121. Chaos in Sudan, Biden vs. Sunak, and the fall of Braverman?

25:40The other guy I think was mentioned who, to Fair George Mitchell, did pay significant tribute to General De Shastler in the Canadian military guy who ultimately was part of the thing the whole way through and eventually oversaw the decommissioning of weapons. But I think that's what I'm finally a little bit sad about this thing, is that you're seeing all this positive good public service at a time when there's very little of it around. Well, the international community doesn't exist in the same way. So this was the glory days of the 90s when Canadian generals were popping up all over the world.

26:09My friend General Romeo De Laire was involved in the Rwandan genocide and wrote a very, very moving book called Shaking Hands with the Devil about his experience then. It was a period where Canada was very involved in Haiti, Australia and Canada were very involved in the East Timor piece process. I mean, all these things that you'll remember. And of course, most dramatically of all Bosnia, Kosovo, these extraordinary ends of wars. And it feels so, so different now. I mean, if you, maybe this is an opportunity to segue on to Sudan because that's the moment that should have been the 1990s moment.

26:46This has been the 1990s. What's happening in Sudan would have been the classic example of where you would expect the UN, the US Canada, Australia, Britain, Norway to be really leaning in and they're not. Well, as they applaud the end of Tony Blair, we're not the end of Tony Blair, the end of Tony Blair's comments, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about what's going on in Sudan.

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29:49The rest of the politics this week is sponsored by The New European again. And as listeners know, this is a paper very close to my heart as I'm one of the two editors at large. We have a new one, Matthew Donkona. Even for me, absolutely brilliant to see their cover story. I claim no credit because I've been here in Belfast. The headline read, Hate Mail, one newspaper century long quest to demonize migrants. And inside a truly splinetic, wonderful analysis by Liz Gerard, on the way the Daily Mail has, over the course of its history, methodically supported hard -right nationalism and help create the culture of fear and loathing for migrants in our country.

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31:57Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And I think we should update the ceremony for the George Mitchell statue unveiling is now being addressed by Chris Hilton Harris. That's it. And actually, I mean, I'm a bit bit envious of Chris. He's colleague of mine, joined in 2010, but he's managing to deliver a very long speech as far as I can see with Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair or Standing Behind him listening quietly. Given half a chance, I would have delivered like a three -hour cast -ra style. Would you, would you, would you, what would you, what he's going on quite a bit?

32:30I mean, I don't know what, what, what, whether he's explaining how he's going to get the storm on institutions up and running, and, and possibly might be, he's, he's, Ray Bidbrecht to hear, wasn't he? He was, he was a Brexeter, yeah, so he was a Brexeter, yeah. He's a Brexeter. He's chief work too. Right, okay. The latest episode of Leading, yep, David Miller Band. Yeah. I think we should give a shout out to that, but people seem to be liking these interviews. Are you enjoying them, Rory? I think it's probably one of the better things we do. Oh, okay. I think it is one of the better things we do.

32:58And I think, you don't know how to talk to other people. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah, we, we, we don't have anything to say to each other, and to each other, no, no point in that at all. No, I think it's good because I think we're avoiding the confrontation, or we're giving people space to talk, which I'm not sure exists in conventional media, but maybe in the new world podcasting, we shouldn't be comparing ourselves to conventional media anymore. But I don't think David Miller Band would have been given an hour to really talk openly in the way that he did. No, the reason why it's not to just a lot of people find what he said, particularly about impunity.

33:29It's very, very interesting. We could do a little plug of an article he's just written, which he's been sending all of us. It's called the world beyond Ukraine, the survival of the west and the demands of the rest. That's kind of what we talked about. Now, should we talk about Sudan? Yeah, and it sort of comes out of it, doesn't it? It comes out of the middle of our reflections because, well, let me, if I can be cheeky and give my sort of one minute update on what's happening in Sudan, and then over to you. So Sudan was once the largest country, and the very largest countries in Africa, slightly smaller now since South Sudan succeeded.

34:06It's this huge territory south of Egypt and on the margins between North African and sub -Saharan Africa, country which had a strong tradition of a great intellectual class in Khartoum, a country with enormous oil wealth and some gold wealth, came to international attention, I suppose, with Darfur, so the horrors of the early 2000s where people remember maybe the Janger wheat militia, which were mostly ethnically Arab nomadic groups who were fighting groups who looked more traditionally African who were more settled in southern Sudan. And then the breakaway entirely of the world's newest countries, South Sudan, which was completely different from the North.

34:54So the North was Arab -dominated Muslim in identity, South Sudan very much traditional sub -Saharan African and Christian, credible proxy wars which everyone was involved in from these railies to the Libyans, to the Ugandans, to the CIA, and referendum was held, South Sudan separated off and very, very sadly after a great burst of optimism based on South Sudanese oil has collapsed into its own horrendous civil war. And South Sudan has been through a similar cycle, its president was indicted by the international court, criminal court. He was toppled in a amazing revolution led by young people and civilians, brought him down.

35:38There was a moment of optimism, but we have to say the US and the international community were pretty slow to take advantage of it to lower sanctions and braces of any government. And pretty soon it collapsed into a military government and the military government has now torn itself into two factions. One of which is essentially the commander of what used to be the Janger -Weed militia and the other half of which is the commander of the traditional armed forces, the Egyptians backing, the Second, the Saudis, UAE and the Russians backing the First. And it's on that that I'm standing over you. Well, it's yet another proxy essentially.

36:14And we were talking about the importance of in the context of here, Northern Ireland, of that international support. I'm afraid if the big powers turn away, I'm not saying that they turn away and that they will be tracking it, be very interested, you have all the ambassadors out there doing all the things they can, all the military days, on guys doing all the stuff that they can. But ultimately this feels like a situation that could spiral very, very quickly into something as catastrophic as we've seen there before. You probably know these characters better than I do, but essentially you've got the military guy who's effectively running the place and his deputy have now taken different sides, both pretty well stocked with all sorts of arms and they're killing each other.

36:57The deputy comes from the Darfur region of the South, so he's from a different ethnic group and he runs this rapid reaction force, which basically was the Janger -Weed militia. It was these mounted Arab pastoralists who conducted a lot of the atrocities and were then brought into the army. He also controls the government's gold reserves and he was sent off to fight in Yemen, paid for by UAE in Saudi, which is where his connections to UAE in Saudi came from, he used to travel openly to Russia. So as these two men, essentially the leader and the deputy have broken apart taking their own military units with them, they've kept those international relations too and underlying it is the fact that Sudan, like the whole chain of this whole territory called the Sahel that stretches all the way over from Chad, Niger and Mali, is an extreme victim of climate change.

37:53This desertification moving across the whole region has been a drought basically for six years, now stretching right the way across the Horn of Africa and very similar conflicts between pastoralists, people moving with their livestock and settled communities, happening across nine or ten different countries of which Sudan is now one. I'd have thought a particular interest to you with your charity hat on, I think I'm right thinking that among the dead, so far, have been three people who work for the World Food Program who was a result of halted their program there. That's heartbreaking. So what happens in those situations?

38:29Because this is again something we talked to David about. He's operating in some of the most dangerous and difficult parts of the world, his charity rescue. And they have to make decisions about whether they can effectively and safely do the things that they have to do. So how do you make those decisions? It's horrifying. We're having to think about it with Givdurekli which is he says the charity that I now run because we've got staff in Gomer in the Congo where the M23 militia have been on the edge of the city, but perhaps the most dramatic example that I had in my own life was our charity in Afghanistan, Tehquas Mountain, which I set up with my wife.

39:05We were having to make decisions in four or five days, I'm staying up all night trying to make these calls on which staff you needed to get out and which could remain with the Taliban taking over the country, with our staff screaming that they were going to be killed in their beds with 14 hour delays that the airport fence with people being shot in the crowds with no planes to put people on. And the question of do you keep operating? And Tehquas Mountain decided to keep operating, decided to keep going in Afghanistan. A lot of our staff were understandably felt utterly betrayed because they'd lost an opportunity to leave Afghanistan and move to a better life in Europe with the United States.

39:49We are now running again. We now have women back being educated. We're very proud of what we're doing on the ground, but it's incredibly difficult and going back in the day when the Taliban with the insurgency, we were having to make decisions. One of my key members of staff came to work one morning and found a hangar maid under his desk. He then went back to his guest house and found a man with suicide vest to try to talk his way in and blow out the whole guest house. And at what point do you decide this is too dangerous? Our staff are going to get killed and we're going to leave effectively abandoning all your recipients who are no longer going to receive any support.

40:25Or do you risk your life to continue delivering development assistance? And every time I've had to make this decision, going all the way back to Iraq where I was having to decide whether to evacuate people into the middle of gunfire in 2004. And I thought I'd made completely the wrong decision. I pushed my civilian staff out in vans and they were immediately attacked by shield militia with me watching from the roof. You have this kind of factual going in your head. Are you going to get your staff killed moving them out? Are you going to get them killed staying? And is what you're doing worth the risk?

40:55If you look around Africa at the moment, I don't know what they're different in type. But I'll giriabakina façade chad, DRC gana, Ivorycos, Maritaine, and Mozambique Niger, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, and Yemen, all currently with some sort of terrorist insurgency going on. These are countries that are some of them desperately in need of support. At the centre often, not least Yemen, which we've talked about before, of another proxy war between bigger powers. And the help that they need can only really come through international political support alongside the support of organisations like David's, like yours, etc.

41:39And the heartbreaking thing is the political support isn't there. It makes it a lot harder for you guys to do. Completely heartbreaking. So take Britain, when I was the Minister for Africa, I had a bilateral budget of over four billion pounds a year for Africa. This year, the equivalent bit of the budget will be less than a billion. At the same time, the UK government will be spending well over three billion pounds on Ukraine and looking after Ukrainian refugees in Britain. So at a time when Africa's needs are at their most extreme, under the fourth year of drought and Somalia, these military governments are taking over right across the cell.

42:17We've cut our aid to the bone. And my Africa strategy, I mean, being quite self -centered here, but in 2016, was a large part of it was about the Sahel. It was about recognising that because of climate, these were the places that Britain needed to concentrate on. We put the structures in place, we were opening embassies, we were moving troops into that region, and we've basically given up, as have, and the French have been kicked out of these countries and the US have given up. The truth is that many of those countries that you mentioned in that long list have now been taken over by military governments backed by the Wagner Group, which is this very unpleasant Russian mercenary group.

42:56And this is the soft underbelly of NATO. This is NATO's son, flank, and when those countries go wrong, you will see a lot of migration coming across the Mediterranean into Europe because of our short -sightedness. Okay, well, on that happy note, poor, it's pretty grim note. Let's just talk maybe to close off today, the Franco -German situation. We talked about it very, very briefly on the Q &A last week, but I think there's something quite profound going on at the moment, and I can't quite put my finger on it. That relationship, there's always been tensions, but by and large, we were talking earlier about the US -UK relationship and the importance of that to both countries, and yes, it's more important to the UK than the US in many ways.

43:44Franco -German probably closer in terms of the needs of each other, but the sense that maybe Germany is a little bit more powerful and therefore the French may even need a bit more. Okay, Macron, we talked last week about his trip to China, where the criticism, I guess, if you had to boil it down, was that he was positioning himself. I don't think this is fair, but this is what happened, and sometimes you have to manage these situations, is that the criticism is that he positioned himself too much as Europe between the US and China, particularly when it came to Taiwan. And the Americans, some very, very evolving, but I heard one American said it to say, you know, is this guy speaking for himself?

44:31Is he speaking for France? Are he speaking for Europe? Because if he's speaking for Europe, we're not on the same page. Germany, meanwhile, Bearbock, the foreign minister, been in China this week, with a much tougher message, but then again, she also has a much tougher message than Shalts, her chancellor. And although Macron gets a lot of the stick in the European media for being the guy who's not fixing this relationship in the way that maybe it should be, because he has his flights of fancy, and he talks about European strategic autonomy, and there's also a sense, I think that Shalts is maybe not tending the relationship, as he should as well.

45:10And he's also got real problems, which are not getting that much tension in the UK, with these part of his coalition, the three Democrats who are being absolutely hammered in state elections, and I think they've got another two coming up quite soon. So they're having to take positions that aren't necessarily going to be fitting with what Macron's trying to do. And therefore, it seems to me that they're almost like in a standoff at a time when they need to be kind of getting together. Well, it's interesting how China seems to be the trigger point for us, because we were talking about Shalts' visit to China a few weeks ago, where again, he got in better trouble, seeming to cozy up too much to China, setting off there without the EU with him.

45:52But it's a sign, in a sense, of Europe's, has got an issue with China, because I think China is bringing into focus fundamental questions about what Europe wants to be in the world. Is it prepared to stand up for the human rights of the weaker people, Tibetans, democracy, and indeed stand against Chinese aggression towards Taiwan in the way that there is a total consensus across every part of the political divide in the United States? Or is it going to be pursuing its own economic interest? 50 % of the profits of the European automobile and luxury goods manufacturers now are made in China. 50 % of the growth of most European sales are in China at the moment.

46:39And therefore, there is a huge temptation for the Europeans to think, well, as the US is standing off against China, we have this amazing opportunity to cozy up to them and get fantastic economic benefits from doing so. But at the same time, I guess, they're feeling pretty yucky about it, and they're a little bit disturbed about what they're actually up to. And you can see these fractions, or these sort of fractures within Germany, within France, because there are opposition groups saying we shouldn't be doing this. And of course, the particular problem that Macron has, well, the two problems I foresee, one is that he, I mean, it was a pretty extraordinary achievement to get his second term and would it pretty well.

47:16Since when he's had these strikes that we've talked about before over a reform that seems fairly modest to us, but to the French is a really big deal about raising the pension age from 62 to 64. I think his other big problem is there's no sense of succession. And I do think that just as to some extent, Barack Obama's legacy has to be partly defined by the fact that Donald Trump became the American president. Likewise, I think that for all the good stuff that Macron's done and for all the credit he gets as being a pretty stellar political politician in many, many ways, if Marine Le Pen is the legacy, that is a very, very bad legacy.

47:56And I heard something very, very interesting from somebody who lives in Wurtson, Paris, and who operates in the political world, who was describing a visit recently to a pretty swanky restaurant near the French national assembly and having lunch with the politician and in Wurts, Marine Le Pen. And what she said was that it was really interesting because she was expecting some kind of reaction that Le Pen would attract a kind of level of hostility and a sense of hostility that would be marked. And she said she just walked in, very nicely dressed, kind of a lovely handbag and sat down with these five pretty youthful, very smart parliamentary assistants and had lunch and nobody would be back to night there.

48:43There's Marine. There's even me saying there's Marine. She's completely defined herself as Marine without the Le Pen, which still carries the baggage of her father Jean -Marie Le Pen. The worry I would have if I was a... I'm sorry. I'm going to be boring here, but again for American and other listeners, it's American and other listeners, but people will be very, very aware that what she represents is the far -right nationalist element in French politics. And that was very explicit on her father when it was a much more obviously offensively far -right nationalist party, deeply, deeply anti -immigration and anti -smitic.

49:27Anti -smitic. Often it's been anti -EU taking big loans from the Russians who've clearly been using this party to mix stuff up. And she's been trying to give it more of an acceptable face and came second to Macron the last elections. And as you say, difficult to see who's going to be able to beat her next time round because there's no other big political figures emerging. And Macron is not succeeding in creating a clear deputy. There's no Gordon Brown to his Tony Blair. No. The other thing I say about French politics, Macron being a very good example of this, they do have a greater capacity for breaking molds and new forces and new parties emerging.

50:08They've all basically changed their names in the last few years, including Macron. But I think that without that sense at the moment, I guess what I'm saying about the thing in the restaurant that really stuck with me is the sense of the idea of the normalization of Marine Le Pen. The idea that she's actually a legitimate political figure who you can see standing up there on the world stage a bit like, look at Maloney and Italy, Maloney, I think not as probably not as hard -right as Le Pen, certainly not as hard -right as John Marine Le Pen, but very, very much on the right. But did the same thing, a sense of normalization, a sense of getting rid of the worst elements of the party and its baggage, surrounding herself with some fairly young, attractive -looking people who don't go around saying terrible things about Jews or the Germans, but actually just sort of talk about how terrible the government is and how we need housing and of jobs and a fair deal.

51:02Nevertheless, the subliminal dog whistle, which is their perpetually benefiting from the sense that a lot of their supporters like, yeah, well, we know where you really are. We know where your sympathy is really like. Interesting also, something I sometimes think with Suella Brevenman too, how women are often part of the rebranding of right -wing projects and giving legitimacy or acceptability to some of these movements. Am I meditating a bit of a selling in Bravenman shares within the conservative fold? Am I just, is that wishful thinking? I just noticed, was it Greg Hans the Chairman being pressed at the weekend on how her policies on immigration are not going down terribly well, she's not seen as effective, and he was actually put on the spot about whether she shouldn't be sort of moved on or moved out.

51:49And I just wondered whether that was coming from someone. I think they dearly love to get rid of her. I think she's seen as profoundly disloyal, profoundly disruptive. She took to Rishi Sina, come on, conservative party. Oh, because she is frequently out there saying things that aren't government policy, I mean, she's not clearing them with the grid, she's deliberately getting out there and doing things against the grid that was established in 1997. How dare they do this? And deliberately appealing to factions, the Daily Mail, and putting out stories that number 10 is not keen to put out. So they would really like to get rid of her.

52:25Well, you think she's seen as a lot of people? 100 % and he brought her in at a period where it seemed as though the ERG, so this right -wing brexitier faction, the conservative party felt like it was very strong and she was their standard bearer and he couldn't afford to leave her out. But I think as he showed with the winds of framework that the ERG was losing its teeth and that that part of the party is less of a threat to him than he maybe thought they were. He may begin to feel that he can flex his muscles more and she's definitely, I mean, he's somebody who I was talking to a conservative minister yesterday on the phone, who said one of the things that one doesn't understand about Sina, this guy was a minister under Cameron, under May, under Johnson and actually even under trust.

53:12And he's... Right, well, we've got workshops with ways. I'm going to push it too far. But he said to me that this is the first time that he's really felt there's a well -run number 10 better than it was under David Cameron. He said, I mean, obviously better than it was under this trust of Boris Johnson, which is complete catastrophic chaos. But Rishi Sunak is running things better than anybody's seen internally, just the way the number 10 works than people have seen since 2010. Actually, one of the people I met going into the event earlier this one was Simon Cases here. Very good. Yep. Cabinet Secretary, because he used to work in the Northern Ireland.

53:52Did he forgive how rude we are all about Simon Cases all the time? I basically said, look Simon, I mean, Rory goes on about your whole time, I do my best to try and do no. Well look, I think the demise of Swella Bravaman is a very, very good place to end this week's, the rest is politics. Very good. Thank you very much.