Eyes on Sudan: A Conversation with Sudanese Organizer and Activist, Mubarak Elamin
In this episode, we speak with Sudanese organizer and activist Mubarak Elamin about the unfolding crisis in Sudan. Mubarak offers a perspective on the nonviolent history of the country and how the current war is not a civil war but a proxy war, and what we can do as part of an international community of solidarity.
Transcript (with gratitude to Elizabeth High):
Stephanie Van Hook: Good morning, everybody, it's time for another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I'm your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I'm here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California, and Nonviolence Radio explores the power of active nonviolence around the world.
Stay tuned for today's show as we'll be sharing an interview with a friend of ours who is part of the Sudanese diasporic community and extremely involved in helping raise awareness of the conflict in Sudan and sharing some of his experiences and understanding of what's happening and what people can do.
So that's a huge part of the show today. So keep listening. And Michael, let's start off, the Nonviolence Report should be a report of hope. And before we get into the different pieces of news and hopeful analyses that you have. I'd like to just talk to you a little bit about how are you staying sane in the news cycle and this growing, escalating violence in our world? What's bringing you that kind of hope that's anchoring you and grounding you and keeping you sane?
Michael: I've got to get some professional opinion maybe, but yeah, I would say two things.
First is a kind of understanding that I think I have of why we're going through so much turmoil and chaotic disruption right now. And that's because as I see it, and I ran this by some friends I was speaking to yesterday at a webinar and got some enthusiastic agreement. Like a recognition that I think we're at the end of an era. It wasn't a terribly good era. It had a couple of really serious problems. One was American hegemony. I have to say that any kind of hegemony of one country over others is a violent, unhealthy situation.
And we've been going through that for a long time, and in more deeply, if you look further into it, I think we're at the end of an era, which has been called the era of reductive materialism. That is the vision of the world as consisting of material objects, and it made for very neat science. We had all kinds of breakthroughs and physical science, but it. It had a serious problem and that was a very reductive misunderstanding of what the world is and especially what we human beings are. So that whole era is crumbling, I think, by its own insufficiency, and I'm not sorry to see it go. It does mean that if you don't have something ready to replace it there's going to be a lot of confusion, and insecurity reaches for the gun.
Stephanie: Now, I do want to follow up on this because we see human beings acting out in terrible ways, and I think a lot of us also can understand feelings of violent frustration at times. I don't think that it's a human impulse. Violence is a kind of impulse in us, and yet your work is really about this changing the image of the human being, as you said, we're coming to an end of one image in a way, and that you're trying to point people to a different non-materialist basis for what a human being is. Now, are you saying, so human beings, right? It's hard to see that in human beings all the time. So are you saying that because we have this concept of ourselves as fulfilled by material things, this capitalist human, that the things are what make us happy, that we act out of that, like that we've come to some kind of sense of ourselves and then perpetuate that. So we have to, if we're seeing bad behavior, it's because we've internalized that vision of ourselves and…
Michael: Freud had a concept that he called repetition compulsion, that if you try to solve a problem in the wrong way and it doesn't work, you face a critical juncture. Are you going to ask yourself, “I guess I've been trying the wrong way. What else is an option?” Or are you going to say, “I better do it more and harder?” And that repetition compulsion means constantly repeating a hopeless effort, in this case to gratify ourselves by material consumption. And as Gandhi said in one very poignant phrase, there is enough in the world for everyone's need. Think about the implications of that for a second. You know that the world has been balanced and brought into existence with a purpose. There's enough in the world for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.
Stephanie: I’ve even heard people say not enough for anyone's greed.
Michael: Yes, I've heard that improvement
Stephanie: Because you have people making, they're being given packages of a trillion dollars of wealth. So, you don't need a lot of human beings to be greedy.
Michael: That's right. Just one will really do it if he has unlimited resources.
Stephanie, I never got around to telling about the second thing that gives me hope in this chaotic era and that is the growth of nonviolence, which is happening in many ways. We have regular institutions studying it. We have a vast library of nonviolent episodes to draw upon at Swarthmore called the Global Nonviolent Action Database. And we have a better theory and that theory is connected with a lot of science that's coming in about what a human being actually is. And it's because we are actually that spark of life, that consciousness within us rather than the bodies that we travel around in. There is infinite possibility for connection, connectedness, and we're beginning to discover that here and there. This theory of paradigm shift, there's no telling when we will build a… and I'm not predicting that it's definitely bound to happen, but it could easily happen. It's happened in the past where enough momentum will build up, that there'll be a dramatic shift in public understanding to the new paradigm, where we are all interconnected and we have an infinite, nonviolent potential within us. Phew. If that doesn't give a guy hope, I don't know what would.
Stephanie: That does sound very hopeful and I here, I can launch something here actually, because that sense of how much nonviolence is growing in the field. So the Metta Center is going to be having a 12 month course starting in January, our nonviolence studies. So you can see it at mettacenter.org/nonviolencestudies. And someone asked me, where are you going to get all the content? I said, from the institutions in the world of nonviolence that come across our desk every single day. It'll be a journey of discovery. For people joining this, we're going to start off with that first month of January 2026 on the New Story, this image of the human being. And then we'll get into topics like economics. We'll get into topics like technology and AI, talking about inner work, outer work, the whole nonviolent communication, mediation skills, unarmed civilian protection. We're going to go through all of this throughout the year, and people can sign up for just a month at a time if it's a topic they're really into or want to learn more about, or if they want to apply for a certificate in Nonviolence Studies, they can take all 12 months and we’ll be mentoring projects along the way, which is a really cool program and there's so much in the world of nonviolence that we don't have to look far to find that content and share it with participants. You have your hand up Michael.
Michael: I do, Stephanie. Something unique just struck me. This Global Nonviolent Action Database that I mentioned has a little bit over 1200 episodes that they've recorded and analyzed, and we could do a hundred a month for the 12 months. Think how well informed we would be at the end of that year. That would be an immersion to be wished for.
Stephanie: You know that could be a potential later project in some way actually, because one year in December, maybe it was at Christmas, I decided that on January 1st, I was going to write an entry every day for our audience with a Gandhi quote and an interpretation of that quote. It ended up being a project that lasted about three years. By year two, I had you involved and we made a book of it. So there could be something there to do, to share. We could maybe create a little listserv or use it in our social media. Something to think about for sure. But what else is happening in the world of nonviolence, Michael? Let's get to that before we turn later in the show to our interview with Mubarak Elamin.
Michael: Yeah, thank you Steph. This is going to be a kind of mixed bag of good and bad things and of other parts of the world and our part of the world. But I'll start off by mentioning that in Kerala state, now, this is a state in the southeast coast of India and it has been noted for some remarkable innovations. And recently they made a very bold announcement: that state had eradicated extreme poverty. And remember Gandhi said poverty and specifically starvation is the worst form of violence. So this is a very creative form of nonviolence, though most people wouldn't recognize it under that label, and of course the Keralites hope that their approach will provide a model for the rest of the country. There's a little over a billion people around the world who lack access to food and other basics and, so there's been years of microplanning to implement land reforms, increased wages, et cetera, and things are starting to happen in other places too. Mexico's social programs have lifted 13.4 million people out of poverty, and about four years ago, China announced that it had ended absolute poverty, which meant in that country lifting almost 100 million people out of poverty. And if that doesn't satisfy your hunger for good news, there are 81 stories in the recent Nonviolence News research archive that our friend, Rivera San, has been collecting, 81 stories.
Now on the negative side, we are having this kind of decline and slippage into chaos that we're all aware of. And if we were aware of the other side, it wouldn't be so bad. But there's a commentator, and we're really gifted with good commentators just now. And one of them is Michael Nellis and he has a program called Endless Urgency. And let me read a quote. This is not going to be a lot of fun, but I think we should hear it: “At this point,” Mike says, “the federal government looks like an organized crime unit.” Yes, there was corruption before and there will be corruption afterwards, but right now this corruption has, this is not his language, it's been built into a science and in his language, “this is a billionaire protection racket run by someone who's selling pardons like party favors.”
So the good, the silver lining here, and I think there is one, is that, if you read like this historian Ted Gurr, a sociologist, wrote a book called “Why Man Rebel.” There is a qualitative distinction between poverty and destitution. People will endure a lot of poverty, but when destitution happens, meaning they can't live, they can't feed their families, they can't get health care for their children; they have nothing left to do but rebel–whatever happened. And we may be reaching that point, and we do seem to be reaching that point here in the US where a lot of people are saying, “whoa, the wheels have come off. This is not working. We have to look to something entirely different.” So to go abroad now for a bit… did you want to say something, Steph?
Stephanie: Yeah. I was just thinking about all of these pardons and generally in the world of nonviolence, one would say forgiveness is a good thing and taking people out of the retributive justice system is a good thing because mostly people are there as scapegoats anyway. Pardons can be good. And also, thinking of the prayer of St. Francis, “it's in pardoning that we are pardoned.” So there could be, in a way, a noble motive behind the act of pardoning that's not just political or power but maybe a deep sense of guilt for the things that one has done. And so by offering pardons, they feel that maybe they will be spared the wrath of the people for the things that they've done. I think it's much more complex than just power dynamics. I think there's deep psychological issues involved.
Michael: I think that there are those deep psychological issues and it's beyond me to understand exactly what's going on.
Stephanie: or it could just be power at play, but this is nonviolence, so we get to explore this a little bit more. Please continue. What's happening in other parts of the world?
Michael: I wanted to make a general comment about pardon. And that is that when people are pardoned for misbehavior, period, end of quote, it often doesn't really lead to closure. For example, and this is not a very good example, was the Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South Africa where a lot of harm had been done. People were given the opportunity to come step forward, say what they had done and be forgiven. Now that I think was not a complete closure. An example that is complete closure happened about eight or nine years ago in the southern US where some white kids had burnt down a black church and they were caught and they were brought before a judge and he ordered them, by way of their punishment, if you will, to rebuild the church. Now, to me that seems like a much more complete closure where you get to actually do something to pay back for the harm that you caused. And this is happening on a pretty large scale with Vietnam veterans. They're going to Vietnam, they're building churches, schools and places of worship and educational institutions or various kinds. So I think that's the way to really get closure after a harm has been committed. And I think there's a lot of evidence for that in criminal justice studies.
Stephanie: Yeah. See what I mean, we can pause with these ideas in nonviolence and ask really what's going on beneath the surface. That's really the work that we should be doing. But please continue.
Michael: I want to draw attention to the conflict that Mubarak will shortly be speaking about in Darfur, in that Darfur state. There is also a team from the Nonviolent Peaceforce, one of those groups that does unarmed civilian protection that we like to follow pretty closely, which we think is really a part of the future. And they are seeing, this could sound terrible, but I want to make a comment about it. They're seeing,”the completion of the genocide that began 20 years ago.” They say “the humanitarian situation is the worst we've ever seen.” Now what I think we can learn from this is that conflict in Darfur, which was really a bruising, dehumanizing conflict, and a lot of us were extremely upset about it; it was stopped, but not resolved. The reason being that it was stopped by military force. There was a combined team from the African Union and the United Nations, which was a considerable force. Something over 20,000 people, service people, and they did put a stop to that conflict, but not a resolution. That's why it's re-erupting. When things are resolved through nonviolence, when the needs of all parties are taken into account, they tend to stay resolved, whereas when things are just blocked by military force, they don't, and we have a set of terms for this, which is simple and very useful, and that is persuasion versus coercion. When you can persuade the other side to see that what they're doing is wrong, they themselves will change or at least be strongly motivated to change and that kind of change will be permanent.
And so this leads me to mention that a very important UCP group based in this country, Meta Peace Team, not to be confused with us, because we have two T's. They are looking for volunteers: metapeaceteam.org. They're looking for volunteers; and volunteers, I think does not necessarily mean unpaid. The reason that these UCP organizations have gotten away from that volunteer framework is that it meant that only people from the First World could afford to do it, whereas they really wanted to involve people from across a broad spectrum of humanity. And to do that, they had to offer subsistence. So when you make a contribution to Nonviolent Peaceforce or Meta Peace Team, that's what you will be supporting.
Now another group I'd like to mention briefly is the Peace Alliance. They've been in existence for quite a while, and they have now a number of partners, have created an opportunity to hear from a woman named Tawakkol Karman, K-A-R-M-A-N, who is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. I had not recognized her name at the time. She's a journalist and a human rights advocate, and they have put up on the web, a free webinar hosted by Lynne Twist, an old friend of ours from this area, and Sarah Vetter of the Soul of Money Institute. Usually don’t think of money as having a soul, but they're looking at ways that it can be used soulfully, and in fact you can find out about all of this at soulofmoney.org/awaken, and here's what they say about it: “In an era marked by polarization and uncertainty,” there's an understatement, “this conversation reminds us that peace building and democracy both begin with the courage of ordinary people.” And I'll be saying a little more about that pretty soon.
Now, here's an interesting development that comes to us from Waging Nonviolence, a very useful resource. And that is how labor activists, and in particular in this case, dock workers, they load and unload cargo that makes the world economy go around, and they have played an increasingly visible role in the present wave of solidarity with Gaza. In addition to Sudan, that is the other really bruising conflict going on in our world now. And one of these dockworkers said “if we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades, even for just 20 minutes, we will block all of Europe," said an unnamed dock worker in front of a very large crowd in Genoa, which is Italy's busiest port and his video was widely shared. “Together with our union, together with all the dock workers who stand with us, together with the whole city of Genoa from this region, 13 to 14,000 containers leave for Israel every year,” and they're saying if this conflict is not resolved, “not a single nail will leave anymore.”
So I did not realize what kind of power these people have, and what a wonderful thing that they have that kind of conscience and solidarity with a conflict in a different part of the world. Shipping figures into about 90% of all the goods that are consumed world over. And so they really are as central to the global economy of the 21st century as it was in the 15th or the 18th centuries.
So these political actions have been happening from time to time. Among the first of them happened in 1935 after fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, and at that point, dock workers in Durban and Cape Town and Namibia, which was then called Southwest Africa and it was a mandate just the way Palestine was a British mandate. So again, they refused to load food and other cargo aboard Italian ships, and this was among the very first political boycotts by dock workers. And also it was the first one that was documented by African workers in solidarity with Ethiopians. So you had fellow Africans fighting fascist imperialist invaders, and there's a very exciting film that I saw some years ago called Lion in the Desert about Omar Mukhtar and his attempt, not a nonviolent one, to defend what is now Libya against Italian invaders.
So let's go back now for a minute to Palestine, and then I want to say something about the US and that is that in a village there is a history of protective presence that we can learn from. They have leveraged the visibility of the international community with their own efforts to resist settler violence and land annexation. So various international groups frequently visit here and they are able to hold protective presence at the community center and protect a lot of people from harassment. So that's All That's Left, that's the name of a group, pretty clever, Rabbis for Human Rights, Mothers Against Violence of Israel, et cetera, and they're able to minimize the harassment.
Now here in our country and abroad, we have experienced a major outpouring of sentiment against authoritarianism that was called the No Kings Rally. It was the largest protest in US history. More than 2% of the entire country was mobilized. It's just breathtaking, we're really seeing history in motion, Daniel Hunter said, he's one of our best theorists. But he raises an important question, and I'm very glad it was raised because sometimes these protests come and go without accomplishing anything. He said, “where do we go from here?” And there are four quick reflections that he offers. Protests capture attention. They create a platform, they provide cover and encouragement for defections, and they give courage. Non-cooperation changes the balance of power, but then the question becomes, and it is becoming, I'm very glad to notice people saying this, “where do we go from here?” because otherwise if you blow off steam and express your emotions and go back to the same old, you're actually being part of the problem. But it looks like people are starting to be part of the solution.
Stephanie: Thank you so much, Michae, to continue on the news today, I did want to share one organization that you didn't mention, actually a GoFundMe. Our friend Jennie Tefler who has been working on this, has been sharing this with us a lot recently, and so I thought it would be nice to share on the air. So the organization is called Trauma Rescue Aid, and it's a Sudanese-led grassroots organization in Mukono, Uganda making a tangible difference for refugee families by providing vital counseling and support services to help them cope with their experiences. So they're receiving food, I think families are receiving a meal a day. They're receiving trauma support and other services. And they're raising funds for Sudanese refugees who are in Uganda without anything at all. They need everything. And the link is gofundme.com/TRAID2024. So Trauma Rescue Aid, T-R-A-I-D 2024.
And you can make a donation there, which then brings up our interview with Mubarak Elamin. He is part of the Sudanese diasporic community. He's living up in Seattle, Washington and doing a lot of work for the Sudanese on this side of the ocean, this side of the country, and able to also reach a lot of people and raise a lot of awareness about what's happening, which is really the first step. And Mubarak is going to talk to us also about what people can do to help support the Sudanese people at this time. So let's turn now to our interview with Mubarak Elamin.
Mubarak Elamin: I'm Mubarak Elamin. I live in the Puget Sound here in the beautiful Northwest. I came here about 27 years ago and I call this home. I'm an immigrant from Sudan and I still connect with, I still have extended family in Sudan and always am concerned about the international affairs of the people of Sudan and also just humanity in general.
And one of my work here is really, I'm a software engineer by profession, but I'm also really trying to do a lot of work in the community, working with specifically advocating for immigrants and immigrants' rights and also social justice. And I'm also proudly sit on the board of the ACLU Washington. So we do a lot of work also on that front.
Stephanie: Now, the last time we spoke with you on Nonviolence Radio, you really gave us an overview of the nonviolence that has been a part of Sudanese history, that it's a very proud history of nonviolent resistance. And yet, as we're looking at what's happening in Sudan now, it seems that movement is really buried and there's a humanitarian crisis, there's a crisis of violence. So can you hold those two pieces and explain to us a bit of the history of nonviolence and what we're looking at today in Sudan?
Mubarak: Yeah, so this is just the sort of things that actually brings a lot of the contradiction. The history of Sudan as specifically looking at after the independence in 1956. Sudan really rose as a country that has a lot of aspiration to lead not just Africa, but also the Middle East in the whole region. And part of that was also centering more of the voices of the nonviolence because they came out of that colonialism trying to constitute and form a system of government that can be representative of the people. And through that, they went through the process of having democratic system. But before enjoying that, like in a few years, then the military came and took over. And that was in ‘59. And then in 1964, there was the first nonviolent revolution that really like toppled that military regime. And then again, we went into another cycle of another military dictatorship in 1969. And went on all the way to 1985. And then there is another nonviolent revolution that also toppled that regime, which is called the an-Nimeiry regime. And then again, we came to another military coup. So the military always wanted to really take over and assume power. No matter how the will of the people, what the people want. And we experienced that, but the irony is we always have generations that come up and they wanted to live a life that is better than what the military was offering. And a life of prosperity, a life of ambition and all of that. So really in 1989, the military takeover was met with a lot of the resistance from the nonviolent community, which is a lot of the trade unions and the students and all of these aspects.
So that was in 1989. That's the Al-Bashir regime, which was backed by the Islamists. And then that ruled for about 30 years. In 2018, there is a movement against Al-Bashir regime. And that was really like a very inspiring moment for the whole world to see young people, students, trade unions, women leading those movements. And that was the moment that everybody was inspired to see this movement and also was hopeful that something big is going to happen in Sudan.
Unfortunately, the path that was taken for the revolution to align itself or to try to bring in peace for everyone else was to build an alliance with the military and this other group that is called the RSF. It's called the Rapid Response Forces. And that Rapid Response Force was created by the military. And it was a military tool that was actually used in 2003, used to be called Janjaweed, was known internationally as Janjaweed, and they was doing a lot atrocities and genocide in Darfur, because of some tribal and ethnic historical– it manifested in that genocide in 2003. And the same RSF was also the force that was used by the UAE and the Saudis to fight the war in Yemen, to fight the Houthis in Yemen. Just give you a little bit of background of how this all happened after the revolution. The military and the RSF, they really control the power which is the military power because they have the weapons. But the street has the political power. The street really had all of the resistance, from the trade unions, from the students, from just the people, the average people. They had the political power, that’s why they shared that power with the military, and that’s what’s unfortunate, because just a few years after the revolution, in 2021, the military and RSF went and took over, and not just taken over but it’s also violent takeover of the government. So that was in 2021, and that’s really what kind of created this cycle of violence. After we had a few years of peace, that violence has started in 2021.
Michael: Mubarak, I have a couple of questions. In the US, in the civil rights movement, which we didn’t know at the time but which has become clear now, there was a lot of exchange in both directions between civil rights activists here and Gandhian activists in India. Some of them came here, some of us went there. Now, I would imagine that there may be some kind of connection; Sudan is a lot closer to India than the United States. Are there Gandhians or Sudanese who have gone to India, trained over there, bringing back some idea of nonviolent methods, is any of that happening to your knowledge?
Mubarak: The connection between Sudan and India is actually very strong. Even if you look at the attire that women wear in Sudan is just very much similar to the sari of India. So culturally there is a lot of connections. But also, historically, when you look at the British, when they colonized both Sudan and India, there was a lot of exchange of workers, the people who built the railway in Sudan and the engineers that went in and trained in India.
And Sudan was one of the first countries in that region that was seen as a bright light for education, because so many of the universities and civil servants were trained in Sudan. And those were the same people that went in to build the Middle East; they built the UAE, they worked on building all of the modern ideas of civil services to Saudi Arabia, to the Gulf in general, you see that, and actually I read now about some of the work that Sudanese did in UAE to bring it to this level.
But just to get to your question, there is that synergy. I would not be surprised that there is a lot of the intersectionalities specifically on the nonviolence movement is really inspired by Gandhi. I knew Gandhi since I was a little child, you know, so everybody knows Gandhi and knows what he did. Specifically there is two pieces of connection here. And I can actually vouch to that because in university, we used to connect what is happening in South Africa and the apartheid movement and also Nelson Mandela and the history of South Africa and what Gandhi went through and connecting Africa to India. So I would say yes.
Michael: Thank you so much. That's very good to know. Now, my next question is, apart from strikes and protests, what forms have nonviolent resistance taken in the near Civil War violence that's going on?
Mubarak: In Sudan the civil services, the trade unions, most of the institutions used to be more unionized, so there's a deep culture into that. And also one of the biggest industries that started in Sudan early on was the railroad industry. The railroad created really a working class that is very much connected to the issues that today we hear in these elections like affordability and the consciousness of how do you make it better for everyone else, and the comradery. And that really inspired a lot of people to learn about how to protest and how to organize. And the organizing in Sudan became so sophisticated because when a regime is holding on power with an iron fist, then people try to become creative. They try to come up with ideas that is out of the box that might work for them, that might not have worked before somewhere else.
And one of the first things that people did when they were organizing against the Omar Bashir dictatorship, because Omar Bashir dictatorship, they had surveillance on everybody through the Secret Services. Also, they used all of the telecommunication methods to spy on people and also block and allow for certain apps and remove certain apps. So the youth in Sudan were very creative because they started really using methods that even the regime could not fight. For example, they used an app called Telegraph when people didn't actually know about it. Because they were trying to work in groups in neighborhoods. They organized themselves in neighborhoods and when they were working in neighborhoods also, they set up something, they call it like “the revolution time.” And “the revolution time” is a concept that became more of: at this particular time, everybody would come out at the same time, so they overwhelm the secret police or all of the security apparatus. And then at the same time, they would also do things that are very destructive to the regime. They probably also, they do brackets, they block certain streets and open certain streets, and they would just coordinate in a way that is just really the military government couldn't really be able to fight back in a way that is as effective as it used to be because all of these methods are just new.
Stephanie: So, bring us into escalation of violence that's happened over the past three, four years. There's a truly humanitarian crisis unfolding and ever escalating. Can you help us see that angle a little bit too?
Mubarak: Yes. So that's, as I said before, it was in 2021. When the two military powers, which is the military itself and the RSF, the rapid support forces, when they decided to take over because there was an agreement between the civilian or the political actors at the time. Part of the agreement is in after three years, the military will give up power in the sovereign council, and the civilians will lead the sovereign council. And when that time approached, it became very clear that it's going to happen, then these two actors realized that if they lose power, then there is a sense of accountability. There's a lot of things that are going to come their way, and they did not want that to happen.
So they basically staged a coup d’etat and took over and even jailed and imprisoned all of the civilians who were in power at that time. And that's really started the violence because people went to the street, wanted their government back, they wanted their power back. They don't want this military to lead again or become more of the defacto leaders of the country because that's going to step the revolution back. And that really continued until we came to 2023, which is a moment in time in April, 2023 when these two allies became enemies, which is the leader of the army and the leader of the RSF. And these two overnight became enemies.
And in that point of time, the whole Sudan turned into violent players where so many people killed and so many lives lost, and so many displaced. We're talking about 40,000 life people killed. More than 10 to 12 million displaced and people were starving. And unfortunately also this whole crisis could have been really stopped right in from that moment. But we're still living in that nightmare.
Stephanie: And I am aware too that this internationally has been pushed aside and buried behind the genocide in Gaza. When these were really co-arising crises.
Mubarak: That is a really very sensitive point because for so long we did not want to take away from what is happening in Gaza as something that we all need to focus on. But at the same time, the crisis and the humanitarian crisis, just the magnitude of it in Sudan is so enormous that people need to pay attention to it and it did not receive the attention it deserved. People call it the forgotten, but I think ignored, completely ignored, and ignorance is always more of a choice in my opinion, and people chose not to pay attention to it.
Michael: Yeah. As Gandhi said, it's not hard to wake up someone who's sleeping, but it's impossible to wake up someone who's pretending to be asleep. Mubarak, isn't there a kind of Pan-African consciousness and some institutional forms of that could perhaps have provided a mediating body to bring the two sides together?
Mubarak: There is, and there is not. We're talking about an international order today that is thrown by ideas and opinions of people that decide who deserve attention, who doesn't, and who is really someone that we care about their livelihood and who doesn't. And it's really a matter of choice. If we're talking about international institutions, it completely showed clear failure. From the top, the United Nations or the African Union or any of these institutions. And also when a war that is fought that is not by the people, but fought by proxies, then that is a war that it can be stopped by the handlers of these proxies, and this is the reality in Sudan.
People try to paint this war as a civil war, but it's not a civil war. Because the people of Sudan did not choose to be in this war. The people of Sudan do not want this war. The people of Sudan are not people that are actually choosing this war; there are two individuals that made that choice, and those are supported by international actors, and those actors can be stopped, but that's the message is really very clearly when people ask me, okay, how can we stop this? I do actually have an answer. If a war in Gaza people were able to do a ceasefire by a phone call from the White House, a phone call from the White House to the UAE and a phone call from the White House to Egypt; a phone call from the White House can stop this war right now as we speak. And that as simple as that. Okay. Now then you were asked me why this is not happening. I would raise the same question back to you.
Michael: So there is something that we could possibly do in this country to the extent that we have some leverage. And I know that Trump wishes to be perceived as a peacemaker and very much tried to play that role in the Gaza crisis. And it seems like mobilizing political energy here to urge him to make that phone call. It might be, along with, as you so eloquently said, the unwillingness of the Sudanese people to support this, to endure this. It seems to me that people could here bring some persuasion to bear that might make that phone call happen.
Mubarak: Yes. And that's really what we're hoping for because you heard what happened in the last week or so in El-Fasher and El-Fasher is the capital of North Darfur. And it's the last major city in Darfur that is held by the military. And the moment that people have been warning the international community of the disaster that is waiting to happen. For the past 18 months, this city was sieged by the RSF and people knew exactly what is going to happen if the RSF entered the city. And this is exactly what happened when they entered. They executed people, they killed so many in one day, that is 3000 in one day. That's just, that's when we fail to act as human beings. And of saving lives. And we're not talking about, forget about the starvation, forget about all of these kinds of other things. But this is just executing people. And the Yale lab showed pictures of what happened there, and I think Mr. Raymond talked about this, these atrocities and the size of the crisis, the humanitarian crisis, and called on the White House to act. Called on like this is just a phone call to stop this genocide and stop this. We all live by regret tomorrow and say, what could happen? Could we have saved one life there? There is now about, I think 260,000 civilians trapped in a kill box because they built a wall around the city.
Michael: This lesson really should have been learned in Rwanda. We had the same dynamic. There was a time when a little bit of friendly services offered, could have stopped the explosion, but then of course it became too late. And so really despair of the human capacity just talking about us corporately as a race, the human capacity to learn from missed opportunities in the past.
Stephanie: Yeah, so I just want to reinforce that beyond any other solution to any other issue that's happening from the work that's happening in unarmed civilian protection in Sudan at this point, or contributing money for food from humanitarian groups. All of that is good. But you're saying wherever you are in the world, call your government and ask for a phone call to the leaders to get them to stop. You're asking, you want to stop the war through political pressure on the leaders. And do you feel like that's the most important thing?
Mubarak: Yeah, so there is, we always say there are three things, calling your political leaders to make that phone call to these people that are waging war on Sudan. The second thing is also really the humanitarian, as you said, like the humanitarian crisis. We need to respond to it, that's immediate. We need to have like safe passages so even these humanitarian agencies can provide food. I think the United Nations is calling on that, but they're really not acting on it. And then we also want to make sure that people are sharing this widely because we don't want it to be, as I said, forgotten or ignoring. We have to make this crisis known and we have to give it the right attention so people can save lives. People are starving, all of the healthcare institutions, hospitals being bombed. You know about when we talk about 260,000 right now in El-Fasher, half of them are children. So this is a place where now there is only women and children, so we need to save those because the men that were able to leave, they already left because they get executed right away. And this is a humanitarian crisis in motion right now, and responding to it is really very important and very critical.
Stephanie: How can people learn more, be in touch? What resources do you have to share?
Mubarak: I think it just, right now, we are under, there is not enough information out there really. People I really want them to go into, like Nonviolence International, go to places where not the normal news are cycled, not just the daily recycled news about just normal stuff here. Look at international, I look at the Associated Press, AP and also BBC. I look at other agencies that actually are reporting from Sudan.
Stephanie: And have you seen any forms of misinformation or disinformation being spread about Sudan that we should be aware of?
Mubarak: I think anybody who's calling this now as a civil war actually is really misstating that. I think we need to call it what it is as a war that is led by proxies that are international actors. We need to hold them responsible. The UAE being very close ally to RSF need to be called out. They need to also be put on notice. That's where the White House call can come in place. They can make that call to Mohamed bin Zayed today and ask him to stop this war. Stop funding. Stop providing weapons to the RSF and just stop this madness. And if he doesn't do that, like what Raymond from the Yale Research Lab said, are we going to impose sanctions on you? And we are also going to stop this free trade and free tariffs from the port of UAE and that's going to make him stop.
Stephanie: Thank you so much for joining us.
Mubarak: Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Really. It's good to talk to both of you.
Michael: Good to talk with you, Mubarak.
Stephanie: Thank you everybody for listening. We were speaking with Mubarak Elamin. He is doing everything that he can to help draw attention, education, and action to help end the war in Sudan. He made a lot of very powerful and concrete suggestions that people within the international community can do. And so go back, listen to this show again. You can find it at nonviolenceradio.org.
So a very special thank you to Mubarak for joining us today, to our mother station, KWMR, to everybody who helps make this show great, including Elizabeth High, who's working diligently and beautifully on transcripts of the show that we make available over at Waging Nonviolence. And really anywhere you find the show later, you'll find the transcript, including nonviolenceradio.org. To you Michael, thank you for all your hard work on the Nonviolence Report, to our friend and board member Francesca Po, who is working hard on Metta social media and always getting that out there a little bit further. To everybody who is listening out there, thank you so much for following Nonviolence Radio. It's important information and we're happy to be a part of sharing it, of sharing nonviolence with the world. Until the next time, we'll be back in two weeks.
Please take care of one another. Thanks everybody.