A displaced boy from Al Fasher arrives at a camp in Al-Dabba, Sudan, on Wednesday.El Tayeb Siddig/Reuters
It has been less than a month since one of this century’s most horrific mass slaughters began: A systematic, organized brutalization and murder of a population of uninvolved civilians on no basis other than their presence. Its methods and results resemble the mechanized mass killing that eight decades ago gave us the word “genocide” – the very word shouted boastfully by the killers this month as they made videos of the piles of corpses resulting from their carnage.
It is estimated that more than 10,000 people in the Sudanese city of El Fasher, half of them children, have been pulled from their homes and workplaces in door-to-door raids, separated from their families, lined up on the streets or penned into enclosures, raped, tortured and executed. The 460 staff and patients inside a maternity hospital were casually exterminated. The killing was so intense at the end of October that piles of bodies, mass graves and pools of blood on residential streets were visible from space. It is not clear that it has ended; the killing is known to have continued westward, as soldiers have hunted down the estimated 100,000 people who fled.
There are two important facts about this atrocity that should shape the response of any political leader – especially any leader engaging with the United Arab Emirates, as Prime Minister Mark Carney has been doing this week. It is not like other humanitarian crises that loom in the background during trade talks.
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The first fact is that this violence has not emerged from the Sudanese people or society. It is entirely imposed from outside, and not at all inevitable. This isn’t a timeless rivalry between peoples that has exploded into violence. The two-year-old war in Sudan, of which this massacre has been a culmination, has virtually no civilian support.
Sudan’s people had almost unanimously cheered the overthrow of dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and the restoration of democracy; they were betrayed by a coup in 2021 and then by a horrendous war between the army and one of its militias, the Rapid Support Forces. The RSF has expelled and slaughtered civilians occupying territories it wishes to control, forcing more than 12 million to flee, especially in the largely Black African regions in the west, where El Fasher is a regional hub.
The second fact, acknowledged by every informed observer, is that none of this violence would be taking place without the active support of the UAE, and that the Emiratis are the only party capable of bringing this conflict and its outrages to an end.
Leaders in Abu Dhabi deny this. But the RSF is largely a product of Emirati policy, which has sought to replace strongman rulers and militias across the region with ones within its control. The RSF’s leader, Mohamed Dagalo (often known as Hemedti), built a fortune as a Dubai-based businessman, trading Sudanese gold and other resources in the UAE before taking control of the former Janjaweed militia and turning it into the RSF.
According to a report by a panel of United Nations experts leaked last year, the RSF has been able to prevail, despite having only 100,000 fighters compared to the army’s 200,000, because it has been receiving very regular shipments of arms, drones, money and other support from the UAE via an “air bridge” consisting of regular Ilyushin Il-76 cargo flights from Abu Dhabi to the Sudanese border. Although Emiratis have argued that these are in fact humanitarian flights, a very wide range of analysts and experts have shown that the RSF is heavily armed with weapons and drones clearly of UAE origin, and their attacks have consistently coincided with the arrival of the flights. It is a strongly held consensus among intelligence agencies and defence analysts that the RSF is under more or less direct influence, if not control, of the UAE.
This means, for someone like Mr. Carney seeking to do business with Abu Dhabi, that this is not yet another foreign negotiation for which there is activist pressure to “bring up human rights.” The Prime Minister is engaging with a group of leaders who are directly involved in one of the most serious humanitarian atrocities of modern history, and they are capable of stopping it.
It is understandable that the Prime Minister may wish to break from previous governments’ idealism and seek new partnerships abroad, and shift the balance from values back to interests. It is also understandable that the leader of a wealthy Western country, on the way to the G20 summit, may not want to appear haughty and judgmental toward a less-developed country.
But this is one instance where those considerations are overwhelmed by the depth of the moral chasm looming before him. To remain silent or ambiguous, at this point, is to become part of that very dark place.