Over the past few years, you can plot the plunge into global instability not only through the unchecked assaults on international law and civilian life, but through the decline and undermining of the authority and credibility of international institutions. The latest level in this spiral is the proposed appointment of Lana Nusseibeh of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the UN secretary general. Her bid has been rapidly gaining momentum and endorsements. And it has been met with outrage among the Sudanese.
Nusseibeh is the minister of state at the UAE and a former UAE ambassador to the UN. For the past three years, the country has been connected to – bear with me, this will be a long sentence – supporting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia in Sudan, facilitating mercenaries to fight alongside the militia (which is accused of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and sexual violence), and appropriating international aid infrastructure to smuggle weapons into the country.
The war between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) is an ongoing calamity of historic proportions. It is grinding and brutal, and has already resulted in hunger, displacement and a humanitarian crisis. Although it has drawn in external actors, multiple investigations and reports point to the UAE as the country that has in essence fuelled the conflict by aggressively sponsoring one side from the start. The result has been intractable conflict, unfathomable losses and relentless momentum fed by external supply lines.
The UAE’s role in Sudan’s war has been the target of years of media investigations, human rights activism and political condemnation. There were calls from two US congressmen to American media and sports organisations to end all associations with the UAE in response to its “abetting genocide” by “arming one faction”. In the UK, a complaint was submitted to the government demanding an investigation into the Manchester City owner and deputy prime minister of the UAE, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, due to the “abundance of evidence” of UAE involvement. Attention has been called to the well-established violations associated with the vastly wealthy and hitherto immune power, which has used that wealth to try to secure a toehold in territories in Africa with geopolitical significance. Sudan’s Red Sea coastline, its bountiful gold reserves and strategic location within the continent seemingly drew the Gulf power’s predatory eye.
In the face of all efforts to highlight the gravity and high stakes of the situation, the UAE has behaved with arrogance, dissimulation and, according to reports, the use ofmisinformation and digital propaganda. Wherever such prevarications were made, there was Nusseibeh, affirming the denial of “baseless allegations”, undermining the work of the international media and, in one instance that should surely be disqualifying, disputing the findings of a UN panel of experts.
In one instance, Nusseibeh was confronted by an indignant Sudanese man in Chad who rejected her whitewashing visit to his refugee camp, imploring her delegation to keep their aid and insisting that if the UAE wants to help, it should stop interfering and stoking the war. Another enraged refugee refused aid, saying the UAE killed her brothers. Against this backdrop, the appointment of Nusseibeh, who has been the face of the UAE’s Sudan strategy, would be a slap in the face to the millions of people suffering the horrors of war, a dereliction of duty towards those thousands who have already been killed, and a green light to the prolonging of conflict.
Why the UK is accused of allowing the UAE to fuel war in Sudan – video explainer
It has been a lesson, or I should say another lesson, about the extent to which so many of the pleas from those who purport to care about Sudan are performative. How so much of the rhetoric about Sudan or even cursory interest in it is a sort of box-ticking, name-checking exercise. Something to be put on the record – here is the official statement of concern for civilians, here is the pundit with their once-and-that’s-enough treatment, here is the post on X. Going beyond that, making the necessary links that render the conflict not just a sad clash of armed groups but a war in which powerful external parties have been allowed to play abjectly immoral and accelerating roles, is a step too far.
It has also been a lesson in how much a certain kind of Arab politics and mien goes a long, long way to securing consent and licence. Nusseibeh is an operator, that’s for sure, but she is also a beneficiary of a branding exercise that the UAE has been working on for a long time to ingratiate itself with western establishments. One pillar of that strategy has been presenting itself as a “moderate” Muslim country that is alive to the dangers of radical Islam (up to and including being allegedly linked to the funding and support of hard-right groups in Europe). The other is in the cultivation of close financial ties with the UK and the US, particularly with the Trump family, conjoining itself with political and business elites.
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And it has understood that between the allied, the gullible and the ignorant, Nusseibeh can easily be presented as the obvious choice for the position as a Muslim woman with liberal credentials and a western education, regardless of the dark politics she advances and represents. It is hard for some to see beyond the facts of her CV – Wycombe Abbey, Cambridge University and, on top of that, of Palestinian origin, serving a country that has normalised relations with Israel. A high identity-politics jackpot.
All which makes Nusseibeh and the country she represents far more relatable and knowable to the world than the vastly weaker, poorer and underrepresented Sudanese people who have been victimised. The UAE, to put it simply, is seen as one of the club, its offences the private business of a country that is too wealthy to antagonise and too solicitous to spurn. Its rise speaks to this moment. At a time of big regional wars, multipolarity, energy crises and fraying norms, who better to become a global anchor than a country that is offering value-free transactional politics, is backed with sovereign wealth, and is expert in the opulent backroom gangsterism of the new world order.
Appointing a representative widely seen as one of the authors of Sudan’s tragedy to such a prestigious and influential post, one that only entrenches the UAE’s position and secures it even more wriggle room vis-a-vis its actions in Sudan, is not just another small way in which the business of international affairs is changing. It is a new chapter, one in which a perpetrator and its tribunes are not just not held to account, but crowned. The contempt is exceptionally bewildering even in an era of outrages. Nusseibeh’s appointment can only be secured by stepping over the dead, and turning backs on the living.
