Same as the old boss? Crackdown in Sudan

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. Gun violence in Mexico is on the rise, and one factor is making it worse: weapons streaming in from the north. In fact, an American-made gun is more likely to be involved in a Mexican murder than in an American one. And Mohamed Salah plays football—well, soccer, if you must—for Liverpool, which won the Champions League final this weekend. He is a superstar striker who's also well known as a devout Muslim. And new research suggests that his fame is actually lowering levels of hate crime and Islamophobia. First up, though, it's been a week of turmoil for Sudan. Its people's hopes for democracy are under threat again. On Monday, security forces stormed a pro-democracy protest camp in the capital, Khartoum. After 2 days of unrest, scores are dead and hundreds injured. In the wake of this brutal crackdown, the country's military leaders announced yesterday they had canceled all agreements with the main opposition alliance and called snap elections. The opposition rejected the military's plan to hold polls within 9 months. After 4 months of popular protests against the authoritarian rule of President Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's military staged a coup in April. Military leaders had agreed to a managed 3-year transition to civilian rule. But fears are mounting that the Transitional Military Council will try to cling to power.

On Monday, the Sudanese military cleared the main protest site outside army headquarters.

Richard Cockett is a senior editor at The Economist and the author of Sudan: The Failure and Division of an African State.

They've broken off all talks with the opposition. They've called snap elections for 9 months. The opposition on their part have broken off relationships with the military, and they've denounced the elections in 9 months as a fraud, which I think they are. Very unlikely they're going to happen, and they certainly won't be fair.

And so after months of protests, then the military carries out a coup, this Transitional Military Council is founded, and now the protesters find themselves at odds with that military. I mean, these are members of the same authoritarian regime that was ousted, right? Yes.

The protesters were hoping that the hardliners had gone when President Bashir was overthrown. But in fact, what's happened is that instead of a hardliner, you've got a really hardliner who's come back to seize power. The real power behind the throne now is a notorious militiaman called Hamdan Dagolo, usually known as Hemeti. And he was the commander of what are called the Rapid Support Forces. In Darfur. And basically what he's done is bring the violence that has been visited upon the western region of Darfur for years to the heart of the capital, Khartoum. And they deployed exactly the sort of tactics that they've used to ravage Darfur for decades now on the streets of Khartoum, leaving probably as many as 60 dead and 600 wounded.

And do you think that this crackdown will suppress or galvanize the pro-democracy protesters?

Well, I saw them yesterday, representatives of them, and they're of course shocked and horrified by what's happened. They have called for civil disobedience and a general strike, and they claim that yesterday their calls had been heard, that the country was basically in a sort of lockdown or shutdown. But it's hard to tell, of course, whether people are not working or going onto the streets for fear of the military, or whether they're following the call of the protesters for civil disobedience and a general strike. We'll see in the next few days. What's certainly true now is the battle lines have been drawn. There's no room for accommodation, I think, between the protesters and Hamati and his Rapid Support Forces. So the country is now deeply divided as it's ever been.

And you sound as if you don't believe that the election will happen in 9 months, and even if it did, it couldn't be free and fair.

You know, they may call an election in 9 months. I've got no doubt it will be boycotted, it will be rigged, it will be meaningless, and nobody will pay any attention to it after what's happened on the streets. I mean, we have to understand here that the Hemeti has received, I think, direct backing of the powerful countries in the region, mainly Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE. They were on a visit to the Hemeti and other members of the TMC just a few days before this happened, presumably to get the green light for the crackdown. Nobody in the region, least of all Egypt given its recent history, want a flourishing democracy on their doorstep. They do not want the virus of democracy to spread to their own countries, so they will do everything in their power to back someone like Hemeti to extinguish any kind of democracy in Sudan.

Well, what about more widely though, outside the region? I mean, surely this kind of brutal crackdown hasn't gone unnoticed.

You're quite right, it's been condemned by the three Western countries with the closest interest in Sudan. So that's Norway, the United States, and the UK. But there is no concept of international community on Sudan. Countries are deeply split. And yesterday there was a call to condemn this at the UN, but that was blocked by Sudan's traditional supporters, China, mainly supported by Russia. So as long as those traditional divisions exist or survive at the UN Security Council, there will be no international consensus on how to react to these protests. The Russians have been behind military rule here for a long time, as have the Chinese, and they're not going to waver at this point.

And if on the inside of the country everyone is quite dug in, both the Transitional Military Council and the protesters, then this sounds like a powder keg. I mean, how do you see this playing out? Is there a risk of a full-blown civil war? People have mentioned this civil war.

I mean, I think we've got to understand that Sudan has been enduring regional civil wars for decades now. Ever since 2003, there's been a civil war raging in the west in Darfur. There's been a civil war in Blue Nile region the south of the country, and there's been a low-intensity civil war going on in the east of the country. So on the peripheries, there's been no peace for decades. All that's happened now is that that low-intensity conflict, that civil war, has now come to the center of the country, Khartoum. But many people in the country have experienced nothing but low-intensity civil war, civil conflict for decades. And unfortunately, The experience of the periphery, Darfur or the east of the country, the south, does not augur well for Khartoum because there no side has gained an advantage over decades of fighting. All that's happened is that the country has been driven to more and more poverty and oppression, and that might well be the pattern for the center of the country now too.

Richard, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. In Mexico, over the past decade, violence and crime have soared. Last year's murder rate was the highest since records began. A few years back, in the city of Monterrey, a young academic named Eugenio Weygand was researching what's behind the increase in crime, looking into things like drug gangs and the military. One day, his research became very real.

In 2011, unfortunately, I was a victim of an armed robbery.

Mr. Weygand's mother had asked him to pick up his uncle from work.

I was outside my uncle's office. I was waiting outside inside the car. I was looking at my phone, and then I look up through the window. There was this guy pointing a gun at my head, telling me to get off the car, give him my wallet, the phone, and the car keys. So I did. I absolutely complied with it because he had a gun.

If they hadn't been armed, the robber and his accomplice wouldn't have been very threatening.

And the perpetrators were, to my perception, around 18, between 18 and 20 years of age. So pretty young.

But the weapon they carried gave them all the power they needed. Eugenia was shaken, but the incident did begin a train of thought.

So that got me started on questioning, you know, what's the role of guns on the current situation of violence in Mexico, because at that time everybody was talking about drugs, but nobody was really talking about guns. So I started to dig a little bit more about that. I realized that the majority of guns come from the United States.

Mr. Vigand now researches the illegal flow of weapons at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

The weak gun laws in the United States has affected not only the country, but has gone beyond. It's affected citizens in Mexico, citizens in Central America, and We suspect that even beyond.

We can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that as of now, an American-made gun is actually more likely to be used across the border in a murder in Mexico than it is in a— for a murder in the United States.

Richard Enser reports for The Economist from Mexico.

So we know that last year Mexico's murder rate reached a record high of more than 33,000 homicides. We know the number of homicides where a gun was used as the murder weapon. And we also have a fairly decent idea from crime scene statistics of the number of gun homicides where the weapon involved was an American-manufactured gun.

So how do these guns get from America into Mexico?

The number one way that these weapons move into the hands of criminals in Mexico is quite simply by being legally bought. At gun shops and gun shows in the United States. We know that the United States has some of the laxest gun laws in the world, and criminals take advantage of that. They take these purchases, which are referred to as straw purchases. They will find a friend or a family member, a business associate who will come in, buy the guns that they need to then use their transport links that they use to move drugs north to move these south. And the border checks, of course, are fairly negligible.

OK, just to play devil's advocate, there are all kinds of plausible reasons behind violence in Mexico: powerful gangs, problems with corruption, organized crime. What evidence is there that American regulations really add to it?

We know that the gun laws in the United States do have an effect on the murder rates in Mexico, because in 2004, when the national ban on assault weapons expired, that actually provided a real-time experiment to see how murder rates changed, because California, one border state, kept banning these weapons, and New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona all started to sell them again. And if you look at what happened in the municipalities in Mexico right across the borders from these different states, you saw a very different story. In municipalities bordering the states that legalized these assault weapon sales, so next to Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, the murder rate shot up in the couple of years following the assault weapons ban. So I'm going almost to double. And in municipalities bordering California, we saw a murder rate that stayed just about the same, relatively flat, with very little movement. And so this gives us the suggestion that these kinds of laws can have real-world impacts right across the border in Mexico. And what about impacts beyond Mexico?

Is this having an effect elsewhere in Latin America?

Increasingly it does. You see very often in other drug trafficking hotspots or hotspots of organized crime, that they are fans of American-made weapons. You will see in the ports of Honduras that many traffickers really enjoy smuggling in through shipping routes, you know, weapons, their weapons of choice. There are many ways to do this. You can bribe the customs agencies. They are seeing increasing numbers of American-made guns showing up in Brazil, especially assault weapons. So in Brazil, you have a fairly large domestic arms manufacturing industry, which means even if you did keep out some of these American guns, you would still have, you know, guns available in various ways. In a country like Mexico, where they have no domestic weapons manufacturing, the presence and availability and accessibility of American guns can sometimes very much be the difference between whether an organized crime group or narco drug traffickers have access to weapons and whether they don't.

Well, is there anything that might be done to cut off this access to weapons?

You might be sitting there thinking, well, this is simple, just enforce the border. But checking every single car, the supplies in every single truck that crosses the American border into Mexico is the kind of thing that could slow down and cause immense bottlenecks with a huge economic cost. What can work is improving, you know, large networks of ballistics gathering and data sharing, tracking systems, implementing tracking systems. Another thing that is being discussed in Mexico is in fact trying to go after the people who help make guns and trying to punish financially the gun industry in America. And that includes, for example, banning steelmakers who give their steel to gun manufacturers, banning them from Mexican government contracts. But ultimately, it's a question of institutions and strengthening and purging the police forces of corruption, trying to strengthen institutions to make sure that you have more people doing the right thing is just something that any solution will absolutely need to have right at the center of it. Profit.

Richard, thanks very much.

Thank you, it's a pleasure.

Can sport do more than just entertain?

Within 30 seconds of the start of the biggest game in club football, Liverpool were awarded a penalty after the ball hit the hand of a Tottenham player, and Mo Salah stepped up to the spot and, as he always does, drilled the ball into into the net. It was his 71st goal in 104 appearances for Liverpool. He's broken all kinds of records and he led Liverpool to victory in the biggest trophy of them all. They lost last year, but they managed it this year.

James Tozer edits Game Theory, The Economist's blog about sport.

Mo Salah is Liverpool's star player. He's broken all kinds of goal-scoring records for them. He's a striker. He's also Egyptian and a practicing Muslim. He celebrates his goals by kneeling in prayer on the turf. And Liverpool's manager Jürgen Klopp has been very accommodating of his faith, along with that of Sadio Mané, another African striker who is also Muslim. Mr. Klopp requires that every player arrives in the changing room early before the game so that Salah and Mané can pray before the match.

For Muslims in the city of Liverpool, Mo Salah has become a role model for their faith.

People think Muslims are terrorists, to things like that, but when they see people like Mo Salah, they see that Muslims aren't what they expect.

You know, you bring along a man who is fantastic at what he does, is Muslim, but is also humble, and when you bring that into a city like Liverpool, of course we're going to react to that. Whether you're Muslim or not, it doesn't matter. Whether you're Arab or not, you're going to react to that because the man is such a gentleman, such a nice easygoing guy. He prays in Penny Lane Mosque.

You know, it's no issue. A new working paper by a group of political scientists at Stanford University has found evidence that Mr. Salah's popularity might have helped tackle anti-Muslim sentiments in Liverpool. How so? How did they figure that out? Well, they looked at 3 things. The first thing they did was to look at the number of hate crimes in Liverpool. So hate crimes, those are attacks, verbal or physical, that are motivated by someone's religion or race. And they found that those had declined in Liverpool even as they'd been rising in other parts of the country. And they found that decline only existed in Liverpool for hate crimes, not for other types of crime, which suggests that there might have been a Salah effect. They found it after he moved to the club. But of course, that could be caused by anything. To narrow it down a little bit more, they looked at tweets by football fans of different clubs, and they found that for Liverpool, after Salah arrived, there wasn't a rise in Islamophobic tweets, but there was at other football clubs, which might be part of an unfortunate rise in Islamophobia around Britain. But it suggests that something different was happening for Liverpool fans than for other clubs. But all of those things could be sort of circumstantial. It's hard to nail down what exactly caused them. The really robust bit of their research was they conducted an experiment on Facebook where they asked 8,000 Liverpool fans to answer various questions about football. Now, disguised in that survey was a question about their attitudes to Islam. And for some of those football fans, about a third of them, they also showed a slide showing Mr. Salah praying and saying how committed he was to his faith. And they found that the fans who had seen that slide had a more positive view of Islam when it came to that question later on, even though they'd been randomly assigned whether or not they saw the slide. And what that showed was the mechanism in action of Liverpool fans thinking, you know, 'God, this is a player I really like and respect. He celebrates his goals by praying. He's a very devout man. And, you know, actually, I probably think that Islam is okay and is compatible with my way of life.' And so by showing that causal mechanism, the researchers were basically able to show that there probably is some kind of relationship between Mr. Salah's prowess on the pitch and these fluctuations in crime and Islamophobic sentiment on social media within Liverpool. But Mr.

Salah is not the first Muslim in English football. Why do you suppose he's had such a noticeable effect?

Well, I think he's much more prominent about his faith, the fact that he prays after celebrating. He's very upfront about it, and he's also been far more successful, I think, than other Muslim players in the league. And also, the Liverpool fans have embraced it. They sing 'If he scores more goals, I'll be a Muslim too.' 'If he scores another two, I'll be a Muslim too.' It happens that Salah and Allah rhyme, so he's a gift from Allah in the chant that rings from the Kop. So they've really embraced that part of him.

And do you think it gives any indications as to how the sport can more broadly attack Islamophobia, racism?

Well, I think one thing football has been really good at actually over the years is by exposing a bunch of fans who aren't necessarily the most open-minded to people who look differently or believe differently to them. There were Black black footballers in Britain before there were black MPs. And that's true of many other countries. And, you know, it's a sport that has historically had a lot of racism and homophobia and intolerance in the crowd. But history suggests that, you know, gradually those people are won over. There are still problems with racism, definitely in football. But as trailblazers like Mr. Salah and like many of the black footballers in England who went before him set an example and gradually win people over, I'm sort of hopeful that maybe 20 years down the line, maybe we'll be talking about gay footballers causing the same kind of change in attitudes, maybe. There's always a new frontier to be pushed. I'm hopeful that people in football will continue to do that.

James, thanks very much for coming in. Thank you. 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/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.