7 ms·

The Sudan crisis and the Sahel gold rush

136 points by hackandthink 3y ago

fit2rule 3y ago
[dead]
hackandthink 3y ago
US was well intentioned in Sudan (this happens sometimes), but it did not work out. Wagner has no morals at all. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/20/sudan-civil-war-biden-burhan-hemeti-foreign-policy/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/20/sudan-civil-war-biden-b...
- f6v 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - simonh 3y ago
    After the outcome of the one known encounter between Wagner and US forces, in Syria, I don’t think so.
    - f6v 3y ago
      I choose to think that doesn’t matter. Romans were defeated so many times. What won them the empire was perseverance.
- sschueller 3y ago
  The United States does not do anything other than what serves it's own interests. If those interests align with what is moral it's just convenient and an easy way for the US to get other to go along with what they are doing.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > if those interests align with what is moral it's just convenient and an easy way for the US to get other to go along with what they are doing Sure. But the American strategy relies on building alliances. That naturally aligns us to others in a way a more-domineering imperial approach doesn’t.
    - D_Alex 3y ago
      "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests" - Henry Kissinger. And also... “To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests" - Henry Kissinger Nobody has permanent friends or alliances. The point is we, a maritime power, tend to be mutually supportive in our alliances in a way land powers are not. (We prefer them to have strong economies and militaries, for instance, and are generally okay, if not thrilled, when they compete with us.)
        nmylc 3y ago
        I would say that Britain (maritime power) has been playing off European continental countries against each other, certainly up to WWI. The U.S. still does this. Now the Eastern European countries are used as a wedge against the Western ones. Pipelines are blown up, which is not supportive.
        cpursley 3y ago
        The US puts major preconditions on other countries. And are very inconsistent on how they apply/enforce them. Contrast to all the newly formed (and preexisting but growing) non-western alliances and trade agreements.
        cpursley 3y ago
        And the weaponization of the dollar really spooked a whole lotta other countries and just added fuel to the fire of them looking into alternative non-dependent systems (trading in non-usd, swift alternatives, etc). At this rate, we’re going to isolate ourselves (Europe is already feeling significant pain). The West is only around a billion people out of what, 8 billion?
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    Most people act in their own interest A nation is comprised and guided by people Thus, unless something extraordinary happens, nations will act in their own interest
  - BjoernKW 3y ago
    > The United States does not do anything other than what serves it's own interests. No country does. Countries don't have morals, countries have interests. Actions by countries are of course almost always justified based on the former, rather than the latter.
    - RedCondor 3y ago
      This is just the fascist mindset. "Everyone is as depraved as me, so I can and should be infinitely depraved preemptively."
  - rayiner 3y ago
    > The United States does not do anything other than what serves it's own interests. That's a common belief, especially among people outside the U.S. But I think it's totally wrong. I don't think you can look at the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, our our support in Ukraine, and say that's serving America's interests. George W. Bush and Hilary Clinton exemplify a bipartisan coalition, cut from the same cloth, that believes in liberal democracy and individualistic human rights as a religion, and who think America is justified in using war to promote that religion around the world.
    - dmreedy 3y ago
      A "bipartisan coalition cut from the same cloth" does not sound very "bi", nor very "partisan" to me, beyond the absolute barest colloquial use of the term to describe the fact that there are two choices of the flag you can raise in order to functionally participate. What you are describing to me sounds a lot more like a single powerbase with a few disagreements of narcissism amongst its participants, with a dramatic hegemonic control over the broader citizenship. The self interests of this neoliberal consensus include empire-building, and have since the cold war that spawned and shaped it. A program to spread that hegemony broader and broader to preserve the flow of resources into the imperial center. I'm trying not to assign morality here per se; just give I think a better model with, I think, more explanatory power.
      - rayiner 3y ago
        I disagree with your characterization because I don't think it's accurate. I come from a country where the government has "hegemonic control over the broader citizenship." That's not what's happening in America. It's much more akin to different infighting sects of the same evangelical religion. I also disagree that your model has "more explanatory power." We spent $6 trillion going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we certainly didn't get $6 trillion in oil. We opened up trade with China, gave them our technology, and put them on a path to leapfrogging ahead of us. Your theory is that America is an empire trying to direct "the flow of resources into the imperial center"--but if that's the case then our imperial leaders are extremely incompetent. What happened in Iraq and China makes much more sense under my model. It was an attempt at converting those countries into our religion of liberal democracy, human rights, and capitalism.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  US was supposedly well intentioned in a lot of countries that are now in chaos. Good luck finding a conflict where the US wasn't poking around before it started.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > good luck finding a conflict where the US wasn't poking around before it started The Cold War saw the U.S. and USSR take geopolitical positions with global remit. There is no conflict where either “wasn’t poking around before it started” because there was no place either wasn’t. In some cases, e.g. the banana republics, we can clearly trace causation to one party. Sudan is more complicated: there is a mix of foreign interests, some American-aligned, some not.
    - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
      Thats too easy, also after 2000's its the case: iraq, syria, ukraine just mention a few
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        My entire point was America pokes around. You’re mentioning more cases. Yes. We do that. Sometimes, mostly around WWII, we did it well. Since Vietnam, the record has been crap. (Question mark for the first Gulf War.) Ukraine and Taiwan look more like the work our Greatest Generation did than the Boomer years. The conflicts we hear the least about tend to be those we were least involved in. Myanmar. Tigray. Whatever the fuck South Africa is currently up to.
        wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
        Come on, too easy. Too many lives have been lost to just step over it with a shoulder shrug.
        timellis-smith 3y ago
        As far as I know, South Africa hasn't been involved in anything since Angola. The current military probably couldn't find enough working vehicles to even get to a conflict let alone fight one.
- jpm_sd 3y ago
  US-led economic sanctions have made a bad situation much worse, as outlined in the original article. In fact they mostly don't work at all. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/11/1169072190/why-sanctions-dont-work-but-could-if-done-right https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/11/1169072190/why...
- postsantum 3y ago
  An entire book was written on "US was well intentioned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hell_of_Good_Intentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hell_of_Good_Intentions
- nixass 3y ago
  Where Wagner operate things are about to go genocidal soon
  - simonh 3y ago
    It's already happened without them, but yes, their involvement doesn't bode well.
qtzaz 3y ago
[flagged]
- PradeetPatel 3y ago
  I think that is a very naive at best, discriminatory view at worst of Sudan. Many African countries face extremely unique challenges, which can only be assisted with empathy, education, and awareness as a part of their nation building program.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > many African countries face extremely unique challenges, which can only be assisted with empathy, education, and awareness as a part of their nation building program Interpreted generously, it might be a reference to Africa’s borders being halfway nonsense. If we swapped eastern Canada and western Mexico into the United States, it would be difficult to build the sort of common empathy and identity that countries require to persist. (Not going to touch adding back the indigenous population.)
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > If we swapped eastern Canada and western Mexico into the United States, it would be difficult to build the sort of common empathy and identity that countries require to persist. How would that be harder than it is with the parts of Eastern Canada and quite giant portion of Northern and Northwestern Mexico, including over a quarter of its west coast, that actually were “swapped into” the United States?
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > how would that be harder than it is with the parts of Eastern Canada and quite giant portion of Northern and Northwestern Mexico, including over a quarter of its west coast, that actually was “swapped into” the United States? Territories. Not substantial foreign populations. Hence the parentheticals.
    - 3y ago
bjackman 3y ago
I've enjoyed the growth of expert blogs like this one in the last few years! I've generally felt that traditional news falls into several traps of writing style that turn me off completely: - an insufferable mixture of informational coverage with character profiles (e.g. I come to read about the Sahel gold rush but I am confronted with paragraphs of vibe-setting introduction as the author interviews a person of interest). - coverage that assumes the same level of contextual knowledge for complex and distant conflicts as for recent national news. - dull "long reads" that I just don't feel like spending a hour on. On the other hand this piece is just informative, concise, and engaging :)
- IkmoIkmo 3y ago
  Oh god that first one… It’s really nice in podcast form on the way to work or in the bathtub, absolutely terrible to keep my attention when trying to understand news in readable form, and always suspect of being mere anecdata and generally wrong. Especially when it concerns a country or industry or phenomenon I have no experience in.
  - bjackman 3y ago
    In some publications it's almost a formula. Headline: <something that sounds really interesting about the war in Ukraine> First para: For the uninitiated, it's easy to mistake Ilya Shevchenko for an everyday middle-aged Ukrainian man. His short-cropped brown hair, mild paunch, and gentle demeanour are disarming. When we first met, he insisted that we finish our cup of tea before we discussed important matters. [And so on]
    - NikolaNovak 3y ago
      Oh gawd. Too eerily accurate.
- atombender 3y ago
  If you like this sort of coverage, I highly recommend The New York Review of Books. Contrary to the name, their articles aren't book reviews so much as excuses to write solid, expert articles on topics that happen to be written about in recently published books. The articles are almost always interesting even when they are about books, because of their extremely high-quality contributors — Joyce Carol Oates, Tony Judt, Gore Vidal, Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee come to mind. They also publish lots of global, topical analysis. During the Egypt conflict of 2011-2014, they had some of the best coverage, for example. I also enjoy the sheer lack of pretentiousness. They have world-class writers, yet they never seem full of themselves the way some other "liberal intellectual" publications (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Monocle, etc.) do. (Their book coverage is great, though. They also publish books, and are responsible for keeping a lot of obscure out-of-print stuff in print.)
pjc50 3y ago
Interesting article with disappointing comments so far. I'd heard that the war in Sudan had started up, and this explains why: the resource curse. Physical control becomes so valuable that the country tears itself apart to get at the money. > "The regime would license production by a handful of large companies on the enclave model familiar from the oil industry. This was both “modern” and it would leave the existing structure of politics and society in place" Very good way of looking at it. This is how oil works in various Gulf states. Westerners are brought in for technical expertise, but kept away from the rest of the country and in particular its power structure.
- newsclues 3y ago
  It's a resource curse and also a strategic geopolitical location due to shipping and oil.
- macleginn 3y ago
  > Physical control becomes so valuable that the country tears itself apart to get at the money. The article, however, does not have any concrete thoughts on how exactly the gold is connected to the current round of fighting. Other analyses suggest that it was inevitable anyway since (i) the agreed-upon scheme of transition of power to the civilian government did not entail any actual transition of power to the civilian government (the scheme must have been implemented by the military, which does not want to relinquish power) and (ii) the proposed scheme to combine two military factions into a single one was unworkable. Given that RSF already seems to control the gold-producing region, there is no self-evident resource-based reason for it to try and capture the capital.
cpursley 3y ago
[flagged]
- rippercushions 3y ago
  Wait, how exactly is the US to blame for any of what's happening in Sudan? Would it really have been better if they had just wholesale ignored the Janjaweed massacres? As it stands, both sides just seem to trying to court anybody who can support them, be it the US, Russia, Egypt, UAE etc.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    This is absolutely the continuation of the Great Game (which the English passed the torch to America post WW2). With neo-imperalism resource control as well as controlling the sea lanes thrown in the mix. Make no mistake, this is similar to Crimea (Black Sea dominance denial). The West does not want Russia gaining a foothold on the Red Sea. Especially now that they are friendly with the middle eastern powers.
- Eumenes 3y ago
  The ol' "We Support Democracy" - a classic!
- pjc50 3y ago
  Critiques of the rule-based order only work when they're not proposing a far worse alternative.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    What are the rules? Who makes them? Do I get a democratic say on what they are?
    - cpursley 3y ago
      Considering the downvotes, I guess not. Global dictatorship it is.
ericbarrett 3y ago
> But there is one gizmo of which the Sahel’s gold miners can claim to be the most important users worldwide - the cheap portable metal detectors, which became widely available in the region around 2008-2009 The article (which I quote above) argues that the artisanal mining in central Africa is often called "primitive" but is actually a modern phenomenon based on the availability of metal detectors. Certainly these devices have been around since much longer than 2009. What changed? Manufacturing cost? Regional distribution networks? Trade agreements with China?
- tokai 3y ago
  Mining by hand with metal detectors is primitive even if the technology is modern and the practice is new. It is non-industrialized, low complexity, and unsophisticated compared to modern mining operations.
  - ericbarrett 3y ago
    Well, yes, nobody is claiming that artisanal mining is state of the art. Just that it's a modern phenomenon at this scale. I thought it was interesting, but it also lead me to more questions.
- pjc50 3y ago
  The world is a very large place; it probably took this long for people to realize that using a handheld metal detector in those particular areas would find a useful amount of gold. It's not clear whether they're just for prospecting or actually finding meaningful quantities of gold as nuggets? Traditionally it's in tiny specks.
foobarbaggins 3y ago
"Sudan’s gold production surged to 70 million tons" Given that less than a quarter million tons of gold have been mined in history, I find this difficult to believe.
- gavi 3y ago
  That one line made me question all the facts presented in this article. Might be unfair, but according to wikipedia[1] - total gold ever is ~ 250k tons [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve
  - thehappypm 3y ago
    I think it’s just a typo, the chart above says 70 metric tons, not 70 million!
grecy 3y ago
I spent a few weeks driving the length of Sudan back in early 2019, just before the coup that happened back then. As I learned all around Africa, government warnings about a county tell you little about the people there - while the government of Sudan at the time was no doubt evil, the people were some of the friendliest and kindest I've met anywhere on the planet. Not only did locals help my buy bread, they refused to let me pay for it. They invited me into their homes repeatedly, etc. etc. The currency was in such a free fall I was getting a different rate literally every day. It's one of the countries in the world that is cut-off from global markets, and so regular credit and bank cards do not work. Still, people were smiling, laughing and getting on with life. Here's some of my footage and experiences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pqtfwlfDAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pqtfwlfDAw
- tonetheman 3y ago
  [dead]
0xDEF 3y ago
The Wagner Group is all over Sudan's gold: https://unherd.com/2023/04/how-wagner-plundered-sudans-gold/ https://unherd.com/2023/04/how-wagner-plundered-sudans-gold/ They are also active in the rest of Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%AFgbado_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%AFgbado_massacre
from 3y ago
> Within weeks (of the meeting of al-Bashir with Putin), Russian geologists and mineralogists employed by Meroe Gold, a new Sudanese company, began to arrive in Sudan, according to commercial flight records obtained by the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative body, and verified by researchers at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. Does anyone know how a non-profit "London-based investigative body" obtains call logs, commercial airline tickets, entry permits, visa applications, and browsing history of people they are investigating [1]? [1] https://dossier.center/car-en/#p3-3 https://dossier.center/car-en/#p3-3
- postsantum 3y ago
  "OSINT" In practice that often means they do "parallel reconstruction" to launder information they receive from special services. This "investigative body" in question is owned by a disgraced russian oligarh
  - from 3y ago
    I am aware of "probiv" where on Runet forums people advertise services where they basically pay people who work at phone companies or government agencies for data on people. This is mostly an ex USSR thing from what I can tell. I don't know how they got the records from Sudan/CAR though but I assume it's through some combination of bribery and their backers.
    - postsantum 3y ago
      https://www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence-agencies-launders-talking-points-media/276603/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence-agenci...
      - _kbh_ 3y ago
        Just so you know mintpressnews is a website that publishes disinformation and leans heavily into conspiracy theories and regularly publishes pro Russian propaganda. I wouldn’t use it as a source of anything that the Russians would want to discredit (such as bellingcat). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News
oblak 3y ago
I read the article and while I have little reason to doubt what's been reported, it strikes as the usual one-sided US trying to do do good things while $competitor doing bad things. What is this, Hollywood? Or do I have to read between the lines?
southernplaces7 3y ago
For anyone who liked this article, I'd really recommend Tooze's book, "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy". Aside from being an extremely high-quality, genuinely ground-breaking new look at a fascinating old subject, it's also exceptionally well-written.

136 points by hackandthink 3y ago

[dead]

US was well intentioned in Sudan (this happens sometimes), but it did not work out. Wagner has no morals at all. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/20/sudan-civil-war-biden-burhan-hemeti-foreign-policy/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/20/sudan-civil-war-biden-b...

f6v 3y ago
[flagged]
- simonh 3y ago
  After the outcome of the one known encounter between Wagner and US forces, in Syria, I don’t think so.
  - f6v 3y ago
    I choose to think that doesn’t matter. Romans were defeated so many times. What won them the empire was perseverance.
sschueller 3y ago
The United States does not do anything other than what serves it's own interests. If those interests align with what is moral it's just convenient and an easy way for the US to get other to go along with what they are doing.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > if those interests align with what is moral it's just convenient and an easy way for the US to get other to go along with what they are doing Sure. But the American strategy relies on building alliances. That naturally aligns us to others in a way a more-domineering imperial approach doesn’t.
  - D_Alex 3y ago
    "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests" - Henry Kissinger. And also... “To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests" - Henry Kissinger Nobody has permanent friends or alliances. The point is we, a maritime power, tend to be mutually supportive in our alliances in a way land powers are not. (We prefer them to have strong economies and militaries, for instance, and are generally okay, if not thrilled, when they compete with us.)
      - nmylc 3y ago
        I would say that Britain (maritime power) has been playing off European continental countries against each other, certainly up to WWI. The U.S. still does this. Now the Eastern European countries are used as a wedge against the Western ones. Pipelines are blown up, which is not supportive.
      - cpursley 3y ago
        The US puts major preconditions on other countries. And are very inconsistent on how they apply/enforce them. Contrast to all the newly formed (and preexisting but growing) non-western alliances and trade agreements.
        cpursley 3y ago
        And the weaponization of the dollar really spooked a whole lotta other countries and just added fuel to the fire of them looking into alternative non-dependent systems (trading in non-usd, swift alternatives, etc). At this rate, we’re going to isolate ourselves (Europe is already feeling significant pain). The West is only around a billion people out of what, 8 billion?
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  Most people act in their own interest A nation is comprised and guided by people Thus, unless something extraordinary happens, nations will act in their own interest
- BjoernKW 3y ago
  > The United States does not do anything other than what serves it's own interests. No country does. Countries don't have morals, countries have interests. Actions by countries are of course almost always justified based on the former, rather than the latter.
  - RedCondor 3y ago
    This is just the fascist mindset. "Everyone is as depraved as me, so I can and should be infinitely depraved preemptively."
- rayiner 3y ago
  > The United States does not do anything other than what serves it's own interests. That's a common belief, especially among people outside the U.S. But I think it's totally wrong. I don't think you can look at the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, our our support in Ukraine, and say that's serving America's interests. George W. Bush and Hilary Clinton exemplify a bipartisan coalition, cut from the same cloth, that believes in liberal democracy and individualistic human rights as a religion, and who think America is justified in using war to promote that religion around the world.
  - dmreedy 3y ago
    A "bipartisan coalition cut from the same cloth" does not sound very "bi", nor very "partisan" to me, beyond the absolute barest colloquial use of the term to describe the fact that there are two choices of the flag you can raise in order to functionally participate. What you are describing to me sounds a lot more like a single powerbase with a few disagreements of narcissism amongst its participants, with a dramatic hegemonic control over the broader citizenship. The self interests of this neoliberal consensus include empire-building, and have since the cold war that spawned and shaped it. A program to spread that hegemony broader and broader to preserve the flow of resources into the imperial center. I'm trying not to assign morality here per se; just give I think a better model with, I think, more explanatory power.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      I disagree with your characterization because I don't think it's accurate. I come from a country where the government has "hegemonic control over the broader citizenship." That's not what's happening in America. It's much more akin to different infighting sects of the same evangelical religion. I also disagree that your model has "more explanatory power." We spent $6 trillion going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we certainly didn't get $6 trillion in oil. We opened up trade with China, gave them our technology, and put them on a path to leapfrogging ahead of us. Your theory is that America is an empire trying to direct "the flow of resources into the imperial center"--but if that's the case then our imperial leaders are extremely incompetent. What happened in Iraq and China makes much more sense under my model. It was an attempt at converting those countries into our religion of liberal democracy, human rights, and capitalism.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
US was supposedly well intentioned in a lot of countries that are now in chaos. Good luck finding a conflict where the US wasn't poking around before it started.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > good luck finding a conflict where the US wasn't poking around before it started The Cold War saw the U.S. and USSR take geopolitical positions with global remit. There is no conflict where either “wasn’t poking around before it started” because there was no place either wasn’t. In some cases, e.g. the banana republics, we can clearly trace causation to one party. Sudan is more complicated: there is a mix of foreign interests, some American-aligned, some not.
  - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
    Thats too easy, also after 2000's its the case: iraq, syria, ukraine just mention a few
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      My entire point was America pokes around. You’re mentioning more cases. Yes. We do that. Sometimes, mostly around WWII, we did it well. Since Vietnam, the record has been crap. (Question mark for the first Gulf War.) Ukraine and Taiwan look more like the work our Greatest Generation did than the Boomer years. The conflicts we hear the least about tend to be those we were least involved in. Myanmar. Tigray. Whatever the fuck South Africa is currently up to.
      - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
        Come on, too easy. Too many lives have been lost to just step over it with a shoulder shrug.
      - timellis-smith 3y ago
        As far as I know, South Africa hasn't been involved in anything since Angola. The current military probably couldn't find enough working vehicles to even get to a conflict let alone fight one.
jpm_sd 3y ago
US-led economic sanctions have made a bad situation much worse, as outlined in the original article. In fact they mostly don't work at all. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/11/1169072190/why-sanctions-dont-work-but-could-if-done-right https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/11/1169072190/why...
postsantum 3y ago
An entire book was written on "US was well intentioned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hell_of_Good_Intentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hell_of_Good_Intentions
nixass 3y ago
Where Wagner operate things are about to go genocidal soon
- simonh 3y ago
  It's already happened without them, but yes, their involvement doesn't bode well.

qtzaz 3y ago

[flagged]

PradeetPatel 3y ago
I think that is a very naive at best, discriminatory view at worst of Sudan. Many African countries face extremely unique challenges, which can only be assisted with empathy, education, and awareness as a part of their nation building program.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > many African countries face extremely unique challenges, which can only be assisted with empathy, education, and awareness as a part of their nation building program Interpreted generously, it might be a reference to Africa’s borders being halfway nonsense. If we swapped eastern Canada and western Mexico into the United States, it would be difficult to build the sort of common empathy and identity that countries require to persist. (Not going to touch adding back the indigenous population.)
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > If we swapped eastern Canada and western Mexico into the United States, it would be difficult to build the sort of common empathy and identity that countries require to persist. How would that be harder than it is with the parts of Eastern Canada and quite giant portion of Northern and Northwestern Mexico, including over a quarter of its west coast, that actually were “swapped into” the United States?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > how would that be harder than it is with the parts of Eastern Canada and quite giant portion of Northern and Northwestern Mexico, including over a quarter of its west coast, that actually was “swapped into” the United States? Territories. Not substantial foreign populations. Hence the parentheticals.
  - 3y ago

bjackman 3y ago

I've enjoyed the growth of expert blogs like this one in the last few years! I've generally felt that traditional news falls into several traps of writing style that turn me off completely: - an insufferable mixture of informational coverage with character profiles (e.g. I come to read about the Sahel gold rush but I am confronted with paragraphs of vibe-setting introduction as the author interviews a person of interest). - coverage that assumes the same level of contextual knowledge for complex and distant conflicts as for recent national news. - dull "long reads" that I just don't feel like spending a hour on. On the other hand this piece is just informative, concise, and engaging :)

IkmoIkmo 3y ago
Oh god that first one… It’s really nice in podcast form on the way to work or in the bathtub, absolutely terrible to keep my attention when trying to understand news in readable form, and always suspect of being mere anecdata and generally wrong. Especially when it concerns a country or industry or phenomenon I have no experience in.
- bjackman 3y ago
  In some publications it's almost a formula. Headline: <something that sounds really interesting about the war in Ukraine> First para: For the uninitiated, it's easy to mistake Ilya Shevchenko for an everyday middle-aged Ukrainian man. His short-cropped brown hair, mild paunch, and gentle demeanour are disarming. When we first met, he insisted that we finish our cup of tea before we discussed important matters. [And so on]
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    Oh gawd. Too eerily accurate.
atombender 3y ago
If you like this sort of coverage, I highly recommend The New York Review of Books. Contrary to the name, their articles aren't book reviews so much as excuses to write solid, expert articles on topics that happen to be written about in recently published books. The articles are almost always interesting even when they are about books, because of their extremely high-quality contributors — Joyce Carol Oates, Tony Judt, Gore Vidal, Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee come to mind. They also publish lots of global, topical analysis. During the Egypt conflict of 2011-2014, they had some of the best coverage, for example. I also enjoy the sheer lack of pretentiousness. They have world-class writers, yet they never seem full of themselves the way some other "liberal intellectual" publications (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Monocle, etc.) do. (Their book coverage is great, though. They also publish books, and are responsible for keeping a lot of obscure out-of-print stuff in print.)

pjc50 3y ago

Interesting article with disappointing comments so far. I'd heard that the war in Sudan had started up, and this explains why: the resource curse. Physical control becomes so valuable that the country tears itself apart to get at the money. > "The regime would license production by a handful of large companies on the enclave model familiar from the oil industry. This was both “modern” and it would leave the existing structure of politics and society in place" Very good way of looking at it. This is how oil works in various Gulf states. Westerners are brought in for technical expertise, but kept away from the rest of the country and in particular its power structure.

newsclues 3y ago
It's a resource curse and also a strategic geopolitical location due to shipping and oil.
macleginn 3y ago
> Physical control becomes so valuable that the country tears itself apart to get at the money. The article, however, does not have any concrete thoughts on how exactly the gold is connected to the current round of fighting. Other analyses suggest that it was inevitable anyway since (i) the agreed-upon scheme of transition of power to the civilian government did not entail any actual transition of power to the civilian government (the scheme must have been implemented by the military, which does not want to relinquish power) and (ii) the proposed scheme to combine two military factions into a single one was unworkable. Given that RSF already seems to control the gold-producing region, there is no self-evident resource-based reason for it to try and capture the capital.

cpursley 3y ago

[flagged]

rippercushions 3y ago
Wait, how exactly is the US to blame for any of what's happening in Sudan? Would it really have been better if they had just wholesale ignored the Janjaweed massacres? As it stands, both sides just seem to trying to court anybody who can support them, be it the US, Russia, Egypt, UAE etc.
- cpursley 3y ago
  This is absolutely the continuation of the Great Game (which the English passed the torch to America post WW2). With neo-imperalism resource control as well as controlling the sea lanes thrown in the mix. Make no mistake, this is similar to Crimea (Black Sea dominance denial). The West does not want Russia gaining a foothold on the Red Sea. Especially now that they are friendly with the middle eastern powers.
Eumenes 3y ago
The ol' "We Support Democracy" - a classic!
pjc50 3y ago
Critiques of the rule-based order only work when they're not proposing a far worse alternative.
- cpursley 3y ago
  What are the rules? Who makes them? Do I get a democratic say on what they are?
  - cpursley 3y ago
    Considering the downvotes, I guess not. Global dictatorship it is.

ericbarrett 3y ago

> But there is one gizmo of which the Sahel’s gold miners can claim to be the most important users worldwide - the cheap portable metal detectors, which became widely available in the region around 2008-2009 The article (which I quote above) argues that the artisanal mining in central Africa is often called "primitive" but is actually a modern phenomenon based on the availability of metal detectors. Certainly these devices have been around since much longer than 2009. What changed? Manufacturing cost? Regional distribution networks? Trade agreements with China?

tokai 3y ago
Mining by hand with metal detectors is primitive even if the technology is modern and the practice is new. It is non-industrialized, low complexity, and unsophisticated compared to modern mining operations.
- ericbarrett 3y ago
  Well, yes, nobody is claiming that artisanal mining is state of the art. Just that it's a modern phenomenon at this scale. I thought it was interesting, but it also lead me to more questions.
pjc50 3y ago
The world is a very large place; it probably took this long for people to realize that using a handheld metal detector in those particular areas would find a useful amount of gold. It's not clear whether they're just for prospecting or actually finding meaningful quantities of gold as nuggets? Traditionally it's in tiny specks.

foobarbaggins 3y ago

"Sudan’s gold production surged to 70 million tons" Given that less than a quarter million tons of gold have been mined in history, I find this difficult to believe.

gavi 3y ago
That one line made me question all the facts presented in this article. Might be unfair, but according to wikipedia[1] - total gold ever is ~ 250k tons [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve
- thehappypm 3y ago
  I think it’s just a typo, the chart above says 70 metric tons, not 70 million!

grecy 3y ago

I spent a few weeks driving the length of Sudan back in early 2019, just before the coup that happened back then. As I learned all around Africa, government warnings about a county tell you little about the people there - while the government of Sudan at the time was no doubt evil, the people were some of the friendliest and kindest I've met anywhere on the planet. Not only did locals help my buy bread, they refused to let me pay for it. They invited me into their homes repeatedly, etc. etc. The currency was in such a free fall I was getting a different rate literally every day. It's one of the countries in the world that is cut-off from global markets, and so regular credit and bank cards do not work. Still, people were smiling, laughing and getting on with life. Here's some of my footage and experiences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pqtfwlfDAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pqtfwlfDAw

tonetheman 3y ago
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0xDEF 3y ago

The Wagner Group is all over Sudan's gold: https://unherd.com/2023/04/how-wagner-plundered-sudans-gold/ https://unherd.com/2023/04/how-wagner-plundered-sudans-gold/ They are also active in the rest of Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%AFgbado_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%AFgbado_massacre

from 3y ago

> Within weeks (of the meeting of al-Bashir with Putin), Russian geologists and mineralogists employed by Meroe Gold, a new Sudanese company, began to arrive in Sudan, according to commercial flight records obtained by the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative body, and verified by researchers at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. Does anyone know how a non-profit "London-based investigative body" obtains call logs, commercial airline tickets, entry permits, visa applications, and browsing history of people they are investigating [1]? [1] https://dossier.center/car-en/#p3-3 https://dossier.center/car-en/#p3-3

postsantum 3y ago
"OSINT" In practice that often means they do "parallel reconstruction" to launder information they receive from special services. This "investigative body" in question is owned by a disgraced russian oligarh
- from 3y ago
  I am aware of "probiv" where on Runet forums people advertise services where they basically pay people who work at phone companies or government agencies for data on people. This is mostly an ex USSR thing from what I can tell. I don't know how they got the records from Sudan/CAR though but I assume it's through some combination of bribery and their backers.
  - postsantum 3y ago
    https://www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence-agencies-launders-talking-points-media/276603/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence-agenci...
    - _kbh_ 3y ago
      Just so you know mintpressnews is a website that publishes disinformation and leans heavily into conspiracy theories and regularly publishes pro Russian propaganda. I wouldn’t use it as a source of anything that the Russians would want to discredit (such as bellingcat). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News

oblak 3y ago

I read the article and while I have little reason to doubt what's been reported, it strikes as the usual one-sided US trying to do do good things while $competitor doing bad things. What is this, Hollywood? Or do I have to read between the lines?

southernplaces7 3y ago

For anyone who liked this article, I'd really recommend Tooze's book, "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy". Aside from being an extremely high-quality, genuinely ground-breaking new look at a fascinating old subject, it's also exceptionally well-written.