As this year’s COP28 climate conference opens in Dubai, the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), attention is obviously focusing on how Sultan al-Jaber, the UAE’s designated chair, steers the meeting’s efforts to reduce rising temperatures and gain new commitments to accomplish climate sustainability goals. The planet is heating up inexorably, probably beyond the point where its inhabitants can achieve any or most of the CO2 reductions promised at earlier climate summits.
The participants in COP28 will also be watching how the UAE chair, head of the state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., a major revenue producer, handles both the public and private discourse in Dubai as well as allegations that he has been and will continue to use his COP28 position to benefit the UAE’s oil and gas exporting ambitions. Al-Jaber is accused to cutting deals favoring the UAE at the same time as he chairs the COP28. “I can’t believe it,” expostulated UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
But as the rest of the world keeps an eye on al-Jaber and what happens in Dubai, we should all (together with Western diplomats and the press) question what motivates the UAE to meddle fiercely in Africa, invariably taking retrograde stances and assisting the most reprehensible of those disturbing the continent’s peace. Why? And for what gain?
In recent years, the UAE has employed its immense wealth to influence the fierce contest for hegemony in Libya, to foment conflict in Ethiopia, and to put a very heavy paw on the scales of mayhem in the Sudan. While taking these seemingly counter-intuitive policy positions, and doing so aggressively, the UAE runs eighty of the world’s ports in fifty countries, at Washington’s behest signed the Abrahamic Accords with Israel, and profits financially and reputationally by running two important airlines and transiting centers for travelers and cargo.
Dubai has become a massive trading bazaar and the glittering nexus of Russian and Indian oligarchical togetherness: wealth (licit and illicit) from Russia, China, India, South Africa (the BRICS), and the rest of the globe mingles securely in Dubai, a major transshipment hub for gold. (Hamas has its political and public relations base in nearby Qatar, but all of globe’s many other dubious as well as legitimate deal makers operate from Dubai’s man-made islands and atop its prestigious skyscrapers.)
The precious yellow metal arrives (often in a clandestine manner) from South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or wherever, en route to refining centers in western India or, since the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow. Dubai is GDP-accumulating from wars everywhere, including Ukraine and now Gaza, but the attraction and profiteering from gold imports cannot fully explain why the UAE is engaged in so much risky adventurism in Africa, especially since it finally gave up its attempt to enable a victory against the Iranian-backed Houthi in Yemen.
The UAE is backing surprising sides in the wars of Africa. Exactly why the UAE is supporting what appear to be dangerous anti-Western maneuvering in the African conflicts is unclear, but certainly worth examining.
In Libya, the UAE since 2014 has been backing upstart General Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan Armed Forces in their so far successful attempts to separate Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) from the western half of a country that was only really united during the reign of Muammar Qaddafi.
Haftar controls sizable petroleum pumping revenues and has battled the UN-recognized government of Libya, based in Tripoli. With the UAE’s assistance, on several occasions he and his forces tried to conquer parts of western Libya, now supported by Turkey. The UAE conducted hundreds of drone strikes on Haftar’s behalf, supplied weapons and jet fuel, and financed many of his failed attempts to expand his eastern Libyan redoubt. In this Libyan war effort, the UAE cooperated intensively with Russia’s Wagner mercenary group. In turn, they together managed to turn defeats for Haftar into relatively successful retreats.
Conceivably, but improbably, the UAE’s consorting with the Wagnerites has something to do with the shifty game that it is playing in Sudan. There (as we commented in this Newsletter last week), the UAE is materially backing a renegade warlord – Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti) – in his so far energetic attempt to wreak havoc, gain power for himself and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that he created and commands, and amass untold riches from gold. Hemeti, as he is known, led the camel-riding janaweed when they engaged in ethnic cleansing against Africans in Darfur, Sudan’s westernmost state, in 2003-2006.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN labelled the resulting decimation of Africans in Darfur “genocide;” Hemeti and the RSF are at it again and have both killed 10,000 Africans in Darfur already this year and forced about 7 million Africans throughout Sudan to leave their homes, some becoming internally displaced, some fleeing into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, or across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia.
Ostensibly, the murderous rampage in Darfur and a spate of killings in Khartoum, Sudan’s distant capital on the Nile River, are part of the ongoing struggle for total control of the entire Sudan between Hemeti and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the regular Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Burhan has largely retreated to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, but the internecine combat continues, with daily atrocities.
Hemeti is winning only because of financial and material help from the UAE. It supplies the RSF by flying arms and ammunition to landing fields eastern Chad, next to Darfur, and by sending cash to Hemeti via other avenues. But what the UAE accomplishes by bankrolling Hemeti is not evident. He is neither the popular nor the legitimate leader of Sudan. Nor are his avaricious ambitions necessarily those of the UAE in the wider world. Moreover, the UAE is oft-considered close to the West, and to Washington. But no one anywhere outside of Putin’s Russia, has a good word to say about Hemeti and his RSF. Indeed, the fact that Putin’s Wagner Group is also helping Hemeti (in exchange for smuggled gold exports) puts the UAE squarely in Putin’s camp.
Nearby in the Horn of Africa, the UAE is supplying arms to Amhara dissidents fighting to gain territory and autonomy for themselves against the government of Ethiopia and also against the regional administration of Tigray, the war-ravaged province to Amhara’s immediate north. Again, how this interference in Ethiopia advantages the UAE is unclear, especially since the UAE is not campaigning to be known as a rogue state. It usually wants to be regarded as a facilitating and responsible polity, hardly as a spoiler bent (as in Libya and Sudan) on interfering where it has no agency, history, or obvious reason to be involved.
Away from a fighting front, a shadowy UAE concern is attempting, also in Africa, to acquire 50 million hectares (193,000 square miles) of forested and agricultural land in Angola, Kenya, Liberia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in order to sustain it and sell carbon sequestering rights (and carbon credits) for hefty profit to multinational companies and governments who cannot or will not reduce their spewing of carbon from coal-burning power plants, cement factories, high seas ships burning heavy oil, and so on.
A member of Dubai’s royal family is behind the scheme being promoted by Blue Diamond LLC. It promises invest billions of dollars to preserve Africa’s forests and fields, while sharing the carbon offset proceeds with local governments and their inhabitants. Zimbabwe, enmeshed in poverty, appears to welcome the scheme, but Liberians and Kenyans distrust what is proposed, and Zambia seems to be edging toward it with great care. Some critics assert that accounting for carbon offsets is almost impossible (a much-touted scheme folded recently near the Kariba Lake in Zimbabwe), and such carbon substitutions hardly ever really mitigate actual pollution. Moreover, they take farm fields from and other property and usage rights from vulnerable Africans who have no say. Some call the process “environmental colonialism.”
Investors in Dubai want to make sizable fortunes from “preserving Africa.” But if so, why is the other arm of the UAE investing so much cash in propagating the wars of Libya, Sudan, and Ethiopia?
Were Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Secretary David Cameron not otherwise preoccupied with Ukraine and Gaza, presumably they could call a halt to the UAE’s interference and promotion of mayhem in places like Sudan. But world order must do so instead, and imperatively, to save lives and restore the peace that the UAE appears to cavalierly to disdain.
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So very true in every respect, professor ... and what a curious choice of venue for COP-28, a citystate carved out of the desert with apparently hardly a crosseyed glance at its impact on the global ecosystem, let alone the waste of dragging everyone from so far to gather on glittering jewel on the edge of a trackless desert !