Sudan

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Train stabbing attack, Mamdani takes New York and the Andrew formerly known as prince

From our UK edition

Home The King ‘initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew’, who is now known as Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor; his lease on Royal Lodge, Windsor, was relinquished and he made a private arrangement with the King to live on the Sandringham estate. His former wife, Sarah Ferguson, will find her own accommodation. Their daughters remain Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice. Richard Gott, who resigned as literary editor of the Guardian in 1994 after The Spectator accused him of having been in the pay of the KGB, died aged 87. Gopichand Hinduja, the head of Britain’s richest family, died aged 85. Eleven people were taken to hospital after a stabbing attack on a train from Doncaster to London, which began after it left Peterborough.

Tuesday

Nigel Jones

Do black lives still matter?

It was an ethnic massacre so bad that it could be seen from space. Satellites picked up bloodied patches of soil in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, after Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swept into the besieged city. Pools of blood and piles of bodies were identified. Thousands of people are feared to have died in the appalling violence. Many thousands more have fled for their lives. Others remain trapped in the city. The scenes of slaughter were so blatant that it should have brought marchers out onto the streets in passionate protest. But there wasn’t a peep from the usual suspects. Was this because the killings did not take place in Gaza or the West Bank, but in Sudan, one of Africa’s largest countries?

sudan darfur

Thursday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Activist silence over Sudan speaks volumes

The city of El Fasher, long a symbolic and strategic stronghold in Darfur, has in recent days become the site of atrocities so grave that the United Nations has openly warned of the risk of genocide. Videos reviewed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights show scores of unarmed men executed in cold blood, some lying dead at the feet of Rapid Support Forces fighters, others dragged off and detained. Journalists and aid workers have disappeared. The last remaining functional hospital was shelled, killing patients and staff. The Saudi Maternity Hospital, once a rare lifeline, is now a mass grave.

Sudan

Tuesday

Michela Wrong

The fresh, forceful voice of Frantz Fanon

From our UK edition

‘If I’d died in my thirties, what would be left behind?’ is the question that keeps coming to mind reading this timely new biography of Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and philosopher who became an icon to leftist revolutionaries across the globe. ‘Would I want history to judge me by what I wrote at 36?’ For that was the absurdly young age at which Fanon died of leukaemia in 1961, leaving two key works to his name: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Not a huge legacy, then, in sheer numbers of words.

Thursday

John Pietro

Sudan and the decline of American courage

Over the weekend, US special forces evacuated American embassy personnel from Sudan in a nearly day-long operation. The evacuation came as the African country descended into near civil war on April 15 when the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces took their disagreements to the battlefield. US forces managed to get all of the personnel — along with a number of foreign individuals — out of the country safely, flying about 800 miles from Khartoum back to Djibouti in three heavy-lift helicopters. The decision to leave an embassy is not an easy one, and is typically reserved for only the most severe circumstances (Kyiv in early 2022, for example).

sudan

Tuesday

Richard Walker

Sudan: coup, what coup?

From our UK edition

Sudan’s army has just dissolved the government, dismissed the prime minister and declared a state of emergency. That certainly sounds like a coup — but it’s not, unless you count the army taking over from itself as a coup. The two uniformed power brokers who effectively controlled Sudan last week (a regular soldier called General Burhan and an opportunistic warlord lieutenant general Hamdan) still control the country this week. My Oxford English Dictionary defines a coup as a ‘sudden and decisive stroke of state policy’ and also as ‘a finishing stroke.’ Sudan’s coup that is not a coup was neither sudden nor decisive.

Thursday

Hugh Thomson

The least familiar stretches of Nile prove the most interesting

From our UK edition

It’s one of the most tantalising travel images in the world — a felucca floating along the Nile at sunset, its lateen sail spread aslant to catch the wind. It takes us back to the beginnings of ancient Egypt, when the need to manage Nilotic flooding and the imperative to trade along the river’s course were the motors of civilisation. Even 2,500 years ago Herodotus was fascinated by the ease with which the Egyptians had learned to cultivate the soil with its waters rather than with laborious ploughs — which, some speculate, had given them the leisure to build pyramids in the down months.

Tuesday

Rebecca Tinsley

Black African lives should matter too

From our UK edition

The treatment of black people, particularly by law enforcement, has become a principal point of protest in the western world. But little it said about the millions of black Africans mistreated by the ruthless security forces of authoritarian African regimes. If black lives matter regardless of where they are in the world, then it’s time to challenge the immensely privileged black African ruling elite that clings to power by persecuting its often-voiceless Black African citizens. The numbers tell the story. An estimated 5.4 million people or 8 per cent of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s population died in the 1997-2003 conflict at the hands of government security forces and non-state armed militia.

Friday

Jake Wallis Simons

A Sudan-Israel peace deal could be Trump’s crowning achievement

From our UK edition

Twitter is not always kind to the Jewish state. But the peace accord between Israel, UAE and Bahrain that was signed in Washington in September has opened the floodgates to a social media love-in. In one video, recently shared by Ivanka Trump, an Israeli called Amit Deri expresses his astonishment at finding produce from his country in a food market in Dubai. Elsewhere, in pictures that were shared thousands of times, a vast Emirati flag is seen projected onto the façade of Tel Aviv’s city hall. Even Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has got involved, posting in Arabic this week to mark UAE’s national day, alongside a video in which he referred to the Arab state as ‘our new friends’. These were not empty tweets.

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Have Arab nations forgotten about Palestine by accepting Israel?

From our UK edition

The Palestinians are entering one of the most precarious periods in their nation’s history. The normalisation of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is only the beginning as other Arab and Muslim states are expected to follow. Yesterday, Haidar Badawi Sadiq, spokesman for the Sudanese foreign ministry, confirmed talks between Khartoum and Jerusalem and predicted a treaty before the end of the year. Today, Sadiq was fired and the ministry denied all knowledge of secret negotiations. Maybe Sadiq spoke out of turn; maybe he jumped the gun; maybe he floated the test balloon that he was told to. No matter.