Gold, Guns & Genocide: How the UAE Profits from RSF War Crimes in Sudan

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to Sudan. Earlier today, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres renewed his call for an immediate halt to the fighting between the Sudanese military and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Guterres also condemned last week’s drone attack on the last functioning hospital in the besieged city of El Fasher in North Darfur. The attack killed an estimated 70 people. Sudan’s government blamed the RSF for the massacre.

Over 14 million people have been displaced by the war in Sudan, which started in April of 2023. Three million of those have become refugees, most of them crossing the border to South Sudan and Chad.

We go now to Declan Walsh, chief Africa correspondent for The New York Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Last month, he wrote a piece headlined “The Gold Rush at the Heart of a Civil War.”

Declan, thanks so much for being with us. Explain why gold is so essential to what the U.S. is now in Sudan calling a genocide even.

DECLAN WALSH: Thanks, Amy. It’s great to be with you.

Look, it’s really the most astonishing thing in this huge war. You know, the war has been going on for two years. It has destroyed the country, pushed it into famine. It has just absolutely crushed the economy. And yet, the one thing that is still functioning — in fact, the one business that’s still thriving is gold. Sudan has some of the richest gold deposits in Africa. And since the war has started, our reporting showed that both sides have stepped up their efforts to exploit that gold, most of which ends up being traded in the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf, and they’re using that funding for — to fund the weapons purchases that are being used to fight the war.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Declan, could you talk about the role of the United Arab Emirates in this conflict?

DECLAN WALSH: So, one of the aspects of this conflict that have really bedeviled efforts to try and bring the two warring sides to peace is the fact that so many foreign countries have gotten involved on both sides. But far and away the most significant meddlesome foreign power, if you like, is the United Arab Emirates. Our reporting and reporting by other outlets has shown that they have been smuggling weapons across the border into Sudan to the Rapid Support Forces — that’s the paramilitary group that the U.S. has now determined committed genocide during the war. They’ve been smuggling those weapons for about the last 18 months.

And it’s become — certainly in the last months of the Biden administration, it had become quite a sensitive point between the two countries. Biden administration officials, up to Vice President Harris, had raised this issue in private with the Emiratis, asking them to stop the support for the RSF. There is a certain degree of support in Congress. Some lawmakers have introduced laws — or, had proposed laws, rather, suggesting that the U.S. should condition weapons sales to the Emirates, so that it would stop supporting the RSF.

But in public, the Biden administration was actually, I would say, much more supportive of the Emiratis. The Emirates, of course, is an incredibly wealthy country with a lot of money to invest. It buys a lot of American weapons. And so, that support has continued. Just last Friday, as news was coming through of the drone strike that you referenced in the introduction there that killed about 70 people at a hospital in Darfur, we had a word from some lawmakers in Washington who said that they had been informed officially by the Biden administration that despite the promises by the Emiratis that they would stop funding or arming the RSF, that that arming continues to this day.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what is the reason, the purpose of the Emiratis in their support of the RSF?

DECLAN WALSH: Well, it should be said the Emiratis absolutely deny that they’ve — they’ve consistently denied that they provide any support to the RSF. But as we know, you know, Sudan is a country with immense natural resources, not just gold, but it also has huge amounts — huge, immense agricultural potential, a lot of agricultural land along the Nile that is coveted or desirable to many Gulf countries that are facing a future where their own food security could be in doubt. But it’s also a very strategic place. It has a long coastline along the Red Sea, and there are many countries that are jostling, in the hope — including Russia, that hope that they may at some point be able to set up a port along that.

And frankly, the other reason is just because the Emirates can. They have — the Emirates has a long-standing relationship with the Rapid Support Forces and with its leader, General Mohamed Hamdan, that goes back to the campaign that the UAE waged along with Saudi Arabia in Yemen some years ago. As part of that campaign, the Emirates paid for the Rapid Support Forces to send some of its troops to Yemen to fight alongside its own forces. And so, there is this long-standing relationship between some of these — the leaders of the Emirates, effectively, members of their royal family, and the RSF. And the Emirates appears to have taken a calculation that they thought that he could win this war. But increasingly, the RSF has been losing ground on the battlefield, and there’s a real question mark over whether — I mean, there’s a question mark, frankly, over whether either side can win this war by purely military means.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Declan Walsh, as we wrap up, I wanted you to take us on the journey that you begin “The Gold Rush at the Heart of a Civil War” piece with. You say, “The luxury jet touched down in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, on a mission to collect hundreds of pounds of illicit gold. On board was a representative of a ruthless paramilitary group accused of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s sprawling civil war, the flight manifest showed. The gold itself had been smuggled from Darfur, a region of famine and fear in Sudan that is largely under his group’s brutal control.” Take us from there to UAE, where the gold goes to, and the fact that you interviewed the head of the RSF, what, back in 2019, when they took over a gold mine, and yet minimized its power, though ultimately it fueled the RSF to the power it is today.

DECLAN WALSH: Yeah, gold is really at the heart of the RSF’s ascent to power. I mean, the RSF endeared itself to the autocratic ruler of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, before he was overthrown in 2019. But it also grew incredibly rich by taking over the largest gold mine in the country and by using that money to build a business empire that extended into many businesses. And that’s why when I met the leader of the RSF in 2019, I asked him about that. At the time, he tried to downplay it, but our reporting shows just how pervasive it’s been.

And the incident that you referred to that we reported on in the story was really just an effort to illustrate just one of many, many routes that gold follows when it flows out of Sudan. Sudan is a country that borders about seven other countries. Gold seems to be flowing across almost all of those borders into those countries, and sometimes through very circuitous smuggling routes involving a whole range of officials, not just in Sudan, but in neighboring countries, involving companies, gold traders in the UAE themselves. It ends up in the UAE, where, you know, research has showed about 90% of the gold from across Africa, including many conflict zones, like Sudan, ultimately is traded.

AMY GOODMAN: Declan Walsh, we want to thank you so much for being with us, chief Africa correspondent for The New York Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya. We’ll link to your pieces on Sudan at democracynow.org, “The Gold Rush at the Heart of a Civil War.”

Coming up, Holocaust survivors mark 80 years since the liberation of Aushwitz. We’ll speak to the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Raz Segal. Stay with us.