Uma guerra civil esquecida: a do Sudão - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

 

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By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email Sudan marks grim anniversary of civil war in shadow of other conflicts Sudanese refugees gather as teams from Doctors Without Borders assist the war-wounded from West Darfur, Sudan, in Adre hospital, Chad, in June. (Mohammad Ghannam/MSF/Reuters) Exactly a year ago, Sudan’s ruinous collapse began. Tensions between two powerful rival factions that had already carved out fiefdoms in the country — the Sudanese Armed Forces, headed by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), headed by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — exploded into open war. Airstrikes hit civilian centers; militiamen and vigilantes set up checkpoints and looted neighborhoods. The capital, Khartoum, transformed into a sprawling battlefield. The conflict flared elsewhere in the African nation of close to 50 million people, including the already war-ravaged region of Darfur. For a time, Sudan’s civil war attracted some global attention. President Biden and his European counterparts whirred into action to evacuate their embassies and hundreds of foreign citizens and dual nationals based mostly in Sudan’s big cities. International journalists met convoys of refugees in the Saudi port city of Jeddah to hear their desperate, harrowing journeys to escape the country. The conflict marked a sad turn of events: A fledgling transition toward democracy in the years prior had won Sudan closer ties to a host of Western governments, and some relief from decades of U.S. sanctions. Even after Burhan and Dagalo, known universally by his sobriquet Hemedti, collaborated in interrupting that transition in 2021, ousting a civilian-led government, Sudan remained the subject of eager diplomacy. A U.S.-led initiative hoped to add Khartoum to the list of Arab capitals that could normalize relations with Israel. But the war seems to have doomed all that. The Sudanese state has essentially collapsed in many parts of the country. In some areas, hospitals and health services barely function. Thousands of civilians have been killed, including in atrocities and massacres likely to be remembered as war crimes. Courageous civil rights groups are documenting myriad accounts of sexual violence and rape. Lackluster rounds of peace talks, convened in some instances by Arab governments that tacitly back one party or the other, have yielded failed cease-fires. And as destruction and death mounts, international awareness and interest in Sudan’s misery has waned. RSF soldiers on a motorbike drive by a destroyed tank belonging to the defeated Sudanese Armed Forces, on a main street in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, Sudan, on February 20. (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Washington Post/for The Washington Post) Twelve months on, the humanitarian situation in Sudan is astonishingly grim. The country is the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis, with more than a fifth of its population forced out of their homes by the civil war, as well as earlier rounds of conflict. Nearly a third of the population is acutely food insecure, according to U.N. data. Some 19 million children are out of school; an estimated 3 million Sudanese children are malnourished. Humanitarian officials have been warning of hunger — and its attendant miseries, such as cholera and other diseases — gripping the country. “This is a huge, looming problem, and they are very close to famine,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program, told my colleagues at the beginning of the month. “Kids are dying of starvation within Darfur and other parts of the country.” International organizations complain that it’s logistically impossible to service much of the country. “Constraints to humanitarian access are severely impeding the delivery of life-saving assistance, and humanitarian funding needs have gone largely unmet,” noted a reportby the International Rescue Committee. By February, food prices in Sudan had spiked by more than 110 percent since the war began. In ramshackle refugee camps in neighboring Chad and South Sudan, aid groups say a dearth of funding may see food distribution cease imminently. The World Food Program says the “roots of the hunger problem are twofold: access and funding,” explained my colleagues Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi and Katharine Houreld. “Within Sudan, WFP trucks have been blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted and detained. Outside Sudan, makeshift camps are swollen with hungry and sick arrivals — but there’s no money to feed them.” On Monday, international governments, humanitarians and donors will convene in Paris for a conference aimed at raising funds for Sudan. They meet at a time when a paltry 5 percent of the humanitarian requests put out for Sudan by U.N. agencies have been met. There’s no question that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — exacerbated furthermore by the recent escalation between Israel and Iran — have put Sudan’s tragedy in the shade. “As communities barrel toward famine, as cholera and measles spread, as violence continues to claim countless lives, the world has largely remained silent,” said U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, last week. That must change now, she added. “The international community must give more. It must do more, and it has to care more.” “For one year, the people of Sudan have been neglected and ignored as they bore the brunt of violent clashes” between the warring parties, said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s regional director for East and Southern Africa, in a statement. “Diplomatic efforts have so far failed to end violations, protect civilians, provide sufficient humanitarian aid, or hold the perpetrators of war crimes to account.” Women prepare a meager meal on Feb. 18 in the yard of a former primary school, one of the numerous sites where thousands displaced by the war are seeking shelter in Sirba, a town north of El Geneina. (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Washington Post/for The Washington Post) Yet the warring parties are as likely to sharpen their hatchets as they are to bury them. The country is roughly split now between west and east, with the RSF ascendant in the former and Burhan and his allies better entrenched in the latter. In its Sudan briefing, the International Crisis Group, a think tank, urged countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to use more of their leverage to bring the feuding factions to heel, open up access for humanitarian relief and place Sudan back on a path to stability. “The alternative is grim to contemplate, as the country teeters on the brink of chaos, mass starvation and a war that could spread across its borders to a troubled region,” noted the Crisis Group. “Time is of the essence – particularly since the parties are inveigling new warlords to join the fight with promises that they will share in victory’s eventual spoils, which promises to make negotiations to end the war that much more difficult.”

A busca por um navio negreiro no Brasil em 1852 - Terrence McCoy, Sammy Westfall The Washington Post

 

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By Terrence McCoy with Sammy Westfall  Email The underwater hunt for the lost ship of an American slave trafficker An aerial view of the mouth of the Bracuí River, near the island of Little Cunhanbebe, where the likely Carmargo shipwreck was found almost 200 years after it sank. It was one of the last ships to illegally transport enslaved Africans to the Americas. (Photographs by Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post) ANGRA DOS REIS, Brazil — Gilson Rambelli motored out into the dark waters, thinking of the crime that had haunted him for years. The evidence of it was down there, in the bay’s depths. That was where the researcher believed he’d find the Camargo, the long-lost slave ship of Nathaniel Gordon, the only person ever executed in the United States for the crime of trafficking enslaved Africans. As dense clouds muffled the December morning sky, Rambelli and his research team approached a small island off the coastline of Rio de Janeiro state. There wasn’t much to distinguish it from the dozens of others dotting this vast bay. But it was here that the crew dropped anchor. “This is it,” Rambelli said. For decades, Rambelli and others have researched the shipwreck. According to contemporaneous accounts, Gordon sailed his American-made vessel into Brazilian waters in December 1852. As authorities closed in on him, Gordon sold his “cargo” — more than 500 enslaved Mozambicans — to the coffee plantations in the mountains beyond. Then he burned and sank his ship somewhere in the bay and escaped arrest dressed as a woman, scandalizing Brazil’s government and leading to its first crackdown on the country’s illegal slave trade. The remarkable story is part of a forgotten chapter in the history of America and slavery, when American ships and the American flag were used to illegally transport enslaved Africans to Brazil by the tens of thousands. In the first half of the 19th century, after much of the world had banned the transatlantic slave trade but before the end of slavery, a highly lucrative contraband trade continued to supply Brazil with enslaved Africans. Some of its most important players, according to historians and a Washington Post review of thousands of pages of records, were American merchants and sailors. They sold ships, captained slaving voyages and ultimately assumed such an active role in the illegal commerce that senior U.S. diplomats at the time suggested it couldn’t have happened without them. ADVERTISEMENT   “The African slave trade ‘thickens around us,’” wrote U.S. Brazil Minister Henry A. Wise in an 1845 letter to Secretary of State John C. Calhoun. “Without the aid of our citizens and our flag, it could not be carried on with success at all.” In all, between 1831 and 1850, American-made ships brought approximately 430,000 enslaved Africans to Brazil — nearly as many as were shipped to the United States during its entire history of slavery, Brazilian historian Leonardo Marques has found. During the latter half of that period, according to Marques’s review of British consular reports, more than one-third of all slaving vessels that made landfall in Rio de Janeiro did so under an American flag. Hunting in December for one of the most notorious of those vessels, Rambelli and colleague Luís Felipe Santos pulled on their wet suits. This expedition, scheduled to last four days, was their fourth attempt to find the Camargo in two years. All previous efforts to retrieve physical evidence of the ship had failed. Funding opportunities were drying up. If they didn’t find the Camargo soon, the team worried that the tale could again slip through the cracks of history — and deprive a nearby community of descendants of enslaved Africans of answers about its role in Brazil’s history. “When our elders told us stories of this ship, we thought it was just another tall tale,” said Marilda de Souza Francisco, a leader of the Santa Rita do Bracuí community in the city of Angra dos Reis. “Now we find out it could be true.” ADVERTISEMENT   The men fastened on their compressed air tanks. They pulled down their goggles. Jumping overboard, they vanished beneath the water. Santa Rita do Bracuí, a community founded by descendants of enslaved Africans, has passed down the story of the Camargo for generations. Here, community members Maria Madalena da Silva and Natalina Adriano da Silva sit in pews after Sunday Mass. (Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post) ‘Our flag is preferred over any other’ How U.S. nationals became “leaders in fomenting the illicit slave trade” and “permanently transformed Brazil for all time,” in the words of historian Gerald Horne, was largely a function of two historic developments. The first was a diplomatic dispute. In the early 1800s, Great Britain led an international campaign to end the transatlantic slave trade. It signed accords with several of the world’s naval powers, allowing British patrols to inspect suspected slaving vessels. But wary of British influence, the United States refused to sign on, effectively placing ships sailing under the American flag beyond the reach of the crown. The second was innovation in American ship engineering, with American shipyards pumping out vessels built for speed. The Baltimore Clipper, which could easily outrun British patrols, grew popular among merchants moving high-profit, low-volume goods. Few were as lucrative as enslaved Africans.  Seizing the opportunity, American merchants based in Rio de Janeiro sold U.S.-made vessels to slavers sailing for Africa. The proliferation of the American ship and flag — used by slavers of all nationalities — in the illicit commerce soon provoked alarm among diplomats. “Our flag is preferred over any other,” complained Gorham Parks, the U.S. consul in Rio de Janeiro, in an 1848 letter. Half of all enslaved Africans brought to Brazil, estimated U.S. diplomat David Tod in January 1850, “are introduced through the facilities directly and indirectly afforded by the American flag.” What ultimately ended the involvement of U.S. nationals in the trade was Brazil’s passage in 1850 of a new anti-trafficking law. An early test of Brazil’s commitment to enforcing it came in late 1852, when the Camargo neared the Rio de Janeiro coastline. With authorities in pursuit, Gordon dropped anchor at the mouth of the Bracuí River. His human cargo was brought ashore to the farm of Santa Rita do Bracuí. Then Gordon set fire to his ship and fled. “He escaped in woman’s clothes,” a U.S. diplomat at the time reported, “hastily put on in the cabin.” The Camargo sank to the depths of the bay, where researchers believed it had sat, undisturbed, ever since. Gilson Rambelli, right, and a colleague prepare to search the Brazilian waters for the Camargo. (Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post) A hunt decades in the making The search for the Camargo began by happenstance. In the summer of 1994, historian Martha Abreu was scouring old newspaper clippings at Brazil’s national library, working on her dissertation, when she learned of an untold history that left her stunned. It was, in her understanding, Brazil’s first real attempt to crack down on the illegal slave trade. At the center of the tale were an American captain and his ship. After the Caramgo burned, Brazilian police launched an operation to rescue the Africans sold by Gordon and searched the region’s coffee plantations. The action was seen as a direct challenge to Brazil’s powerful slaveholding elite and helped establish a new precedent in a country that had allowed enslavers to do as they pleased. Police ultimately found 75 people whom Gordon had sold into slavery. Most of them were children. The youngest was 11.  The rest were lost. Abreu published a book chapter on the fallout and moved on to other projects. But she never stopped thinking about the Camargo or its captain. She later learned that Gordon continued his slaving exploits until he was convicted in federal court in New York of slave trading in 1861. The punishment was death. No one had ever suffered that consequence. But this time was different. “Any man, who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I will never pardon,” Abraham Lincoln said, according to author Ron Soodalter, denying Gordon’s pleas for clemency. Nearly 150 years later, Abreu was researching how slavery was remembered along the Rio de Janeiro coastline when, at the mouth of the Bracuí, the story of the Camargo again found her. In the community of Santa Rita do Bracuí, founded by descendants of enslaved Africans on what had once been the farm of Santa Rita do Bracuí, she met a bald patriarch named Manoel Moraes, 85. He told her a story he first heard in his youth. He didn’t know the name of the boat that had gone down. But all the details aligned. Moraes was describing the Camargo. “I got goose bumps,” Abreu said. “I said, ‘It’s not possible.’” Then Moraes, now deceased, provided a bit of information even more tantalizing: He knew where the Camargo had sunk. “People often talked about that boat,” he said, “because it was a good spot to fish.” “It sank at the point of an island” named Cunhanbebe. For generations, the people of Santa Rita do Bracuí have told and retold the story of the Camargo. Their version, recounted in spartan homes set against a misted mountain, included details not found in any historical text. The sinking of the Camargo was more chaotic than recorded. Many of the captured Africans perished. The fate of those who survived was little better. “They were brought into the mountains beyond and put to work up there,” said Flavia da Silva Adriana, who’d heard the tale from her grandmother. “But first, they were brought here.” The land on which this village was built was then a crucial entry point in Brazil’s illegal slave trade. The Souza Breves family, among Brazil’s largest enslavers, had used its Santa Rita farm to receive and revive newly arrived enslaved Africans. Many came ashore so emaciated, Moraes once told researchers, that “they’d lost their value” and had needed a “fattening station” before being sold into labor. This story and others, told in informal settings, helped form a cultural framework through which the community came to understand its place in Brazil’s history. But many of the tales were impossible to prove. “They were myths,” said Emerson Luís Ramos. “We didn’t have any documents.” As a result, residents said, the community had always been easy to ignore. The people never secured official ownership of the land, and a federal highway cleaved it in two. Many have only known poverty and struggle. But then, several years ago, came a new story, this one told by visiting researchers: The Camargo was not a myth. And the evidence was there in the bay, waiting to be found — proof of the historic injustices suffered and witnessed by the people of Santa Rita do Bracuí. “If God wills it,” said Adriana, “we will find the ship.” Ruins of an old sugar mill known as Engenho Central do Bracuí, which was built in 1885 by enslaved people. Nowadays, members of the Santa Rita do Bracuí a community say they are unable to visit the site due to a high entrance fee. (Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post) Desperation, then sudden hope With time running out, the researchers remembered Abreu’s research and Moraes’s clue.  One local man, who had once told them he’d fished over the Camargo as a child, brought them to the spot he remembered, near Little Cunhanbebe. But again, nothing. As the prospect of failure hardened into reality, a fisherman approached their vessel. “I know what you’re looking for,” the man shouted. Then he continued on, without stopping to talk. The next morning, on the last day of the expedition, the researchers again saw the fisherman. This time, the man, Luiz Henrique de Freitas, did stop. He’d grown up on Big Cunhanbebe, where his family had lived for generations, and had fished the bay’s waters his entire life. He knew where the Camargo had sunk and, after hours of conversation, agreed to lead the researchers there. They motored to just 500 meters from where they’d looked the day before and dropped anchor. There, on their first dive, they came upon something, buried in the muck. It was a hard, wooden. They grabbed a few pieces of the debris. What they saw when they emerged elicited shrieks of euphoria. The wood was blackened and charred. The sunken ship they’d discovered had been burned. “We found it!” Rambelli yelled. In the weeks to come, the researchers would alert government authorities and designate the area as an official excavation site to ward off potential treasure hunters. They’d test the wood fragments, revealing traces of copper — the material that had encased the Camargo’s hull. And in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and GWU researchers, they would plan another expedition in May to further examine the remains, to study the hull and engineering and hopefully render a final conclusion on whether it’s the Camargo. The true scholarly work was only now just beginning. But for this moment, they sat on the boat, cherishing the discovery and what it meant. “This is an answer for the communities here, that the stories they’ve always told were true,” Felipe said. “They weren’t just stories.

The history of foreign intervention in Haiti is ugly - Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

 

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By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall  Email The Washington Post, Mas 7, 2024

The history of foreign intervention in Haiti is ugly

The chaos in Haiti is getting worse. Almost three years after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in his home July 7, 2021, the country is locked in political turmoil, with no elected leaders and no nationwide elections held for almost a decade. Armed gangs control much of Port-au-Prince, where they’ve attacked the airport and opened up prisons while pressing for the ouster of the interim leader, Prime Minister Ariel Henry. The State Department on Wednesday urged U.S. citizens to leave Haiti as soon as possible.

For well over a year, Henry’s government has been calling for an international security force to step in. But while the United Nations passed a resolution that approved the force and set up its structure five months ago, so far no force has materialized. The latest round of disorder in Haiti came after Henry traveled to Kenya and signed a deal that he hoped would bring 1,000 Kenyan police officers to the country — a bid to bolster a faltering plan that was exploited by the armed gangs that seek his ouster.

There has been a notable lack of enthusiasm among global partners, with the United Nations saying it would only provide oversight to a mission to Haiti, and not lead it, and the United States refusing to commit personnel. Many ordinary Haitians are also wary of foreign intervention, all too aware of its painful history in the country.

“Deeply patriotic, Haitians revile the prospect of yet another foreign occupation following a string of failures by the international community in their country,” former diplomat James B. Foley, U.S. ambassador to Haiti from 2003 to 2005, wrote for Politico Magazine in 2022 after Henry’s government first called for intervention.

Henry has long been unpopular within Haiti. This week, he finally lost the backing of the United States, which is now calling on the prime minister to step aside and hold elections. But it is unclear how any election can take place without security being restored, with or without foreign powers.

International intervention in Haiti goes far back. Haiti was once Saint-Domingue, the “Pearl of the Antilles” in the French empire, its highly lucrative plantation economy built on the backs of imported West African slaves. After a slave revolt in 1791 led to the Haitian Revolution, Haiti would go on to face not only an invasion from returning French forces, but also attempts by imperial rival Britain on its path to independence.

In the 20th century, it was the United States’ turn. A 1915 invasion turned into an occupation that lasted until 1934. The intervention came after a period of political turmoil in the country and the appeals of U.S. banks that held debts to President Woodrow Wilson, but it was marred by numerous abuses — including the creation of the corvée system that saw the U.S. occupation use peasants in unpaid forced labor.

When the U.S.-educated François Duvalier came to power in 1957, he did so in large part by portraying himself as an opponent to American imperialism. Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, would rule until he died in 1971, when he was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, or Baby Doc. The men’s combined reign of almost three decades was known for corruption, repression and violence.

In 1994, the United States sent 20,000 troops to Haiti in Operation “Restore Democracy” which aimed to restore Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power after a military coup. The U.S. troops joined a U.N. peacekeeping force that had entered the country in 1993. These foreign troops would remain until 2000.

When Aristide was forced from power again in February 2004, the United States helped him escape and sent troops along with Canada, France and Chile. The U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym MINUSTAH, served in the country from 2004 to 2017 before being replaced by a smaller follow-up mission that concluded in 2019.

Whatever the intentions, there was little evidence that these interventions had helped Haitians. “In all, the U.S. military and its proxies have been in Haiti for at least 41 of the last 108 years, always in the name of securing peace, political stability, and human rights—and never actually succeeding in doing so,” Jonathan M. Katz wrote for Foreign Policy Magazine last year.

In plenty of cases, interventions made life worse, with accusations of sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers and reports of a massacre by Brazilian soldiers working for the United Nations in 2005.

A huge outbreak of cholera, once rare in Haiti, after a 2010 earthquake was linked to U.N. peacekeepers deployed from Nepal, where the disease is common. The outbreak killed at least 10,000 in Haiti, but the United Nations has provided little compensation. “They brought cholera to Haiti and they need to compensate us,” victim Lucmane Tabuto told my colleagues in 2022. “It’s an injustice. It’s an unspeakable abuse.”

Can this time be different? Both the United States and the United Nations have stepped back from leadership roles, both a reflection of how poorly previous interventions in Haiti have gone and also the wide range of other global issues in other parts of the world at the moment. But few countries are willing or capable of taking their place.

U.S. pressure on Canada to lead a peacekeeping force did not work, with Canadian officials openly pessimistic about the project. “We have to admit there’s been a history of what I would call large-scale military interventions that have not worked,” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the Globe and Mail a year ago.

When the U.N. Security Council approved a peacekeeping force in October, Kenya was instead named as the leader of the newly formed Multinational Security Support (MSS) and pledged to send 1,000 police officers, with $200 million in backing from the United States and the hope that other nations would supplement the manpower.

On one level, the presence of African police officers may avoid some of the colonial overtones of past interventions, but some major problems remain: Few Kenyan officers are likely to speak French or Creole, for example, and Kenyan police have been accused of widespread abuses at home.

There has been a considerable backlash in Kenya to the plan, with opposition politicians suggesting that police officers are direly needed at home. In January, a court ruled that the proposed deployment was unconstitutional, in part because Kenya and Haiti did not have bilateral agreements in place. Henry’s trip to Nairobi over the past week was partially designed around signing ceremonies for these agreements, though it is unclear how this will address the court’s broader criticisms.

The chaos seen in Haiti since Henry left the country has only amplified the need for security there, with a new estimate this weekthat two-thirds of the country are directly exposed to political violence. It has also created a more volatile situation that will be even more difficult to contain. The most prominent gang leader, Jimmy “Barbeque” Chérizier, this week criticized foreign nations for supporting the unpopular prime minister and warned of greater conflict unless he resigned.

“Either Haiti becomes a paradise or a hell for all of us,” Chérizier told reporters Tuesday.