The UAE deals in the darkest of politics - its representative should be nowhere near the UN - Middle East Eye

A bid by the United Arab Emirates to install one of its top diplomats as secretary general of the United Nations, even as the country stands accused of supporting a genocidal paramilitary force in Sudan, has polarised opinion and left many wondering about the future of the world body’s moral authority. 

The bid of Lana Nusseibeh, who is a switched-on, worldly diplomat, was pushed by UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, autocrat and sponsor of warlords, paramilitaries and mercenaries across the Middle East and Africa, and reflects the rapacious politics of our times. 

Evidence of the UAE's support for genocidal forces in Sudan has piled up for years including in the form of UN investigations, yet the Gulf state denies it all while cultivating a polished international reputation.

In September, Anthropic established with "high confidence" that the UAE was behind an influence operation targeting UN experts and critics of its role in Sudan. Given the killings and disinformation and her role in denying them, placing Nusseibeh at the head of a world body already struggling to stay relevant and stem a deluge of wars would all but seal the coffin on its moral authority.

Until October, the race to succeed Antonio Guterres was dominated by centrist or left-leaning Latin American candidates. But US President Donald Trump, who has called the UN prone to "a far-left agenda of globalist bureaucrats", rejected them all.

That opened the door for Bin Zayed, whom Trump calls a "warrior", to advance Nusseibeh’s bid. The monarch has committed $1.4 trillion of investment to the US, including in artificial intelligence. Bin Zayed is in contact with Trump on containing Iran, and is the Middle East's staunchest ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose separate genocide has decimated Gaza, where the UAE is helping Israel's redevelopment plans.

Of Palestinian descent herself and with an academic history in Israeli studies, she has secured the backing of her nomination by the Palestinian Authority, which is partially dependent on Israel for its revenues.

Nusseibeh says that as the UN's first female leader she will act "with the interests of the United Nations only in view".

The women-led Centre for International Policy, a US think tank, says her career will continue to owe itself to an "authoritarian regime that serves as a haven for global kleptocracy and corruption".

As UAE ambassador to the UN, then minister and foreign-policy envoy, Nusseibeh has led her government's categorical denials of UN and media reports that it supported Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, whom even the Trump administration has confirmed as committing genocide. The denials persist as UN investigators keep reporting the UAE's role to the Security Council.

Questioned at the UN this week about whether she would continue to reject the findings of UN investigations on the UAE’s support to the Rapid Support Forces, she sidestepped the question saying the allegations were something for the UAE to answer directly, as she has now taken a leave of absence from her ministry to focus on her candidacy.

Instead she insisted, vaguely, that resolving Sudan’s conflict would be a "litmus test" for the success and credibility of any UN secretary general. 

As a Security Council investigator, I saw first-hand how the UAE mission to the UN under Nusseibeh’s ambassadorship behaved when faced with overwhelming evidence of UAE complicity in sanctions-busting.

During 2013 and 2014, just after she took up her post, I documented over 160 shipments of charcoal shipped from Somalia to the UAE, in violation of a UN resolution linking the trade to the financing networks of the Al-Qaeda affiliated group al-Shabab. 

During meetings with her team, I was always struck by how her office routinely dismissed the evidence at hand. My investigations culminated in the identification of a site in the UAE desert where I was able to find and photograph multiple warehouses stuffed with Somali charcoal, in flagrant violation of international law.

In 2022, long after I had left the UN but when Nusseibeh was still ambassador, I passed through the UAE in transit only to be detained on arrival, questioned for several hours and then expelled.

My own investigations, including enquiries made via a UAE-based lawyer, established that my detention was connected to the work I had previously done in the UAE and was provoked by renewed UN investigations on Somali charcoal. However, Nusseibeh’s office flatly denied her government’s involvement.

Back to today, the UAE is still not shy of intimidation tactics.

A UN report drafted this year and detailing the UAE's deployment of Colombian mercenaries in support of the RSF as they committed atrocities during last year's siege of the Darfuri city of El Fasher has been blocked for months, after the UAE's ally Bahrain, a non-permanent council member, requested a stay in proceedings.

In August, the UAE's UN ambassador demanded UN investigators to "immediately remedy the serious defects" in the report.

Controlling the Sudan narrative is vital to how the UAE shapes perceptions of its role in wars across the Red Sea region. It has backed a warlord controlling eastern Libya, supported pro-Israel secessionists in Yemen, and armed an Ethiopian regime now fighting several factions, including one in northern Tigray, where hundreds of thousands have been killed or starved since 2020.

These conflicts run parallel to the UAE's multi-billion-dollar port developments on the Red Sea's vital waterways, such as Berbera in the breakaway region of Somaliland, now recognised as independent by Israel.

The projects are partly designed to encircle and outflank Saudi Arabia, with which the UAE is locked in a contest for regional supremacy. They also cement its role as an indispensable hub of global capitalism; by some estimates its trading systems touch a third of humanity.

The UAE has used its vast wealth to buy influence with the permanent Security Council members who could have vetoed Nusseibeh. It has committed billions of pounds to the UK, whose government now tiptoes around the UAE's role in Sudan and in the Manchester City football club scandal.

It has pledged billions of euros to France, while hosting a French military base and a branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi.

China's reticence about a candidate so heavily backed by Trump and so close to Israel may be tempered by Beijing's view of the UAE as its most important Middle Eastern strategic partner.

Some 60 percent of Chinese trade is re-exported through UAE ports to more than 400 cities. Beijing is still committed to a Latin American candidate, but may yet be swayed.

The UAE has also tightened ties with Russia, taking large volumes of Russian oil and refined products via intermediaries since western sanctions were applied on Moscow.

Bin Zayed also recently mediated Trump's diesel supply deal with Putin, a trade Trump needs to lower fuel prices and soothe voters before US mid-term elections.

With all five Security Council permanent members so tied to and dependent on the UAE, it will be no surprise if they eventually wave Nusseibeh through. Her ascension may thus smooth the superpowers' collusive politics. But don't expect her to act in the interest of the victims of wars, mass atrocities and genocides.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.