See also CAAT’s statement: Stop arming the UAE! Stop the Sudanese genocide!
In the past few days, news of horrific atrocities has been coming out of the city of Al-Fasher in the Sudanese region of Northern Darfur, following its fall to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. The RSF, which emerged from the pro-government Janjaweed militias that perpetrated a genocide in Darfur in 2003-04, have been engaged in a civil war against Sudan’s military dictatorship since 2023. They had been maintaining a brutal siege of Al-Fasher for nearly two years.
The Sudanese military, then allied with the RSF, seized power in a coup in 2021, ending a fragile transition to democracy, but they fell out in 2023 in a power struggle between Sudan’s military ruler, General Abdul Fatah al-Burhan, and the RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. While both sides have committed atrocities, the RSF has engaged in such extreme brutality as to achieve the remarkable feat of making the ruling junta look like the lesser evil. They have perpetrated massacres and ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of western Sudan. A report by the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in April 2024 went further, finding that the RSF was committing genocide against the Masalit non-Arab people of western Darfur. The RSF have also used starvation as a weapon of war in Darfur, leading to a declaration of famine in August 2024 in the Zamzam displaced persons camp near Al-Fasher. The UN has described the situation in Sudan as the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe and “most extreme hunger crisis”– worse even in Gaza in terms of the absolute number of people affected, if not in the sheer intensity of slaughter and destruction in relation to the population.
This latest horrific news coincides with the revelation that documents seen by the UN show that UK military equipment exported to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been found in the hands of the RSF, The equipment includes military training equipment produced by Militec in Mid Glamorgan, and engines for UAE-produced Nimr armoured vehicles, produced by the UK subsidiary of US company Cummins Inc. There has been overwhelming evidence over the past two years of UAE arms supplies to the RSF, but this is the first time UK equipment has been found in Sudan via the UAE.
The role of the UAE
As early as January 2024, Middle East Eye reported on a complex network of supply chains used by the UAE to conduct arms supplies to the RSF, via Libya, Chad, and Uganda. This included a wide range of weapons and ammunition, including surface to air missiles. In May this year, there were further reports of the UAE supplying Chinese drones to the RSF. Meanwhile, in July 2024, Amnesty International produced a detailed report of recently-made arms from the UAE, Russia, Turkey, China, and others to the two sides, including UAE-made Nimr armoured vehicles. UAE-supplied equipment to the RSF however may have come from various other countries, including as noted China and the UK. Further evidence of UAE involvement emerged in July 2024 with the discovery of the passports of four UAE nationals – possibly intelligence agents – in the wreckage of a vehicle in Omdurman, following its recapture from the RSF by the Sudanese military. The allegation came in documents passed to the UN, which also alleged that the UAE had supplied the RSF with drones capable of dropping powerful thermobaric bombs. A Sudanese analyst described the discovery of the passports, as well as details of arms captured from the RSF and shown to the UN, as a “smoking gun” on UAE involvement, when combined with previous evidence.
According to Middle East Eye, Hemedti’s commercial empire is based in Dubai, and gold from RSF-controlled mines in Sudan is traded in the UAE. The UAE used RSF fighters as mercenaries in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere, and generally have extensive commercial and geopolitical interests in Sudan, for which they see the RSF and Hemedti as their preferred partners. Many analysts believe the RSF would have been unable to maintain their war for so long without UAE financial and logistical support, and arms supplies.
Western complicity
Western countries do not directly arm either party in Sudan, and the US, the EU, and the UK all have arms embargoes on the country. (Shockingly, there is no UN arms embargo on Sudan. There has been a partial embargo on arms transfers to Sudan being used in Darfur, which is of course impossible to enforce once arms are actually transferred.) However, this does not excuse western countries and other powers from complicity in the genocide, even before the recent discovery of UK equipment.
Failure of export controls
The fact that UK military equipment supplied to the UAE could be transferred to the RSF represents at the very least a shocking failure in UK export controls. One of the criteria under which the government assesses export licence applications, criterion 7, is the risk of diversion of the equipment to an unauthorised end-user; and indeed, it is clearly recognised that the UAE poses a risk on this count. Of 22 Single Individual export or trade control licences for the UAE that were refused between 2015-2024, 21 were refused under criterion 7, and with 18 of these this was the only grounds for refusal. [1] In other words, the UAE is a known diversion risk, and with their involvement in the war in Sudan – not to mention Libya, Yemen and elsewhere – this ought to be a flashing red light for all exports to the country. But since the UK carries out no end-user monitoring to track what happens to military equipment after it is exported, it is inevitable that, while some licences may be refused based on the risk assessment, there will be other cases that are missed. Furthermore, it seems that the armoured vehicles engines were exported without even the need for an export licence, as they can also be used for civilian vehicles. Additional military end-use controls on such “civilian” equipment are only applied when the destination is a country under a UK arms embargo.
Impunity for the UAE
But the issue goes far beyond a technical failure of export control assessments, and far beyond the UK. Despite the critical role of the UAE in enabling the RSF’s genocidal campaign, there have been no efforts to pressure the UAE or hold it to account, and massive US and French arms supplies to the Gulf dictatorship continue unabated, as well as smaller but significant exports from the UK.
The US has been the UAE’s main arms supplier over the years, providing 55% of deliveries of major conventional weapons according to SIPRI, followed by France at 14%. France may be overtaking the US in future however, with orders from the UAE of Rafale combat aircraft and A-330 MRTT transport/tanker aircraft. But the UAE is an eclectic buyer, having imported arms also from Turkey (drones), Sweden (radar systems), South Africa, Canada, South Korea, Netherlands, Russia, Israel, China, Germany, Australia, Spain, the UK, Singapore, Finland, “unknown suppliers”, Serbia, and even New Zealand over the past decade. The UAE has also been developing its own domestic arms industry, often with the help of technology transfer from arms suppliers, and the state-owned EDGE Group has been in the SIPRI Top 100 arms companies worldwide for several years now.
UK arms sales and links to UAE
The UK is a relatively minor supplier to UAE, but its arms sales are nonetheless far from trivial. There have been £825m worth of single export licences issued for arms to UAE between 2020-2024, the 9th largest recipient over the period, in addition to open licences. The UK has recently delivered Seaspray Maritime Patrol Aircraft radars, for Swedish GlobalEye Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft, as well as engines and air-refuelling systems for the French transport/tanker aircraft, with deliveries ongoing, and has orders for Meteor air-to-air missiles for the French Rafales.
The UAE is of course not only a lucrative arms customer for the west (and others), but a source of vast investment possibilities through its huge oil wealth; The UK in particular, highly dependent on the finance industry, does not want to do anything to disrupt the flow of Gulf petrodollars through its stock market, banks, and other financial institutions.
All of this may help explain the utter failure of the UAE’s western allies to hold it to account for its enabling of the genocide in Sudan (not to mention its malign role in numerous other conflicts across the region and beyond, including Yemen and Libya); no restrictions on arms sales, no sanctions, not even any public condemnation. The UK, which acts as the “penholder” for Sudan on the UN Security Council, has indeed been accused of shielding the UAE from criticism over its role.
Halting arms supplies to UAE ought to be an immediate, minimum first step, but far greater political, economic, and diplomatic efforts need to be brought to bear by major powers in general to end the horrific conflict in Sudan. The UAE, and other external powers supporting one or other side in the civil war, need to be pressured into ending arms supplies. Even so, there is no guarantee that this would bring a swift end to the war – though it would certainly greatly reduce the warring parties’ ability to fight. Building real peace would require not just negotiating a halt to active fighting by the various armed actors, but must involve civil society and women’s voices being brought to the table.
But first, the US, the UK, and other major powers must start paying urgent attention to ending the war, and in particular putting serious pressure on the UAE to end its support for the RSF’s genocidal campaign. Ending arms sales to the UAE would be a good start.
[1] There were also numerous open licences rejected for the UAE, but in this case no criteria are given for the rejection, and companies may still apply for single, fixed-value export licences for some or all of the equipment and destinations refused.
