Sudan enters fourth year of war

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm Leila Nathou. For exactly three years, Sudan has been in the grip of a brutal civil war. Today, as the country marks this grim milestone, the power struggle between the army and paramilitary fighters, the rapid support forces, is no closer to a resolution. Meanwhile, Sudan has been devastated. It has in effect been partitioned. The country divided into territory controlled by the two sides, and it is now the scene of the world's worst humanitarian crisis. The fall of the western city of El Fasha in October last year was one of the most brutal chapters of the conflict. Journalist Mohammed Suleiman was there, and for almost all of the period since the war began, he was caught in a communications blackout that cut off his connection to the world. He has now made it to safety. His account, though, is a story about the worst of the war and the resilience of Sudan's people, as our Africa correspondent Barbara Pletusher now reports. This sound is so familiar and so crucial to how we live our lives. But when Mohammed Suleiman entered the telecoms office in Port Sudan in January, he hadn't heard a phone ring for a very long time. He'd been isolated by conflict and unable to convey fully the horrors he was witnessing. I was flustered because people were talking on their phones inside the office. Throughout the past three years, my phone has mostly been on silent. After I inserted the SIM card, my tears flowed. When his phone sprang to life, it was pinging with three years of messages, news of colleagues who died, friends asking whether Mohammed was alive. A few days ago, a friend called me saying he thought I had died. Some people had told him that I was in Port Sudan, so he called me. But he didn't believe it until I called him back by video. Then he broke down in tears. Mohammed had been trapped in the western city of Al-Fasher, an epicenter of the war. From the beginning, communications were very unstable because of the fighting. But that became a full blackout when the paramilitary rapid support forces laid siege to the city. In some ways, the silence was almost as deadly as the violence. He felt suffocated as he watched people, including children, die of hunger, thirst and disease. He was unable to call and warn others when he saw drones coming. Once a shell narrowly missed him, but he lay still for half an hour, clutching his useless hands. And when the RASF finally took over the city in October last year, the relentless daily trauma exploded into apocalyptic scenes. The scenes of displacement are indescribable. It was like the day of judgment on earth. We witnessed the day of judgment on earth. We saw dead children in the streets. We saw women crying from extreme hunger and thirst, and from being unable to protect their children. So they left them on the road. There were people we knew by name, and we knew their fathers, but we could not provide anything for them. There was no food, no water, no fast aid to save them, or to carry them with us. You cannot do anything. So you step over them, jump over them, cry and continue walking. Many fled the fighting to the nearest safe place, the town of Tawila. The road they took was littered with the dead and injured. If there had been a way to call for help, says Mohammed, they wouldn't have had to leave so many wounded behind. There are things I cannot describe because they are inhumane. I cannot talk about them. And unfortunately, the media did not convey the scene. Until now, the world does not know what happened in Al-Fashe city, nor does the state know. Mohammed Suleiman is reconnected to the world, but he says, after what he's witnessed and experienced, it feels like the world has not returned to him. There is no international law in the world. There is no such thing as the United Nations. If there are human rights international organizations, no day would pass in Al-Fashe with people dying, hungry and thirsty, bombed by shells and drones. There is no cizfire, no medicine, no basic necessities of life. This confirms that there is no world to begin with. And it's a different country. Sudan is fragmented. Its peoples scattered. But says Mohammed, telling their story helps him hold on to a sense of purpose. There are events that happened that no one is left to narrate, and the memory remains only with us. Until we die, we will convey the truth to correct the situation for the next generation, so they live dignified and honored in their homeland. That report from our Africa correspondent, Barbara Plattusher, who we will speak to very shortly, but first, Volker Turk is the current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He spoke to my colleague, James Koppelnau, earlier, and he confirmed reports of atrocities in Sudan. I was in Sudan in January. There is indeed rape. It was used in Al-Fashe as a weapon of warfare, abductions, people missing, people tortured, mass executions. There is a pattern, an all too familiar pattern that plays out in the country on an almost daily basis. What we have also seen recently is an increase in drone strikes. My office documented since the beginning of this year until end of March, 700 civilians who got killed as a result of drone strikes. And drone strikes, and we know and we have seen some of these drones, they become more and more modern. So clearly, we are in a very horrific situation. And it is a human rights and humanitarian catastrophe. And I hope that this conference today will send a very clear signal to the parties that this absolutely needs to stop in the interest of the people of Sudan. We are speaking here of war crimes and in Al-Fashe and in maybe other places as well. We are talking even about crimes against humanity because it's so systematic. And in especially in Al-Fashe, we have seen ethnically motivated killings, which indeed come to make us conclude that these are targeted killings of those who are perceived to be associated with the other side. And very often they are ethnically ethnically motivated. And yes, indeed, then we are talking about very serious crimes here. The RSF is held accountable for what happened in Al-Fashe. Do you though also believe that Sudanese military is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity elsewhere? So what we have seen on the part of the Sudanese armed forces are indeed indiscriminate bombardments. We have seen these drone strikes also on their part, which means that civilians got killed. And they are not respecting these fundamental principles. So yes, unfortunately, we see serious violations on both sides. But it has to be said that what RSF did in Al-Fashe and previously last year in in Samsung IDP camp had a scale that is manifestly different from what we have seen from the other side. That was United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk. Well, let's go back to our Africa correspondent, Barbara Plet-Asher, who's been following this conflict throughout, who joins us live from Nairobi. Barbara, you heard Volker Turk there mention this conference that's taking place in Berlin today. It's a major conference between various countries. Is this about humanitarian aid, the provision of aid, or actually is this another attempt to try to find some sort of political solution? It is primarily about humanitarian aid. This is the third such conference. Two others have been held on the anniversaries as well. And this year it's particularly important because of the cuts in aid that we've seen over the past year. International aid has decreased significantly. And so the goal is to try to put Sudan on the diplomatic agenda and to get pledges of more than a billion dollars is what the Germans are hoping for for the humanitarian situation in Sudan. There is a political element in that the U.S. envoy who's been trying to negotiate a humanitarian ceasefire is there. So there will be an update on progress or not in that case. I mean, nobody's really expecting a diplomatic breakthrough because neither side has moved from their particular red lines. And there's been no suggestion that that is in the near future. In fact, what experts predict is that the war will continue. You also don't have either side there as in the military-backed Sudanese government and the rapid support forces. Again, in the previous two conferences they weren't participating, but the Sudanese government this time has criticized it and said that this is meddling in internal affairs. So not a good sense of participation there. But they are going to try to get some participation from civilian actors, people who want a civilian-led government, who haven't had much of a voice in a lot of these forums before. Now, it has to be said that's extremely complicated because the civilians are not united. They also fall on different sides of the divide, but that is one of the efforts in this conference. And, Barbara, just the scale of the crisis facing the people of Sudan is absolutely staggering. It absolutely is. You have an economy that has collapsed, including the farming sector, which is crucially important, of course, for food production. You don't have enough international aid. You also have great difficulty getting aid into the conflict zones for various reasons. So if you look at those numbers, 33.7 million are in need of food, water, shelter, or medicine. That's 65% of the population. You have nearly 12 million people displaced inside and outside the country. You have civilians subject to atrocities, as Falkar Turk was saying. Nearly seven civilians also have been reported killed by drones since the beginning of the year. More than 12 million people are at risk of rape. That's mostly women and girls, not only. And that figure has increased by 350% since the beginning of the war. So the figures do tell a very dark story. And also, they tell a story of impunity. Nobody's being held to account for these things. And given those numbers, Barbara, obviously, it brings to the fore the urgency of finding some solution to the conflict. Why has peace been so elusive? Well, peace has been elusive because the parties on the ground have stuck to their core positions and they are diametrically opposed. So just briefly, for example, the armed forces insist that the RSF has to withdraw from urban areas, regroup in designated locations, and disarm. In fact, that's what the army sets as a precondition for talks to actually even begin. So you can't even get to the starting gate on that. And there are other positions the army holds that the RSF rejects. But again, the RSF will not integrate into existing army in a structure says if there are withdrawals that should be mutual, says any Islamist actress should be excluded from the process. And the Islamists are major allies on the SAF side. So those things are not being solved. Both sides think they can still win militarily. And both sides are being backed by external powers play a significant role in shaping positions and providing support, including military support. So they're able to keep fighting. Now, analysts say, given how far apart the sides are, you really do need high level pressure from these Arab allies backing both sides, especially on the army chief to get past his absolutist preconditions. But that's just simply not happening. Okay, Barbara, thanks so much. That's our Africa correspondent Barbara Plattusher there, live from Nairobi. Coming up on the programme, the director of a new film about the Kremlin on a major casting decision. What I needed was not a lookalike. I needed a great actor. I needed a powerful actor who would deal with the complex and multiple layers of the character of Vladimir Putin. And luck has it that I knew Jude. That is Jude as in Jude Law, that interview coming up on the programme in about 20 minutes time. The headlines for you this hour. Iran has warned that it will block trade through the Red Sea as well as the Gulf and the Sea of Oman if the US continues its own blockade of Iranian ports and shipping. And officials in southern Turkey say four people have been killed in a shooting at a secondary school. And the BBC is set to cut one tenth of its workforce around 2,000 jobs as part of cost cutting plans over the next three years. You're listening to News Hour with me, Leila Nathu. We're live from the BBC World Service in London. The March of Artificial Intelligence is driving the building of more data centres, places that house all of the components that support the technology. But the American state of Maine has become the first in the US to pass a bill to temporarily ban their construction. Seth Berry is a former state legislator in Maine and now executive director of Our Power, a non-profit focused on lower energy costs in the state. I asked him if it was the scale of these centres that was the main issue. It is the scale in the sense that we have never before seen this kind of energy development and demand. And it's having huge ripple effects up and down the supply chain as well as all the other problems that AI is posing to society. Right. So there's a practical implication of it, which is that it's a drain on energy on water in Maine, but also perhaps their symbolic value too. I think that's right. I mean, certainly there's the larger existential question of what's the role of humanity in a world populated by chatbots, workers are starting to ask what happens to our jobs after we finish building these things, are we basically digging our own economic graves. But for us, for Our Power, the issue really is energy. And so far in the United States, the development of data centres has caused double digit inflation last year alone. The pace in the next few years is expected to pick up. And so the inflationary pressures will be absolutely massive and unprecedented. Maine is the first state to get as far as passing this bill. There are others not far behind, but just tell us specifically what this piece of legislation would do. So Maine's bill, as passed by the House and Senate, would establish an 18 month ban on permits for new data centres over 20 megawatts. That's pretty big. And it would also set up a commission to make policy recommendations to the next governor and legislator so that they could adopt them before the ban expires in late 2027. The regional impact, especially the inflationary impact, can be very, very significant if our policies are not well tuned to the new situation. Data centres are obviously springing up across the world and tech companies say that they are much needed. And there are some countries who are really getting behind them. Are you alarmed by the speed at which they are being rolled out without, in your view, I guess, proper interrogation of the consequences? We've heard lots of promises from big tech before about how it would make life better. And in fairness, sometimes it does. But most of those promises are not even worth the paper they're printed on. The developers of data centres are making many promises to local politicians and to the media. They're hiring lobbyists, but in general, they have failed to keep those promises. And it's clear that people have had enough. We are hearing from people all around the country and the world who are excited about Maine's bill, who are interested in doing something similar and just giving ourselves time to adjust to this new reality and make sure that the people are not collateral damage in this seismic change. And what do you make of the existing protections or the regulatory framework that is in place in Maine and elsewhere when it comes to planning permissions, power provisions for these sorts of centres? Generally speaking, we are not prepared. And if you start making more demands of the energy workforce or adequate siting for renewable energy, making more demands on limited fossil fuel supplies in the region, that hurts everyone. So our policies are generally not prepared for this kind of scale and pace of development. And that's why we really need this 18 month pause. Is it going to go through? Well, it is now on the desk of the governor. Governor Mills is feeling pressure from a lobbyist on one side and pressure from the grassroots on the other. She is also in a primary race right now for the US Senate. I can say that her voters overwhelmingly support a moratorium. Only time will tell what she does. And she has a couple of weeks to make up her mind. That was Seth Berry there, former state legislator in Maine talking to me about the legislation before Maine on AI data centre construction. Now, in Germany, a new online tool is helping families come to terms with their past, allowing them to easily find out whether any of their relatives were members of the Nazi party. The search engine was set up by the German newspaper, Dizit, which says it now it has now been accessed millions of times and widely shared since it was launched at the beginning of the month. Christian Stas is editor of the history page for the paper and was involved with the project. He told me first how it came about. These membership cards, they were all in the NSDRP central in Munich. And when the end of the war approached, the Nazis decided to destroy all these cards. And they brought them to a paper mill near Munich. But the owner of this mill, a man called Hans Huber, he rescued these membership cards after a while when he saw what was in his hands. So a few were destroyed, but the rest of them he gave to the US army who was in Munich. It took a while and then they were brought to Berlin. And from there, copies of the membership cards went to the National Archives. And the US National Archives, they started releasing their digitized copies of the NSDRP membership cards at the end of last year. And everybody was very much interested, oh, now we can look up if our grandfather or our great grandfather was in the NSDRP. But the site of the National Archives was very difficult to navigate. And the site was also very quickly down because so many people tried to reach it. So this was the point where we said, okay, can we do this better? Can we download the data and build and search engine that makes it easier? And that's how it started. So prior to your database, how would people wanting to know about their family members past association with the Nazi Party? How would they have established that? It was possible to send a letter to the Bundesarchives and to ask if they have any information. And then you could get an answer after a few weeks. So this took time and you needed to write a letter, etc. So it was more work. How comprehensive are the membership records? So the Nazi Party had roughly 10 million members and they filed a card for each member in two separate card indexes and they were destroyed to a different extent at the end of the war. So all in all, there are about a bit more than 12 million cards that we have today. And in these cards, you can find about 90% of the former members of the NSDAP. I mean, it sounds like you've had an absolutely phenomenal response to this search tool. It must be starting so many conversations in families. Yes, it did. And we released it just before the Easter holidays and it was an instant success. So there were millions of page views. So for some, it was just a confirmation. They wrote to us, I always had this feeling or I heard about it that my grandfather or my grandmother was in the NSDAP. But we also have a lot of people who tell us that they were kind of shocked when they found closely related people in the card index. Because in many German families, especially directly after the war, there was a lot of conversation about this. To deal with Germany's past, so this is at the core of German memory culture. And as you know, there have been a lot of debates about this. And there's also a lot of scientific research about institutions, about companies, etc. But a lot of people didn't look at what happened in my family. So this is what we see now because if they would have already researched this, there wouldn't have been such a big interest in our search tool. That was Christian Stas from Dizite. Welcome back to NewsHour. Anyone who's spent time in Scotland will instantly recognize Tartan, a traditional cloth with a pattern of interlocking stripes. But now a country almost 6,000 miles away, Brazil, has its first official Tartan. It was designed by a six-year-old school girl, Indy Mingus, from North Ayrshire, in a competition to mark the two countries' meeting in the Football World Cup this summer and to celebrate the Scotsman who introduced the game to Brazil in the late 19th century. Fernanda Del Piaz is acting Brazilian Consul General in Edinburgh and was on the judging panel for the competition. I asked her to describe the new Tartan. So it has the Brazil colours, it's predominantly green with dark blue, blue, yellow and it has a very thin red line representing the school that participated in the competition. I mean it is very vibrant and it is recognizably Brazilian in some ways. Why did you think that Brazil needed its own Tartan? So we are only three years old, the Consulate here in Edinburgh. I think it was important to us to deepen our connection to Scotland and when we arrived, every place we went, people asked, do you have a Tartan? And we didn't. We looked into the Scottish National Register of Tartans. We couldn't find a Tartan representing Brazil so we thought it was important to have one and now we can use it in official functions. The Brazilians can use it. It's a Tartan for everybody really. And you were one of the judges in this competition. How did you assess all the entries? So we had the students from Primary 7 doing a previous elections. So they brought to us five designs and we thought that Indy's design was the most Brazilian one of them. She chose beautiful colours so that's how we decided to go with hers. And coincidentally she has a lovely connection herself, doesn't she, to Brazil? Yes, so that's such a coincidence because we didn't know that beforehand obviously, but her family, her grandmother did a research on the family lineage and they found out that she has a connection to Charles Miller who is credited to have introduced football to Brazil. That's an incredible, incredible connection and so lovely for her that she has had the opportunity now to design this material. How is it going to be used? So the first event we have is the Tartan Day Parade here in Edinburgh. I think it's on the 10th of May but it's going to be used in any official event. We have made ties, we have made kilt and trues and also I think it's going to be worn by Brazilians in the World Cup. You know that Brazil and Scotland are playing together. I was going to ask if the football team were going to get a sample of it. We hope to send them some. I don't know if they're going to be able to wear it but definitely, yes. Well it's all very collaborative now though, isn't it? But when it comes to the game it's going to be the competition between Brazil and Scotland will resume. Yes and we are so happy that we're playing against Scotland because Brazil has played against Scotland so many times in World Cups and yes we're going to be compacts with us but I think it's going to be a great party anyway. That was Fernanda Del Piaz acting Brazilian Consul General in Edinburgh. You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. I'm Leila Nathou. Now Israel's military says it has struck more than 200 Hezbollah targets in the south of Lebanon in the past 24 hours. That's despite Israeli and Lebanese representatives meeting in Washington yesterday for rare direct discussions to try to end Israel's campaign against the Iran-backed group. Now it also continued to fire rockets into northern Israel and Hezbollah reiterated its opposition to the talks even taking place. Well the BBC's Nick Beek is in northern Israel for us and joins us live. Nick can we start with those talks yesterday in Washington because both sides seem to be reporting a positive set of discussions but actually still no ceasefire even that on the cards. Yeah I think that's a fair assessment Leila. Certainly the Americans were talking this up. You had the Secretary of State Marco Rubio who was the mediator calling this an historic opportunity to end the influence of Hezbollah and I guess yes it certainly was an achievement in itself. You had the Israelis and the Lebanese holding these direct talks for the first time in more than 30 years and yes at the end of it the Americans said that there would be a process of direct negotiations in the future but we don't know when they'll be and we don't know where they would take place so although there's this shared goal I think it's important to stress different positions. The Lebanese government wants a ceasefire immediately says there needs to be a focus on the one million people who've been displaced in Lebanon in the past six weeks. The Israeli government on the other hand saying that they should be allowed to continue to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon that should be the focus and I guess the biggest problem in all of this is that these were talks between the United States and the Lebanese government not Hezbollah the powerful Iran backed group and what Hezbollah is saying is that they wouldn't abide by any agreement that was reached in Washington or anywhere else at the moment. And Nick where you are in the north of Israel this is really at the center of Israel's campaign against Hezbollah because of the threat of Hezbollah rockets landing in Israel's north. Certainly I mean the people we've spoken to in the past 24 hours they said they've lived with this for years for decades and they want a future in which that threat doesn't exist and that's a position that the the Netanyahu government says absolutely is at the center of their thinking and the center of their actions. I mean it's also significant this conflict in itself but also it does threaten to to jeopardize really this very tentative ceasefire we've got at the moment between the United States and Iran because you know if we rewind a week ago you had the Iranian saying that Lebanon had to be right in the middle of this ceasefire it had to be contingent and the Americans and the Israelis were saying no this is a completely different theater it should be the case that the the fighting there is completely separate from what goes in a goes on in the war with Iran so yeah it is a crucial place in itself but also has the potential to really derail things. And Nick just very briefly this is why Israel wants to have a developed what it calls a buffer zone in the south of Lebanon. That's right I mean from where we were earlier today Leila we were able to see this this buffer zone in action we were in the the town of Matula it's Israel's most northern town right on the border surrounded by Lebanon on three sides and it means they're first in the firing line when Hezbollah launched their rockets. We've just come into what is a control center it's a really small room that's like a pretty normal office until you look at these huge screens here and they show what's going on from dozens of CCTV cameras interestingly they say in the past few days the number of rockets coming across here has diminished and is that because it's a prelude to talks happening in Washington DC between Lebanon and Israel or is it just a mere blip people here of course don't know and that sense of uncertainty is something that characterizes their daily lives. And I think we got no other option besides working with Lebanon to stop Hezbollah's attacks. 19 year old Tuval Yarkoni is volunteering here before he starts his military service. The threat on Israel still exists I don't think only war can get this I really think there gotta be a better a better way than continue the war and then stopping it and continue it again. Hezbollah started firing again six weeks ago after the US and Israel struck Iran. Rockets have killed 12 soldiers and two civilians in Israel since then. In Lebanon Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 2,000 people including more than 160 children. And now it's up to us and we have to finish the job that's the reason that most of the people don't want ceasefire. Yossi Assa now in his 60s has lived in Matula all his life. And what do you say to people who say that the Israeli army through hitting Hezbollah in Lebanon is actually undermining the whole peace process between the US and Iran putting it in jeopardy. Well it's the same system it's not a different world it's the same world. Hezbollah is the proxy of Iran okay so it's these things are combined together. Just down the road we meet Ronit Weiss a retired head teacher. We are very sad we are not we are not see the solution. When you hear those explosions what goes through your mind? I'm trying to be strong but it's not pleasant to be here. They want to kill us they never want to be together with us and we have to be strong and to fight. That was Nick Beek reporting from Northern Israel. Now to the story of one man's rise to power. Russia needs a new president. He's young, athletic, he's a spy, KGB, Vladimir Putin. What interests me is power. That is a clip from the trailer for the new film The Wizard of the Kremlin which comes out in the UK this week and next month in the US. It tells the story of President Putin played by the British actor Jude Law through the eyes of Vadim Baranov a fictional character who becomes Putin's spin doctor. It's based on the book of the same name by Giuliano D'Empolli. I have been speaking to the film's director Olivier Assayas. How did he react when he was first asked to turn the novel into a film? I read the book very early. I thought it was brilliant as for me directing it and turning into a feature that was a long shot. I mean I thought it was really tough. I thought it was, you know, it was there was a lot of dialogue. It dealt with modern politics in fairly abstract and it's only when I started having a conversation with Giuliano D'Empolli and with my co-screenwriter that gradually, you know, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. It looked like a very tough and problematic job. And not least the hurdle of filming in Russia. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, that was part of the problem. You're shooting about things that happen in well-known places like the Kremlin Palace and so on and so forth and you have no access to Russia whatsoever. So everything had to be reinvented outside of Russia. I mean, that was a mighty job. So you ended up shooting the whole film in Latvia. But it's incredibly vivid though. I mean, it really does take you to Russia through the ages. I suppose because I was so concerned that it was the movie would be too slow or not lack energy or be too abstract. Like I put the bar as high as I could. Jude Law plays Vladimir Putin and I think for people who are used to seeing him in his other films, he might not be immediately obvious as someone to play Vladimir Putin. Well, ultimately, he was my first choice for many reasons. I mean, because you know, either you that kind of material, even you approach it and you use somewhere like Vladimir Putin look alive. This movie was dealing with the rise to power of Vladimir Putin and many other things, meaning power, meaning how you access power, how you keep it, how all those themes are universal. And we're talking about the modern modernities of of politics, meaning post internet, post social media. I thought my film was a little bit wider than just the story of Vladimir Putin. And what I needed was not a lookalike. I needed a great actor. I need the powerful actor. I needed an actor who would deal with the complex and multiple layers of the character of Vladimir Putin. And luck has it that I knew Jude when I wondered who had the potential to find in himself the layers of Putin. I instantly thought of Jude. He read the screenplay, called me immediately to say he loved it, loved the part and and it was really as easy as that. What risks did you see in portraying Putin like this or telling the story of President Putin and modern Russia? Even if it's events that are decay over a decade old nowadays, it still does deal with present day politics in deep ways. My concern was will we be understood that this is not just the story of Vladimir Putin. It's about how politics are changing or transforming or morphing. When I'm dealing with the story of Vladimir Putin, I think I am also dealing with the story of many non-democratic leaders today. I mean, I'm dealing with what is going on in Ukraine, of course, but I am also dealing with how someone like Donald Trump got to power. I mean, you know, I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who watches the film and tries to figure out what we were trying to say. President Putin is actually not the main character in this film. It's actually this fictional advisor Vadim Baranov played by Paul Dano. How did you want to present him? He is very loosely based on a real life character from the start. The only American actor who could deal with that, deal with the complexities of it, deal with the nuances of it was Paul Dano. A lot of the nature of this film is something that we owe to Paul because as dude, he did his homework, but I think he invented a very subtle and very both low key and powerful version of something that is essential, which is the travails of Vadim Baranov. Has the process of making this film made you think differently about Russia and its modern history? What I kind of understood working on the screenplay is more about how the modalities of propaganda have changed and how it happened exactly during that period. It's the rise to power of Vadim Putin that gave substance to postmodern politics and media manipulation and so on and so forth in the environment of Vadim Putin when he was in the early years of his presidency and even before that when he was prime minister. That was director Olivier Assayas talking to me earlier about his new film The Wizard of the Kremlin, which charts the rise of Vadim Putin. It's based on the book of the same name by Giuliano d'Empoli. You're listening to the BBC World Service. This is news up. Well, let's return to our top story on the program today, the war in Sudan entering its fourth year. How are those who've left the country looking on at what is still happening there? Jamal Majub is an award-winning writer of British and Sudanese heritage who grew up in Sudan but who's now based in Amsterdam. He's written a number of novels and a travel memoir, A Line in the River, Khartoum, City of Memory. News Hour first spoke to him at the beginning of the war and when I caught up with him again earlier today, I asked him whether he could have envisaged then Sudan still being in this situation. Well, I did because I didn't really see honestly that there was a kind of way out of it. It wasn't aiming towards any kind of resolution that would be of any use to the country as a whole. It was individual actors and now we can see that neither of them has really managed militarily to prevail. So we're back in the same situation where it's a never-ending war unless something changes in terms of the whatever's happening outside the country somehow. It's the outside actors which seem to have taken an increasingly important role in this. It's no longer simply an internal affair. It's really an international affair I think, looking at it that way. And so it needs initiative to be taken from the outside to get some kind of resolution. It's not, militarily neither side is going to win. I mean it's simply a process of destruction that's going on and that's not good for anybody. What about you Jamal? How have your feelings developed, evolved during this time? It's difficult to say. I'm not a journalist and I'm not an academic so I'm kind of looking at it from the perspective of the novelist or the writer and trying to look at it in terms of what's happened in the past and where Sudan is sort of going. That takes time and I think that I kind of feel that what we're looking at is a situation that's very different from anything that anybody expected. I think there's a certain degree of shock that came three years ago when this happened because I think nobody really expected Sudan to collapse. So quickly it's an established state that has been functioning one way or the other. However pessimistic you want to look at it, it's been functioning and politically Sudan has gone through a lot of changes since independence in 56 but it has somehow managed to maintain some kind of of an equilibrium and that I think was lost three years ago. Then you really descended into this simply a violent confrontation which had to my mind no ideological underpinning. I mean this was really basically about material wealth and about the violence that is really difficult to understand where that came from but which was clearly part of the underlying feelings of inequality in the country and the sense that there's a kind of nihilism to it. It's really like the only way that makes sense is the only logic is a violent one and it's always easy to go to war but it's really difficult to get back out of that situation. You say you're looking in with the perspective of a writer. Are you writing about Sudan now? Yes I am. It's really a question of how do we look at this not now, not in the immediate short term but in the longer term. What will this mean? What are the repercussions of this? Sudan is a country that you know there's a great deal of creativity in 2019 when you had this overthrow of al-Bashir. What happened was what you saw on the streets was really an outpouring of creativity so color literally color. Walls covered with graffiti and paint and music being played and there is this creative side to Sudan which is the one that you don't see in the news headlines. You see the violence you see the guns but there is another side to Sudan which and that is the side that somehow throughout all of this conflict we have to hold on to because at the end of it when the guns fall silent as it were then we are left with asking well what do we have now who are we now and the only answer to that in my opinion comes through creativity and art you know whatever else we have history politics etc there is a framework which establishes what is this country or what does the Sudan actually mean you know that's the question that only art in some way can answer. You've written before about your home city of Khartoum and you're talking about holding on to memories does that impression of Sudan of the capital feel very far away at the moment to you. It feels far away but it also feels very close I mean it hasn't changed it's been destroyed before it's been burned to the ground it's risen up again it is a location that has somehow endured all manner of conflict over centuries and going back you know when I went back and started writing about what had changed since my childhood what I was really interested in was precisely how it had evolved the way in which the city has metamorphosed into something of its own which has elements that I can recognize and elements that have changed and elements and new elements but all of them were somehow belonged to the same entity and I think that city will remain whatever happens for you better or worse a city is never static it's always evolving in some way or another you know so that idea of the idea of Khartoum remains familiar to me you know the place where my family lives where my grandmother used to live all of that somehow there was a trace that remains of that and that's the familiar part of it and somehow you know all of history is the evolution of these elements with new arrivals and new changes and that's what makes a city any city fascinating and your friends and your family members who are still there how are they finding a way through this how are they finding a way to stay hopeful about the future well hopeful is another question but I think people have moved some of the areas in Khartoum North where my father's family lived were badly hit so people have moved away people have moved out of town I mean this is also has been a remarkable period for everybody finding out how to go on with this and what will remain I mean a lot of people their homes were invaded and their you know their things their possessions taken or destroyed there was a lot of wanton destruction and more than the personal side there was also looting at the at the national museum which is is also very worrying because it's this is really that country's heritage which has now to a large extent gone and will not return we're living in a very difficult time and I think that what's been happening in Sudan has kind of been sidelined by what's happened in Gaza what's happening in Syria what's happening now in Iran so there's a lot to occupy the world right now and I think you know as a writer you kind of need to find a way in which to communicate or connect with people connect this to how people see the world that was the British and Sudanese writer Jamal Majoob speaking to me earlier from Amsterdam giving his reflections on three years off brutal civil war in his home country off Sudan and that is it from us here at News Hour today from me Leila Nathu and all of the team at the BBC World Service thanks for being with us