Power rationing: Sudan in transition

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. When Britain's parliament undergoes a huge renovation in 2025, its lawmakers will move to an exact replica of their debating chamber. We take a look at the curious assertion that function follows form, that how the world's parliaments are laid out affects how they operate. And nearly half of Estonia's adult population has sung at Lollapudu, a huge choral festival. Singing in the Baltic country is intimately tied to protest and revolution. And now populists are trying to get festival goers to sing from their hymn sheets. But first, the former president of Sudan, Omar Al Bashir, is in court this week facing trial on allegations of corruption. Mr. Bashir governed Sudan for almost 30 years after seizing power in a coup in 1989. His was a violent autocracy. In 2009, the International Criminal Court charged him with crimes against humanity and genocide. In April, he in turn was toppled by a coup orchestrated by military leaders that surrounded him. They were responding to months of public protests that started in December, initially about bread and fuel prices. That soon escalated to demands for civilian rule.

We'll stay here and we will not.

Move until the regime has left with.

All its barriers and all its inequality. And all its debt.

But after Mr. Bashir's ouster, the military stayed in power and demonstrations continued. In June, a brutal raid on a protest camp left more than 100 dead. Sudan seemed stuck in a cycle of uprising and violence. But this weekend, the leaders of the April coup struck a deal to share power with civilians over a three year transitional period. Abdullah Hamdaq, an economist, was nominated as prime minister. The streets of the capital Khartoum filled with celebrations. Now there's cautious optimism that the people's demands will, in time, be met. In the meantime, Mr. Bashir faces a very visible reckoning.

What we saw in Khartoum yesterday on, you know, people saw on their TV screens was the incredible sight of Omar Al Bashir, who was the military dictator of Sudan for the best part of 30 years, and he's on trial.

Daniel Knowles is the Economist's international correspondent.

He was in a cage. They asked, where do you live? And he joked, why? I live in prison now. Cobalt Prison, where he used to send people. So this guy who ruled with nine fist in Sudan for decades and was indicted by the ICC and seemed untouchable, is now. Yeah, on television in a cage. So it's quite a sight.

What's he on trial for?

The primary accusation that came out yesterday is corruption. He's accused of being given at least $25 million by Saudi Arabia, probably more. You know, his house was supposedly found with $113 million in it.

So how is it that this man who ruled, as you say, with an iron fist, finds himself now in a cage?

So it sort of began really the end of last year when protests which were kind of about food prices and things began to take off in Khartoum, the capital. And that continued until April, when Bashir was deposed by various other kind of military leaders in Sudan. And then there's these continued protests and this tussle between the military leadership and people on the streets. In June, the army went and broke up those protests. In early June, they killed over 100 people at least. Since then, there's been this kind of continual negotiation. It's involved the African Union, it's involved Ethiopia and other mediators. And it's reached this point on Saturday where an agreement was signed that in theory creates a path to civilian government.

And so what's the situation now? Who's in charge now?

On Saturday, there was a sort of an agreement signed with a lot of fanfare between civilians and military leaders that in theory creates a kind of transitional government and has a pathway towards full civilian government. But for now, the military, or rather a couple of particularly militarized guys, remain in charge. There's a guy called Mohammad Hamdan Dagelo and this nominal leader, Abdel Fattah Al Barram. These guys are basically military guys who are in charge, at least for the next two years.

So this new power sharing agreement, how will that work? How is that composed?

There's a kind of transitional council, and that will stay in charge for the three years and three months, and then there will be elections after, in theory. Now, the leader of the council right now is Abdel Fatt Al Bahram, and the military leadership will stay in charge for the first 21 months. And after that, civilians will take over. That's what the agreement says, anyway.

Do you think that will work? Do you think that that answers the public's call for civilian government in a sufficiently direct way?

Well, I think we'll have to see what happens. So Mohammad Hamdan Daghala, who's the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, which is this quite important militia essentially, that came out of the Janjaweed, which did a lot of violence in Darfur a decade ago. And he said yesterday that the government will stick to every single letter of the agreement. Now, the letter is not necessarily the same as the spirit, but I think for now they probably will. But we'll have to see, when it comes to the point of organizing elections and letting civilians take over, who knows?

I mean, do you think this will placate the people, the people who have been protesting for all this time?

So, you know, when the agreement was signed, there were celebrations on the streets, fireworks, that sort of thing. But I think probably a lot of Sudanese, you know, while they're sort of happy that it's got this far, are also fairly nervous and waiting to see what happens. But they don't yet. They have to negotiate with the guys with the guns. And I think they've just got to hope that the leaders of the council, people like Dagelo and Alberon, actually stick to what they've signed.

And what about a reckoning for leaders like Mr. Bashir? He finds himself now on trial. Do you think that's sort of the. The start of coming to terms with and accountability for the people who have ruled so violently?

You want to hope so, but the sort of. The reality is that, yeah, Bashir absolutely did all of these outrageous things. You know, he ruled Saddam with this kind of combination of bribery and violence. But the people who have taken over since he was deposed are hardly better. Yeah. Dagelo Hemetti, as he's known was this. You know, he's the leader of the forces who were basically known Janjaweed, who were accused of committing genocide in Darfur 10 years ago. He's a militia leader who trades in money and violence, too. There's a lot of violence in Sudan. There's a huge amount of fighting and of brutality. I mean, and it continues. I mean, there were attacks in Darfur just this weekend, so who knows? There's so much to come to terms with. In one sense, it looks good. I mean, the dictator is on trial. But on the other hand, whether that's going to change the entire kind of system of governance that he developed Sudan, that's a bigger task to do.

So what do you mean by changing the system? It appears to be simply a question of military or civilian rule. You make it sound harder than that.

Since 2011, at least, when South Sudan split off and was given independence, Sudan's basically been sort of facing an economic crisis. It lost its main source of revenue, which was oil. But what Sudan, the system in which Sudan kind of was run has been run for decades by Bashir. A kind of system of arbitraging money and violence. You take centralized money, use it to bribe people to balance off these different leaders. And outside of Khartoum, which is where most of these protests have taken place and most of this negotiation has taken place, but outside of Khartoum, you have a very poor, very dysfunctional, massive country where people have only a fairly limited relationship with the state and where there's guns everywhere. The last kind of seven or eight years, there hasn't been the money around to keep what Bashir's system was going. And that's how you've led to the pressure now. But whether you can kind of satisfy the demands of people in Khartoum who want more money, who want better governance, that kind of thing, and also keep on side the various militia leaders and, you know, people with guns out in. Out in the sticks in the edges of Sudan under control, That's a really big question. You know, there's still the risk here of a civil war.

Do you see the steps that are being taken now as the best ones towards an eventual peace and stability?

I think they're broadly positive. You know, I mean, I think kind of transition to civilian rule is what's needed. You need to find a way of getting these kind of people with these horrible backgrounds out of the way without them causing chaos. But Sedan has just such a huge history of violence, of brutality, of impunity, that it's not going to be easy.

Daniel, thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

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Broken pipe had begun pouring in.

I'm going to suspend the sitting and.

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Ring two minutes before we restart. So the sitting is now suspended and no photographs, please.

The 19th century parliament building is long overdue. An upgrade. Parliamentarians are due to move out in 2025, while a $5 billion restoration takes place.

Britain is creating more or less an exact replica of the House of Commons, because British people have a very strong belief that function follows form. In other words, if you want a certain kind of politics, you had better build a very specific sort of chamber.

Joel Budd is the Economist's social policy editor.

There was a moment in the Second World War when the House of Commons was destroyed by a bomb, and a couple of years after that, Winston Churchill stood up in the temporary debating chamber they were using and said, we've got to rebuild the Commons chamber exactly as it was before. It's got to have opposing rows of benches and it's got to be deliberately too small to fit all the MPs in, because he said, if you deviate from this, then you will weaken the party system.

Is that belief in the function following form unique to Britain?

I think British people believe it perhaps more than others do. When Winston Churchill was talking about rebuilding the Commons, he contrasted the Commons with the kind of debating chamber that's common in continental Europe and also in America, which is known as a hemicycle. It's really a sort of fan shape. And Churchill said, if you put politicians in that kind of shape, you don't have proper adversarial party politics. Politicians can kind of slide sideways from one party to another party, and you can't really have a proper debate. You need people who oppose each other very Close to each other and facing each other to increase the drama. Other countries sometimes argue that their fan shaped chambers are better because they're in some way more consensual. They're not as adversarial, not as shouty.

What about the rest of the world? There are more shapes in these two.

Yes. So these are the main two shapes. The opposing bench's shape, which is really based on the layout of a chapel, and the fan shape, which is based on a theater. Although actually the original model was the College of Surgeons in Paris. There are some other ones. There's a shape that's become quite popular, which is like a U shape. So the idea there is that you have two opposing parties and they're sitting on opposing benches, but the benches sort of curve round at the end and meet each other. And the advantage of that is that if the governing party becomes enormously large, then it can sort of slide around the end of the seats onto the other side. Jamaica is about to build a new parliament which will have that kind of seating. And finally there's a style where the politicians sort of sit in rows facing a stage. It looks almost like a sort of enormous classroom. That occurs in Brazil and also in some very authoritarian countries like China and Russia.

So what about size rather than shape? There was this idea from Winston Churchill that it should be small and close quartered so as to heighten the drama. Does that seem to have an influence on all of these different shapes?

Some of the debating chambers that were pretty large had really very, very bad acoustics. People could hardly hear each other. And obviously if most people can't be heard, then that gives you a certain sort of politics. That was true in the American House of Representatives for a long time. Nowadays, of course, people have very good microphone systems and assisted sound systems, so it's become a bit less important. But I do think it's still a factor. The German Bundestag, for example, is just absolutely vast. And I do think that the German style of debate, which is very formal and very polite, it's hard to get out of that because the room is so colossal.

It might, though in part be just about Germans rather than the space the Germans have chosen. I wonder about the causal relation between particular governments, end up with particularly shaped parliaments rather than the shapes of the parliaments influencing the politics itself. If it were more that the parliamentary chambers shape influence politics, then there might be a best one. One that lends itself best to cooperative, helpful, useful politics.

What might be ideal is really a bit of variety in the palace of Westminster. We do have that, actually. So the House of Commons and the House of Lords are the opposing benches model, but the select committees don't sit on opposing benches, they sit in a U shape. And those committees have become more and more powerful over the years. And after all, you know, politicians do more than just debate with each other.

So perhaps we need more flexible spaces than in parliamentary buildings.

Yes, perhaps. So perhaps you could have a space that you could repurpose, use different seating arrangements within it. The other thing that you can do, and perhaps you should do, is force politicians to move around the chamber in ways that are unpredictable. And there's only one country in the world, as far as I know, that does this, which is Iceland. And so they allocate seats in their quite small parliament through the drawing of lots of. And so you're quite likely, as a politician, to be seated next to somebody from a different party. And because Iceland has been doing this for so many years, we know that the effect is very, very strong. So if a politician is seated next to another politician from a different party, the first politician is much more likely to rebel against their own party. And over time, they even start to talk in a similar way to their neighbourhood. Which leads me to think that perhaps, if countries want to transform their politics, they shouldn't be thinking about architecture, they should instead be thinking about forcing the politicians to move around within whatever kind of chamber they have.

Joel, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

There's a lot that can be said about the transformative power of music, but it's not just turning a bad day around for Estonia. Singing has proved literally revolutionary. Lollapudu is a huge choral music festival held every five years during the summer. It's helped this Baltic country move first into becoming its own nation and then freeing it from Soviet control. But now, as the country's politics shifts again, so too does the beloved festival.

It's still an incredibly big deal. Of the adult population, 48% have actively performed in at least one iteration of the song or dance festival. Not just watched, have actively been on stage singing or dancing.

Rachel Dobbs writes about the Baltics for.

The Economist, and this year was the largest year on record. On the second day, there were, by the end, 22,000 singers on stage singing at one time. With 62,000 people in the crowd, it's the largest amateur choral event in the world, and it's huge.

So what are the origins of the festival?

After the Second World War, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union and the festival became essentially yet another element of Russian propaganda. The festival would feature Soviet army choirs. The national anthem was banned. It started to be used by the push for independence, particularly the Estonian Popular front in the 1980s. So singing became a way of protesting. So much so that actually this entire period called the singing Revolution. This peaked in about September of 1988 when 250,000 people, which was a full quarter of the Estonian speaking population at the time, gathered at the song festival grounds in Tallinn for a spontaneous song festival which is widely considered as being the turning point. I spoke to Maru Lodiston, who was a leader in the Estonian Popular Front and the Singing Revolution and is now a politician and academic who studied the song festival. We had really very severe oppressions, repressions over time, but we had singing revolution without any violence. There was no single drop of blood. And that is a self organized, peaceful, non violent, a lot, but very strong feeling of say, how to say writers fight.

It's clear that La Lupdu has this very heavy history, this sort of resistance history and so on. And yet this year's sounds pretty joyous. How did it get from then to now?

It's a way of expressing happiness and togetherness, being your own people and having your own values. When you speak to people about the festival, a lot of them mentioned the singing Revolution. It's very present that within living memory there was a severe period of oppression and suppression by the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the politics of Estonia are currently changing and there is a slight difficulty in squaring the circle between Lolopedu being a celebration of freedom and democratic values and an expression of a national identity that certain politicians want to twist in a slightly perverse way.

How do you mean? Who's trying to twist it?

Ecra, which is the right wing populist party currently part of the governing coalition, is very adamant in its requirement for a more insular Estonia. It's very anti immigration, it's anti Russia, which is. And anti the Russian speaking Estonian citizens, which is a third of the population. There are definitely concerns that such an outpouring of national pride and identity can be used by the populist movement for their own ends. Despite this, a lot of festival goers aren't too worried about the festival being co opted by ECRA for their own ends. I spoke to Antero Uisberg, who has been coming to the festival for years.

The populist politicians clearly are trying to to hijack some of these values, some.

Of these themes, and I think this needs to be resisted and I'm pretty optimistic that we are able to resist that.

And through the power of singing, they will get through this, too.

There are obviously things that you need to do that are more than singing, but Estonians seem pretty confident in the role that singing will play in their future.

Rachel, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist at economist.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.