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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Mark Townsend

UK prioritised ties with UAE over averting mass atrocities in Sudan, MPs to be told

A group of men wearing khaki camouflage T-shirts celebrate raising assault rifles in the air.
Sudan's paramilitary RSF celebrate after seizing El Fasher in Darfur last October, which the UN said had the ‘hallmarks of genocide’ after 60,000 civilians were massacred. Photograph: AFP

The British government had received intelligence that Ethiopia appeared to be supporting a genocidal militia in Sudan’s civil war as far back as 2024 but did not go public with the news for fear of upsetting the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a parliamentary committee will hear.

In May 2024, officials from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) told Nathaniel Raymond, an American human rights investigator at Yale University, that “significant private pressure” from the UAE meant the UK would not publicly divulge information linking Ethiopia and the emirates to their support for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

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