By Enyichukwu Enemanna
The United Arab Emirates has denied an allegation by Amnesty International that it is providing Chinese-made weapons to the paramilitary organisation in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been at war with the army for the past two years.
“These claims are baseless and lack substantiated evidence,” said the UAE’s Assistant Minister for Security and Military Affairs, Salem Aljaberi, in a statement posted on the Foreign Ministry’s X account on Friday.
“The UAE strongly rejects the suggestion that it is supplying weaponry to any party involved in the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” he added.
London-based human rights group Amnesty International said on Thursday that it had identified “Chinese GB50A guided bombs and 155mm AH-4 howitzers” through analysis of footage of RSF attacks on Khartoum and Darfur.
The organisation said the UAE was the only country to have imported the howitzers from China, in a deal struck in 2019.
Amnesty International relied on data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for its report.
“The howitzer referenced in the report is a system manufactured outside the UAE and has been available on the international market for nearly a decade,” said the UAE Assistant Minister, branding the Amnesty report as “misleading”.
“The assertion that only one country has procured or transferred this system is invalid,” he added.
Amnesty’s report came as the RSF pressed its long-range drone attacks on regions controlled by the Sudanese army.
The UAE has repeatedly absolved itself of providing arms to the RSF, despite reports from UN experts and international organisations.
Earlier this week, Sudan’s military government cut diplomatic ties with the UAE, accusing it of supplying the RSF with the advanced weapons systems used to strike Port Sudan.
Both the UK and the US have implicated the UAE in separate appeals urging foreign countries to stop backing Sudan’s warring parties.
On Monday, however, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) dismissed Sudan’s case against the UAE, in which it accused the Gulf state of complicity in genocide.
The UN court in The Hague ruled that the case could not proceed because the UAE had opted out of Article 9 of the Genocide Convention, meaning it cannot be sued by other states over genocide allegations.
