Sherif Mansour is an Egyptian-American democracy and human rights advocate. Most recently, he served as Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
It has now been more than a month since the exiled Egyptian poet and dissident Abdul Rahman Youssef al-Qaradawi, who is also a Turkish-dual citizen, disappeared after being illegally extradited from Lebanon to the United Arab Emirates. He has had no contact with his family or lawyers while in apparent Emirati custody, and his whereabouts remain unknown, according to his lawyer, Mohammad Sablouh. His crime? He criticized Emirati and Saudi officials on social media for their destructive role in Sudan and the wider region, ironically while on a trip to celebrate newly liberated Syria following the fall of the Assad regime in December.
I was with some of Abdul Rahman's friends in Turkey just last month. We watched with rare hope as Marco Rubio, during his confirmation hearing as Secretary of State, offered some rare criticism of the UAE, singling out its support for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the militia on one side of Sudan's civil war. Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "we need to raise the fact" with the UAE "that they are openly supporting an entity that is carrying out a genocide." In early January, in its last weeks in office, the Biden administration officially declared that the RSF was committing genocide in Sudan. In November, two Democrats in Congress, Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Sara Jacobs, introduced resolutions to halt arms sales to the UAE over its support for the RSF in Sudan.
Was our hope well placed? Is there finally enough bipartisan support in the United States to combat the growing threat of the UAE's transnational repression, including but not limited to the genocide in Sudan? Abdul Rahman's case should be a warning for all of us. The time to stand up is now.
As an exiled Egyptian human rights advocate myself who faced a politically motivated extradition request from Egypt in 2012 and has been targeted by digital surveillance, I worry a lot about my own safety. But I also worry about the safety and rights of many fellow Egyptian, Sudanese, Lebanese, Syrian and other regional activists who have been targeted by the UAE and its allies across the region. Many of us refuse to be silenced.
It is time to expose America's own role in furthering nefarious Emirati influence and transnational repression.
- Sherif Mansour
What Abdul Rahman said about the destructive role of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the region is true. The Emirati government's response to his critique only proves his point about the UAE's central role in suppressing any voices in the region demanding democracy and accountability. The fact that the UAE relied on the Egyptian government to press the Arab League to extradite him only proves that this "league" has become another tool for the region's autocrats to go after Arab dissidents.
But it is also time to expose America's own role in furthering nefarious Emirati influence and transnational repression. Across successive administrations, the U.S. has been holding the Gulf country up as a model for the region on security, the environment and more. No other U.S. ally besides Israel has been offered the purchase of advanced F-35 fighter jets. (Trump signed off on a deal to allow sales of the F-35 to the UAE in the final days of his presidency in 2021, but talks were then suspended under the Biden administration.)
The Biden administration worked with the United Nations to have the UAE co-host the COP27 climate talks in Egypt, which Biden himself attended, despite both Egypt and the UAE's awful human rights records. The U.S. also supported the UAE hosting COP28 the following year in Dubai, even as more evidence emerged of blatant Emirati support for anti-democratic forces across the Middle East and North and East Africa—as well as its role as one of the world's largest oil producers. COP28 in the UAE was a farce for climate talks, presided over by Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the chair of the UAE's state-owned oil company, who used his role as president of the conference to instead push for $100 billion in new oil and gas deals.
The U.S. gave the UAE yet another honor last fall, when the Biden administration in September recognized it as a "major defense partner" of the U.S., which allows for closer military cooperation, including joint training and military exercises. India is the only other non-NATO country with this designation. The same month the Biden administration rewarded it as a supposed partner in building "a more stable, secure, peaceful and prosperous Middle East," Freedom House once again ranked the UAE as "not free."
The very same country being called upon to bring "regional stability" has been one of the core forces for instability and repression across the region. Long before the UAE backed genocidal forces in Sudan, human rights groups were documenting and condemning the UAE's active and direct role in supporting mass violence and torture in the prolonged civil war in Yemen. In fact, the Emirates' relationship with Sudan's notorious RSF militia, and its leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—the general who is widely known as Hemedti—started when the UAE recruited child soldiers, including from Sudan, to fight the Houthis in Yemen. Today, the UAE uses the RSF to extract Sudan's natural resources, including its gold and agriculture exports, despite the fact that tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians have been killed by these paramilitaries during Sudan's civil war and millions more displaced, suffering acute hunger. All the while, some estimates say that the UAE imports 90 percent of its food from Sudan alone.
Hemedti, of course, is but one of many military leaders and warlords in the region that are being actively supported by the UAE. Others include Eritrea's military dictator, Isaias Afwerki, Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar and Egypt's autocratic president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The very same country being called upon to bring "regional stability" has been one of the core forces for instability and repression across the region.
- Sherif Mansour
The UAE has also become a regional leader in digital surveillance, extending the reach of its repression far beyond its borders. In my previous role at the Committee to Protect Journalists, I documented how the Emiratis and other U.S. partners imported surveillance experts from the U.S. to develop their own surveillance infrastructures and collaborated with regional allies to buy and sell surveillance technologies that targeted journalists and civil society. In 2020, the UAE allegedly deployed Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, against journalists with links to the UAE's Gulf rival, Qatar. The UAE reportedly used Pegasus to spy on the phone of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and perhaps French President Emmanuel Macron too. The UAE also hired former U.S. government staff to develop its own surveillance tool called Karma, which was then used to hack into the phones of activists, political leaders and dissidents.
Will the Emirati government ever be held accountable for these abuses? Temporary halts on arms sales and a few public statements are not enough. If Rubio was sincere in his confirmation hearing about raising issues of concern with the Emiratis, he should follow up as Secretary of State with action, including by publicly demanding Abdul Rahman's release. More punitive measures, including the sanctions and visa restriction under the Khashoggi Ban, can be used to target Emirati and Lebanese officials involved in his unlawful extradition. Finally, Congress can do its part by passing the Transnational Repression Policy Act, which was introduced in the wake of Khashoggi's murder by agents of the Saudi government, to deter foreign governments from abusing Interpol and extradition treaties to target human rights defenders and dissidents with physical or digital threats.
Breaking the silence on the U.S. government's complicity in the UAE's actions is admittedly the first step toward addressing its long record of impunity. But Abdul Rahman and many exiled dissidents are in imminent danger if we fail to speak up now. With Trump's return to power, another Gulf ally could feel even more emboldened to target exiled dissidents around the world. As Secretary of State, Rubio should be held to account on his pledge to confront the UAE about its support for genocide in Sudan, but also about his record in the Senate of supporting past transnational repression resolutions when China and other U.S. rivals were the focus.
