The House | Another genocidal massacre is about to happen in Sudan. Andy Burnham can’t say he wasn’t warned

5 min read30 min

Right now, the UN and other agencies are warning that the besieged city of El Obeid could be the next crime scene.

Britain is not a bystander. As penholder on Sudan at the UN Security Council, we are supposed to lead the international response. What Britain does next on Sudan will tell us fast whether Andy Burnham’s promise of a principled, resilient Britain means anything at all.

Like Gaza, Sudan is experiencing innocent suffering on an enormous scale, yet too much of the media and public look away. When the RSF captured the city of El Fasher last October after an 18-month siege, at least 60,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed, in a massacre a UN investigation has now concluded amounted to genocide. Repeating that failure now, in El Obeid, would be a choice, not an accident.

So, it’s worth being clear about who is funding and fuelling this conflict. Sudan’s army has been fighting a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, and the RSF’s chief backer is the United Arab Emirates, a close British ally and trading partner.

The UAE denies arming the RSF. But last month Nathaniel Raymond of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the group whose satellite imagery documented the massacre, told Parliament that his team had traced the weapons pipeline, tracking phones moving between Addis Ababa, RSF territory and addresses in the Emirates linked to the RSF’s leadership. Human Rights Watch, the New York Times and UN experts have gathered evidence pointing the same way.

Raymond testified that Foreign Office officials told him “significant private pressure” from the UAE meant Britain would not publish what it knew about who was arming the RSF. Instead, officials suggested that his lab, a university research team, release the evidence itself, because doing so “could help neutralise” the Emirati pressure the British government would not confront directly.

Our Foreign Office was seemingly so under the thumb that it asked American academics to do what British diplomacy could not, while prioritising its economic and diplomatic relationship with the UAE over preventing the slaughter of tens of thousands of people.

Burnham has stated that his first priority will be national security, because ordinary lives are impacted by global events. No one could disagree. But national security does not just mean preparing for war. It means preventing conflict, tackling the instability that reaches British citizens, and defending the international rules that keep us all safe. Burnham was right to say our foreign policy must be guided by our values. You cannot say that and then retreat into a protectionist agenda.

Keir Starmer cut the aid budget to fund defence, taking it to its lowest level in cash terms since 2012. Sudan’s aid was ring-fenced. The government has protected £146 million in humanitarian funding for this year and doubled support to local Sudanese responders. That matters, and I welcome it. But ring-fencing a budget does not make it enough. Bilateral aid to Sudan actually fell last year, to £120 million, and the government’s own aid watchdog concluded that Sudan remains one of the world’s most under-resourced crises. £146 million for 30 million people facing starvation and genocide is a drop in the ocean.

Sufficient aid would allow Sudanese communities to get healthy again and create some ingenuity of their own. When a prime minister signals that aid is expendable, the average person on the street won’t stop to give a charitable donation, and charities begin to feel Sudan is too difficult a cause to take on.

I live in Manchester, and I’ve watched Andy Burnham up close. He’s decent, and Manchester is a city with a historic solidarity with people in the global south. His whole brand is about looking past the hazy world of politics to lead our country with a principled programme.

He has found his voice on Gaza, apologising for Labour’s failures and promising pressure on Israel. Sudan needs the same treatment: calling out the UAE’s role and putting genuine pressure on Abu Dhabi to stop, whatever the diplomatic cost.

Britain should impose network sanctions on those profiting from the illicit gold and finance fuelling this war, targeting the Emirati refiners and traders who handle Sudanese gold, as the European Parliament has just demanded. Raymond put it in terms every Mancunian understands: “If people in Manchester were burning Emirates jerseys we would be having a very different conversation,” he told MPs, referring to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi ownership. The forthcoming illicit finance summit is the ideal opportunity to crack down.

We should also energise the atrocity prevention coalition on Sudan that the UK itself created: monitoring, early warning, accountability, and serious discussion of a civilian protection force.

Burnham has publicly lauded the Hillsborough law and the families who fought for it. The idea that when the state fails people, it owes them the truth, accountability and proof that lessons will be learnt to prevent it from happening again.

So apply that standard here, and stand alongside the thousands of Mancunians with families in Sudan.

After the revelations about the government’s response to El Fasher, the question Burnham should be asking is the one his own politics demands: how many warnings, and how many deaths, before there’s a proper inquiry into why the Foreign Office failed so badly? If he looks away, he proves his critics right that these principles are just branding. If he engages, he proves them wrong.

Mohannad Taha is an activist and chair of Manchester for Sudan