As Civil War Rages, Sudan's Government Cancels $6B UAE Port Project

 

The military government of Sudan has canceled a $6 billion port deal with the United Arab Emirates over the UAE's alleged weapons transfers to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the Sudanese militia that launched a brutal civil war in April 2023. An estimated 15-60,000 people have been killed and eight million displaced in the fighting to date, with no end in sight. 

The RSF has its roots in the notorious Janjaweed, the Arab militia that drew charges from the International Criminal Court for ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region in the mid-2000s. The official Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF were allied for decades under longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir, and they worked jointly to restore a military dictatorship in 2021, ending a brief experiment in civilian rule that began in 2019.

In early 2023, SAF leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan "Hemedti" Dagalo had a falling out over ministerial appointments, largely on regional lines. Al-Burhan re-appointed prominent Islamists from the Nile region to the positions of power that they held under al-Bashir. Hemedti, who came from the country's rural southwest, feared that these appointments would weaken his influence and responded by going to war. 

In more than a year of fighting, neither side has gained a firm upper hand, though the RSF made major gains in Khartoum and the country's west. As of October 2024, the SAF was on the offensive, retaking parts of Khartoum and Dinder. "It is not clear how far the army is able to advance but they are putting up a big fight," Suliman Baldo of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker told Al Jazeera. 

Foreign powers have weighed in on both sides of the conflict, with some evidence of Iranian and Russian support for the SAF - including a landmark Russia-SAF deal to build a naval base on the Sudanese coast. 

The UAE is widely believed to support the RSF with large quantities of arms, flown into neighboring nations and trucked across the border. The UAE denies providing any backing for the RSF, describing its intervention as a humanitarian aid operation, and in public it has called for mediated peace talks. 

The economic motive for the UAE's alleged support, according to analysts, may be the Gulf nation's interest in securing its landholdings in Sudan's fertile Nile region. The UAE is overwhelmingly dependent on imported food, and has invested heavily in agricultural land in Sudan; the $6 billion transport network and seaport complex that it had planned with the SAF-led government would have supported exports of UAE-bound agricultural products. 

That planned seaport, Abu Amama, sits well within SAF-controlled territory. On Sunday, SAF finance minister Gibril Ibrahim told local media in Port Sudan that the agreement was off, citing repeated reports of UAE arms deliveries to the RSF. "After what happened, we will not give the UAE a single centimeter on the Red Sea coast," Ibrahim told Sudan Tribune. 

The agreement with the UAE was signed in 2022, the year before the RSF launched its attack, and it was the first major foreign investment announced under the brief SAF-RSF military regime. In addition to the greenfield port north of Port Sudan, the project would have included a 400,000-acre agricultural development in the Nile region, hundreds of miles of new roadways, a large free trade zone, and a reported 35 percent share of port profits for the Sudanese government. Sudanese dry bulk specialist Invictus Investment partnered with AD Ports Group on the proposal.