The Sudanese ambassador to the UN urged the international community on Tuesday to pile the pressure on the United Arab Emirates, accusing it of propping up the paramilitaries in Sudan’s devastating war.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a brutal conflict with Sudan’s regular army since April 2023.
The supplier of arms to the RSF “is very well known. Unfortunately, it is the UAE,” said Hassan Hamid, the ambassador of Sudan’s army-aligned government to the United Nations in Geneva.
“Sudan repeatedly calls upon the international community to act today with… public decisive pressure on the United Arab Emirates to cease immediately arming and financing such terrorist militia,” he told reporters.
The war, which has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more, has spread to new areas of Sudan in recent days, sparking fears of an even graver humanitarian catastrophe.
The fall of the key city of El-Fasher gave paramilitaries control over all five state capitals in the vast western Darfur region, raising fears that Sudan would effectively be partitioned along an east-west axis.
Early in the conflict, the army accused the UAE of supporting the RSF with weapons and mercenaries sent via Chad, Libya, Kenya, and Somalia, by land and air.
The UAE has consistently denied any involvement, despite evidence presented in international reports and open-source intelligence investigations based on publicly available data.
“This pressure must not be whispered only behind closed doors. It must be declared publicly and openly, enforced with robust sanctions, and matched by a decisive accountability to the supplier,” said Hamid.
In the aftermath of the RSF’s assault on El-Fasher, reports emerged of mass killings, sexual violence, attacks on aid workers, looting and abductions during the October 26 offensive.
The UN rights office said it had received “horrendous accounts of summary executions, mass killings, rapes, attacks against humanitarian workers, looting, abductions and forced displacement”.
“Unless these military supplies stopped and halted immediately, things will be always a recipe for further deterioration of human rights,” said Hamid.
“That inaction of the international community is being considered by the rebel militia as a green light to continue atrocities and by the main supplier UAE also as a green light to continue supplying… the militia with all arms, weapons, military equipments to the end.”
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© Agence France-Presse
