Pressure is mounting on the United Arab Emirates over its presence at a crucial conference in London aimed at stopping the war in Sudan after a leaked confidential UN report raised fresh questions over the UAE’s role in the devastating conflict.
The UAE has been accused of secretly supplying weapons to Sudanese paramilitaries via neighbouring Chad, a charge it has steadfastly denied.
However an internal report – marked highly confidential and seen by the Guardian – detected “multiple” flights from the UAE in which transport planes made apparently deliberate attempts to avoid detection as they flew into bases in Chad where arms smuggling across the border into Sudan has been monitored.
The allegations raise complications for the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, who controversially invited the UAE alongside 19 other states for Sudan peace talks at Lancaster House on 15 April.
The date marks the second anniversary of a civil war that has caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, displacing more than 12 million people.
A senior diplomat, who is familiar with the leaked report but requested anonymity, said: “The UK needs to explain how it is responding to massacres of children and aid workers while hosting the UAE at its London conference.”
The 14-page report – completed last November and sent to the Sudan sanctions committee of the UN Security Council – was written by a panel of five UN experts who “documented a consistent pattern of Ilyushin Il-76TD cargo flights originating from the United Arab Emirates” into Chad, from where they identified at least three overland routes potentially used for transporting weapons into neighbouring Sudan.
They found that the cargo flights from airports in the UAE to Chad were so regular that, in effect, they had created a “new regional air bridge”.
They noted that flights demonstrated peculiarities, with planes often disappearing for “crucial segments” of their journey, a pattern that the experts said “raised questions of possible covert operations”.
However, the experts added that they could not identify what the planes were carrying or locate any evidence that the planes were transporting weapons.
The findings of numerous cargo flights from the UAE to Chad are not mentioned in the final report of the UN expert panel on Sudan, due to be published in a few days. No reference is made to the Emirates in the expert’s final 39-page report except in relation to peace talks.
Questions over the UAE’s alleged role in backing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) arrive after a weekend that saw its fighters kill more than 200 civilians in a wave of violence against vulnerable ethnic groups in displacement camps and around the city of El Fasher, the last major city still held by the Sudanese army in Darfur, the vast western region of Sudan.
“It will be shameful if the conference does not deliver concrete civilian protection in the context of ongoing genocide,” said the diplomat.
In January the US formally declared that the RSF had committed genocide in Sudan.
The UAE states that it is committed to bringing “lasting peace“ to Sudan.
In their November update, the UN experts, investigating the possible smuggling of weapons from Chad into Darfur in possible violation of an arms embargo, identified at least 24 Ilyushin Il-76TD cargo flights landed at Amdjarass airport in Chad last year.
The flights, they noted, coincided with an escalation of fighting in El Fasher, in particular a “surge in drone activity primarily by the RSF for combat and intelligence” whose arrival in Sudan, said the experts, marked “a new technological phase in the conduct of hostilities”.
Some of the flights identified in the report were linked to operators previously connected to “military logistics and illicit arms transfers”. Two of them, said the experts, had previously been flagged for violations of the arms embargo.
Experts also examined “regular departures” into Chad from two UAE airports – in Ras Al-Khaimah emirate and Al Ain in Abu Dhabi emirate – and found that the flights frequently disappeared from radars during crucial moments.
On one occasion, the report describes how a flight “left Ras Al-Khaimah, vanished mid-flight, and later surfaced in N’Djamena [capital of Chad] before returning to Abu Dhabi”.
Crucially, however, the UN experts said they could not prove that the planes were carrying weapons because the “flights lacked evidence regarding the specific content being transported”.
Four of the five UN experts said that although the flights “marked an important new trend”, what they managed to uncover “failed to meet evidentiary standards regarding evidence of arms transfers”.
For instance, although residents of the South Darfur city of Nyala reported “cargo plane activity and informants attributed it to RSF logistical operations, further triangulated evidence to confirm the nature of the cargo transported was absent”.
Therefore, the experts said, it was “premature to infer that these flights were part of an arms transfer network”. They also added that the fact that several of the flights and cargo operators were linked to military logistics and past arms violations “did not provide proof of current arms transfers”.
It added: “Additionally, patterns and anomalies in flight paths, such as mid-flight radar disappearances and unrecorded take-offs, raised concerns but did not offer verified evidence directly linking these flights to arms shipments.”
It said “closing these investigative gaps was crucial”.
The revelations come days after the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague heard a case brought by Sudan accusing the UAE of being “complicit in the genocide” during the war. The ICJ has heard claims that the RSF is responsible for serious human rights violations including mass killings, rape and forced displacement in West Darfur.
The UAE has said the case is a cynical publicity stunt and a “platform to launch false attacks against the UAE”.
A UAE source pointed out that the confidential UN expert report contained the disclaimer that four of the five panel members felt that “allegations of an airbridge from the UAE to Sudan via Chad failed to meet the evidentiary standards required to establish a clear link between the documented flights and the alleged transfer of arms”.
A UAE statement added that the imminent final report from the Sudan expert panel did not reference the Emirates in relation to any flights “because the allegations against us failed to meet the panel’s evidentiary threshold. The record speaks for itself.”
It added that they had been told by the UN security council’s Sudan sanctions committee that the final report “did not make any negative findings” against them.
“The latest UN panel of experts report makes clear that there is not substantiated evidence that the UAE has provided any support to RSF, or has any involvement in the conflict,” said the statement.
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