And also helping to launder Hemedti's gold via Dubai. https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/conflict-resources/ex...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80...
- Significantly more than 150,000 total killed
- Estimated 522,000 children dead due to malnutrition
- 8,856,313 internally displaced
- 3,506,383 refugees
When the war initially broke out, some articles in The Economist seemed somewhat agnostic between the two sides, noting that both had serious corruption issues and had committed many abuses. But as the war has progressed, the RSF seems to have revealed itself to be the far more vicious faction, and the red E along with the rest of the Western media now sees their advances as a tragedy. Unfortunately, the one constant here is the general failure of foresight among nearly all countries of the global North (whether aligned with the West or Russia) getting involved in Africa. If the brutality of the RSF had been better anticipated in 2023, the current situation might have been prevented.
Sudanese tensions predate the current mess in Gaza, as well as the Abraham Accords.
At this point I’m surprised we aren’t seeing people conclude that we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq because of Israel.
The UAE isn’t an arms manufacturing juggernaut.
I think it’s possibly fair to say the U.S. doesn’t want this war to continue and probably doesn’t even want the UAE to supply weapons to it, but that was likely true of Israel’s bombing of Gaza as well and no one batted an eyelid when holding the U.S. responsible there.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/05/sudan-advance...
I haven't found any articles implicating the US, which has export sanctions on Sudan. The only thing I could find was something about small arms from the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/28/u...
This report https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/sudan-constan... lists
> Weapons from China, Russia, Serbia, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates and Yemen identified
Although that seems to be mixing it up a bit, since Turkey and Russia are supporting the SAF.
Also some France-made weapons: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sudan-civil-war-amnesty-interna...
If GGP is going to count China as a supplier it's only fair to count the US. Js. Fwiw, both China and the US place sanctions on the RSF and denounce it as a genocide. Neither directly does business with either side.
Russia is involved directly in the conflict however, literally sending in Wagner mercenaries. They used to back the RSF but in early 2024 switched sides and now fully back the SAF. The sad truth is that most major international players don't care about the Sudanese people. They just want to have the support of whichever side comes out on top so they can continue exploiting the gold reserves of the country like they did before the dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown by a popular revolution.
eg: Very British bribery: the whistleblower who exposed the UK’s dodgy arms deals with Saudi Arabia
~ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/07/long-read-brit...
discusses some of that history back to the 1970s. It has gone on far longer than that.
Both the US and UK governments are aware of where their weapons are destined for, both pretend to have no knowledge or control.
The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland. (Qatar is trying to copy, but clumsily.)
They buy American weapons and financial assets, making them influential. They’ve also established themselves as a logistics hub in an important logistics channel to the West and Asia. (They also pitch their balancing effect on Saudi Arabia skillfully.)
And whenever someone is talking fondly about UAE that's all you need to know about that person
5% GDP growth in non-oil. More diversified than Saudi. #2 globally for being "easy to do business in and with". Top-10 in Global Soft Power Index since 2023 [0], rose from #18 in 2020. Dubai has become a global influencer capital.
Looks like the US is backing UAE as Saudi wanes, and as a regional counterweight.
If we're talking about Switzerland, yes it's a federal republic with semi-direct democracy, but it also happily supplied mercenaries to mainland Europe for several centuries.
How exactly are they waning? Last I heard everyone there was still as rich as ever due to the oil money.
I’ve heard that line about Qatar, Uruguay, Singapore, Malta, Cyprus, the Maldives, and countless other small states.
I grew up in Switzerland. Folks like to compare themselves to us, mostly due to complete ignorance of our actual history and culture.
It’s true in part and misses the point in others. Geopolitically, however, the observation is sound. Small states need a powerful protector far away or to balance their position between nearby large states. The latter only works in mountainous hellholes and on peninsulas (provided your larger neighbor(s) can’t blockade you; if they can, you need a foreign guarantor with a blue-water navy, of which historically there have only been one or two at a time).
(You know Switzerland is a weapons exporter, right? To the U.S. But also to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Hungary. One could almost say that folks who conclude intent from a place of ignorance communicate “all you need to know about” themselves.)
They were neutral in WWII like ie Spain was, think a bit what does it actually means. Not participating in conflict in any way. So they accepted both jewish and nazi gold or art, and everybody's else. If you want to understand why some of that was kept around after the war maybe reading about numbered accounts would enlight you. If you actually care to understand history as it happened.
Hitler had plans to conquer Switzerland after dealing with Russia, he was aware that they were 'most free and most armed nation in the world', fiercely independent and taking them would cost him dearly not only due to terrain.
Literally nobody had come out of WWII with properly clean slate, you just need to dig (not even deep) to find abhorable stuff on everybody, to different volume of course. Swiss have no problem acknowledging their mistakes, much more than most other nations.
One might say your own comment tells everyone all they need to know about you.
Where did I say I'm referring to OP? I'm merely adding to his point on what UAE is today
How does that square with the face that Israel literally attacked Qatar to get to Hamas leaders in there?
>Qatar does, the official allows, transfer $30 million each month to the Hamas administration in Gaza. But those payments are performed in consultation with Washington and Israel - and with their approval, he says.
>Each month, he says, construction materials worth tens of millions of dollars are also delivered from Egypt to Gaza via the Rafah border crossing. those supplies are then sold by Hamas. He says the organization uses the proceeds to pay its administrative staff. Israel, in turn, he explains, supplies $10 million worth of diesel fuel to the Gaza Strip each month, with Qatar providing another 10 million to needy families. They receive $100 each, "martyr families excluded," the government representative stresses.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-partner-and-...
Not calling Dubai the devil but you could make deals with the devil if the devil was known to religiously fulfill his contracts.
There are a lot of places where you don’t know whether their currency or political system could be rocked next year.
> ...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group...
The TRUTH is that those of the "other religion" who are committing crimes in Syria and Sudan - in other words ISIS in Syria & UAE in Sudan - ARE THEMSELVES ALLIED WITH your "oppressed class", aka Israel.
The links between Israel/CIA and ISIS have been documented by many, and now is out in the open since 2024 Syria. And the UAE's alliance with Israel has been on open display during the Palestinian Holocaust, even down to them running supply convoys to them.
When you strip away all the propaganda and outright lying (as copious real journalism has done over the past few years), then you continuously see members OF THE SAME ALLIANCE on THE SAME SIDE of genocide.
The 2020's have truly stripped away DECADES of propaganda, leaving behind a simple picture of good vs evil. Twas ever thus ...
The RSF got their weapons by acting as mercenaries for the UAE to fight against the Houthis in Yemen. Fighting as a mercenary is pretty much the only reliable source of income for many people in the country.
On examination of photos and videos of weapons used in the conflict that were posted on social media, the rights group identified that companies registered in China, Iran, Russia, Serbia, and the UAE were associated with the weapons provided to RSF.[96] Human Rights Watch reviewed images of show crates with markings indicating they were manufactured in 2020 and initially acquired by the UAE Armed Forces in through a contract with Adasi, a subsidiary of UAE-based weapons manufacturer Edge Group. A January 2024 report by the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan deemed the UAE's alleged support to the RSF as "credible"
According to Business Insider, "The two generals helped Russian President Vladimir Putin exploit Sudan's gold resources to help buttress Russian finances against Western sanctions and fund his war in Ukraine."[108]
Russia: initially supported the RSF, then at one point was trading with both sides, and in 2024/2025 fully switched sides to back the SAF
Iran: stayed out of it until 2024 when it finally backed the SAF which caused a major turning point in the conflict
UAE/the US: the main player responsible for RSF's rise. It hired out RSF mercenaries to fight the Houthis in Yemen. At one point there were more than 40,000 RSF mercenaries (mostly between the ages of 14-17) in Yemen. It continues to be the primary funder of the RSF
Israel: the RSF buys surveillance tech and weapons from Israel
Saudi Arabia: the largest smuggler of (illegally acquired) gold from RSF. A major source of funding for the RSF
China: doesn't directly deal with either side but Chinese-made weapons were found in the hands of the RSF mostly through the UAE reselling them. The SAF also has some Chinese made weapons through Russia and Turkey
tl;dr: it's a very complex disaster but international players simply don't have an interest in ending it. The SAF is the main opposition to the genocidal RSF, but they are also uninterested in maintaining the democracy that the people fought for and the sides backing the SAF (mostly Iran, and now Russia) are likely hoping to continue their exploitation of gold if they defeat the RSF
There’s also the Islamic Arab monarchies (RSF) vs the Muslim Brotherhood (SAF).
The common denominator is the Islamic Arab presence from Islamic conquests. Sudan’s ethnic tensions trace back to the 7th-century Arab-Islamic conquests, which Arabized the northern Nile Valley, creating a dominant Arab-Muslim elite that marginalized non-Arab, indigenous groups in the periphery (e.g., Darfur’s Fur, Masalit, and Nuba).
Qatar is an Arab monarchy and they are backing the SAF.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...
Abu Bakr [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr] and even Mohammed himself [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_expeditions_of_Muhamma...].
It has never been a particularly ‘turn the other cheek’ religion.
No, definitely not with the same authority. If you take the Bible as the equivalent of the Quran, and the church fathers as the equivalent of the hadiths, neither has any endorsement of conversion through threats of violence. Jesus was never a political or military leader, nor were the first few generations of Christian leaders.
I cannot give as clear an answer with regard to islam, because I do not know enough in depth, but there are a variety of interpretations. There was persecution of religious minorities in the Muslim empires, but mass slaughter of those who refused to convert would have inspired rebellion. The conversion did happen in places like Egypt and Syria and Persia and there was coercion.
As for Indonesia, the GP did not claim Islam spread only by the sword.
Besides these debates about religion are an obvious distraction when we know EXACTLY why this is happening. The previous governor was propped up by international players because they allowed them to exploit the countries gold reserves. They are the 3rd largest producers of gold but the poorest country in Africa because none of the resources being extracted from Sudan is going back to the Sudanese people. The UAE (which is funded by the US) is currently the largest player but even Russia was funding the RSF until early 2024 (Russia has since switched sides).
The conflict has NOTHING to do with Islam. It's a resource grab, by (ostensibly Muslim) certain Arab states which ARE ALLIED WITH ISRAEL (in a general sense).
Birds of a feather flock together ...
Arab vs non-Arab conflicts are also nothing new. See Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, etc.
Throwing out "whataboutism" every time someone dares ask a question like this is a fallacy in itself, intending to distract from the question of why genocide in places like Sudan are so thoroughly and utterly ignored and even buried.
The simple truth is a lot of, if not most, such vocalised outrage in any country is nine parts vanity. Remember #StopKony? About as effective for the people being harmed as students at Columbia barricading themselves into a building.
I’m not sure I condemn moral vanity. It is a genuine intellectual exercise. But it’s one that doesn’t particularly benefit from repeat unless one seeks to become a student of atrocity, and one that has strong viral effects.
What about the minority who actually try to help those harmed, e.g. by fundraising for victims or volunteering? They’re far and few in between. Moreover, their efforts benefit from economies of scale.
As a result, in any community, the people actually being helpful will tend to pick their battles. And the people flipping out for fun will cluster around whatever is trendy to flip out about in public.
Well, maybe it signifies that nobody wants to go and take photos in person.
I'd happily do it if someone pays for my ticket
The "visible from space" here is clearly dumb click bait from The Telegraph.
That sounds slow and expensive.
You could say, I drink so much coffee it's visible from space and it's literally just a coffee mug sitting on a park bench.
Once Israel gets involved then all the world’s attention will shift to this actual genocide that has been long, brutal, and has been killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions but in almost complete radio silence.
The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world. Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.” It appears the world only pays attention when Jews are involved.
An estimated 500,000 children have died from malnutrition alone since the Sudan conflict began in 2023[0]. Do you see people in Paris, Washington, or New York demanding an end to that conflict? We have not even accounted for deaths caused directly by the fighting.
Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties, yet all condemnation is directed at the IDF, which attempts to avoid civilian deaths, including by dropping leaflets before airstrikes[2]. No one seems to care that Hamas—the elected government of Gaza—is deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way in a war it initiated. Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Sudan_(2024%E2%80%93...
[1]: https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....
[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/16/middleeast/israel-leaflet...
That's a lie. It was front page news for a week in every major western newspaper. Just use the Wayback Machine to look at the headlines for that day.
> The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world.
Verifiably false.
> Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.”
Because we've seen time and time again the brutal methods the IDF uses to retaliate against the entire population of Gaza, employing collective punishment against innocents. And the protesters were sadly proven very right yet again.
> Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties [...] Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.
Surely even you realize that bombing a building when you know there are human shields held within is a bad thing, right? If you know there are innocent people in the blast radius of your bomb and you still fire the bomb, you are the villain in this story. The IDF has killed more civilians than Hamas has and it's not even remotely close, a difference of tens of thousands at minimum.
the people seeking power would sell out their own mothers if that's what it took.
the ideologies here are the ideologies of the HN commenters who try to fit the facts into their predetermined narratives.
and "visible from space" means absolutely nothing meaningful. can we read license plates from space or not yet? I don't know, but in this context, who cares
(way back in the 1980s a china-zealot was telling me that the Great Wall of China was "the only manmade thing visible from space." I had the presence of mind to say back, "isn't it more significant to be able to get to space to see what's visible?")
The UAE backs the RSF [2] (formerly known as the Janjaweed of the Darfur Genocide), and Qatar supports the Sudanese Army [3]
[0] - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/united-arab-emirates-pala...
[1] - https://lobelog.com/doha-and-abu-dhabis-incompatible-visions...
[2] - https://www.wsj.com/world/how-u-a-e-arms-bolstered-a-sudanes...
[3] - https://www.africaintelligence.com/eastern-africa-and-the-ho...
[4] - https://gulfif.org/changing-alignments-in-the-lower-gulf/
They buy our weapons and financial assets. We get base. I’m not sure we’ve ever particularly cared about what anyone is up to in Africa. Yemen became of interest because it was fucking with the Red Sea.
Then someone else parks there. Barring a Saudi takeover of Qatar, we’re stuck there to keep the Russians and Chinese out.
So does the UAE. They’ve played their game well.
It doesn’t mean we need to be their staunch defenders. But it’s in our government’s interest to not piss them off for no gain. And we’re not in a place in America where foreign policy swings power.
And the current crisis is happening because the last time we were hands off with Middle Eastern affairs shortly before the Arab Spring, a number of conflicts spiraled into proxy wars between KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, and Iran.
Quite a high moral ground to be on, I tell ya. I know I know, realpolitik and all, but then lets stop pretending there is some higher ground and treat say china-us conflict as something that literally doesn't concern Europe at all (seems like US has still military upper hand but who knows for how long, seems like China will steamroll ya economically/technologically pretty soon). Especially given this year developments when we saw that US military equipment cannot be trusted, US IT infra cannot be trusted and so on.
There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are.
A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as well - Qatar has historically supported Hamas whereas Abu Dhabi has historically supported the Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and the former head of Fatah in Gaza is now the 2nd in command in Abu Dhabi (Mohammed Dahlan)
I'm jaded because I've been following this for 15 years, and looked at the Arab Spring with hope, but now all I've seen is the entire movement swung into a transnational proxy war.
Balkans, you say?
You're probably right. It's unfortunate that acts of genocide like the one ongoing in Gaza need to go viral on social media for many Westerners to even be aware of them, much less care.
Perhaps more effort should be put towards raising awareness of other genocides like the genocide in Gaza.
There is always a choice! The choice the RSF made today is entirely on them. Don’t try to deflect that.
Not completely and not for everything, but largely it is at least recognized. I mean, I learned about it and how bad it all was in a ordinary european school. What you say implies it is like in turkey, where they don't tell students in school what happened in Armenia. Or like in china, where even the knowledge gets removed. (I think Japan also largely choose not to reevaluate its glorious bloody empire past)
So blaming every war in Africa on the colonial past is maybe not helpful, when there have been wars before european involvement. And especially here, to me it seems a inner muslim/arab war. Different factions backed by different arabic states. UAE and Quatar. What exactly is the european involvment here?
Should we go through the history of India, China, Cambodia...
The UK can’t blame Brexit on the Romans.
You're reaching thousands of years ago and missing the much more significant event of the Norman conquest. And I would say that the Normans actually did influence Brexit to the extent that there's a confusion about continental vs. English identity that's only expanded over time.
1,000 years is no time at all, in the age of writing.
Influenced, yes. Can be blamed for, no, much less their descendants today (who aren’t British).
I agree!
This is different than saying the British are responsible for many current day conflicts (e.g., India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine) which is much less controversial.
Hamas intentionally created the situation where the IDF will kill women and children to accomplish their objective.
The IDF incursion is also a response to an attack by Hamas that targeted non-combatantants for murder, rape and abduction.
I don't think any of that is a controversial but correct me if I'm wrong.
In Sudan the US is not clearly propping up one side.
People are reasonably more mad in the US about Gaza since their taxes directly fund it and the US seemingly could exert influence on Israel if there was political will.
It is not clear how the US would improve Sudan without wading into some massive peacekeeping / reconstruction mission - which no one has the appetite for.
This is so incredibly dumb.
The UAE is a spigot of oil and money. (Secondarily, a massive buyer of American goods, services, weapons and financial assets.) Sudan isn’t on our to-do list because it doesn’t directly affect American voters. Oil prices and capital do.
> Do you think the money that the UAE offer precludes all other incentives to ignore mass slaughter?
Precludes? No. Politically balanced. Absolutely. You’re not going to win votes promising higher oil prices and stalled construction projects to plant a moral flag in Africa so the guys backed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey win. Abu Dhabi is more than just geopolitically convenient.
Why? I get nothing from views, and much of our foreign policy is based around Israel, which serves the needs of our state in almost uncountable ways. Is it not just as dumb to ignore this? Acting as if our relationships with foreign countries appear in a vacuum seems.... absurd, to put it charitably.
Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts. Those are simply the excuse. It’s what’s used to fuel the fire.
The heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold that’s laundered via Dubai then Switzerland.
The culpability of Western powers including the US cannot be ignored either. The RSF is supplied with diverted arms shipments from the West to the UAE.
Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call.
Polite western society has become so disconnected from what earnest religious belief feels like that they have become unable to comprehend the world around them, which hasn’t. They project their own materialism onto the own world and conclude that sectarian hatred is overblown because after all, who could really get that worked up about some dusty book? The idea that the Sudanese are just innocent victims of big evil powers fighting over gold is the kind of thing that makes a good theme in English class. We’re now dealing with an entire generation that was only taught this “counter-narrative”, and simply pattern matches it to every single thing. Yes, you can always construct sentences that recast any bad world events as being caused by our own callous indifference to the beleaguered and noble savage. No, that is not an automatic shortcut to truth and wisdom. The West does not have a monopoly on making terrible, short-sighted, violent choices.
But putting aside the diminishing of African agency, even if you do focus on the involvement of outside forces, the Sudanese civil war is notably characterized by the involvement of _middle_ powers, and not particularly Western ones. They are there for varying reasons, all of them nihilistic but only some of them materialistic. Ukrainians are there, for instance, because Russians are there, and it’s a lawless place where you can kill Russians. That’s a lot of things, but a simplistic gold grab it is not.
Earnest religious belief means nothing without material support. You can hate someone all you want for whatever religious reasons you want but it doesn't matter unless somebody gives you guns, bombs, tanks and planes. And why would someone do that? Because of material interests.
Why did the Crusades happens (multiple times)? Because of material interests. How did those who materially benefit get ordinary people to fight? By fomenting religious fervor and hatred. Why did they do that? To further their material interests.
You mention Ukraine. Perfect example. Russia took Crimea to get a port on the Black Sea in 2014 and also to control resources in that area. Why did Russia invade in 2021? Because maintaining what is essentially an oblast (like Kaliningrad) became too expensive. Ukraine had cut off the water. So Russia ideally wanted to despose the government and install another Lukachenko puppet government (like they have in Belarus) but, failing that, they wanted to secure a land bridge to Crimea. Just look at a map.
One could say the exact same thing you do about "African agency" about the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine but that's just an excuse. Putin doesn't care about that. He cares about the land they live on. And we've seen this exact playbook many times over. For example, Hitler used to annex Austria and the Sudetenland to ostensibly re-unite German-speaking people but again, that wasn't the point.
Now you might say in any of these places the people are motivated to kill for ethnic and/or religios interests. They may genuinely believe in this (but again, ask yourself why) but there are also a ton of opportunists. An absolute perfect example of this is Maria Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who opposed Maduro in Venezuela and her two biggest goals are to privatize Venezuelan industries (previously nationalized) and to further support Israel. She may as well put out a press release saying she's open to the backing her in a coup. Privatizing national industries for Western companies to profit? Sounds a whole lot like material interests to me.
Go back in history and ask yourself why the borders of Sudan are what they are, just like we could for Rwanda and a host of other civil wars. Why exactly are these different ethnic groups in the same country? Well, that's a colonizer special, perfected by the British Empire, to sow division in the locals so the colonizer can profit. Once again, material interests.
That no doubt does make understanding things seem easier.
Economics motivates. But these divisions dominate in determining magnitude. You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields. (You need labour.)
The dial turns from enslavement to extermination when there is deep-rooted fury. That sort of fury can really only be channeled on divisions of race and religion. (You need a way for poorly-trained, uneducated troops to mostly reliably identify the enemy.)
> heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold
Why not oil, too?
> Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call
This hubris fuels our forever wars, both in trade and militarily.
We don’t have that influence. If we tried restricting both Qatar and the UAE in Africa, we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about enough that our leaders have even less free rein than our geopolitical limits circumscribe.
True but if your goal is the control of resources, you don't really care if your proxy ends up engaging in these and other war crimes. That's just the cost of doing business.
Take as example when Saddam Hussein used nerve gas on the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Well that's a war crime. Did the US care? Not until 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. Up until then Saddam was a foil against Iran, who was only really an enemy after religious fundamentalists overthrew the US puppet regime of the Shah in 1979. Then in the 1990s, the US retroactively started caring about Halabja.
So did the US need Saddam to use nerve gas on the Kurds? No, of course not. Did they care? Absolutely not. Again, it was the cost of doing business.
> We don’t have that influence.
Yes we absolutely do. You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to. We have many weapons that we could wield against allies in particular. What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in? If you say the US can't make laws in other countries, I'll just laugh. The US still has control of the global financial system and can declare that any bank wanting access to the US financial system has to not trade in Sudanese gold.
Currently, the UAE gets away with this by essentially laundering Sudanese gold. The system allows them to do this. Well the UAE produces no gold so what if any gold exports from Dubai had to come with certificates showing from where it was imported?
If you don't think that can be done, look no further than the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds [1].
> ... we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about ...
I'm curious what African (or even Middle Eastern) interests you think voters care about? I say this because American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all. Also, foreign policy is notably uniparty. The war in AFghanistan went through 4 administrations, 2 Republican, 2 Democrat. Vietnam went through 5 administrations (2 Democrat, 3 Republican) as well (ie Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford).
Granted. The UAE is not involved due to animus. But this analysis renders everyone in Sudan as NPCs. The reason the conflict is an opportunity for meddling, the reason it has turned into a genocide, these causes are found more in culture and politics than pure economics.
> You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to
America withholding arms from Sudan wouldn’t change much.
If we started dictating Emirati foreign policy based on withholding arms, they should drop us as a security guarantor. (And can. And eventually would.)
We’d lose a reliable ally and investor and oil producer in exchange for foreign policy control in a region Americans are sick of being involved in.
> What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in?
Nothing. Like actually nothing. Maybe domestic gold prices would bump up a bit, but less than they have with tariffs and the deficit explosion.
If we tried to get the UAE to stop trading Sudanese gold, on the other hand, that would mean applying diplomatic and possibly economic pressure. That could result in costs to American voters we don’t care to pay.
> the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds
Yet blood diamonds still sell.
Gold is tracked and traded based on provenance—high-end mints will produce more expensive bars. The difference is there is a larger buyer pool for conflict gold than there is for diamonds. (And much more for oil.)
> American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all
This is what I meant. American leaders are constrained in acting on foreign policy lines that result in domestic pain. Alienating the Gulf would result in domestic pain.
The US could drop a nuke on UAE and tell them to stop funding colonialist expansion. The war against evil is never ending playing nice is a fools game.
Yes, this is terrible, but atrocities like this happen all over Africa on a daily basis for innumerable reasons, and Sudan specifically has been in civil wars longer than I have been alive. The piece's structure: 'look at how terrible this is, don't you just feel soooo bad?' + 'by the way the UAE has been accused of facilitating this' signals to me that the writer is primarily motivated by a desire to make the UAE and all muslims by comparison look bad. Notice how they focus on the atrocities by the RSF, ignoring the fact that all sides in this war are complicit in slaughter.
America, Europe, Russia, China, and their satellite countries have been starting and fueling wars in Africa since before these countries became independent.
They deliberately draw borders that cut ethnic populations and religious groups in half.
They flood these regions with weapons and mercenaries.
They replace incentives to develop stable societies, robust agricultural industries, and infrastructure with 'just good enough to survive' aid.
They bribe local warlords with collective billions of dollars.
Global power blocs have effectively enforced a continent of lawlessness where you're only safe from war in the immediate vicinity of resource extraction sites, and lucky for you those sites are the kinds of places small children handle mercury without PPE and die of exhaustion and chemical burns. All of this to give you fiber optic cables.
Yes, the UAE is complicit, but so are you if you're reading this. This is not a 'muslim' problem. This is not a 'UAE' problem. This is a structural problem driven primarily by increasing population, materialist consumer habits, and the geopolitical reality that if any bloc stopped doing all of this horrible stuff the only outcome would be that the other blocs get a bigger share.
This article is not written with the intention of solving these problems, it is written with the intention of keeping you just angry enough to do what they tell you, without making you so angry that you replace the ones making these decisions.