Dubai ruler confronted in London over UAE involvement in Sudan war

The ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the UAE has been confronted on the streets of central London over his country's involvement in the Sudan war.

A video posted on Sunday shows a Sudanese man shouting at Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum and his entourage as they walk through the affluent Knightsbridge area.

“Emiratis and UAE, they’re killing Sudanese people,” the man shouts from across the road at the ruler of Dubai and the group he is with. “UAE is killing people in my country. Stop killing my people.”

One man, who appears to be Emirati and part of Maktoum’s entourage, then appears to racially abuse the Sudanese man, shouting: “Fuck you, fuck you and fuck your people… Motherfucker, Black bitch.”

“You said Black?” the Sudanese man asks him. “Shut the fuck up,” replies the Emirati, who then crosses the road to confront the Sudanese man.

“Stop killing Sudanese,” the man says. “Emirati and UAE they’re killing Sudanese people. They are killing people in my country… Mohammed bin Zayed, they are killing people in my country,” he says, referring to the president of the United Arab Emirates.

Last Thursday, Emirati media reported that Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) had met with al-Maktoum, who is his brother, at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel in London.

The get-together was described as a “fraternal meeting that reflected the enduring bonds of unity, mutual respect and shared values that define the UAE's leadership”.

UAE involvement in Sudan war

Though the United Arab Emirates continues to deny it, there is now widespread evidence supporting the claim that the UAE supports Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which have been accused by the UN and US of committing genocide during the war in Sudan.

United Nations experts, human rights groups and reporting from Middle East Eye has documented arms transfers to the RSF facilitated by networks based in Libya, Chad and the breakaway region of Somaliland.

Earlier this year, MEE revealed the use of an Ethiopian army base supporting the RSF in Sudan.

Western nations including the UK have been accused of failing to publicly oppose Emirati involvement in the Sudan war, which began in April 2023 and has led to the widest humanitarian catastrophe in the world, because of economic capture by the UAE.

Figures close to the Emirati leadership and analysts sympathetic to the UAE have recently seemed to tacitly acknowledge the support provided over many years to the RSF and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who owns property in Dubai through a network of shell companies.

Earlier this year, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati academic and former adviser to MBZ, criticised the “singling out” of the UAE over its support for the RSF, noting that the Sudanese paramilitary also “has support from Uganda, from Ethiopia, from Chad”.

Referring to Egyptian and Turkish support for the RSF’s enemy, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), Hussain Abdul-Hussain, an analyst who describes himself as an “advocate of immediate, unconditional, Arab-Israeli peace”, posted on social media:

“So Turkish and Egyptian intervention in Sudan is ok but Emirati intervention is not? What am I missing here?”

When the RSF captured el-Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur, the paramilitary executed, raped and extorted thousands of civilians as part of a campaign the UN said bore “all the hallmarks of genocide”.

UAE rulers in London

Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai confronted on London’s streets, has previously been found by a British court to have kept his daughters Latifa and Shamsa captive, and to have conducted a campaign of harassment against his now former wife, Jordan’s Princess Haya.

In 2020, a judge in London ruled that Maktoum had organised the kidnapping of Latifa, who attempted to flee Dubai in 2018, and her older sister Shamsa, who in 2000 temporarily escaped her family in the UK.

A year later, in 2021, a senior British high court judge ruled that the UAE’s prime minister had hacked the phone of Princess Haya and five of her associates using NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.

On Monday, Maktoum posted a photograph of his holiday in London with the caption: “Life taught me… that the greatest investment in vacations is not the number of cities we visit… but the number of moments we create with our families.

“Beautiful memories are happiness and energy that drive us to more work, achievement, and success.”