Since October 26, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia has being carrying out a brutal massacre of civilians in Darfur state in Sudan — particularly in and around El Fasher, the state capital.
The Yale Human Rights Laboratory estimates that “nearly 250,000 civilians who were in El Fasher before October 26 may have been killed, died, been displaced, or remain in hiding and unable to move”.
The actual number of people killed is hard to confirm because communication with the outside world has been cut off. But accounts from survivors and satellite imagery paint a frightening picture.
The RSF’s genocide of mainly non-Arab people in Darfur has been going on for many years. Between 2003 and 2005 alone, 200,000 people were estimated to have been killed.
The RSF, which has been waging war against the Sudanese Armed Forces since 2023, is being supported and armed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which buys most of its military equipment from the United States and its Western allies, including Britain, France, Germany, Israel and Australia.
While the UAE denies arming the RSF, a report from a United Nations panel of experts, leaked in April, detected multiple transport flights from the UAE, in which attempts were made to avoid detection as they flew into bases in Chad, from where arms were smuggled across the border into Sudan. British military equipment exported to the UAE has been recovered from RSF operation zones in Sudan.
According to the UN’s Comtrade database, over the last five years, the UAE has been the single biggest customer for Australian arms exports and Australia was UAE’s fourth-largest supplier of weapons over that same period.
Australia is very secretive about the exact nature of its arms exports.
However, independent Australian arms exports researcher and writer Michelle Fahy told Green Left, earlier this year, that Freedom of Information figures revealed that between July 1, 2015, to January this year, the defence department approved 257 arms export permits to the UAE.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge told GL that Anthony Albanese’s government “has been green-lighting weapons sales to the UAE at an astonishing scale”.
“The Albanese government has repeatedly refused to be transparent about who the end user of Australian-made weapons is. This government has a track record of not telling the Australian public the truth about either the scale, or destination, of its arms trade.
“When you start selling weapons to regimes like the UAE, what do you think is going to happen? Those weapons are going to end up in some of the bloodiest conflicts in the world.
“We know the UAE has been sending arms to the RSF in Sudan. The public has had zero assurances from the Albanese government that Australian weapons are not being used and abused in places like Darfur.
“We had the Labor defence minister [Richard Marles] just this month saying the ADF [Australian Defence Force] was ‘salivating’ over a ‘Disneyland’ of ‘extremely cool’ weapons at a global arms fair.
“Before minister Marles gushes over his next arms fair, he needs to look at El Fasher, at the piles of bodies visible from space, which is the end result of the global arms industry that he is so aggressively funding and promoting.”
Shoebridge will be pressing Labor to reveal details of its military exports to the UAE in the upcoming Senate Estimates hearings, set for December 1–4.
Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR) wrote to Labor’s foreign minister Penny Wong on November 14 expressing its concerns over the arms exports to the UAE being used by the RSF in the mass killing of civilians in Sudan and, in particular, in El Fasher.
AWPR said that Australia’s exports of military equipment to the UAE, despite credible evidence of the UAE’s role in Sudan, “appear to be at odds with our legal obligation to ensure that we do not contribute to human rights abuses overseas. These decisions were made without any parliamentary oversight or vote.”
“In our view, the government should immediately review all current exports to the UAE and Sudan to ensure our equipment is not being misused.”
In August, AWPR joined with 60 other civil society groups to call for an inquiry into Australia’s military exports more broadly.
Australia’s military trade is “at best opaque and at worst negligently poor”, it said. “Neither the public nor parliament have detailed knowledge of what military goods Australia is exporting, to where or for what purpose.”
Government data indicates actual exports may have doubled in the last three years, AWPR said. “Australia has approved military exports to many countries with documented patterns of human rights abuses, including Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, Sudan and South Sudan.”
Australia’s “weak anti-corruption safeguards” and “unscrutinised procurement policies” combine dangerously with the “active lobbying by military companies” to pose a risk of corruption, it added.
Labor is already under pressure to end its arms exports to Israel. Now, there is evidence that Australia is complicit in the genocide in Sudan, as it continues to pour billions of dollars in public funds into the sick dream of making Australia one of the world’s top ten arms exporters.