CAIRO (Reuters) -Sudan will cut ties with the United Arab Emirates, the army-affiliated defence council said on Tuesday, following army accusations that Abu Dhabi supports the rival Rapid Support Forces in the nation’s civil war.
The defence council accused the UAE of supplying the RSF with advanced and strategic weapons that enabled it to carry out damaging strikes on facilities in the city of Port Sudan since Sunday, a major escalation in the two-year-old conflict.
The UAE has repeatedly denied such charges.
The council said it had decided to declare the UAE an “aggressor state,” saying that it “reserves the right to respond to the aggression by every means to preserve the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
Sudan’s army leader Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, speaking in a televised address from Port Sudan that followed the announcement by the defence council, said that the army will “defeat the militia and those who support it and back it”.
“We say to those who attacked the Sudanese people that the time for retribution will come and the people will prevail in the end,” he, said while giving his address in front of a plum of smoke at the damaged port facilities.
Sudan’s army has long accused the UAE of arming the RSF. The UAE denies the charge but some U.N. experts and U.S. lawmakers have found it credible, citing evidence in reports by human rights organisations on the supply of weapons.
The latest report by a U.N. panel of experts published in April did not mention the UAE except to refer to its involvement in peace talks in Sudan.
On Monday, the International Court of Justice said it could not rule on Sudan’s case accusing the UAE of fueling genocide in Darfur by supplying weapons to paramilitary forces as it lacked jurisdiction.
Sudan had argued before the U.N.’s top court last month that the UAE was violating the Genocide Convention by supporting paramilitary forces in Darfur, but the UAE said the case should be thrown out.
(Reporting by Jaidaa Taha and Menna Alaa El Din; Writing by Menna Alaa El-Din; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Aidan Lewis)
