Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, the leader of a notorious paramilitary force fighting for supremacy in Sudan’s civil war, is not the president of his country. Yet on a recent whirlwind tour of six African nations, he was treated just like one. Some of the continent’s most powerful leaders rolled out the red carpet for General Hamdan after he arrived on a luxury jet for meetings in late December and early January, having swapped his military fatigues for business suits. In Kenya, traditional dancers waited at the plane steps. In South Africa, he sank into an armchair beside a smiling President Cyril Ramaphosa. And in Rwanda, General Hamdan posed solemnly at a memorial to victims of the 1994 genocide — even though his own troops have faced accusations of genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. The surprise tour was a remarkable comeback for a commander often rumored dead or wounded since Sudan plunged into war in April. General Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces are steamrolling across Sudan, beating the country’s regular army into retreat — in large part thanks to military backing from the United Arab Emirates, a Persian Gulf petrostate that is emerging as a kingmaker in the Horn of Africa region, according to a new report by United Nations investigators. The as-yet unpublished report, obtained by The New York Times, offers new detail about how the Emirates has been smuggling powerful weapons to General Hamdan’s forces, known as the R.S.F., through Chad since last summer — armed drones, howitzers and antiaircraft missiles, sent via secretive cargo flights and desert smuggling routes. The supplies have boosted his forces to a succession of victories that in recent months have altered the course of the war. “This new R.S.F. firepower had a massive impact on the balance of forces, both in Darfur and other regions of Sudan,” the report says. War has brought utter catastrophe to Sudan, killing at least 12,000 people since April and displacing another 7.4 million from their homes, the United Nations estimates. Fighting has laid waste to large parts of the capital, Khartoum, and 25 million of Sudan’s 45 million people need relief aid to survive. Experts say the Emirates is using its vast wealth and sophisticated weapons to steer the course of a turbulent region of Africa dogged by conflict but endowed with vast natural wealth and a lengthy Red Sea coastline. Its motivations are ambiguous; experts point to the Emirates’ desire for port deals and agricultural land in a part of Africa that it increasingly sees as its strategic back yard, and its longstanding hostility to Islamist forces. But the latest U.N. report, compiled by experts monitoring a 2005 arms embargo on Darfur, highlights the cost of those ambitions. It documents widespread violence against civilians that has accompanied the advance of Gen. Hamdan’s forces — massacres, bombings and reports of hundreds of rapes that echo the genocide in Darfur of two decades ago. That pattern of… Source: The New York Times
