A hole blasted by the Rapid Support Forces in the Aliaa Specialist Hospital in Omdurman, Sudan, on April 21.IVOR PRICKETT/The New York Times News Service
With the death toll rising dramatically in Sudan’s embattled Darfur region, U.S. President Joe Biden is under pressure to push for a halt in alleged arms shipments by a key regional player, the United Arab Emirates, when he meets the UAE’s leader this week.
Human-rights groups have warned that a genocide is under way in Darfur for the second time in 20 years, fuelled by weapons from the UAE and other countries.
The issue of Sudan “will certainly be on the agenda” when Mr. Biden meets with UAE leader Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Monday, U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on the weekend.
“We are concerned about a number of countries and the steps they are taking to perpetuate rather than resolve the conflict,” Mr. Sullivan said, predicting “intense but sensitive diplomatic conversations” with multiple players in the region.
Persistent reports from many sources, including United Nations experts, have alleged that the UAE – an oil-rich Gulf state with strong interests in Africa – is providing an arsenal of sophisticated weaponry to Sudan’s paramilitary militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been battling Sudan’s military for the past 17 months.
The Sudan conflict has become the world’s worst displacement crisis, with more than 10 million people forced from their homes and 25 million suffering hunger. As many as 150,000 people have been killed in the war, according to independent estimates.
The RSF is now escalating its assault on the strategic Darfur city of El Fasher and could be on the verge of capturing the city, which is likely to trigger a wave of ethnic cleansing and civilian massacres, analysts say.
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International concern is growing. “The EU will not bear witness to another genocide,” European Union foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said in a statement on Sunday.
“Consequences will reach a point of no return for thousands of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire,” he said. “We also call again on those who are fuelling the war, particularly regional and international sponsors, to cease their support in this context.”
A recent UN fact-finding mission documented a litany of war crimes in Sudan and called for an arms embargo to be imposed on the entire Sudanese territory. An earlier UN report had found that the UAE was supplying weapons and money to the RSF.
In a letter on Friday, five members of the U.S. Congress urged Mr. Biden to use his meeting with the UAE’s leader to push for a halt to its support for the RSF.
“We are concerned that the UAE’s support for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan is at odds with efforts to stop the fighting in Sudan,” they said.
A major humanitarian agency, Refugees International, went further. “The RSF’s actions may amount to genocide – directly fuelled by the UAE’s military support,” the agency’s president, Jeremy Konyndyk, said in a statement on Sunday night.
He urged Mr. Biden to use his meeting with the UAE leader “to convey a tough message” and publicly condemn UAE support for the paramilitary force.
El Fasher is the last city in Darfur that the RSF does not control. The UN has documented massacres of thousands of civilians in other cities that the paramilitary force has captured since the war began.
Satellite images show a rising number of fresh graves in El Fasher, an exodus of civilians on foot from the city, and scores of damaged buildings and bomb craters from air strikes and shelling, according to a report on Friday by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab. Famine has already been officially declared at a refugee camp where 500,000 people live.
The UN’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, said the situation in El Fasher has become “harrowing,” with intense door-to-door combat that has created “existential dread” among the civilian population.
“The recent escalation of hostilities has unleashed a maelstrom of violence that threatens to consume everything in its path,” she said on Friday.
Global controversy about UAE’s role in Sudan has intensified in recent months, symbolized by U.S. rapper Macklemore, who cancelled an October show in the country’s biggest city, Dubai. “Until the UAE stops arming and funding the RSF, I will not perform there,” he said in a post on Instagram, describing the Sudan war as “horrific.”
The UAE government has denied it is funnelling weapons to the RSF. But the allegations gained further momentum on the weekend when The New York Times reported that the UAE was secretly deploying Chinese-made drones in eastern Chad to assist the RSF in its military offensive in Darfur.
That offensive has inflicted huge suffering as the RSF moves deeper into El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. On Saturday, at least 14 people were killed by RSF shelling in the city, the Sudan Tribune reported.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres appealed to the RSF to halt its assault.
“It is unconscionable that the warring parties have repeatedly ignored calls for a cessation of hostilities,” he said in a statement issued on Saturday by his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric.