Unseen horrors

WHEN yet another Sudanese civil war erupted in April 2023, the then year-old Russian invasion of Ukraine continued to hog the attention of the so-called international community. Now, as Israel supplements its bombardment of Beirut with ground incursions into Lebanon almost a year after launching an open-ended genocidal assault on Gaza, the intensifying catastrophe in Sudan is still struggling to attract anything more than cursory concern and the usual platitudes.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has a possible explanation. “I think race is in the play here. … We see the pattern now,” he told the BBC last month, after describing the “destruction, displacement, diseases everywhere, and now famine” that he witnessed during a visit to Sudan.
The violent tussle for power between rival military forces has claimed at least 20,000 lives, mostly among civilians; up to 12 million people have been displaced from their homes; there is mass starvation bordering on famine as the cultivation of food crops has dwindled and the conflict interferes with aid delivery. On top of everything, there are appalling indications of the 2003 genocide in Darfur being resumed by the same perpetrators: the Janjaweed militia, which evolved into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) now competing for power with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
The RSF and the SAF jointly carried out the 2021 coup that crushed tentative hopes of a transition to some kind of democracy after a popular uprising in 2019 led to the end of Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year dictatorship. The duumvirate formed by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF chief better known as Hemedti, and the SAF’s General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan crumbled when the latter insisted on a relatively rapid integration of the RSF into the regular armed forces. Sudanese civilians have paid the price, as evidenced last week when the SAF embarked on a fresh effort to retake Khartoum.
Both sides have justifiably been accused of atrocities, although the RSF and its associates appear to be well ahead of the SAF in perpetrating sexual violence. Systematic rape as a weapon of war was a prominent part of the Janjaweed modus operandi, and it remains a favourite form of torture for the RSF, alongside arbitrary executions of young males, especially in its vicious campaign against non-Arab ethnic groups.
At the UN General Assembly last month, Burhan, invited as Sudan’s de facto head of government despite the limits of his authority, appealed for international initiatives to stop the flow of weapons to the RSF in order to end the war (and, although he didn’t say it out loud, consolidate his power). His remarks were widely interpreted as a salvo aimed primarily at the UAE, which, notwithstanding denials from Abu Dhabi, has been outed as the RSF’s biggest arms supplier, its largesse ranging from hi-tech Chinese drones to Serbian munitions.
A New York Times investigative report co-authored by Declan Walsh revealed last month how an Emirates Red Crescent hospital in Chad, near the Sudanese border, set up ostensibly to aid refugees from Sudan, mainly treats injured RSF combatants, and is situated next to drone hangars and a munitions storage facility. The drones help to stave off threats to arms delivery convoys. Back in July, a Guardian report revealed that Emirati passports had been found in a part of Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, after it was retaken by the SAF from the RSF, indicating that the UAE may be “covertly putting boots on the ground”. The discovery was described by analysts as “a smoking gun” that called into question Abu Dhabi’s denials about its alleged favouritism in the Sudanese conflict.
The UAE president stuck with his narrative during his meeting with Joe Biden last week, as the US president hailed his country as a “major defence partner” — an accolade hitherto reserved for India — and refused to call out the controversial role of a key Gulf ally that is a reliable customer for the US military industrial complex. The UAE leadership, seen as indebted to the RSF for its nation’s misadventure in Yemen, may also be guided by Israel’s penchant for disregarding the occasional verbal diatribes from Washington, as long as the military and intelligence supply chains it relies on remain intact. And they do.
Sudan is coveted for its vast gold reserves and extended Red Sea coastline, and the UAE is not the only pebble on the beach. The Wagner Group was once allied with the RSF, but Russia now backs Burhan, reports suggest, alongside the likes of Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and even Ukraine — not to mention Iran. Russia and China, alongside the US and its European allies, are all part of the 21st-century scramble for Africa. But the UAE might possibly have trumped them all.
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Published in Dawn, October 2nd, 2024