Enough Forum report describes “brutal kleptocracy”: land grabs, grand corruption, military plunder
A new report published today details how the governing regime in Sudan is structured to extract the nation’s wealth in order to maintain power, benefit elites, and sustain violent and repressive campaigns against its citizenry. Published by the Enough Project in its “Forum” series, “Kleptocracy in Khartoum: Self-Enrichment by the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party,” is authored by Professor Eric Reeves of Smith College, a Senior Fellow at the Enough Project.
Eric Reeves, report author and Senior Fellow at the Enough Project, said: “For the past five years, the current regime in Khartoum has continued to engage in massive theft of Sudanese national wealth. Such theft occurs against a backdrop of some of the world’s highest rates of malnutrition as well as a series of brutal and costly civil wars. Agriculture is in decline as is the economy as a whole, largely because of the brutal kleptocracy that rules and plunders Sudan by force of arms from Khartoum.”
Selected highlights from “Kleptocracy in Khartoum”:
- The primary means by which the regime in Khartoum presently enriches itself is the sale and leasing of valuable Sudanese land—both urban areas as well as large tracts of arable land—mortgaging Sudan’s future to Arab and Asian countries interested in their own long term food security and cheap, profitable real estate deals.
- The regime’s complete control of the federal bureaucracy, the Central Bank of Sudan, and the Central Bureau of Statistics ensures that very large amounts of money can be easily siphoned off without detection and economic danger signals muffled.
- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) currently provides no meaningful oversight of the collapsing Sudanese economy, accepting at face value untenable figures provided to the Fund by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
- Waging war against the marginalized citizens of Sudan’s vast peripheral areas, and deploying a ruthlessly efficient set of security services, is all that keeps the regime in power.
- The character of the wars enabled by the massive misallocation of national wealth has often been genocidal, as it continues to be in Darfur, in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, and in Blue Nile State. Ethnically-targeted human destruction is the norm rather than the exception in the government’s conduct of counter-insurgencies.
Presented by the Enough Project, the Enough Forum is a platform for dynamic discourse engaging critical issues, challenges, and questions among thought leaders, field researchers, and policy experts. Opinions and statements are those of the authors and participants in the forum, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or policy recommendations of the Enough Project.
Link to “Kleptocracy in Khartoum”
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About THE ENOUGH PROJECT
The Enough Project, an atrocity prevention policy group, seeks to build leverage for peace and justice in Africa by helping to create real consequences for the perpetrators and facilitators of genocide and other mass atrocities. Enough aims to counter rights-abusing armed groups and violent kleptocratic regimes that are fueled by grand corruption, transnational crime and terror, and the pillaging and trafficking of minerals, ivory, diamonds, and other natural resources. Enough conducts field research in conflict zones, develops and advocates for policy recommendations, supports social movements in affected countries, and mobilizes public campaigns. Learn more – and join us – at www.EnoughProject.org.