[SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: Getting into Sudan
was really difficult. We had to fly to London and wait
at the Sudanese embassy. Our contact in Sudan had talked
to the ambassador. And so the ambassador had talked
to some minister that our contact's father
was friends with. So we're waiting. And I'm like, there's no way
this is going to happen. And at the 11th hour,
we got the visa. They said OK, got on a
plane, and then flew from there to Khartoum. And the minute you get off the
plane, you're like, what's happening here? Because everyone's
in the jalabiya. Everyone's got turbans. There's no foreign
people there. There's no white people there. It's a very deserty airport,
very empty, very hot, at least in the Sahara. Lots of security, lots
of different-- There's the police. There's the army. There's the secret police. There's this. There's that. We talked to our fixer. And she said, oh by the way,
you might get all of your camera gear confiscated
and thrown in jail. But don't worry, I'll
get you out. So we were terrified the minute
we got there that we were going to get everything
taken away from us. But when we went through, it
was 4:00 in the morning. So they were just
tired and bored. So they just said, OK,
well, go through. Then they never checked our
bags, which was fantastic. We've been told that we should
get some bilaja-- bilajabiya? FEMALE SPEAKER: Jalabiya. SHANE SMITH: Jalabiya. So that we fit in a
little bit more. We don't cause so much
consternation. The minute we get out of the car
here, we're the focus of a lot of attention because
they don't get a lot of foreigners here. They're suspicious
of foreigners. My pink Irish face
is not going to do much in a jalabiya. But we're going to
give it a shot. And we're going to check
out the market. JAMIE-JAMES MEDINA: It's
not as tight as I thought it would be. SHANE SMITH: Am I fitting in? All of a sudden, the Sudanese
thought that was so funny, to see Americans dressed
up like them, that they were a lot nicer. When we had to get the press
credentials, we met the Secretary General of the
Ministry of Information. And he was dressed in the
exact same tribal garb. I just grabbed some stuff. But we had dressed in the
exact same tribal garb. So he loved me and
said, oh great. You should go to my friend
the sheikh's place to see a madrasa. The madrasa is a religious
school where you just learn the Koran. Pakistani madrasas were where
the Taliban came out of, which were a lot of terrorists
come out of. And they are an ideological
training ground for terrorists, et cetera,
et cetera. So Sudan, which is incredibly
closed towards Western media, and then a Sudanese madrasa
of children who have been orphaned by the Darfur conflict
is a huge coup. [SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: A lot of the kids
from Darfur come here, and they get put up by the sheikh. And they just learn the Koran. That's it. The sheikh Is a rich guy,
but he's also a religious leader, right. Well, these kids' parents
have been slaughtered. He brings them and he feeds them
and clothes them, if they learn the Koran. Just the Koran. There's no geography. There's no mathematics. There's no foreign language. There's no nothing. [SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: So as you're
walking through there, you really get a chill, because
you realize the world has totally polarized. And there is Muslim world,
non-Muslim world, the rich world, the poor world. And as you walk through there,
and you see that division so clearly defined, it gives
you a shiver. And you say, wow. When I walked out of there,
I was blown away. I got back into the car. And there were these thousands
of kids still burned into my head as they were going back
and forth, back and forth. And a lot of times they
were looking at us. And they are looking
at us with hatred. And they're eight years old. [SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: As heavy as the
madrasa was, we went the next day to see the alternative. And it was even worse. We're here with the Lost Boys
who have been displaced by the war in the South
and in Darfur. And they come here. They live in a market
just over here. And a lot of them are addicted
to solvents. But they're here
playing soccer. And we're going to see
them do some dancing. BARBARA GOULDSBURY: We have a
drop-in center, a learning center, a vocational school, and
a residential center here. SHANE SMITH: And what are they
set up to do exactly? BARBARA GOULDSBURY: The learning
center is set up to take kids off the street who
have had no education or little education to get them up
to an age and a stage where they can be reentered into the
regular school system. SHANE SMITH: And most of these
kids are solvent addicts? BARBARA GOULDSBURY: The older
boys that you see around here are living on the streets and
the market, and they are addicted to solvent
abuse, yes. SHANE SMITH: How do they live? How do they get food? BARBARA GOULDSBURY: They beg. They steal. They come here daily for food. They get a regular meal here. And apart from that, they
just eat what they can get from the market. SHANE SMITH: Right. And they live here as
well, some of them? BARBARA GOULDSBURY:
Some of them do. 33 of them do. But the older boys that you see
[INAUDIBLE], they live in the market. SHANE SMITH: OK. MALE SPEAKERS:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] SHANE SMITH: All these kids,
they live in the market. They all live on the streets. How you doing? You all right? OK. So as we're hanging out and
watching them do their dancing and stuff, we realize that all
these little boys are totally addicted to sniffing glue. And do you sniff glue as well? MALE SPEAKER 1:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] RAZAN AHMED: He said
he's doing it now. SHANE SMITH: Now. Yeah. RAZAN AHMED: That I do it
because it balances my head. It makes me feel more calm. SHANE SMITH: And what do you
think about here saying you shouldn't do glue? RAZAN AHMED:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] MALE SPEAKER 1:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] RAZAN AHMED: He said he knows
he shouldn't smoke it. And he knows that what Barbara's
saying is right. But he gets worried and he
gets stressed out when he doesn't do it. And he's relaxed. SHANE SMITH: What is
he worried about? RAZAN AHMED:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] MALE SPEAKER 1:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] RAZAN AHMED: He said it's
nothing really [INAUDIBLE]. It's nothing really something
in his life that's bothering him. It's more to do with-- He feels like it's
a physical thing. He can't breathe properly. He doesn't sleep well. If he goes a day without
sniffing, he starts shaking. SHANE SMITH: Does he know
that he's addicted? RAZAN AHMED:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] MALE SPEAKER 1:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] RAZAN AHMED: He says
he's fully aware. And he knows he's never
going to leave it. SHANE SMITH: Is he
high right now? RAZAN AHMED:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] MALE SPEAKER 1:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] RAZAN AHMED: He said, yeah
I just had some. The rest is outside. SHANE SMITH: He just coughed
glue into my face, this guy here. He said he's not on glue. RAZAN AHMED:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] SHANE SMITH: He just coughed a
whole model airplane on me. RAZAN AHMED:
[SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] BOY: [SPEAKING SUDANESE ARABIC] RAZAN AHMED: He's saying, no. No, no, no. It's not me. I'm not. And everyone in the background
is saying, yeah you are. SHANE SMITH: Yeah, well
I could smell it. He's coughing. RAZAN AHMED: He knows, because
everyone's laughing at him. He's just trying to deny it. SHANE SMITH: When you see kids,
it's always the heaviest part, because they've
done nothing. And whatever it is, land, or
greed, or any kind of-- it's usually money. And you see what the
ramifications are, which are four-year-old boys living
in the street. We'd only been in Sudan a few
days, and we'd already seen hundreds of displaced people,
and a lot of orphans, and the Lost Boys addicted to glue. And we wanted to go out and talk
to people and see what they thought about what
was happening, what was causing this. [SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: We're here at
a displaced persons camp. 2 million people have been
displaced from the war on Darfur, but also another
4 million from the war in the South. They come to places like this
in the middle of the desert. A lot of the houses are made
from wattle and daub, from manure, from hay, whatever
they can find. They estimate around 300,000
people live here. And we're going to tour around
and talk to people from the South and from Darfur about
what they've done. It's just so makeshift. It's like Star Wars. Pretty heavy to be here. I was thinking about that last
night, how North America and Europe, you get so used to
just booze, and food, and coke, and parties,
supermodels. How you doing brother? And here it's just
water, food. You're afraid to touch anything
because you're worried of getting diseases. Hi. Hi. [SINGING SUDANESE SONG] SHANE SMITH: We hear in America
that the conflict in Darfur is racial in nature,
Arab on black. And when we were in the IDP
camp, there were Arabs, there were blacks. There was actually 40 or 50
different tribes that all co-exist and that
all get along. OLGA EUNICE ODERA: We
have so far about 56 tribes living here. SHANE SMITH: 56. OLGA EUNICE ODERA: And they
are from the 25 states. SHANE SMITH: And so we started
having some questions of, why is this actually happening
in Darfur? What's really happening? So we started asking
the people if they had any answers. Some people say it's racial. Some people say it's economic. Some people say it's
political. People in the South
say one thing. People in Khartoum say
another thing. And I'm just trying to find out
what the general consensus of why it's happening is. SHANE SMITH: We started hearing
a lot of rumors about finding oil in Darfur. So we went into the camp to meet
some people from Darfur and hear what their
stories were. We're going to our
friend's house. He's from Darfur. He was just telling us that the
Janjaweed said, we want you to go because
you're black. But they were the same color. And even in Khartoum the
Arabs are black. So he's saying, he's
not stupid. He understands that they're
just telling him that. But they want him to go for
another reason because they want the land. SHANE SMITH: He had members of
his family, young babies, thrown into fire. His father was killed. His family was killed. And he was kicked
out of his land. And what we were just talking
about after that was in the South, we saw that the informal
militias started coming when Chevron discovered
oil, kicking people off their land, starting a 20
year civil war. And now what's happened is they
just found oil in Darfur. And a lot of people say
that the problem in Darfur is racial. But when we talked to a lot
of people, they say we found oil in Darfur. And then it became much more
serious of a problem. They want the land. They want the land for cattle. They want the land for oil. This is what's happening. And it already happened
in the South. Everybody here knows it. But no one is reporting on
that for some reason. So after hearing about finding
oil in Darfur and hearing that it was so similar to what had
already happened down South, we decided to go to the Unity
State where they first found oil and check out what
had happened there. [SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: I don't even know
what I'm allowed to say. That's kind of a funny
thing, because it was all pretty weird. Jamie-James just
knew this girl. And we went there. And she just organized
everything. We've been on our
own UN plane. I probably shouldn't say that. We're getting on a helicopter. We're going out to Bentiu,
which is one of the Unity States. They have oil. And this is where the
whole conflict started because of oil. We got to get on right now. They're freaking out. But it's all about oil. Oil started everything. Ben Anderson had told us, he
goes, oh yeah, you'll see a Russian helicopter. And they crash all the time
because they're really old. The Russians just give really
old helicopters. Sure enough, we got on this
Russian helicopter. And it's really old and
it's shaking around. And we were going to Bentiu. Bentiu is in southern Sudan. And we get to this camp
in the middle of nowhere, and we land. And we're walking up, and we
just see these really super tall Africans, like you would
see on a National Geographic thing, looking in
the barbed wire. And it's just a little camp. It's like MASH 4077 just
plopped down in the middle of Africa. We're in the middle
of nowhere. JAMIE-JAMES MEDINA:
Literally nowhere. SHANE SMITH: This is where
it all started, were the oil was found. That's where the first well--
it's called the unity well-- was sunk. And it was sunk by Chevron. SHANE SMITH: So the Americans
left during the war, and then the Chinese came back? CHARLES: Yes. SHANE SMITH: They
found oil there. Then paramilitary groups
just started kicking everybody off the land. They took the oil. It used to be Chevron. Now America's in disfavor. So now it's all going
to Chinese and Malaysian companies. So we're standing here
in front of one of the unity wells. A lot of people think in America
that the war here is racial, between the Arab
population from the North and the animist population
in the South. But the war started with the
finding the oil here. Is that true? SHANE SMITH: They
take the oil. SHANE SMITH: And they started
fighting to get-- SHANE SMITH: '82, '83. We have to hurry. And we have to get out and in
very quickly, because the oil security is very tight. They don't want us shooting. They don't want anybody
to know. So we have to jump in, jump
out, jump in, jump out. And no one can see us, otherwise
we'd get in a lot of trouble and go to jail. SHANE SMITH: Charles
was terrified. If they catch you, that's it. So we get out of the
car, shoot it. This is the unity well. First thing, Chevron, in, out. When we have more time, we
went to the villages. And that's where it was really
sad, because you walk and there's just garbage
everywhere. We're here in Bentiu, which is
the capital of the Unity State, which is the richest oil
concentration in Sudan. But as you can see, a lot of the
oil money, most of it goes north or to China. But very little of it
is coming here for infrastructure, for
water, for roads. We're just checking it out with
our friend Charles who is explaining to us the political
situation of what's happening. SHANE SMITH: So most of the oil
in all of Sudan is from the Unity State, but
it looks very poor. SHANE SMITH: So where does all
the money from the oil go? SHANE SMITH: They don't
have water. There's a huge malaria
epidemic. Anybody get any fish? So the kids all come fish
in polluted water. There's a lot of water-borne
diseases. They use popcorn, and they
have a little string. They try to get fish
out of here. The men get water
right from here. And then they just bring it with
a donkey to town and sell it untreated, which of course
leads to a lot of disease. And you're like, hold on. You have a ton of oil. Shouldn't you have money? All the money goes to China,
Malaysia, and Khartoum. They're supposed to get 2%. But they don't have auditing. So it's 2% of what? SHANE SMITH: So they don't
get any money. And it's unbelievable poverty. But right next to oil, right
next to these wells. And they won't even hire them
to work in the camps. They only bring in Chinese
and Malaysian workers. So we're just in the village,
and they don't have water. So they get just water untreated
from the river and they sell it to the villagers,
which makes everybody very sick. But even though right down the
street there's a brand new petrol station for
all the trucks. The only roads are built for
the trucks to come get the petrol, which just goes north. And you see, oh, they
found the oil. Paramilitary groups come in,
kill everybody, get them off the land, take the oil. Now, OK, we've got the oil. Now then people can come back. We don't care. It's ours. Oh, find the oil in Darfur. Send in the paramilitary groups,
kill everybody off, take the oil. They've been doing
it for 20 years. [SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: We were driving
out to the pyramids. And as we were driving out,
there was a huge Chinese refinery in the middle
of the desert. Khartoum really doesn't want
you to know about oil. Because what happened was in the
South, Chevron found oil. Right after that, paramilitary
groups came into the South and started just exterminating
everybody. Why? Because they wanted the oil. So there's a huge civil war. Four million people
are killed. All the oil is going
to Khartoum. So the petrol profits are
going to Khartoum. And then they're
buying weapons. Why are they buying weapons? Because they found
oil in Darfur. But this is what starts and
finishes the whole problem in Darfur, the whole problem
in southern Sudan. It's all about the oil. And this is where they
refine it right here. We're shooting literally for two
minutes in the middle of the Sahara. There's nothing near us. We're shooting this refinery. I'm saying, OK it's
all about oil. The war's about oil. Bang. Out of nowhere, this dude comes
screaming up, grabs the camera right away, is about to
take us into jail, got a gun. Thank God we had a Ministry
of Information guy to say, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. He took the camera back
from the guy. As they were arguing, we went
back into the truck and then we just got out of there. RAZAN AHMED: Most of the time,
they break your camera first and then they let you explain. Other times, they don't just
break your camera, they break your bones. They beat you up. We could've easily
gone to jail. We were very, very lucky. SHANE SMITH: When we finally got
to the pyramids, I was so happy that I was giddy. I was giggling. I couldn't stop laughing. I was nearly in tears
that we weren't rotting in a pit somewhere. Because when they arrest you
in Sudan, you go to jail. And you go to jail for life,
no trial, no nothing. We had to drive four hours
through the Sahara to get to these pyramids and
nobody's here. Surprise, surprise. In Sudan, you're not allowed to
travel outside of Khartoum. No one's been here for months. So there's just us
and a camel guy. Yes, hello. MALE SPEAKER 2: Hello. SHANE SMITH: How are you? [ARABIC]. These are the oldest pyramids
in the world apparently. Hold on, let me start again. It's really hard to
stay on up here. But these pyramids are older
than the pyramids in Egypt. They're Nubian pyramids. And it shows the state of
affairs of tourism in Egypt versus tourism in Sudan. Because the pyramids in Egypt,
it's basically Disneyland. And here, as you can see,
there's absolutely nobody. [SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: We've been in Sudan
for about a week now. And we've been afraid the whole
time about police, or getting caught, or getting
our cameras smashed. We couldn't really
eat anything. Water was hard to get,
clean water. We didn't sleep. Our doctors had warned us of
worms that fly out of the sand into your eye. We were worried about malaria. We couldn't get boners because
of our malaria pills. We were just getting at
the end of our rope. And we're like, wait a minute. We haven't even gotten close
to Darfur yet, where it was really dangerous. So we're off to Darfur. [SUDANESE MUSIC PLAYING] SHANE SMITH: Flying into Al
Fashir, which is the political capital of Darfur, you see the
effects of the conflict everywhere. First of all, we weren't even
allowed into Darfur. They had made it illegal for any
foreign press to go there. The airport was as far as
the UN could take us. In fact, a National Geographic
journalist and his crew had just been thrown in jail days
before for sneaking into Darfur through Chad. When we arrived in Al Fashir
proper, we weren't allowed to shoot any footage. Because it was not only illegal
to be there, but the town was filled with Janjaweed,
Sudanese armed forces, and SLA. The SLA are the rebel militia
headed by Minni Minnawi, who we had just snuck into
Darfur to interview. We're here in the headquarters
of the SLF slash M to meet Minna Minnawi, who is
now the fourth most powerful man in Sudan. He was the main guy fighting
Janjaweed. And the government has made a
peace agreement with him. Minnawi, because he fought the
Janjaweed, is a hero to some. But others, like Amnesty
International, accuse him of raping and killing civilians
as recently as last July. So as I was rushed in to
do the interview, I sat across from him. I looked into his face. And it was totally,
totally fucked up. And what do you think-- I know that Al Jazeera reported
that they found oil in Darfur, which is
why there's a lot of these problems. Because in the South, in the
Unity State, they found oil. And then paramilitary groups
came to clear people out. And now maybe they found oil
in Darfur, and paramilitary groups like the Janjaweed
are clearing people out. Do you know anything
about that? SHANE SMITH: I don't have
a satellite myself. And now that you're part of
the government, do you see that helping the problem in
Darfur, political problem? SHANE SMITH: I went out back to
where Minnawi's troops were singing SLA songs and realized
that it was militia men just like these who were responsible
for the Lost Boys, for the refugees in the IDP
camps, for taking Rasheed's two-month-old brother and
throwing him into a fire. And from what I've learned in
Southern Sudan and seen in Al Fashir, it looked to me like
this conflict is going to continue as long as it is
profitable to do so.
they look like str8 up HOOD n*ggas at the end!!