famously bin laden and even like carlos the jackal were from not from sudan but based in sudan throughout the 90s and if we're looking back over the last 25 years what did our approach to and again you can't really say africa at large but let's say north africa sudan and some of the more troublesome countries where did our approach go wrong did we get anything right in our approach to sort of the trouble spots

Let's stick with Sudan just for a second.

Certainly, as you said, Sudan became notorious for its connections with Osama bin Laden and people like Carlos de Jackal many years ago.

And those connections led to a punishing American sanctions regime on Sudan that went on for decades, was only lifted about five years ago, and arguably had some very serious and negative repercussions for the country overall.

even as it tried to sort of change into a more democratic dispensation.

On the other hand, it's hard not to think about how the place that Darfur in particular occupied in American policymaking just 20 years ago.

At that point, we had a genocide that was declared and ongoing in Darfur, and we had celebrities like George Clooney leading marches down the mall in Washington.

What are you seeing on the ground? What are the real-world impacts from less aid from the U.S.? And the aid that these countries are getting from these other middle powers, what sort of terms and conditions are coming with their support?

Now that we've discussed a little bit about QIC, could you go all the way back to the beginning, talk to us about yourself, give us some background, what you studied, your career journey, and how that segues into your current role?

Yeah, I like to think that I've had a fairly varied career.

For one, I spent, going all the way back, I spent 14 years of my childhood growing up in China.

I came to Australia and finished high school and then I went to university at UTS.

So we share something in common there.

Yes.

I studied a property economics degree.

I guess that segues into the next space, which is any opportunities at QIC or how can students get themselves involved, get out there or the opportunities available?

Describe the scenes in, in that ward.

So when we walked into that ward, two things really struck me.

First, as I said, there were people, apart from the doctor who was with us and ourselves, of course, we were wearing full protective equipment.

Everybody else who was not a patient was just m-moving in and out.

A handful of people had rubber gloves on.

Maybe some people pulled a scarf across their mouths.

But otherwise, almost nobody was protected.

What do we know about, about how officials didn't pick this up for so long?

Hmm.

[speaking French] [speaking French] And at the end of the room in the corner we found this young boy, five-year-old boy called Emmanuel who was lying on this bare mattress on his own hooked up to a very simple drip.

[speaking French] And his dad was standing over him looking so concerned, and we got speaking in French.

[speaking French]He told me that his son had been going to school just a few days earlier when the teacher sent him home.

Apparently, he had a headache and a fever.

The family tried to look after him for the first few days, but he got worse.

[somber music] And then he said that the night before, Emmanuel started to bleed uncontrollably out of his nose, and so they rushed him to this hospital.

And did you get a sense of why this was happening? Did you talk to the doctors what was going on? I'm sure they didn't want that to be happening either.

Hmm.

And at the end of the room in the corner, we found this young boy, five-year-old boy called Emmanuel, who was lying on this bare mattress on his own, hooked up to a very simple drip.

And his dad was standing over him looking so concerned, and we got speaking in French.He told me that his son had been going to school just a few days earlier when the teacher sent him home.

Apparently, he had a headache and a fever.

The family tried to look after him for the first few days, but he got worse.

[somber music] And then he said that the night before, Emmanuel started to bleed uncontrollably out of his nose, and so they rushed him to this hospital.

And when he was lying there, he had this tissue stuffed up his nose to try and staunch that bleeding.

And did you get a sense of why this was happening? Did you talk to the doctors what was going on? I'm sure they didn't want that to be happening either.

Why did you change your mind once you were on the ground?

We were there for several days.

We, we'd spoken with the, ah, with the medical staff, ah, got their permission.

We got the permission from the patients to enter that ward.

Um, and, you know, we, I just felt it was very important to witness firsthand and to show the reality of care, ah, in the Congo, in, particularly in this frontline area.

Here in the main city, Bunia, ah, the head of the WHO has been here the last couple of days, Dr., um, Tedros Ghebreyesus.

There are, you know, aid agencies are present here.

Others call it a curse." As we talk about the deficit in the, the public health response to this crisis, how acute is this problem in particular just conveying to the population how dangerous this is and, and trying to explain in light of those, um, the, the, the sense, the sense of what's happening here that that in fact is not the case, this is a very serious virus?

And, and tell us what you have seen, um, in terms of the, the response to this outbreak so far since you arrived in the country.

It's really just getting underway.

You know, there's very little of the sort of architecture of an Ebola outbreak that you might typically expect to see.

Um, you know, there are not sort of huge isolation tents where, you know, patients are triaged and treated.

Um, there are not, you know, wards full of doctors padding around in the, you know, protective gear that you, that you see with, you know, suits and masks and so on.

I mean, certainly, some of that protective equipment has gotten through, and it's mostly being used by Red Cross workers who are helping to bury the dead.

Um, but for the most part, you know, when I was in Bunia, the capital of this region, a couple of days ago, groups like, uh, there's a French group called Alima, International Medical Corps, they were literally just starting to put up the tents to create those kind of facilities to treat people.

And there are also ethnic tensions, aren't there, uh, in, in Bunia? Um, are those contributing to the, the delays in detecting and, and dealing with the outbreak?

And to make matters worse, there have been these attacks on health facilities.

Some of the handful of isolation tents that have been erected, at least three of them have been burned in recent days.

And then last night a group of perhaps over 100 young men gathered outside the hospital demanding the body of a Christian leader who had just died, and there were running battles outside that hospital.

There are many people in some of the worst affected areas who unfortunately don't believe that the virus is real, or they believe that it is somehow their responsibility or it's been caused by the people who are trying to treat it.

Declan, what about the precautions you're taking?

Yeah, I mean, look, nothing really prepares you for coming into an environment like this.

You know, you just really have to be very disciplined in following practices, particularly of washing your hands.

Um, you know, you see people wearing face masks here, which certainly do play some role, but the experts will tell you that it's not a disease that's spread by respiratory means.

Can you just talk us through the kind of response you've seen to this?

The first Ebola detections here came possibly six or eight weeks, uh, after the outbreak actually started.

So there's a real sense that, you know, the groups that are here, they're just starting to really get going on the ground.

You don't see, um, much of the infrastructure you expect to see in a response to an Ebola, uh, outbreak.

Um, you know, most of the patients who are not in their homes are going into the local public hospitals, which are really overcrowded, ill-equipped, and under-resourced to deal with this.

Um, and some of the bigger aid groups like MSF or, um, the French group Alima, they're just now-- when we were in the main city, Bunia, yesterday, they were just starting to put up tents over there, and they're putting up tents, uh, isolation tents in the city where, in the town where we are now called Mangwalu.

What, what, you know, what are the problems that are delaying a, a quicker response?

There are so many issues unfortunately that are converging at once.

Declan, over the last two and a half years, how have we seen the motivations of each military group change?

Well, it started out, as Kholood said, in April 2023, in what was often described at the time as a, as a clash between two leaders of these two groups, a war of two generals.

Uh, in reality, it was a little bit more complex than that.

It was really a struggle for power between these two dominant factions inside Sudan's security forces, the regular military and then this paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, that was a successor to the notorious Janjaweed militias that had fought in Darfur two decades ago....

so really, it was, uh, it started as a clash between these groups but it quickly, you know, s- firstly, it spread across the country and then it metastasized into this much bigger conflict that began to draw in other armed groups in Sudan, sort of armed groups which had been, uh, mm, dormant to some degree since earlier wars or hadn't been very active.

They got drawn into the conflict.

And then what really made it complex and, indeed, far worse I think for the civilians of Sudan, is it started to draw in foreign powers as well, uh, countries from the Persian Gulf, from the region, that started to take sides in this war, backing one side or the other, um, supplying weapons, supplying money, giving political support.

Declan, what do we know about this proposal?

How did this tip over into war?

Well, it started really as a power struggle between Hemeti and the leader of the military, General Burhan.

Both of these men had seized power together, actually, in a coup in 2021.

Just to rewind slightly, Sudan's longtime autocrat, Omar Bashir, was ousted in 2021. this in these popular protests in 2019.

Um, that was really, I was there for that.

That was this euphoric moment of hope for many Sudanese, because, you know, the, after decades of autocracy and repression, this man had, was gone and Sudanese hope that they would transition to a democracy.

Um, unfortunately that dream only really lasted a couple of years because then, uh, Hemati and Burhan, the two most powerful military figures in the country, seized power together.

And is the prospect of getting hold of the gold the reason why countries are backing not only one side or the other, but I take it, some countries are backing both sides.

Can you talk to us about what is different this time?

That's right.

I mean, 20 years ago, Darfur in fact became synonymous with the word genocide, and that's because at that time there was an armed militia called the Janjaweed that was leading a lot of the killing in Darfur, a conflict that killed as many as 300,000 people.

The difference this time is that the Janjaweed has been replaced by another group called the Rapid Support Forces, effectively its descendant, and that group is better armed than ever before.

In the past, the Janjaweed fought with horses and camels.

This time, the Rapid Support Forces have got armored vehicles, extremely sophisticated Chinese drones.

Last time, the Janjaweed were fighting alongside Sudan's army.

And what did the capital look like at that point after about, I guess, two years of war?

Uh, what was it like to be the first into Khartoum?

Well, it's a story that we've been covering so closely since this war started two years ago.

And to be honest, Lawrence, what was really shocking was just the scale and intensity of the devastation of that city.

Um, we traveled through areas that had just changed hands days before, and, uh, w- the physical destruction, all of the entire city center has basically been turned into a wasteland.

Uh, but especially the, the human toll, uh, the stories that the hunger that you mentioned, uh, the great suffering of the people who endured in the city during the fighting, um, and the tales that they told of abuse at the hand of soldiers, um, rape, abduction, um, killings.

Terrible, terrible stories.

What, what, what is it like to see that up close?

Well, the United States, until recently, uh, was the largest, uh, single s- donor, supplier of aid to the crisis in Sudan.

What is the current status of that humanitarian crisis?

It's extremely serious.

Uh, since we've been here, we have traveled around parts of the city, uh, that had, uh, changed hands in recent weeks and months, and we met many people who were in a dire situation.

Uh, people with no water, no electricity, in many cases, for the last two years.

Uh, malnourished children in extremely badly provisioned hospitals, uh, some of them literally gasping for life.

Um, and their parents told us that they had been living in areas where they were unable to get any food, or certainly very meager food rations, because of the fighting.

Um, there are aid groups that have accused both sides in the war of using food as a weapon of war, of denying food access to humanitarian groups, uh, i- in areas that are controlled by their enemies.

Do you have any sense as to whether the Sudanese army, if they are able to continue to hold the upper hand, would be interested in trying to ameliorate that humanitarian crisis?