The terrible war in Sudan and the negative role of the United Arab Emirates

Source: The Guardian (headline: We ignore Sudan at our peril. This campaign of mass murder and rape will have global consequences)
Translation: Telegrafi.com
The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, is approaching its second year. No one expects war or gets used to it, but it's shocking that the most common thought I hear among Sudanese people – and even some outside observers – is that they still can't believe it's happening.
Since the devastating clash between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces [RSF] – a militia formerly partnered with the ruling army – the speed with which the country has disintegrated and the overlapping crises the war has spawned are difficult to to be understood. Millions of people have been displaced, internally and externally. Famine is affecting hundreds of thousands. Sexual violence is occurring on an "extraordinary" scale, according to the United Nations. In areas where SAF soldiers are said to be raping women and girls, some victims have taken their own lives, while potential victims are considering this act as a preventive measure. In one part of Gezira state, a young woman told me that when they heard that the IDF was approaching, she and her female relatives made a suicide pact.
The SDF originated in the west of the country, among the formalized remnants of an Arab militia that in the early 2000s, in cooperation with the government, brutally suppressed a rebellion by marginalized African tribes. The group is now repeating the ethnic war that the international criminal court defined as genocide at the time: targeting victims based on their ethnic profile, killing thousands of non-Arab communities, burning their infrastructure and displacing hundreds of thousands of survivors. towards Chad, to take their lands and prevent their return.
For the crimes committed in recent months, the leader of the FSM, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, has been sanctioned by the United States. The United States has also sanctioned FSM-affiliated companies in the United Arab Emirates [UAE] – for supplying the FSM with weapons – and has officially declared genocide. These measures are welcome and have broad implications, both in acknowledging the crimes being committed and in limiting the FSM’s ability to clean up its image and present itself as a credible political actor. But as such, they are symptomatic of a years-long approach to Sudan by foreign powers – one that gestures but does not commit meaningfully to saving lives. The current timing, on the part of an outgoing US administration that had months to make these obvious decisions, again suggests a shift of responsibility to the incoming Trump administration, instead of creating practical plans and pressures on the warring parties.
The war, in a poor country like Sudan, cannot continue with such intensity only on the basis of weapons and finances of internal actors. Wars in such countries continue because foreigners finance them, while others pretend not to see. The EBA is the biggest factor in the Sudan war. The Gulf state has a pattern of playing the role of "kingmaker" in Africa's wars, taking risks so that, if its chosen partner triumphs, the Emirates gain access to vast resources and geopolitical power.
To this end, the EBA is providing the FSA with powerful weapons and drones, and even medical aid for their fighters. This country has also become the main recipient of the "blood gold" that is smuggled by both the Army and the SFs in exchange for weapons and money. The EBA practically guarantees funding for the continuation of the conflict, taking advantage of the low rates it pays for a commodity whose price has reached record levels. Meanwhile, the most profitable asset of the Sudanese people is extracted from the ground beneath their feet and transported over their heads to the Middle East, then traded for the weapons that fall on them as they starve.
Despite its extensive role in the war, the UAE has been publicly supported by the current US administration, and only after sustained media attention, pressure from Sudanese activists, and interest in the Senate, did it issue a statement that it was no longer supplying weapons to the FSM. This statement came accompanied by a US assertion that the UAE “has been a humanitarian contributor throughout the war.” Sanctioning the group’s leader, rather than its sponsor, is likely to have little effect in forcing the UAE to end its relationship with the FSM, in which it has already invested heavily and which has so far suffered no consequences or punishment.
While these tenuous rituals of credible denial continue, Sudan's capital is split in two, with different areas under the control of the Army and the FSA. Port Sudan, a city on the Red Sea, has become the base of the remaining military authority that still has the power to issue visas, host foreign missions and NGOs, and administer flights and goods into the country. Otherwise, over the vast expanse of the country, the Sudan has practically collapsed into anarchy and fragmented feudal possessions. The situation will only get worse as neither side has the power to defeat the other as they are backed by outside patrons which in the case of the Army include Egypt and Turkey.
This conflict, which is already challenging, is taking place against a global backdrop of overlapping crises. Blood fatigue, gridlock and long wars from Europe to the Middle East are making the conflict in Sudan just another disaster, the sharp edges of which are softened by the fact that death, starvation and impunity have become the norm. Images and narratives of the most extreme transgressions begin to lose their effect as we reach a point of saturation with suffering. The world is bracing for another Trump administration as tech lords distort global information networks, making it even harder for stories about the world's worst humanitarian crisis to emerge and break through the chaos of conspiracy theories and uncontrolled propaganda. The political map of the Arab world is being redrawn, while Sudan is subject to the competing aspirations of the region's most ambitious players.
But as remote as it may seem from some of the perennial crises that consume global attention, Sudan's collapse cannot be isolated from the rest of the world. It is one of the largest countries in Africa, bordering on other countries that, like Egypt, have to receive large numbers of refugees, or, like Chad, are exposed to the dangers of large flows of weapons and mercenaries in borders. There is already a kind of surrender to the fact that Sudan is heading towards being "another Somalia" or "another Libya". This does not mean that for the next decade or so, the warring parties will exhaust each other in an isolated conflict – it means that the country will become a breeding ground for armed groups and adventurers, increasing geopolitical risks. and pumping weapons into a lawless land located at the crossroads of the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa.
As the months pass and as the war drags on, the fear is that Sudan is simply being forgotten, the colossal crimes committed against its people reduced to nothing more than background noise, with only a few instances of exoneration or rebuke of warring forces by global powers. . But, the price will be very high; so high, not just for the Sudanese, but for a world that cannot afford another conflict to simply continue, involving more foreign parties and causing an ever-deepening pool of death, displacement and destruction that will be impossible to control. /Telegraph/
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