gold. And you move them first to the center and then to the global markets via the center. And of course, elites, including the post-colonial elites that took over at independence, were groomed in a way to take over that role of extracting on behalf of the government and on behalf of the global market.

And so essentially you have a situation where a lot of formal feminist organizations are based in Khartoum. For example, some of the very well-known ones over the last kind of 30 to 50 years include the Sudanese Women's Union, that they also include the No to the Oppression of Women Initiative, and in the wake of the revolution, some other coalitions, like

Mansam, which are different groups coming together. But I think it's really important to say that what the revolution did is that it really kind of opened up a space where there was a very diverse multiplicity of voices coming from both the center and the so-called peripheries. And a lot of young women became politicized and they did not necessarily see themselves in these kinds of more formal structures of resistance like the union and others. They organized in their own ways they organize in smaller groups. Some of them organized for example by… if I think of a campaign like khosh al-ligna which was a campaign to encourage women to join the grassroots neighborhood resistance committees which are dominated by men but women have always been very active in them but there was you know effort for women to encourage other women to join these structures, as opposed to organizing only separately from them. Other women chose to organize separately and organize around very many different things.

Some women, especially at the elite level, were very focused on the percentage representation in government structures during the transition, but others were more interested in organizing, for example, around reproductive issues, for example, making abortion pills available, or essentially helping by dealing with neighborhood issues, Or by bringing young women together to protest in particular forms. And so there's been a real challenge, let's say, to the more organized structures with the war, because with the fall of Khartoum and the destruction of many of those organizations, particularly the non-profits that were there, the civil society organizations lost their offices, lost their spaces.

And it's something that in a way has happened on and off over the years because if you're in opposition to the regime, you would periodically anyways get shut down. So I know many women who worked at civil society organizations were shut down, but this was a complete destruction and also a dispersal. So you had people running, for example, out of a city like Khartoum and going to family in the east, in the north, anywhere where they could be safe or going into shelters and so not really being able to meet in the ways that they were able to meet before.

There are also parts of the movement that have always been shouldering most of the blame or most of the stress of the regime. So for example, you have the association or union for food and tea sellers who are mostly racialized women from the Nuba mountains, also from Darfur. And essentially they had organized during the Bashir era to have some rights because working on the street meant that they were constantly facing the security services, constantly dealing with abuse. For example, having their equipment that they use to make tea or to sell food being taken away from them and then sold basically back to them in some cases, confronting the public order laws which try to regulate or control women's dress and presence in public spaces. So again, these women, a lot of them find themselves today in shelters all over the country.

Feminists have been organizing and women have been organizing in different ways. For example, they've come together to come up with a statement or feminist perspective of a statement on the war that looks at the war not as... That essentially acknowledge that women have faced a state of war for a very long time and that war is not just the absence of peace, it also means that the kind of peace that comes doesn't just mean that it's a kind of ceasefire and an agreement whereby the realities, including the economic realities of women don't change, but that it has to be a more radical change that's kind of rooted in these feminist visions coming out of the revolution and from the different regions of the country.

There's been also organizing by women in, for example, Blue Nile State, which is one of those

places that I speak about which are peripheralized or made into a periphery. It's a racialized state where the relationship historically of the state, whether colonial or not colonial, is one of extraction and of conflict in order, violence in order to extract. And people there have dealt with war on and off for many, years. There are feminist grassroots groups there, for example, a group called Wa3y, which means consciousness. And that group has been working in communities for quite a few years, working with women in order to improve women's economic situation, but also in order to essentially raise women's voices against the war. And they have been able to, along with other groups in Blue Nile, to organize locally, including around stopping their brothers and sons and husbands and other men in their families and in their areas from joining the militias.

So this is one of the things that they do. They work especially as mothers in order to do that. And they are also part of other initiatives like Mothers of Sudan who are working to end the war by mobilizing mothers. And mothers in Sudan, like in Argentina, like in many other places historically have played a really big role in the resistance. For example, during the revolution, the mothers of the martyrs of the young people, mostly young people who have been killed in the protests and in while organizing, they've always been very visible and have always been very vocal about ending this kind of violence, right?

We talk a lot about the crisis in Sudan, but I think what people don't talk about is that the world is in a perpetual crisis. And so even this language of crisis is a way of hiding the fact that, you know, there's a crisis in capitalism, there's a crisis of borders, there's a crisis of living that is creating a situation whereby it explodes into violence, but there is also invisible violence that people are living with all the time. And so there are ways in which these groups are organizing, but it's extremely challenging to do this. I know, for example, some young women who have been active in the revolution, given that they are displaced themselves, most of their activism at the moment is about trying to make sure that women in the shelters get access to sanitary pads for their periods, for example. So the activism looks very in different ways.

And women who have been displaced into neighboring countries are also regrouping and trying to find ways of ending this war, but ending it in a feminist way. And for example, right now, the No to the Oppression of Women Initiative, which had come up when it came up in Sudan during the Al-Bashir regime, it started with women taking space publicly on the streets in protest of the public order laws that target women's clothing and dress and criminalize women's basically presence in the public space. And so they've done different types of work since, and now many of them have found themselves in Cairo, displaced to Cairo, so they are trying to organize there, and I see that they are meeting at the moment to do that. So this is different types of organization.

I'm also in touch with some women in the camps in White Nile who are… there's camps for South Sudanese, there. South Sudanese are the biggest refugee group in Sudan. And over there, some of the activists that I know, they're working really just because the conditions for the refugees in the camps have become, I mean, they've always been unbearable, but now there's new kind of policies that are restricting movement and there's more difficulty getting food, accessing food and water. So they're organizing around these issues and trying to help especially the mothers and the young men in the camp as well.

Deanna: Thank you so much, Sara, for this insight, especially on the role of women's resistance in this situation, be it open resistance or everyday acts of resistance. You said so many important things, but something that I'd really like to know something more about is, you mentioned that for a women's group, they wrote a statement or a manifesto where they say that peace is not the absence of war but a radical change of the current condition. I would like to know in relation to this, what does justice mean for the people involved, for the women involved? Would it mean punishment of the people responsible for this violence? Would it be in the lines of what the very dominant international criminal courts would argue for? Or are there different forms of justice that are currently being envisioned? So when we think about peace, when we think about resolution of this conflict, what are people hoping for?

Sara Abbas: There isn't a unified vision. I mean, you have statements to say, you know, this is a vision for the end of the war, and they are the result of a lot of work and a lot of discussion and debate. I think there are different feelings and opinions partly depending on the positionalities of people. At least this is my observation. So for example, women in Darfur, not all, but many women activists in Darfur are very supportive of, for example, the indictment of al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court, which took place some years before this revolution. So al-Bashir was indicted for war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court. But not just him, there were also several other indictments but they were never arrested or brought to the courts itself for trial.

And so there tends to be more support for this, partly because of a lack of confidence in the Sudanese justice system itself, the legal, I mean, justice system, the court system. There is a lack of trust that the court system, because it's embedded obviously in these violent genocidal regimes, that the court will be able to give a fair trial. There are other visions also that are more like reparative justice type of visions. So a lot of them have to do with restoring land and giving people access to their resources, to control over their own resources, of changing the legal framework so that it protects women and then enforcing that legal framework.

A lot of the visions I find in Sudan of justice are very much embedded also in economics, not just in the politics in the kind of Western sense, right? Because I think one thing that is like I've noticed ever since going to Darfur like starting in 2004, when early in the early years of the war, the first time that I went, having, for example, conversations with women at the time in Abu Shok, which was one of the biggest camps in the region. It had at that point 70,000 people living in it who had been displaced by this genocidal war by the regime, which was specifically targeting groups that are constructed, or tribes, as they say in Sudan, that are constructed as African, as black African in the country. And many of the women there had been burned out of their villages. So literally there was a scorched earth policy of burning down villages. Thousands of villages were burned down in order to push people off the land. This wasn't the first time in the south of Sudan where war had been going on and off since the early 1960s and only really ended with the independence of South Sudan in 2011.

In all those decades, there was also a scorched earth policy by different regimes, actually military and non-military, civilian regimes, whereby you removed people off their land by literally taking away their option to be there. And so burning a village is a very effective way of doing that. So many of the women there had been burned off, burnt, scorched out of their villages and ended up in the camps. In the camps, they were having to go out to the areas around it to collect firewood. So in the beginning, I thought, you know, I was like quite young at the time and I like, I thought that they were collecting firewood to cook. And then I realized that they were actually collecting firewood in order to sell. Because if you live in a camp, you still need money if you needed to buy milk or you need to buy oil or you need to buy something that your food ration card is not giving you - the food rations are very limited - or you needed to buy a piece of clothing or something. So the women would collect the firewood and then sell it in the towns that were close by and in the process of collecting firewood they were being attacked by often being attacked by the Janjaweed militias and basically undergoing sexual assault.

And at the time, the international community, it was a period of a lot of UN and NGOs in the country. They were there because it was the peace agreement period with the South, so there was like a lot of money coming in all of a sudden in order to do development and what they call post-conflict reconstruction. And so everybody was coming to them and asking them, have you been raped? Have you been raped? Have you been raped? Which in itself was a trauma for them. So this is what I realized is that this… they were reduced to people who had been raped and there was only an interest in that.

So at the time, one of the interesting things I kept hearing from different conversations was, if you want to help us, yes, something happened to me. But if you want to help me, what I need is not to be poor. Because if I'm poor and I leave this camp, if there's a chance for me to leave this camp, I will keep getting… things will keep happening to me because I am poor. And so at the time being a naive person, I went back and my suggestion was, yes, people, you know, it's good to have psychosocial counseling and legal support. That's important. But people also need to have the ability to rebuild their lives economically so that they don't continue to be as women and as girls economically vulnerable.

And that was rejected at the time. was psychosocial counseling and legal support. So I'm not sure why we were asking to begin with. But what is interesting, I think, is the fact that often ideas of justice have to do with the right to life, as we say in Sudan. So this is an interesting thing. Often words or phrases in Sudan means something very different than how they're used in the West, right? So I'm Sudanese -American, obviously in the US, the right to life is something used by anti-abortion conservatives to restrict women's rights to abortions. In Sudan, we use the right to life, I think, as it's used in most of the world. It's essentially a way of saying that justice for me is for me to be able to count on the fact that I can live and that I can live with dignity. And so when you look at it that way, there's a legal aspect, sure, but there is also an economic and a social aspect and all of these things are not in these neat boxes, right?

So it means that I have the right to drink water and that my child doesn't die because the water is polluted or not accessible. It means that I know that if, the laws will protect me and I can come to the court and have a fair, regardless of whether I'm educated or whether I'm Arab or not or whether I am rich or not, right? And it means many different things. And you find that often, depending on the area, if it's an area that has had land being violently grabbed, taken away, whether by the state or by investors, if people have been driven off their land, justice for them, for women as well, is being able to have access and safety in their land. Not necessarily as private property, because there's a lot many different conceptions that are not about private property, but it's about having the right to live on this land and to live with this land, right?

And in other cases, for example, women who have been constantly harassed by the public order police, justice is getting rid of this police and making sure that this never happens again. Generally, for a lot of people, justice is being able to count on economically, on being able to live, on being able to express yourself without violence happening to you and also on being able to count on a justice system that is going to protect you. And yes, there are people who would like to see many of these rapists and mass murderers go to jail because we have never seen that ever. So in the history of Sudan, I'm 46 years old, at least in my lifetime, and I think definitely before my lifetime, we've never seen any of those heads of military, heads of regimes, militia heads, these capitalists who have pushed thousands, tens of thousands of people off their land, we've never seen any of them ever go to jail. So there are many people who believe that, and like I said, there is no unified conception of it.

Lucilla: Thank you so much, Sara. I'm wondering now, you spoke about in your last answer… you've also mentioned the genocidal war… and in the most recent violence, the term ethnic cleansing, I think it was more specifically, was also used, for example, in the Human Rights Watch report, in which the ethnic cleansing of the Masalit was documented. And this, I think it was one of the times in the last months maybe when Sudan was sort of a topic again for like more mainstream media. And I would like to ask you why you think, if you think - and I mean you've used the term so I'm assuming that you do - why you think that it is important to talk about the war in Darfur as a genocidal and to emphasize also this aspect in the context of what you described as the creation of a periphery which is also racialized and what this category of genocide or ethnic cleansing might do and why it is necessary or useful and also if you see limitations in using.

Sara Abbas: I do use it because I think for me and my own positionality as a Sudanese woman who is positioned as an Arab woman from the center, I think using it is important because it's… unfortunately too many people did not use this for a very long time because there is this perception that especially at the time when we started to talk about genocide, it was at a period when the Darfur conflict had been adopted by Western liberals, especially in the US as a cause. This was kind of in the early to mid 2000s where there was the Save Darfur campaign and it was extremely simplistic, extremely self-serving, I would say. Even though there were quite a lot of, for example, school kids who were involved who were genuinely wanting to make a difference, but I think at the higher levels of American civil society and of the US government it was a very self-serving kind of framing that played at the time into the war on terror narrative about Arabs being bad and Muslims being bad and all of this kind of stuff and so forth. And of course it was done without an acknowledgement of the kind of deep racism of the American state and its own history of genocide, which kind of remains very much unacknowledged, right?

But at the same time for me, being decolonial also means that I don't just do things also to go to the opposite of what the West is doing. First and foremost, I believe, I try to listen to the people that are being actually affected by these things. And they felt very much that they were being targeted on a mass scale in a systematic way because of their ethnicity. So it was important for me and remains important for me to acknowledge that the war on Darfur is a genocidal war. I actually think if anything that label should have been used for some of the earlier conflicts and wasn't for example, with the for the conflict in the Nuba mountains in the 1990s. It just happened to come before the war on terror at a time when there was not a lot of interest and Sudan had been quite isolated. And so there was a genocidal campaign against the Nuba and also in some parts of the South at different points.

So at the same time, I do think that ethnicity is a construct in the sense that people's identities also shift based on the language that is used to describe them, as we know. And so I do understand also that in the process of the Darfur War, I went in 2003 and then I went again around 2010 and there was already such a big shift that I noticed in the ways that people perceive themselves as being part of Sudan or separate from it. Because of course the war solidifies also these kinds of identities or shapes them in particular ways.

I think the ICC in particular, I personally - this is a very personal opinion - I don't think the ICC is the way because the International Criminal Court might have evolved now to have prosecutors that are, you know, from the Global South, that are people of color, but it remains a white power institution in a sense. It remains an institution that is mostly invested in prosecuting Africans. So if you look at most of the cases that the ICC has gone after, it's very much about going after Africans, as if Africans are the only people who commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. We know, for example, that both in Europe and in the US, there are several candidates for the ICC if we're really talking about this particular type of crime, but you don't see them ever being called up to the ICC.

At the same time, while the ICC itself, think it's quite performative when it came to Sudan because you see that it issued these indictments over two years and then it tried to pressure the Security Council to get help in order to apprehend and the Security Council did not cooperate with it, but then it called off basically the investigation at that point because it said we're not getting enough cooperation by the Security Council. But it felt like overall it was more of a performative gesture. The second aspect of it was if the head of the regime or these particular figures are taken up by the ICC, I think it might bring relief to certain people that have been victims of the crimes that were ordered by these individuals. I think it might also send the signal to say that it is possible for you to be prosecuted, but it might also do other things.

Generally speaking, the ICC indictments made the al-Bashir regime even more paranoid than it was before. They resulted in the closure of a lot of civil society organizations that were devastated because they were accused. It gave them grounds to accuse these organizations of spying, including feminist organizations that were closed down in those years. And overall, it made the regime willing to make allies with countries and regimes that are even harder to pressure than Western regimes, right? In order to solidify itself, right? And so I think overall, it's a debatable issue whether, you know, that particular institution is in favor or not.

I think what the revolutionary standpoint has been in Sudan and it's one that I myself have adopted, for example, if you look at the charter that came out of the resistance committees after a lot of work in 15 of the 18 states in Sudan, after the coup where people talked about a vision, it's called the Revolutionary Charter for the Establishment of the People's Power. And if you look at it, it's not about the ICC. It's not actually interested in that. It's about reforming and building a justice system in the country that is capable of delivering justice. So the focus is on the ability of us to change our own system rather than to wait for savior from the outside in order to do that. And I think ultimately that is really where the future lies because anything from the outside will be temporary and will also bring its own agendas with it.

At the same time, I'm not against using particular moments or things like the ICC in order to expand, if it can expand certain spaces at that moment. So I'm, for example, in favor in general of the work that a lot of Sudanese are doing in the country, activists of documenting the violations. mean, nobody else is, right? So people within communities themselves are keeping track of the violations that are happening, with an unclear idea at this point as to what justice system will be there in future. But the act of witnessing in itself is extremely powerful and the act of documentation itself is extremely empowering in a situation like this. So I didn't quite answer your question, but it's a complicated one and I don't have a yes or no answer to it. But I hope this was good enough for now.

Lucilla: Yes, definitely!
Sara: And it's really super interesting, just one last question. We talked about colonialist powers, forms of oppressions, extractivism, the role of war and different important forms of resistance and an understanding of justice. And in the context of the global movement for Palestine, protesters, have attempts to make connections between the plight of the Palestinians and that of the people elsewhere like Sudan, also Congo. How do you think these connections can be made? And we already talked a little about that maybe and what are the difference and the similarities, too?

Sara Abbas: I think that one of the problems with... I always start with the problem, I'm sorry, but it's just the way my brain works. I think one of the issues is that often these struggles are seen, including by people within them, as like zero-sum games. Meaning, the way I look at it, and I'm trying to write something about this nowadays, I don't know how far I'll get because it's a stressful time… There's like a kind of marketplace of, I think of it as a marketplace of white solidarity, right? So there's this kind of idea that because the centers of power in the world are in the global north and in the former colonial states, that for you to have change in terms of the inhuman realities that you live in places like Palestine and Sudan and the Congo, that you have to appeal to white empathy and white sympathy in order to drum up some solidarity, which then might result in a change in policy, right? Because we know that our regimes and our realities are shaped… A major factor in shaping them is the global north in terms of the way it economically and politically functions in relation to our parts of the world.

So I think, you know, there's a lot in common, whether it's Palestine, whether it's Sudan, whether it's Kurdistan, whether it's the Congo, we have more in common than we have in terms of differences. I think we are positioned sometimes differently in the global order in the sense that I personally believe that it is more difficult to get empathy for African Black lives than it is for any other lives except for indigenous lives because of the historical, let's say, super exploitation and extraction that has made the body, the Black body in these areas have very little value in terms of human life. And unfortunately, this is internalized also within progressive movements.

But the reality is that I think in terms of Palestine, there is, if anything, I believe that… You know, the war, this particular war in Sudan started in April and we were already way deep into it when October 7th happened in Israel and Palestine. And if anything, I believe that the activism that has risen up to end the, well, to end the occupation in general, but to also specifically end this genocidal war in Gaza has opened up a space also for Sudan. Particularly by those people who have been willing to not look at it as an either or, it's either Afghanistan or Sudan or the DRC. People that only have space for one people suffering at one time, but that have really linked the kinds of violences that are happening between the two. And so we see part of the reason, you know, I think one of you mentioned a bit earlier that there's been a bit more of Sudan in the headlines, I think it was Lucilla, in the last few months. And I think that's obviously partly because of these kinds of statistics coming out of the UN that are scary about the level of starvation that is happening, the level of famine that is happening. But I think part of this work is also grassroots, globally grassroots oriented in the sense that people have used also the space that's been opened up by Palestine and the kinds of consciousness that it's creating, to also create consciousness about what is happening in the DRC, which has been also going on for decades and decades, and what is happening in Sudan as well. What is happening in Afghanistan in relation to, for example, 1,000 days of teen girls not being able to go to school. I've also seen people use the space for that.

I do think that besides the similarities in what's happening on the ground. I mean, one obvious difference is that somewhere like Sudan, it seems very much like an internal problem. So it seems like, it's just Sudanese people killing each other, right? While in some cases it's easier to identify an enemy because you see, you know, this is the Israeli defense force that's coming in and occupying a land. I think we have to kind of break our ways of thinking around borders as well. And kind of, sometimes it feels to me like the argument that because something is happening inside a country that it's not as significant is like the argument, at least when I was young in the US, when I was a teen, there was, you know, the police didn't interfere in domestic violence cases because it was happening in the home. So there's a kind of, I see this kind of feminist echoes there where, you know, the borders are almost like the walls of the home where this patriarchal family is. And if the patriarch is beating on people on the inside, it's okay, it's not a crime really. I think it's still a crime, I mean, we know what these borders are. We know that these borders, we know that we were put inside these borders, right? They are not natural to us. But there is no reason for us in feminist circles, especially radical feminists, to really think within them still in these ways.

I think that there has been work to extend the platforms of different organizing spaces to Sudan and to Congo and by Sudan to Palestine. So one of the beautiful things that I've seen is, the government of Sudan during this transitional period between August 2019 and October 2021, not long before the coup, had been forced by the US or pressured by the US - I don't think they were forced, they could have said no - they were pressured by the US to normalize with Israel through this agreement called the Abraham Accords. And this is something that on the ground, most people did not agree with, but there was just so much going on in Sudan then, and there were some demos against it, but people were in turmoil, right? Economically, dealing with economic collapse, dealing with the continued repression and so forth. But what's been really beautiful is even in the middle of this war, there have been, you know, people that have been sending expressions of solidarity to Palestine. I've had Sudanese refugees in Cairo contacting me asking if I could help them raise money, not for themselves, but for people in Gaza and things like that. And I think this was a really important moment because it showed that whatever was happening at this kind of patriarchal state level was something very different because people could see each other in each of these struggles, right?

I think it's sometimes hard for people to see Sudan because not a lot of images come out of Sudan. When they do come out, like, we don't have a lot of technology and a lot of social media presence. And so I think the one critique I would say is that we still very much depend on being able to see videos in order for us to empathize or relate. And somehow I feel like this is one of the challenges for feminism is that we have, we have to break through that, right? Because people don't really all have access to that.

Lucilla: Thank you so much, Sara. think with everything that we've addressed, I would sort of leave it here in terms of questions. But the last thing I would like to ask you is also for our listeners to engage more and to find out more, if you would like to amplify platforms, initiatives of whatever sort, doing work against the war, be it in Sudan or internationally in solidarity with the people in Sudan or that you yourself are bringing forward that you want to amplify and people to know about.

Sara Abbas: Yes, so I think there's a few things I can think of in terms of just general practices but also some specific initiatives. So probably no matter where you are there's probably some Sudanese activists that are trying to work. It's been more and more difficult in the last year because for many of the Sudanese, including myself, most of our families were displaced, and also our own economic and other realities are very different from how they used to be. But people are still working, they're still organizing information sessions, they're still doing protests, they need help. So often, for example, when we have a demo here in Berlin, it's partly, you know, maybe we don't advertise it enough, but also, you know, we're often Sudanese there, mostly. So it would be good to try to link up locally, I would say, first of all, no matter where you are.

I would say the second thing is to try to materially support people, for example, a year ago, it was a real scramble for us because we were like individually collecting donations and trying to help people evacuate and all of these things. And it wasn't so easy. But since then, I see that there have been at least some platforms where… and we still do this, right? Because you still all the time you get requests because people are being displaced constantly and they're dealing with like health issues and all of the education things. So we still do this on an individual level, but there is also more formalized structures now that I really believe in. For example, like the Sudan Solidarity Collective, which a Sudanese activist who teaches at University of Toronto, Nisrin Omar, really great radical feminist helped with her students to set up and they support the emergency response rooms which are these local mutual aid initiatives in different parts of the countries that do things like help people with health care, with evacuation and more and more they have shared kitchens where people cook, try to collect lentils, whatever beans and try to cook because people really are having a hard time finding food in both the areas of active conflict and the areas of displacement. And so the Sudan Solidarity Collective, and I can send you the link, they have a website you can donate by PayPal. This is one way in which you can directly support. They do a lot of labor behind the scenes because what I didn't mention is that the banking sector collapsed in Sudan as well. So there are very few ways of getting money into the country, but people, manage to do that and it's not easy. It's a really big volunteer labor to do this. And so I would say the Sudan Solidarity Collective is a good one. There are others I also have seen up close, for example, the Sudanese American Medical Association. These are Sudanese doctors based in the US. They've done also really good work. They have GoFundMe's all the time.

I think what I would say is really important other than the material support is a couple of things when it comes to feminists, specifically, so one of them is to essentially try to translate articles or things that come out. Unfortunately, there isn't one place in which they're posted, but there are people, for example, if you follow, for example, a journalist called Reem Abbas on Twitter, that's one thing that's important because I've seen some really beautiful things coming out of feminists in Sudan. Like I remember when the Iran protests were happening there was this really beautiful statement because Iran and Sudan have a lot in common in terms of their kind of political history. And there was a really beautiful, I think it was from No to the Oppression of Women, if I'm not mistaken, like statement picking up on that. And I think it's important to translate it not just into English, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be in English, but into other languages where people have networks and where they might want to know. The Sudanese political history is so rich in terms of resistance, in terms of tactics, in terms of thought. And I think there's a lot of learning that can happen both ways.

The other thing is the refugee issues, especially if most of your readership or listening audience is in Europe. Europe is continuing to do some insanely criminal things in our region, the deportations of the Sudanese, I'm not going to talk about it because you will in more depth, but these regimes that are doing this to refugees are being funded by the European Union mostly in order to do "migration control", quote unquote. So like we really have been saying this for five years, 10 years, we need more activism when it comes to this issue of borders and Europe's borders in Africa and also just being able to better support the refugees that are arriving, managing somehow to arrive in Europe, they need support. And in Libya, they also need support, in Egypt, they need support.

And the final thing I would say is the feminists that are displaced, like they are looking mostly, yes, they need help. So some of the initiatives we're in is to just try to help them survive also as individuals. But they need spaces and they need to connect to other feminist movements. So if you're connected to people in Kenya or Uganda or Egypt, in other places, they need support also from the local feminists. They're quite isolated. And I think if people can make these kinds of connections, that works. With Sudan especially, the best way always is to just reach out to a feminist when possible and ask. It's not always possible to help because people are overwhelmed, but usually people will help you connect to the right person. It's not a country where you'll find a lot of things online. So I think if people are willing to make more of an effort, will be, I think, yeah, it will make a big difference. So I'll just leave it at that.

Deanna: Amazing. I would spend hours just speaking with you and asking you questions. Well, and being in I really hope we can meet in real life sometime soon.