alt Hacker NewsAnd you will be held as responsible for exploiting the country if you do actually manage to end the conflict and bring about positive economic change.
People don't understand that it takes generations to train a populace to work in a functioning economy. Sudan would probably need 25 years of colonization before you had competent Sudanese to run all parts of a modern economy. You can't just go in, stop the fighting, and then walk away. People just revert to the same conditions that led to war in the first place. So you end up with 25 years of being held responsible (by the world and by the local population), for every single bump in the totally mangled war-torn road to recovery. No thanks.
Replies
Ok, I HAD to create an account to respond to this one.
Like 99.99% of this continent, Sudan was under colonial rule. And it lasted nearly sixty years if you only count the British one (The Ottomans had a sting earlier).
Now I do fancy myself anti-imperialist, but even I cannot deny that the Brits did all that. They established systems, trained generations of locals, and left a decent seed for a competent state and economy. But still, here we are!
One could argue that this “intervention” was itself a cause of this civil war. Stitching a country out of completely different -and perhaps even incompatible- racial and ethnic elements a great deal of which don’t even recognise any political borders, leave one dictated by an outsider, wasn’t exactly going to end any other way.
Personally, while I do believe the Brits share the blame, I don’t assign them much of it. This hellhole had been ruled by its people for 68 years now, during which we’ve repeated the same weak democracy-junta cycle three times (four if you count the last transitional gov). The ability to notice patterns is like entry-level human skill…
Are you under the impression that Sudan was not under British colonial rule for ~50-60 years? This completely wrecked their economy and political structures, with the British intentionally causing divides between ethnic groups in Sudan and Egypt.
And are you seriously claiming that this was a good thing? Is this some crazy new neo-conservative take about the West being the only block that can be "civilized"?
"25 years of colonization" is doing some pretty heavy lifting.
The reason why there are no competent Sudanese to run the country is specifically because colonizers went in and destroyed all of the home-grown institutions Sudan had and replaced them with ones locals didn't trust, but were more legible to the colonizers. This is why decolonization has been a failure in some countries: removing the boot doesn't help after you've smashed someone's face in.
The countries that did benefit from decolonization had a unique pattern to them: they all had lacking or inadequate institutions before they were colonized. But colonizers don't build infrastructure for free, and the people being colonized know that. Colonial infrastructure tends to only be good for the needs of the colonizers' resource extraction industries. That's what puts distrust into the heart of the people in those countries in the first place, and why the success stories are rare.
You are correct that some sort of political force needs to be put in place to serve as a functioning institution in Sudan. However, colonial powers are very bad at doing that, because it's easier and cheaper to just smash and grab.
Colonizing only helps the colonizers, not the indigenous population.
> So you end up with 25 years of being held responsible (by the world and by the local population)
As they should.
You can develop a country without extracting its wealth.