The International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced on Thursday that Sudan has filed an application to launch proceedings against the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over allegations of complicity in acts of genocide against the Masalit, a black African community, in West Darfur.
Sudan held the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their affiliated Militia responsible for carrying out acts that include, but not limited to, “genocide, murder, theft of property, rape, forcible displacement, trespassing, vandalism of public properties, and violation of human rights.” The country says all of these acts have been facilitated through the “extensive financial, political and military” support given to the RSF militia by the UAE.
Sudan requested the ICJ to implement provisional measures, starting by ordering the UAE to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the Genocide Convention. This includes taking all measures within its power to prevent the killing of the Masalit group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions that could cause partial or total destruction to the group, and preventing measures intended to restrict births within the group.
The UAE is reportedly seeking the immediate dismissal of the case and deemed it “baseless,” insinuating that the submission is backed by the Sudanese government in order to cover up for the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). An unnamed Emirati official slammed the application as “nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt aimed at diverting attention from the established complicity of the Sudanese Armed Forces in the widespread atrocities that continue to devastate Sudan and its people.”
In April 2024, one year into the war in Sudan, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights released what it described as “the first independent investigation” into breaches of the Genocide Convention in Darfur. The report said it concluded, based on “clear and convincing evidence,” that the RSF and allied militias are continuously committing the crime of genocide against the Masalit as well as other Non-Arab groups.
In addition to the UAE, the report also pointed to the complicity of Sudan, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, and Russia, via the actions of its state funded private military company dubbed “The Wagner Group.”
Based on its conclusion, the report deemed all 153 signatories of the Genocide Convention legally obligated to end any complicity and employ “all means reasonably available to prevent and halt the genocide.”
While clashes between the SAF and RSF started in April 2023, Sudan had already been battling violence since the 2003 Darfur crisis when a full scale war broke out when the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) took arms against the government of Sudan for allegedly oppressing non-Arab groups. The then-president Omar al-Bashir labelled the rebels as “racist” and recruited Arab militias, nicknamed the “Janjaweed” later giving birth to today’s RSF.
Al-Bashir’s government, assisted by the Janjaweed, retaliated against the rebel groups and civilian “African ethnic” groups in Darfur through airstrikes, burning villages and poisoning wells, leading to the death of 400,000 people, the displacement of millions of people and the systematic rape of women.
The United States recognized these acts as genocide under the United Nations Genocide Convention and put forward criminal proceedings with the International Criminal Court (ICC), resulting in the issuing of an arrest warrant against al-Bashir in 2009 for “directing a campaign of mass killings.”
The RSF continues on using rape as a weapon of war in Sudan, with countless accounts of women being violently sexually assaulted in front of their families and countless others remaining unreported due to the stigma surrounding the topic. A lot of sudanese women are contemplating suicide to escape the inevitability of rape, with some even asking about a Fatwa that could make suicide permissible under Islamic law.
The UNICEF revealed on March 4 that 220 cases of child rape have been reported in Sudan since the start of 2024, with the youngest survivors being only one year-old.
