The Humanitarian Crisis In Sudan And The Looming Threat Of Famine

>> Eric Wakin: Hello, and welcome to our Zoom audience and our live audience, I'm Eric Wakin, I'm the deputy director of the Hoover Institution and the director of its library and archives. Let me thank you all for being here, physically and virtually, I wanna thank my colleagues for arranging this talk, Neil Ferguson for being here, and the overseers of the Hoover Institution for supporting all of what we do.

We are entirely privately funded, and nothing we do would be possible without the generous support of our donors. We're here participating in the mission of Herbert Hoover, which is to be, for the institution to be more than a mere library, that's a quote and in that, he meant we should be studying the records of the past to talk about how we can prevent horrible things from happening and that's a bit about what we'll be talking about today.

This is a capstone conversation in the Bread and Medicine speakers series, Bread and Medicine is an exhibit here at Hoover about the famine in Soviet Russia and Ukraine a century ago in the American relief mission led by Herbert Hoover that saved millions of lives. There's also a companion book out from Hoover Press now by a research fellow, Bert Patenaude which uses material from the collections and has a series of scholarly essays on the famine relief, so you can get a copy of that from Hoover Institution.

This presentation will be followed by Q and A live from the audience and live from Zoom, which will be facilitated by my colleague Samira, let me introduce our participants, and then we'll get right to it. Our speaker today is Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, Alex is one of the foremost experts on Sudan, and he's a leading authority on famine.

He's the author of many books, I'm just gonna mention three at the moment, that are relevant to his talk today. Sudan, Unfinished Democracy, subtitle as the Promise and Betrayal of a People's Revolution, Famine Crimes, Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa and Mass Starvation, the History and Future of Famine, they're heady topics.

And as you know, Sudan is in the news right now, so I'm sure we're gonna get into that, very much so and I wanna thank Alex very much for coming here. Our discussant and moderator today is Neil Ferguson, who's the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and also a senior faculty fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard.

Neil is the author of 16 books, I can't list all of them, so I'll just mention The Pity of War, the House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and, of course, this masterful Kissinger biography. First volume is out and the next one will be out soon, I want to thank him so much for volunteering to do this.

Neil's also a filmmaker and a wonderful colleague at Hoover, so I'm grateful for him to be here, let's give a warm Hoover welcome to Alex, who will start us off, thank you.

>> Alex de Waal: Thank you very much, thank you for a warm and concise welcome. So just to start off my remarks, I want to say one reason why I was keen to accept the invitation from Bert Patenaude to come to the Hoover Institution had little to do with Sudan, but had more than a glancing relevance to the subject of this presentation.

In November of 1919, Ludwig von Mises, who was the founder of the Urban School of Neoliberal Economics, initiated what became his famous private seminar in Vienna. Amid the shortages and chaos that followed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the end of the Great War and the aftermath of the influenza pandemic.

That seminar was both an exercise in high theory, notably theories of money and value, and of the practical application of theory to the problems of the day. And the problems of the day in Austria were quite extraordinarily challenging, even existential, what was this polity to be called? We used the name, Oesterreich, the eastern empire today, without reflecting that it's the name of an imperial leftover drafted onto something that had never been an ethno-national entity.

And the sharp point of this challenge, as it were, was how to manage the moment of crisis, the moment of potential revolution without total state collapse. Hunger, unemployment, bewilderment, anger, no functional state monopoly on violence, enormous unpayable debt from war, socialism, monetary chaos. The underlying problem that arose was how a small country, stripped of its position at the center of a free trade zone cum empire.

And if ever there was a benevolent empire, it was the Austro-hungarian one, subject at worst to the economic dictate of vengeful adversaries that had just bested it in the Great War, and subject at minimum, to the business cycle of far more powerful neighboring economies. How could it maintain societal cohesion, and the discussions in von Mises seminar shaped the foundations of neoliberal economics as a school of thought.

And for that first seminar on November 26, 1919, von Mises asked a female law student to present a paper, her name was Elizabeth Efrosi, she's my grandmother now. Now, regrettably, I never properly discussed von Mises and his seminar with her before she passed away. And many of her papers, her lifelong correspondence with the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, are here at the Hoover Institution archives and I spent some time looking at that correspondence earlier today.

But she did give me one piece of advice when I studied economics before I went to university, she said, every serious economic question is ultimately a question of political philosophy. I'll come back to von Mises and the Austrian predicament towards the end of this presentation, but the reason that I bring this up is not just my personal interest in this topic.

It's because the more thoughtful political and economic thinkers and policymakers in Sudan and in neighboring countries, when they look to history, they index their current experience to the European interwar experience. That period a century ago was what we might call an inter imperium, the British Empire was passing, and America had yet to take up the mantle of world hegemon.

It was a period of turmoil and confusion in which the survival of entire nations was at peril, it was a time of famine, and there are parallels with today, it was a period when the utility of theory was never more evident. Having spent my working life in famines, wars, genocides and pandemics, I'm always surprised and reassured that there's nothing so practicable as a good theory.

One of the things that really grates is when analytical acuity is abandoned on the grounds that the urgency of the situation demands acting without thinking. And, of course, this was also an era in which the United States, with Herbert Hoover heading the American Relief Administration, undertook its first major international famine relief operation to aid millions of Europeans facing starvation, including in Vienna, where some 90% of school children Aged children were malnourished.

Hoover saw his mission as saving lives and preventing chaos. That kind of bold, ambitious undertaking is needed today in Sudan and more widely. So let me turn to world hunger today. And if I were a loyal speech writer for Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United nations, or Anthony Blinken, US Secretary of state, and I were asked to provide talking points for a presentation at Stanford, this is what I would do.

I would say the summary is up there. Global food insecurity is at unprecedented levels and is rising. Food prices are high, so too are fertilizer and fuel prices. I would give a shout out to drought and climate crisis, especially impacting the Horn of Africa. I would say the numbers of countries facing famine is increasing and that the World Food program, the biggest global humanitarian supplier, is facing a budget squeeze.

I would say the causes of world hunger are complicated. There's food production and supply, which are disrupted, notably by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the world's breadbaskets, coming on top of COVID-19. I would say there's a disruption to food entitlement, people's ability to buy food or obtain it from welfare programs, and there's armed conflict and violations of international humanitarian law.

I would say this represents a terrible failing of policy and ethics and I would implore us to do more. I would say what we should look at for a solution is we need to get more food on ships, especially out of the Black Sea, where Russians are blockading Ukrainian ports and Ukrainians have mined the sea lanes.

Secretary General Guterres has called the Black Sea Grain initiative a miracle and his greatest achievement of his time in office. As a loyal speech writer, I would stress all these things. This is analytical vacuity at its finest. It's a flat description. It says nothing interesting. It homogenizes very different kinds of crisis and it ends up focusing not on what is causing the crisis, but on the simplest tool for policymakers putting grain on ships.

Let's turn to Sudan. Let's do a similar exercise for Sudan very briefly. This is where Sudan is. The map on the left shows population density. The map on the right shows where it is in Africa and the greater Middle east. The map on the left shows its population density.

And you will see how much of the population is concentrated in Khartoum and the adjoining areas, that is around that area there. About one-fifth of the 45 million Sudanese citizens are in greater Khartoum. And that's where more than half the national economy is. And before the recent conflict that erupted on April 15, the situation was dire.

Almost one third of the population was in need of assistance. This map is from the US Agency for International Development's Famine Early Warning System. The UN has very similar maps. Yellow areas are stressed, green areas are fine. You see no green areas there. Yellow areas are stressed, orange is crisis, red is emergency.

Just one little red area on the border with South Sudan. And those little boxes with exclamation points that you see over there and one or two in other places, they're camps for displaced people, which would be in crisis if food relief were to be disrupted. This is the crisis before the crisis, as it were.

And that's crisis that is related to enduring rural poverty, to intermittent drought, to the legacy of armed conflict. 20 years ago, last month, a war broke out in Darfur and there are about 2 million people still living in displaced camps today. So, more on the crisis before the crisis.

Look, this chart shows GDP per capita in constant dollars. You see a calamitous decline. You see an increase in the early two thousands stabling off, and then after 2017, a true collapse. What you see is hyperinflation. This is inflation, people cannot afford to buy essentials. And since that conflict broke out on April 15, calamitous impacts.

More than a million people displaced. The figure I just heard this morning was 1.4 million. Numbers in need climbing by 1 million per week, up from about 14 million to something like 19 million now. Basic infrastructure destroyed. The central bank on fire. It's usually a bad thing to destroy a central bank.

All this is true and all this is sounding a big alarm. But there's something much more important, I think, to know here, how we got here. So if the Austro-Hungarian Empire were to be considered a relatively beneficent empire, Sudan's history puts it at the other predatory end of that spectrum.

This is a state built on the logic of deprivation. The city of Khartoum was founded 202 years ago as an imperial frontier depot for slave traders and freebooters, and it still carries that DNA. If you just look at some of the books on sudanese history, this will become clear.

Slavery, the Nile, black blood, the colonial era of exploitation of labor, that is the middle one here. When the British colonial administration deprived people who were outside its control of access to markets, of access to food, in order for them to work on schemes primarily for growing cotton for the Lancashire cotton industry.

And the post colonial history of starvation as a weapon of war, of driving villagers from their farms so that the land can become commercial, mechanized agricultural schemes. This is the book, the benefits of famine written by one of my classmates when I was a student at Oxford, describing how famine was actually implemented by design.

The key point being that this dispossession created not only extreme inequality, but also deep grievances against those who control the state. Those who control the state built up a fabulously corrupt crony capitalist system. This was a system perfected by President Omar al Bashir. There he is in the center president of Sudan for almost 30 years.

So, as well as the old agricultural system up here, which were formerly small holdings, which had been turned into big, mechanized prairie farms, quite productive, but also deeply exploitative and actually environmentally unsustainable. He also relied on islamic banks, which were essentially money laundering businesses for funding the islamist parties.

Oil, which was in South Sudan, an area in rebellion, had to be exploited sort of under forces of military occupation. And then it was only the Chinese that were ready to go in and actually provide the capital investment for that. And military industries themselves, in fact, there we see some of the military manufacturing.

But the military also controlled something like 60% of the commercial activities in the civilian sector as well. Most government spending was on the army and on infrastructure projects that had massive kickbacks funneled into the coffers of the ruling party. Now, this oil ran out. You will recall a couple of slides ago, that boom, that was the oil boom.

That growth was driven by oil. And the collapse began when South Sudan, where most of the oil fields were, took its independence in 2011. So you saw a collapse of oil rent as a proportion of GDP. You see it over there now for some six years. President Bashir got away with printing money, and as we know, when you print money and there's no basis for it, you have run off a cliff.

And that was the cliff. That is the GDP collapse. And you cannot carry on running on as Bugs Bunny on air indefinitely. So the other thing that this President Bashir did was he, sorry, there is oil. And as the oil declined, they discovered gold. And this chart actually understates the production of gold, because a great deal of it was not reported, was smuggled.

And the key thing about the gold wasn't so much that it was there, but where it was now. I referred earlier to the war in Darfur. Many of you may know the term Janjaweed, referring to those terrible militia that were licensed by the government of Sudan to clear the land, to commit terrible atrocities.

The army itself, they bought tanks and fighter jets. But it was the militiamen in SUVs, in jeeps who did the real fighting. And it was those militiamen that came to control the oil. Sorry, those militiamen that came to control the gold, they were the ones with the gold in their pockets.

Normally, when a country has gold, it is the government that controls it. In this case, it was in the hands of these paramilitaries licensed by the government, but outside their control. The most notorious Janjaweed commander was a fellow called Musa Hilal, he's there on the bottom left. Actually, when I went to Sudan as a graduate student, I stayed with his father and his father quite well.

A very upright, elderly, traditional sheikh, his son was anything but. The biggest gold mine was near Musa Hilal's headquarters. He drove out the local people. Then he was driven out by this man here, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Hemedti is little Mohamed, it's the name that a mother gives to her little boy, Mohamed.

And the name stuck because of his youthful demeanor.

>> Alex de Waal: Hemedti is not only a commander, he's a businessman. He made his fortune out of gold, out of these types of artisanal gold mines with his paramilitaries up there. He turned his paramilitaries, the rapid support force, into a transnational mercenary enterprise.

He rented them out to fighting Yemen, and in Libya, he set up a partnership with the Russian Wagner group. And in the meantime, the country's economy collapsed. You will have seen the graphs beforehand. People took to the streets, chanting down with the rule of thieves. And the symbol of their protests, a loaf of bread that they could no longer afford.

And four years ago, there was a beatific civic revolution in Sudan. A nonviolent revolution, an encampment of people surrounding the military headquarters. Led by women, rigorously non-violent, protesting, saying, we want these authoritarian kleptocrats out, we want civilian democratic rule. This is a picture of that. And on the night of April 11th, 2019, al Bashir's national Security Council decided that rather than follow his orders to open fire on this crowd and kill tens of thousands of them, they would remove him and take power themselves.

And two generals became the twin heads of this junta. There was one called General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, a little known professional soldier. And the other one was our familiar Janjaweed commander Hemedti, head of the feared rapid support forces. And after some three or four months in which the military tried to suppress the civilian movement and the civilians responded with continuing mass protests like this, the generals agreed to a compromise, a civilian led government and a transition to elections.

So there are the two generals at the top, and there is the civilian prime minister, Abdullah Hamdok, a professional economist, a mild man, highly capable, but with no hands on political experience, and in practice, not much authority. He is also a friend of mine. I knew him quite well in his capacity as a professional economist.

And in the week before he took the job, we discussed whether he should do so. And I said I feared that he would become like the cashier in a corner store selling groceries, soda, and soap while the gangsters cut their deals in the back room. He was there to put up shop sign so they could launder their kleptocratic businesses.

Handock did his best. A week before a committee documenting corruption by the military was due to report, and a few weeks before General Burhan was due to hand over to Abdalla Hamdok's civilian nominee as head of what was called the Sovereign Council, the de facto president. The two generals decided this was the right moment to stage a coup, and they did it together.

It was not ideological, it was purely kleptocratic, garnered no legitimacy. The economy continued to plunge, and as Sudan plunged deeper into crisis, the more its DNA as an imperial plunder state expressed itself. A kleptocracy's bad, but there's one thing worse than a kleptocracy, it's an insolvent kleptocracy.

>> Alex de Waal: Think of the mafia, think of the mobsters, think of the godfather.

When the prophets shrink, what do the mobsters do? They turned to violence. And the more the economy shrunk, the more these mobsters were focused on controlling the illicit trade, protecting their ill gotten gains. So think of the conflict in Sudan as a mobster shootout, a battle over turf between two rival gangland chiefs.

I wrote a memo, which then became a little article in foreign affairs in which that was my sort of main tagline. This is a mobster shootout, and I'm glad to say it was put in the president's daily brief. I was surprised that the diplomats were ready to endorse that language.

It was perfectly foreseeable, though not, it seemed, by the UN, United Nations and African Union diplomats. In cartoon, the crunch question was which of these two gangsters was going to be the chief. This was seen by those diplomats as a technical question, as a question of signing off on a piece of paper as to how the two militaries were to be integrated, missing the very obvious point that it was all about power.

The United Nations and the African Union decided on a deadline of April 1st to resolve this question. And they were confident that the differences between the two were very minor, just a couple of lines in a thick document. The deadline was postponed for one week, then for another week, and on April 15th, the fighting broke out.

We're facing not just a conventional humanitarian crisis. This is the collapse of a state. This is tearing the heart out of the country and its economy. We tend to think of humanitarian crises in Africa as rural affairs in which villages flock to camps run by aid agencies and the UN provides food.

This is different. This is urban starvation. This is a middle class famine. People with city apartments or villas, with money in the bank, used to buying their groceries at supermarkets, used to having piped water, refrigerators, air conditioning, suddenly have none of those things. Affluent people are dying. I get messages.

I can't bear to read them. Actually, every day, somebody's grandmother, stuck in the house, was unable to get the electricity turned on, unable to get the groceries delivered, died of dehydration or starvation. Somebody's husband who had hypertension, diabetes, unable to get medicine. Somebody injured by a piece of shrapnel or a piece of flying rubble, unable to get the basic medical attention.

One of Sudan's most famous actresses in her 1980s dying of starvation in her own house. The banks are closed, imports have ceased. Internet and cell phone are at best intermittent. Among the middle class's professionals, managers, civil servants, business people, academics, artists, students, all who can are leaving en masse and the heart is ripped out of the national economy.

Business has created those mechanized farms, as I criticize them, but they do produce the food that feeds the nation. They need to plow and plant this month, next month, June. They need fuel. There is no fuel. They need credit. There is no credit. They need money to pay their laborers.

What's worse than being exploited? Not being exploited at all? And the crisis before the crisis, in Darfur in particular, has gotten worse. There's a lot of fighting and displacement, and the humanitarian supply system has been cut. So in the last few minutes of this presentation, let me return to the suggestive parallels between that episode of intellectually fecund turmoil in Vienna a century ago.

And what is happening in Sudan today, and make some general speculations about what this might mean. So I began sort of the contemporary part of this presentation with talking about the sort of a flat arithmetic of hunger. And then I went into the historical specifics of Sudan, which are very unique.

You won't find this pattern anywhere else, but let's dive a little bit deeper and see if we can find some more interesting and useful lessons. And some 15 years ago, there was another seminar, a seminar convened by the then prime minister of Ethiopia, Alice Zenawi. He convened a seminar of about half a dozen people in his office, in private, three times a year.

He kept it private because he wanted to speak frankly. I was one of them. He died of an illness in 2012 before we could conclude this process. Abdullah Hamdok, who became the Sudanese prime minister, was another there. And the question that Melis posed, this is Melis on the left, Abdullah Hamdok on the right, was how to achieve development and democracy in a country with a small, open economy and a government with limited latitude for policy.

Which was very similar to the framing by Gottfried Haberle, a classmate of my grandmother's and a fellow participant in von Mises seminar, who described what he called the austrian predicament in these terms. How can an economy that is more poorly equipped in almost every respect withstand the competition of an industry and agriculture, working with better production conditions elsewhere without protecting itself with extra high tariffs?

The poor economy can compete with the rich only when the wages and other forms of income are correspondingly smaller. This process of structural adjustment that he advocated and foresaw would be painful and impoverishing, but worth it in the long term. A country like Austria would lose much of its skilled workforce and intelligentsia to emigration, but ultimately, in the long dure, it would be worth it.

Habela, unlike von Mises, recoiled from the brutal implications of this and advocated some limited intervention. Now, when we discussed this in the seminar, the contemporary version of this, the contemporary African version of this in the seminar with Melis, Melis shared with von Mises and Habala the precepts that political economy was subject to scientific analysis.

That material conditions were primary and ideational conditions and concepts were secondary. All shared the belief that a small, educated and enlightened elite could possess the insight and power to change the world. Now, of course, von Mises was a neoliberal and Melis was a Marxist Leninist. They came to radically different conclusions about what could be done, but they were posing exactly the same question.

And Melis riposte to the neoliberals who were there, of course, with the World bank delegations and the US and British and other delegations was I don't disagree with your analysis. I disagree only insofar as in the long run this may be the best outcome, but in the meantime we will starve.

And in the meantime, and these are his exact words, national disintegration cannot be ruled out. The society crisis unleashed by this level of austerity would mean that Ethiopia would not survive as a nation. And I fear that we're coming to see that dismal forecast unfolding in Sudan and in Ethiopia.

Now, very briefly, Meles saw four main factors as driving this, making it almost impossible for Ethiopia, or indeed Sudan, to achieve the kind of that was necessary. He saw climate change, he saw population growth, the demographic escalator of two or 3% per year. He saw China's entry into the World Trade Organization as removing the possibility of countries like his competing at sort of the lower end of manufacturing, the bottom rungs of economic development.

And he saw that western financial institutions, institutions had set benchmark rates of return to capital that simply couldn't be matched by these countries. So he described trying to govern Ethiopia as like running in front of an avalanche. You can't stop and admire the view. And he explicitly indexed his experience to those interwar years in Europe.

And he said to his critics, his neoliberal critics, he said, I understand your arguments, but we will not survive the pressures that your policy prescriptions will bring. Now, I presented a paper at the seminar which was about trajectories of state collapse, how state collapse actually happened. In passing, I might mention that a lot is written about failed states, but they're not really about how states fail.

They're about how states in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East, parts of Latin America failed to succeed, failed to become like Denmark or Canada. So I described actually what happened when these states collapsed as I saw it. The archetypical country in the region was, I said, a rentier political marketplace.

What I meant by that was that rents from oil, from aid, from security corporation were diverted into what I called political budgets. This is a term used in the vernacular by the political leaders of the region, which, and the political budget is the money you have. If you are a leader, which you don't need to account for, you use it to buy political services, loyalties, bribes, et cetera.

And it is the crucial thing for your survival. You need two things, lke Machiavelli, you need a loyal force of soldiers who will fight for you, and you need that money. It's an updated version of patrimonial government, Machiavelli on the political futures trading floor. And that market in loyalties and services is literally a market.

And prices go up and down. Violence is tactical, money is strategic as a general rule. You can predict the outcomes of the trajectories of these countries, and you can predict the outcome of the war in Sudan, by looking at who controls the money and the price of loyalty that they are paying.

So I developed that paper into a book, which is this book. And as you see, I put banknotes on the COVID It's now eight years old. And I made a number of forecasts in this, some pessimistic, some optimistic. Sadly, the pessimistic ones have been the ones that have been born out.

And according to this framework, states collapsed when those trying to run them don't have the political budgets they need to buy the loyalties they need for their ruling coalition. And it can either be because their political money dries up or the price of loyalty goes up, so their money won't go so far, or the sources of political money shift.

And in the case of Sudan, the shift to gold was key, because the gold in the hands of the pockets of Hemedti turned directly into political money. And if you open up a well regulated system to political competition, the price of loyalty goes up. And the money has to come from somewhere, usually some form of illicit activity.

And I should stress, the political money has to come from somewhere, some form of corruption or shakedown. And if that isn't enough, someone will turn to violence. This, I think, this is what I tried to argue in my paper, was why the Arab spring uprisings had so often turned to violence.

And if you license a militia to do your dirty counterinsurgency, don't be surprised when they translate that capacity to violence into some other form of reward, commercial, political, or both.

>> Alex de Waal: It's a fairly simple, intuitive model for how transactional politics works. It's also the one that the political operators use themselves.

It's how they assess one another, it's how they predict what will happen next and what they don't factor in, because they don't care about it, is the people who go Hungary. So we know that the austrian experience of the inter imperium 100 years ago didn't end well. It's not going so well in Sudan and the neighboring countries either.

It's a very different kind of state failure to that facing Austria 100 years ago. And I would argue that, yes, we can look at all the narratives of politics and grievances, of nationalism, of separatism, of Islamism, counter-Islamism. Those actually conceal the basic reality that we face a crisis of survival of these societies.

And those men, and they are all men who are skilled at staying in power, are those who are skilled at managing this political marketplace, using political money and using violence. And they are disregarding almost entirely the welfare of their people. And I don't see how the political economic systems that are in place are going to be capable of producing public goods, including protecting their people from famine.

The humanitarian response is necessary, but necessarily inadequate. It can, as with Hoover's efforts after World War One, save lives. Now, as then, it may mitigate chaos, but it cannot stave it off entirely. The humanitarian response can be done in some more creative ways, and perhaps we can talk about that.

But I think we need to see that humanitarian effort are simply buying us a bit of time for actually grappling with these other more fundamental and frankly more frightening realities that are unfolding. And on that slightly gloomy note I'm going to go.

>> Neil Ferguson: Thank you very much indeed, Alex, for that somber introduction to the, well, eve of what sounds like a catastrophic famine and not one necessarily confined to Sudan.

I want to begin by pointing out that when two British guys are talking about Africa, they have to be a little bit careful. We arrived at this moment from two very different directions, but we started in the same place, Oxford, in the early 1980s. And your studies led you to Khartoum and the study of refugee problems.

Mine led me to Central Europe and the place where you began your talk, the German hyperinflation of 1923, which was also an Austrian hyperinflation in the wake of World War I. That seems to me that the problems of Central Europe in the wake of World War I were very different in a number of ways, though, as you said, the similarities of economic crisis, hunger, and inflation were there.

But in the Central European case, what happened was an experiment with Republican government, with democracy that failed. And within a little more than a decade, Germany and then Austria were subsumed into the nightmare of national socialism. That's clearly not the future that lies ahead of Sudan, or, for that matter, South Sudan or Ethiopia.

So help me think about this fundamental difference. If there's one lesson of the Central European experience, it seems to me it is that if you have an enormous inflationary crisis and a huge economic shock, it's unlikely that people will be loyal to democracy and they will be attracted to dictatorship.

But I think you're telling us something different about where Sudan and its neighbors are heading. Help us understand where you think they're going, cuz it's clearly not the future that Austria had in front of it in the 1920s.

>> Alex de Waal: I think first of all, I absolutely concede that the dissimilarities are greater than the similarities.

What I found intriguing was simply that the questions that were being posed intellectually were remarkably similar. And that the episode, if you look at the sort of the general literature on state building and economic development in Africa. The dominant literature talks about the importance of developing institutions on the sort of Weberian, generally sort of North European market.

And assumes that economies can develop along with those in that kind of institutional political development, but pays very little attention to that particular period of the interwar period in Europe. And it's very striking that all the books that are sort of the seminal texts that are taught to students studying economic development, state building, etc., have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the interwar years.

And I find it very interesting that some of the key thinkers in the Northeast African region fastened onto that. You're missing something here. But getting back to the direction of travel is very different. And the kinds of options that were open in the slightly longer term to those Central European countries of becoming part of the European Union, opening their borders to trade, having that type of economic growth based on the foundation of solid institutions is not there.

It's not gonna happen.

>> Neil Ferguson: By the way, I'm getting questions as I sit here from the online audience, which is quite a bit larger than the audience in the auditorium. I'm going to also make sure I get questions from people in the audience, too, so bear with us.

I'm gonna ask a couple more questions and then summon the roving mics into action. But one question that's come in that follows on from what we just said from one of the online audience members. You said many people are fleeing Sudan, where are they going? Are they receiving help?

 

>> Alex de Waal: So there's two, I mean, there are three major types of flight. One is the mass exodus of the middle class, mainly going to Egypt. And a lot of them are passport European, particularly British passport holders, and will end up in Britain. Quite a lot of these, actually, I should add, people who would like to leave were students who had applied and had their passports in Western embassies.

And then those embassies closed and they can't get them or they've been burned or shredded, they had stuck. The second flight is the Darfur is, again, burning when they're tens of thousands fleeing across into neighboring Chad, and then the third is towards South Sudan. And then in particular, there are a lot of South Sudanese who are living in Sudan and they are fleeing quotes back to South Sudan.

Some of them never actually lived there before, and I think there's a great fear that that will engender instability in South Sudan.

>> Neil Ferguson: So this is a crisis, just to reiterate something you said on top of previous crises, conflict in Darfur, conflict in South Sudan, and a kind of abortive revolution in Sudan itself.

As you showed in one of your maps, there are already refugees reliant on aid in Darfur. Is the system of aid simply going to collapse? You said at one point, somewhat provocatively, that putting grain on ships isn't the answer, though. It's the sort of official UN answer. What more can be done beyond trying to get food to the affected areas?

That's the banal and obvious question, but I've got to ask it.

>> Alex de Waal: Well, I think putting grain on chips is not a bad thing to do. I mean, I'm not against that. I think what's one thing that could be done, and in fact, I've been advocating for this and working with some colleagues in different governments to try and make this happen, is you have large numbers of people who have a lot of money in banks.

Couldn't we have an electronic money transfer system, mobile banking, and this has been done elsewhere. Kenya has some of the most advanced mobile banking systems anywhere in the world. Somalia has some of the most effective remittance systems. And if you could bring those together, you could actually have a financial system that bypassed the central bank is burnt, but bypassed the central bank.

And actually allowed those with money and assets to actually go about some basic economic activities, cuz not all of the country is on fire.

>> Neil Ferguson: That kinda depends on the cell phone network operating.

>> Alex de Waal: Yeah.

>> Neil Ferguson: And I don't know how far that's still intact.

>> Alex de Waal: It hasn't been destroyed, not least because the two warring parties need it themselves.

There's a big problem, really electricity. One of the things that is just being missed because of, I would say, the sort of blinkered and myopic approach to humanitarian diplomacy. Which is being deliberately unkind to my colleagues here in the UN, is that there are huge opportunities for actually mobilizing and extant commercial infrastructure that can operate around the state.

Now, if we take the case of Somalia, the Somalis know how to run a failed state.

>> Neil Ferguson: Hold on there, how to run a failed state is one of those phrases that one shouldn't let pass without questioning it. Being married to a Somali, I'm somewhat sensitive to this paradox.

But in a sense, you're drawing a distinction between functioning failed states and completely failed states, am I right?

>> Alex de Waal: Yes, I mean, one of the great paradoxes of Somalia, which caused some considerable intrigue and interest amongst, let me call them, neoliberals, was the fact that when the central bank was burned in Mogadishu, 1991.

And the government was dismantled, the Somali economy in the short-term had a terrible famine and then boomed. The Somalis, who as you will know, are fearless and entrepreneurial and transnational, were able to get some of the most effective financial and commercial systems in the African and Middle Eastern continents up and running very, very quickly.

Now, they're not terribly good at running schools and hospitals, but they were very good at running telecommunications and commercial systems. And in a few places where those mercantile groups got together, they said, okay, it's in our common interest to have law and order. We will fund the police, we will fund the disarmament.

And in the northeast and the northwest of Somalia, basically, that's what they, they did. They basically said to the politicians, we're the ones paying you, you listen to us. Now, why is it the case that the diplomats engaged in Sudan are talking to the men with the guns and saying, we want you to be in charge of solving this out when it's manifestly the case that they are incapable of doing that for all sorts of reasons.

While you have businessmen, technocrats, people with far more money, no one wanted this war. There's no commercial operator, there's no business interest in Sudan that says this war is a good thing. The starting point for pulling Sudan back from the brink is the business sector and the technocrats who know how to run the banking systems.

 

>> Neil Ferguson: But it's almost the fact of the gold mine that creates the possibility for your mobs to shoot out. I mean, in Somalia, as far as I know, there's no gold mine.

>> Alex de Waal: Yeah.

>> Neil Ferguson: In fact, there's no other source of money than the commercial class.

>> Alex de Waal: Yeah.

 

>> Neil Ferguson: But maybe the gold mine is the problem.

>> Alex de Waal: The gold is indeed. I mean, you put your finger on it, that is the biggest issue. And I don't think there would be a solution to this without getting those who are buying the gold, and that is to buy, and more problematically, Moscow involved.

Now, as I said, this is a war no one wanted. I mean, people may have their preferred winners, but not even those in the Emirates and even the Kremlin actually have interests on both sides. If the rudiments of multilateral diplomacy had been followed, there would be the basis for actually getting a consensus on this.

 

>> Neil Ferguson: I wanna ask a couple more questions before opening it up. One is a big picture historians question. You talked at the beginning about the inter imperium, a problem in Austria of being part of a collapsed empire. And in a sense, as you alluded to in one of your slides, one can't understand Sudan without understanding its history in the colonial era.

But this state failure of postcolonial regimes is such a recurrent feature of African history that it's getting harder and harder to blame colonization for contemporary problems. What's your view of this? Because it seems that things fall apart more often than they hold together in post-colonial African states. This is not the only case that we discussed since the end of empire.

So should we think of this as really a different set of problems from the problems that arose from colonialism, or are they in some measure still related?

>> Alex de Waal: Well, I think the key point about the Sudan in the empire is the 19th century when it was part of the, they called it the Turco-Egyptian empire, but it was really the Egyptian frontier plunder state.

And when the British came in, the British were certainly not in there out of philanthropy. And the British, in many ways replicated or failed to solve many of the problems they'd inherited from the previous regimes. But the roots of it go to the pre-European colonization. That is, I mean, so 202 years ago, it was the cartoon slavers who were a creation of the Egyptian imperial frontier.

And really, that's the DNA. And there's enough things to blame colonialism for, but you can't blame the British colonial into it for what is happening now.

>> Neil Ferguson: Yeah, I had to get that in simply because so often these crises get simplistically blamed on European or British colonial legacies, which I don't think explain terribly much here.

Last thing before we go to the audience, you left me feeling that there's no chance of a Somali outcome here of some kind of more or less functional failed state. It seems to me that you're leading us to expect a pretty disastrous famine in the region because of the complete breakdown of the state and the descent into a mobster shootout that nobody seems able to stop.

Am I right in seeing you as a prophet of a pretty disastrous future, not just for Sudan, but for the region?

>> Alex de Waal: Yes.

>> Neil Ferguson: I wanted to make that clear because I think this is a really incredibly important point. We ain't seen nothing yet. This can get a whole lot worse in this region, and you've certainly left me feeling pretty pessimistic about where this is gonna go.

A question from the Zoom audience. In addition to humanitarian crises, we're also looking at destruction of cultural heritage. On May, the 17th, Sudanese university archives were destroyed by fire and looting, any thoughts on this aspect of the disaster?

>> Alex de Waal: For many of us who lived a long time in Sudan, in a way, this is part of the most painful This is one of the most painful things.

I mean, you never want to say anything is more painful than loss of human life. The oldest women's university, I believe in either Africa or the Arab world, Al-Ahfad University was looted and ransacked. Khartoum University is right on the front line and has essentially been burned, including one of the great library collections and archival collections.

The museums, there are cathedrals, it's a predominantly muslim country, but least two cathedrals have been burned. I mentioned, I was just hearing a few days ago that I mentioned a famous actress. There was a singer who was killed, she was in her 30s. And I think we're seeing the state failure is about that loss of human capital as well.

And there are many who have survived, but are fleeing abroad. And I think that cultural vandalism is appalling. And here, I tend to sort of equalize the two sides, but I think in terms of-, but the two parties are actually, while they're both culpable, are not the same.

The Sudanese army does represent, although in a deeply flawed and corrupt manner, what the Sudanese call the community of the state. The rapid support forces of General Hametti are basically a sort of lumpen militariat. They are young boys from the Styx, most of them illiterate, and they have no attachment to any of the sort of the symbols of culture or statehood in Sudan.

And they are the ones who, should they succeed, will transform Sudan into something unlike a state, something like a transnational, commercial, mercenary enterprise. Whereas if the other side, the Sudan armed forces, win, it will be more like a state, it will be terribly brutal.

>> Neil Ferguson: But that sounds like an argument not just for grain on ships, but for some kind of liberal intervention, so that the civil war doesn't go on indefinitely or doesn't lead to a victory for the full on mobsters.

How do you think about that? It seems like a long time ago that Tony Blair was arguing for liberal intervention in the wake of intervention in West Africa, in the case of Sierra Leone. I can remember going to Sierra Leone after that and hearing local people saying, to my incredulity, thank God for Britain, because they intervened and ended a conflict there.

Are you now, fast forward more than 20 years, are you in favor of some kind of intervention to end this civil war? Cuz I don't see that food aid is going to suffice the fight and keeps going.

>> Alex de Waal: Sierra Leone is a country of just a couple of million people.

And the force that the British special forces went into to suppress was a pretty ragtag bunch, and it was still a difficult exercise. When President Bush the elder proposed the intervention in Somalia in 1991, I was then at Human Rights Watch Africa. I quit rather than support it on the grounds that I didn't see how it could succeed, and sadly, that was the correct view.

And I don't see how any intervention of that type could succeed.

>> Neil Ferguson: So then it would have to be some indirect intervention or quasi diplomatic intervention to tip the scales in favor of the government forces?

>> Alex de Waal: I mean, there's a big debate about sanctions, and the problem with the debate about sanctions is that it focuses on the tool.

It's like saying, does a hammer work? Well, it works for whatever you want it to work for, but it won't work for sawing a piece of wooden. If there were to be a consensus amongst the powers, the external powers that have interests in Sudan, that this has to stop.

And that would include a sort of transparency about all the financial affairs of the major belligerents. And actually, I would add with sanctions, when the UN Security Council adopts sanctions, by far the most effective element of that is the investigation of the sanctions committee rather than the sanctions itself.

So, just to look at the financial dealings of those who are fighting this war and then say to those who are involved externally. Which is the Gulf states and Moscow, and the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, none of whom actually want the war, but if the war develops, they will want it because it will be unstoppable.

So, okay, let's find a way of stopping this. The money will determine the strategic outcome, the battlefield is only tactical. This is a war that neither side can sustain for very long without major inflows of money. And the reason why they're agreeing to these ceasefires, which they keep breaking, is they can't afford to sustain the war, it's a matter of money.

 

>> Neil Ferguson: So this raises the question of how the UN Security Council, which appeared entirely broken over Ukraine, could put itself back together again and achieve something here. Before we try and answer that big question, let me open it up to some questions, we have ten minutes left. From the floor, there's a gentleman who's raised his hand over there on the row near the door.

A microphone is coming towards you, sir. Attract my attention if you want to ask a question over here so we can get the microphone to you, yes, sir.

>> Speaker 1: One thing that has struck me about the instability in Ethiopia and Sudan over the last five years has been the centrifugal nature of it.

As you mentioned, the RSF is largely provincial and makeup. You have the nearly half dozen provincial conflicts in Sudan, in addition to neighboring Ethiopia, the Oromo and the Tigray conflict. Do you think this is inherent to state collapse, or do you think there's something particular happening here in the Horn of Africa that is causing this centrifugal instability?

 

>> Alex de Waal: That's a very good question, and the Horn of Africa is very interesting because unlike any other part of Africa, it's an area of, as it were, pre-colonial empires. So as I was mentioning, that the Sudanese empire is really prior to European colonization and boundary making, same for the Ethiopia.

And the issues in those two sort of long lasting Empires, issues of identity have never been resolved. And this is an area in which states have fragmented. This is one of the few areas in which we've seen new states coming into being, Eritrea, South Sudan, and Somalia, de facto independence of Somaliland in the Northwest.

And I think this process will, unfortunately, well, for better or worse, is set to continue. So there is a particular history to the claims for self determination and secessionism in this part of the world, which is unusual and unfinished.

>> Neil Ferguson: I looked at some figures as I was preparing for our conversation, the population of Sudan is 48 million.

The UN projects it to be at 60 million by 2050, though I'm not sure if you're right that that's going to happen. South Sudan alone is just about 11.5 million. These are very large numbers of people that are being affected by a breakdown of the state and the descent into civil war.

One question-

>> Alex de Waal: And Ethiopia is 120 million.

>> Neil Ferguson: Right, and I remember it seems like not so long ago Paul Collier telling me that Ethiopia was the great economic hope for East Africa, and that if there was going to be sustained growth, it might well be there. And that has been, I think, largely destroyed as a hope by the conflict within that country that you alluded to great conflicts.

A number of people have asked the question, what can we do? And it's a question that I think I need to put to you. In one case, a member of the audience asked before we began, how can you safely provide aid to Sudan in the midst of a civil war?

Are there NGOs that are able to do anything that we should be thinking of supporting?

>> Alex de Waal: Okay, I mean, what can you do? I mean, the agencies that are most reliably active in these kinds of circumstances are the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders.

But the striking thing about Sudan, and this is a real missed opportunity among the humanitarians, is that that nonviolent civic revolution was organized by local committees who brought their people out onto the streets as rigorously nonviolent manner. Now those same committees are now involved in the sort of the grassroots humanitarian effort.

And one of the things that we are exploring is how you could get cash transfers directly into the hands of these people using mobile money. And in fact, some local tech wizards managed to work out a system whereby even though all the Sudanese banks are closed, there's one which is the bank of Khartoum, which is a commercial bank.

Which had a corresponding bank in Cairo and had begun to have mobile money. And how you could actually get mobile money from that corresponding bank and get both the suppliers, the supermarkets, still have some goods and the consumers to use a mobile money system. And it seems to me that is the way to forward to work through those Sudanese sort of on the ground people who are figuring out how to do it.

And also the Sudan Doctors Union, who are maintaining hospital and medical services under incredibly adverse conditions and with amazing courage and selflessness, and without pay. But they could be at least be given pay through this kind of system.

>> Neil Ferguson: Let me bring it back to that level of geopolitics.

We have Russia interested, never an encouraging sign, particularly if the Wagner group is involved. China has an interest, at least, indirectly, because it is the operator and largest shareholder in the oil pipeline from South Sudan, which goes through Khartoum. And so the Chinese have at least some interest.

And as you mentioned, the Gulf states are a market, a buyer of the gold. So how do you get China, Russia, the Emirates and other regional players on the same page? Does this require US leadership or can it happen without the US?

>> Alex de Waal: Let me give an example of something that happened ten years ago when I actually was working with the African Union on Sudan.

Shortly after the separation of Sudan and South Sudan, the two countries went to war over a disputed border area, a place called Heglig. And it looked for a moment as though that was going to escalate from a border skirmish into all out war. Now, the way that was, and this was a time the International UN Security Council level estrangement was not at its current level, but over Syria.

It was quite serious, and basically nothing was happening at the UN Security Council. Now, what happened then was very interesting, because the African Union, my boss of the African Union, former South African president Thabo Mbeki, took the lead. And he, in close coordination with the US special envoy, an ambassador called Princeton Lima, subsequently passed away.

And they worked out a strategy, whereby Mbeki would deal with the Chinese and the Russians and get them on side, and Princeton would get the Americans on side. They would take it to the African Union, the African Union has a peace and Security Council, which its version of the UN Security Council, which adopted a communique, which is their version of resolution, doesn't have the same legal force.

Having consulted with all these key players and also the Arabs, and that went and was adopted by the UN Security Council with hardly a word being changed. And because it came from the African Union, for different reasons, the US, the Russians and the Chinese said, okay, this is an African problem.

The Africans have come with a consensus, none of us want to see this war, we'll get behind it. And the situation was deescalated. And in fact, funnily enough, it was interesting to see the US and Chinese ambassadors actually working very closely together on that, even though they had their other.

Now the problem is that we have an incompetent leadership of the African. And let me be absolutely candid. They had the opportunity last weekend with a meeting of that same council, peace and security council, at heads of state level. They had 15 heads of state in the room, and they had this proposal on the table and it was squashed by some members of the commission, or the head of the commission, who basically wanted to keep it in-house.

So the best opportunity, I despaired when I saw this going away because of the, I don't know what is the appropriate language to use in a public forum.

>> Neil Ferguson: But it's the Hoover institution, you can speak freely.

>> Alex de Waal: I can say, because of the myopic idiocy of a couple two or three individuals, the opportunity for utilizing that route was not taken.

Now, the UN secretary general, where he, sufficiently courageous could take up the baton. Because under Chapter 8 of the UN charter, he does not have to defer to a regional organization. If a threat to International Peace and Security Council is not being handled with sufficient seriousness at the regional level, you can bring it to the UN Security Council.

And the reading I got in the run up to that meeting last weekend was that all the powers, including the Russians, wanted it to work.

>> Neil Ferguson: Well, that's a fascinating insight. It makes me very grateful that I participated in this event. I learned a good deal. Not least I learned that it's potentially going to be a bigger disaster in Sudan than the disaster that we hear about on a daily basis in Ukraine.

And from what you're telling us, an opportunity to bring the situation under control was passed up. Alex de Waal you've shared your experience of a very troubled part of the world today, and we're immensely grateful. We could certainly have carried on longer, but we must draw things to a close according to the timetable I was handed by my masters.

And so it only remains for me to thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and this fairly dark outlook with us, and invite the audience to join me in a round of applause.