分类： politics

In a high-stakes bilateral meeting held Wednesday in Manila, Philippines, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has pushed back against a recent string of antagonistic statements and actions from the United States, issuing a clear call for Washington to respect Beijing’s core interests, uphold the long-standing one-China principle, effectively manage bilateral disagreements, and address China’s fully legitimate concerns. The meeting, which brought together Wang – who also serves as a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee – and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, comes at a critical turning point for China-US relations. Wang opened the discussion by noting that 2026 marks a pivotal juncture after the landmark Beijing summit between the two nations’ heads of state, during which top leaders laid out a clear roadmap for building a constructive, strategically stable bilateral relationship. This agreed-upon direction, Wang emphasized, represents meaningful progress for the two global powers as they work to navigate peaceful coexistence. It aligns with the core interests of both the Chinese and American people, and matches the widespread hopes of the broader international community for stable great power relations. Today, the shared task for both sides is to remain firmly on the path charted by their leaders, Wang argued, urging the US to work with China to push past distractions and unnecessary barriers. Turning the consensus reached at the highest level into actionable policy and mutual understanding across all levels of government and societal sectors, he said, remains the urgent priority going forward. Wang further noted that productive, well-managed relations between China and the US can deliver global public goods: through bilateral strategic stability, the two countries can advance broader world peace and security, and constructive engagement can open new doors for global collective action on pressing shared challenges. Beyond bilateral topics, the two top diplomats also exchanged detailed views on a range of pressing international and regional hotspot issues. Following the closed-door discussions, both sides characterized the meeting as pragmatic, positive, and constructive. They reached a shared agreement to maintain open and functional political and diplomatic communication channels, put in place thorough preparations for the next round of high-level China-US exchanges, and continue working toward substantive progress in building the agreed-upon constructive and strategically stable bilateral relationship.

When tens of thousands of demonstrators with the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a youth-led Indian grassroots movement, marched toward India’s parliament in New Delhi on Monday to demand government accountability over a series of high-profile exam paper leaks and recruitment scandals, few could have predicted the defining image of the day would not be tear gas canisters or baton charges—but viral Instagram memes and deadpan jokes.

The CJP movement first emerged from widespread student anger over persistent exam irregularities, and has since expanded into a broader call for transparency, targeting Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan with demands for his resignation. Pradhan has rejected these calls, instead accusing opposition parties of exploiting young people’s frustrations for political gain. The Monday demonstration, one of the largest anti-government gatherings in New Delhi in recent years, quickly escalated when police moved to disperse the crowd, firing tear gas and charging protesters with batons. Authorities also shut down mobile internet access across the protest zone to limit information sharing. By the end of the day, both sides reported injuries: protesters said dozens of demonstrators had been beaten by police, while law enforcement confirmed multiple officers were also hurt.

Once internet access was restored, a flood of first-person content—short video reels, personal dispatches, and sardonic memes—poured onto social media platforms, capturing the day’s chaos through a uniquely young, internet-native lens. Among the most viral content was a pre-protest “fit check” (a popular social media trend where creators show off their outfits) filmed by 20-year-old Chhavi, who smiled at her camera and joked, “Going to get beaten by cops, guys.” Hours later, after enduring the police crackdown, Chhavi still posted her content smiling—posing beside riot officers, flashing victory signs, and documenting the chaos unfolding around her.

Chhavi’s video was far from an anomaly. Other young protesters shared equally striking, dryly humorous content: one young woman calmly reapplied lipstick in front of a line of fully geared riot police; another quipped she was “serving face at the protest because the government couldn’t serve justice”; one reel cut abruptly from a casual outfit reveal to footage of protesters fleeing tear gas; another offered a deadpan “product review” of tear gas, rating its scent and stinging power like a new street food vendor.

To outside observers, this mix of humor and violence can seem contradictory. But for the young creators behind the content, the jokes are not a dismissal of danger—they are a way to live alongside it. Most of the self-deprecating humor centers on the absurdity of their own experiences: joking about the kilometers logged running from baton charges, or the strangeness of filming an outfit reveal moments before tear gas fills the street. The fear never disappears; it simply coexists with laughter.

Digital culture and political science experts argue this trend signals a fundamental shift in how a generation raised entirely online engages in political protest. “Older generations separated political life from everyday life,” explained Joyojeet Pal, a University of Michigan professor specializing in technology and society. “Younger generations grow up with politics alongside their memes, their family pictures and their daily commutes.”

Critics have accused some protesters of treating state violence as social media content, chasing viral engagement instead of taking the movement seriously. But Chhavi pushed back on that claim, saying the choice to laugh was a coping mechanism in the face of terror. “I was adrenaline-soaked, scared, petrified,” she said. “It was either laugh in the face of fear or cry.”

Payal Arora, a digital anthropologist at Utrecht University, notes that the instinct to document political upheaval with smartphones has grown increasingly common across global protest movements. What was once the exclusive work of professional journalists is now done by ordinary participants, preserving moments that would otherwise be lost to official erasure. “The act of capturing a protest is often an end in itself,” Arora said. “Their message is more like: ‘This happened. We were there. We will remember.’”

Nishant Shah, director of the Digital Narratives Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Journalism and Communication, says misinterpreting the protesters’ humor as detachment misses its core purpose. Humor has long been a unifying tool in protest movements worldwide, helping ease tension, build collective solidarity, and sustain participants through moments of intense fear. “Even when the cause is brutal and the fight fierce,” Shah said, “there is joy, laughter, songs and hope. Without those things, protests don’t sustain themselves.”

For 21-year-old first-time protester Ishaan, that purpose was clear when he posted his own viral reel after a tear gas canister landed near his position. Instead of fleeing immediately, he pulled out his phone to film, and captioned the clip of drifting white smoke: “Delhi Police doesn’t realise I’m from Jamuna Paar.” The joke is familiar to most Delhi residents: Jamuna Paar, the low-income eastern neighborhoods across the Yamuna River, has long been mocked for its chronically neglected civic infrastructure. “The smell there is worse than the tear gas,” Ishaan explained with a laugh. He emphasized the joke was never meant to trivialize what happened. “It was about refusing to let fear dictate the memory of the day,” he said.

Every generation of protest movement develops its own shared cultural language to bind participants together: India’s independence movement relied on rousing songs and speeches; trade unions carried iconic banners; 20th century student movements embraced hand-painted posters and street theater; more recent movements, from anti-citizenship law protests to the year-long farmers’ protest, used murals, constitutional readings, and border livestreams to build their community. The CJP movement’s language is that of a generation raised online, and experts say dismissing it as frivolous is a failure to understand how modern protest works.

The dynamic nature of memes sets them apart from older forms of protest communication, Shah explained: a meme gathers meaning as other protesters remake it, parody it, and share it across their own networks. Sharing the meme becomes an act of protest in itself. That was the case for 18-year-old engineering student Manit, who attended his first protest Monday and almost chose not to film anything. “I was scared,” he said. “Then I looked around. Everyone was recording, talking to the camera, just being themselves. So I asked my friend to record me.”

His viral reel looked identical to the casual workout content he posts regularly—until the final frame, which revealed the running distance logged on his fitness app had been accumulated while fleeing a police baton charge. “I escaped the lathi charge,” he laughed. “I ran and ran and ended up completing my workout too.” For Manit, the approach makes perfect sense. “Not all young people read the news,” he said. “If humour can make important conversations accessible, why wouldn’t we use it?”

*Names of some protesters have been changed to protect their identities.*

New urgent fears have been raised over the declining health of 84-year-old imprisoned Tunisian opposition leader Rached Ghannouchi, following an eyewitness account of the politician fainting inside a sweltering Mornaguia prison during an intense national heatwave.

Haifa Chebbi, daughter of jailed Tunisian opposition politician and lawyer Ahmed Chebbi, shared the account in a public Facebook video posted Tuesday. Chebbi explained she observed the incident while visiting her father at the facility, noting that Ghannouchi eventually regained consciousness—but that the episode remains deeply alarming given his advanced age and pre-existing poor health.

Speaking to the stark inequity of her experience versus that of incarcerated people, Chebbi said, “I can’t describe what it feels like to leave prison. I couldn’t breathe.” She placed direct responsibility for Ghannouchi’s failing condition on Tunisian national authorities, adding, “We are all responsible. We are all complicit.”

The alarming incident comes as Tunisia battles an extreme heat event that has pushed temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius in multiple regions. The unrelenting heat has sent demand for air conditioning spiking across the country, straining the national electricity grid and triggering widespread rolling power outages in populated areas. Human rights defenders have long warned that these extreme conditions create a life-threatening hazard for elderly inmates and those with chronic health conditions, especially in Tunisia’s overcrowded prisons, which often suffer from poor ventilation and almost no access to cooling systems.

Ghannouchi, a former speaker of Tunisia’s parliament and leader of the Ennahda Movement, has remained in custody since April 2023. His arrest was part of a sweeping crackdown on political opponents launched by President Kais Saied, who first consolidated unilateral power in July 2021 when he suspended parliament, dismissed the sitting government, and began ruling by executive decree—actions opposition leaders and international observers labeled a coup against Tunisia’s post-2011 democratic transition.

Since Saied’s power grab, dozens of opposition politicians, lawyers, judges, journalists, and civil society activists have been arrested or prosecuted. International human rights organizations have described this campaign as an unprecedented attack on political pluralism and civil liberties in Tunisia. Saied has repeatedly pushed back against these criticisms, claiming Tunisia’s judiciary operates independently and that all detainees face charges for standard criminal violations, not their political beliefs. Critics of the president, however, frame the prosecutions as a deliberate effort to dismantle the independent opposition that emerged after Tunisia’s 2011 democratic revolution.

Ghannouchi has been targeted with a cascade of overlapping prosecutions and convictions that his legal team and supporters uniformly condemn as politically motivated. Since his arrest last year, Tunisian courts have handed down multiple prison sentences in cases ranging from incitement and alleged illegal foreign financing to conspiracy against state security and terrorism-related charges. The Ennahda Movement has consistently rejected all accusations against Ghannouchi as fabricated, arguing the charges are simply a tool to criminalize peaceful political opposition to Saied’s autocratic rule.

Maher Medhioub, a former Tunisian parliamentarian and senior aide to Ghannouchi, sounded an urgent alarm in a public Facebook post following news of the fainting incident. “Time is running out. The risk to his life is becoming increasingly serious,” Medhioub wrote. He added a broad appeal to global leaders, elected lawmakers, legal professionals, journalists, and all human rights advocates: “We call upon world leaders, parliamentarians, legal professionals, journalists, and all defenders of human dignity to give urgent attention to this humanitarian situation and to uphold the principles of justice, human dignity, and the rule of law.”

International human rights bodies have already repeatedly called for Ghannouchi’s release. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded in a 2023 report that Ghannouchi’s imprisonment is arbitrary and demanded his immediate release. Leading global rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also joined the criticism, accusing Saied’s government of weaponizing the national judiciary to silence political dissent. Middle East Eye, the original outlet of this reporting, confirmed it contacted Tunisia’s Ministry of Justice for comment on the incident and Ghannouchi’s condition, but received no response prior to publication.

A wave of public anger and security anxiety swept across Israel on Wednesday, triggered by early reports that the U.S. administration under former President Donald Trump had approved a landmark 30-year civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that would permit uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. The revelation immediately united political opponents across Israel’s ideological spectrum in criticism, with many targeting long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over what they frame as a catastrophic failure of Israeli foreign and security policy.

Avigdor Liberman, leader of the right-wing opposition party Yisrael Beytenu, warned that the civilian nuclear framework would inevitably pave the way for Riyadh to develop nuclear weapons, sparking a devastating nuclear arms race across the entire Middle East. He called on Israeli leaders to take an uncompromising public stance against the deal and urged immediate lobbying efforts in the U.S. Congress to block its finalization.

Yair Golan, head of the left-wing opposition party The Democrats, issued a direct rebuke of Netanyahu, arguing that the prime minister had simultaneously failed to achieve the long-sought goal of diplomatic normalization with Saudi Arabia and cleared a path for the kingdom to build an unsupervised nuclear program. For decades, normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia has ranked among Israel’s top foreign policy priorities, a strategic push intended to reduce regional isolation and sideline negotiations with the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly rejected normalization progress, however, insisting it will not move forward without a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Golan added that Netanyahu has weakened Israel both militarily and politically, leaving the country sidelined as global powers make decisions that will shape Israeli security for generations.

Even Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist-right Blue and White party, joined the chorus of criticism, echoing that the emerging U.S.-Saudi deal poses a direct threat to Israeli national security. He blamed Netanyahu’s far-right governing coalition for repeatedly squandering opportunities to reshape the Middle East in Israel’s favor.

Against the backdrop of this growing nuclear security debate, Israeli President Isaac Herzog issued a rare urgent warning on Tuesday evening about threats to the integrity of the country’s upcoming 27 October national elections. Though Herzog’s role is largely ceremonial, he told the public that Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet and the Central Elections Committee had alerted him to multiple serious threats to the electoral process from both domestic and foreign actors.

Herzog also called for an end to the vitriolic infighting that has dominated the pre-election campaign, framing the vote as a critical test of both Israeli democracy and social cohesion. Speaking ahead of Tisha B’Av, the Jewish fast day that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Ancient Temples, Herzog drew a direct parallel between modern internal division and the historical cycles of infighting that led to the collapse of earlier Jewish self-rule. “Twice in the history of our people, we merited to establish independent rule in our land. Twice we failed,” Herzog said, urging all parties and candidates to avoid crossing rhetorical red lines and treat political rivals as opponents, not enemies. “Elections are not a civil war,” he repeated twice in his address, emphasizing the historic responsibility of all Israelis to protect the integrity of the democratic process.

In a third development Wednesday, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the country’s State Attorney’s Office will pursue criminal charges against a former senior National Security Ministry official over the illegal approval of thousands of gun licenses, following an exposé published by the outlet last year. The official, Dror Israel Avishar, who previously led the ministry’s Firearms Department, is suspected of fraud and breach of public trust. All charges are pending a pre-trial hearing.

Avishar stepped down from his post in December 2023, shortly after Haaretz revealed that the ministry, led by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, had distributed thousands of gun licenses in violation of existing national regulations. According to the State Attorney’s Office, after the 7 October 2023 attacks, unapproved personnel issued roughly 23,000 conditional gun permits and 15,000 final licenses as part of Ben Gvir’s push to expedite the application process. The minister appointed 82 “temporary licensing officials” drawn almost exclusively from his own political circle, and these appointees routinely ignored mandatory regulations requiring proof of completed firearms safety and shooting training before approving licenses.

Attorneys for Avishar have stated that their client resigned not over misconduct, but because of a bitter public dispute with Ben Gvir over the minister’s push to massively expand gun access across Israel. Since the 7 October attacks, expanding gun ownership for Israeli citizens has been one of Ben Gvir’s signature policy priorities. Between October 2023 and September 2025, Haaretz reports the ministry issued roughly 200,000 new gun licenses. Before the 2023 attacks, roughly 170,000 Israelis held active gun licenses; per Ben Gvir’s own public comments, his so-called “gun reform” has pushed the total number of licensed gun owners in the country to more than 410,000. “My policy is clear: a weapon in the right hand saves lives,” Ben Gvir said in March during an announcement expanding gun license eligibility to Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem.

Turkey’s fractured main opposition bloc entered a new phase of upheaval this week, when former Republican People’s Party (CHP) chairman Ozgur Ozel announced plans to formally launch a new political force — named Yeni Parti, or New Party — on Monday, capping months of escalating internal and judicial conflict that has gutted the decades-old CHP.

The schism traces back to the CHP’s historic victory in the 2024 Turkish local elections, where the party swept most of the country’s major urban centers and claimed the largest share of the national vote, positioning it as the most credible threat to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s long-running rule ahead of the 2028 presidential and parliamentary polls. Within months, a wave of judicial investigations targeted CHP leadership and elected officials, leading to the arrest of 26 CHP mayors on corruption charges — including Ekrem Imamoglu, the widely popular mayor of Istanbul.

A separate legal case accused Ozel of securing the CHP chairmanship through bribery and improper lobbying. In May, a Turkish court annulled the party congress that elected Ozel, removed him from office, and reinstated former CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu as interim pending the outcome of Ozel’s appeal. Since his return, Kilicdaroglu has rejected repeated calls from party members to hold an extraordinary congress to resolve the leadership dispute, instead purging senior party officials aligned with Ozel and Imamoglu. Many Ankara-based political analysts suspect Kilicdaroglu’s reinstatement was quietly supported by Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as part of a deliberate strategy to split the opposition. To date, the judicial pressure and internal chaos have already pushed several sitting CHP mayors to defect to the AKP.

As the party’s power struggle intensified, Ozel opted to break away entirely, building a new movement that is expected to draw the vast majority of the CHP’s sitting lawmakers and provincial leadership. Reports indicate that 94 of the CHP’s 135 members of parliament and 74 of its 81 provincial chairs will join Ozel’s new party. A small group of Ozel-aligned officials will remain in the original CHP, however, to block Kilicdaroglu from consolidating full control over the remaining rump party.

The split has created a complex new political calculus for Erdogan, carrying both clear short-term advantages and long-term risks for his bid to retain power in 2028. In the immediate term, the divided opposition plays directly into the AKP’s strategic goals. The opposition already lost significant momentum after months of legal pressure on the CHP, and a split into rival factions leaves no unified challenger to Erdogan. If the fractured opposition fields multiple presidential candidates, political strategists widely expect that split to enable Erdogan to win outright in the first round of voting.

This advantage has been compounded by Erdogan’s ongoing 2024 peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has pulled the pro-Kurdish Dem Party away from the broader opposition alliance, giving the government unobstructed political space to advance its corruption cases against CHP leaders. Polling also suggests that Kilicdaroglu retains very little support among the CHP’s original voter base: only 5 to 10 percent of CHP voters say they will remain with the party under his leadership. Multiple surveys indicate Ozel’s new party could capture more than 30 percent of the national vote, surpassing the AKP’s current support share — the CHP won 37 percent of the vote in the 2024 local elections.

Still, even with this strong initial showing, the split could benefit Erdogan in parliamentary elections, where tightly contested constituencies often swing to the candidate or party with even a narrow lead. A pollster affiliated with the AKP told Middle East Eye that the new party’s initial momentum is likely to fade over time, and the AKP’s internal leadership sees Ozel as a preferable opponent to other potential challengers. Despite Ozel’s growing popularity, AKP strategists believe he would struggle to win a nationwide head-to-head contest against Erdogan. With Kilicdaroglu also expected to field his own presidential candidate, the opposition vote will be further fragmented, easing Erdogan’s path to victory.

One major wild card in the current political equation is Mansur Yavas, the popular incumbent mayor of Ankara. Multiple independent polls consistently show Yavas leading Erdogan by 15 to 20 percentage points, making him the opposition’s strongest potential presidential candidate. Yavas has thus far signaled he intends to remain in the CHP, but Ozel-aligned officials privately warn that Yavas could face his own corruption investigations if he solidifies his position as the leading opposition challenger. Erdogan’s current approval rating sits between 35 and 40 percent, but polling analysts note he could push that figure close to 50 percent through a well-executed populist campaign ahead of 2028.

Despite these short-term gains for the ruling party, the emergence of Ozel’s new party carries significant long-term risks for Erdogan and the AKP. For decades, Erdogan built successful election campaigns by framing the CHP as an elitist, bureaucratic, statist movement disconnected from ordinary Turkish voters, tying it to unpopular historical policies such as the university headscarf ban. That messaging has resonated deeply with conservative and Islamist constituencies for decades. Ozel’s new party carries none of the CHP’s historical baggage, leaving it free to build a cross-spectrum coalition.

If Ozel succeeds in building a broad center-left movement that unites voters across Turkey’s political divide, while rolling out a credible policy platform focused on restoring independent institutions and repairing Turkey’s struggling economy, the new party could emerge as a formidable long-term challenger to AKP rule. A recent joint poll conducted by the IstanPol think tank and Rawest Research, which surveyed 1,985 respondents across 20 Turkish cities between July 3 and 10, found that 55.9 percent of all respondents believe the new party can succeed. Support for the project is particularly high among opposition voters: 81 percent of CHP supporters, 72 percent of Dem Party voters, and 61 percent of nationalist IYI Party voters expressed confidence in the new party. Notably, even 67 percent of voters from the AKP’s coalition partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and 45 percent of AKP voters said they believe the new party can achieve full or partial success.

Political analysts argue the new movement has an opportunity to avoid the organizational weaknesses that have long hampered the CHP, including an overcentralized structure that relies on tightly controlled local branches with little engagement with broader civil society. Kemal Buyukyuksel, an analyst at George Mason University, wrote for independent outlet Progresif that the new party should not model itself on traditional, centralized political organizations. Instead, he argued, it can function as a broad political space that incorporates elements of civil society and grassroots social movements. “Instead of being a machine that plans everything from the central office, the party can become a platform that opens up space for social initiatives emerging in different places, connects them, and gives them a common political direction,” Buyukyuksel explained.

A closed-door Sudan-focused gathering organized by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office at the Wilton Park conference facility has sparked sharp international criticism after independent outlet Middle East Eye exposed that a senior leader from the political wing of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) will attend the event – while the country’s internationally recognized army-backed transitional government has been excluded from the agenda.

Multiple verified British and Sudanese sources confirm that Nasredeen Abdulbari, a top figure in the RSF-aligned Tasis political coalition, will participate in the three-day conference, which kicked off Wednesday, alongside an official delegation from the United Arab Emirates. Sources familiar with the event’s planning describe the gathering as intentionally kept “discreet,” with no public listing on Wilton Park’s official event schedule, a departure from the facility’s standard transparency practices for most of its dialogues.

The controversial invitation to the RSF representative and UAE delegates follows damning recent testimony to a UK parliamentary committee from Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab. Raymond publicly accused the UK government of prioritizing its close strategic and economic ties with the UAE over taking meaningful action to halt widespread atrocities in Sudan’s ongoing civil conflict.

Sudan has been locked in a brutal civil war since April 2023, pitting the RSF paramilitary group against the country’s formal Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The RSF, which the United Nations, United States and multiple independent human rights bodies have formally accused of perpetrating genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, has long been documented receiving military and political backing from the UAE – a claim the UAE has repeatedly denied despite growing open source evidence. The SAF, by contrast, receives external support from Egypt and Turkey.

In a striking contradiction of the UK’s public posture on the Sudan conflict, British officials joined a joint statement with other European nations in June 2024 that openly condemned RSF atrocities, specifically referencing the group’s October 2023 seizure of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. The statement noted that UN assessments found the violence carried out during that assault carried “the hallmarks of genocide,” with witness accounts collected by Middle East Eye confirming systemic rape, summary executions, and extortion of civilian populations by RSF fighters.

Beyond Abdulbari and the UAE delegation, Wilton Park officials have confirmed that representatives from several other Gulf states will also take part in the closed conference. Founded in the aftermath of World War II to foster open democratic dialogue between global stakeholders, Wilton Park brands itself as the UK’s “foremost multilateral facilitator” and acts as an official expert body for the UK government to convene sensitive international policy discussions.

When reached by Middle East Eye for clarification on attendee lists and the purpose of the confidential gathering, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office declined to issue any comment. A senior foreign office source, speaking on condition of anonymity, only confirmed that the event was proceeding as planned, and a Wilton Park staff member also verified that the conference was scheduled and underway at the facility’s Wiston House estate in West Sussex.

The exclusion of Sudan’s official Transitional Sovereignty Council has drawn fierce condemnation from the Sudanese government. Amgad Fareid Eltayeb, a senior adviser to the council, slammed the UK’s decision as inconsistent with its public rhetoric around human rights and accountability in Sudan.

“We saw a lot of statements from the US and UK governments showing concern about what the RSF would do if they took el-Fasher. It’s the same rhetoric we still hear, the same talk… But while the British government is echoing concern about possible crimes committed by the RSF, a possible genocide committed by the RSF, they have invited RSF affiliates to England to discuss the future of Sudan,” Eltayeb told Middle East Eye.

“Anything that needs to be discreet is hiding something that makes it necessary for it to be discreet. The UAE’s support for the RSF has been documented even by their own parliament, and so we have very little confidence or trust in what the British government is trying to do discreetly,” he added.

Critics have also pointed to deep economic ties between the UK and UAE that may inform the UK’s approach to the Sudan conflict. Official trade data shows the UK has exported £422 million ($565 million) worth of arms to the UAE over the past three years, and independent open source investigations have already confirmed British-made military equipment originating from the UAE has been recovered from RSF fighters on Sudan battlefields.

For Eltayeb, this creates an unmistakable pattern of contradictory behavior: “We can see a pattern of complicity here. They issue statements of concern about the RSF possibly committing genocide, then invite their leadership to discuss the future of Sudan.”

A veteran British policy expert with decades of experience working on Sudanese peace negotiations, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid professional repercussions, called the exclusion of key Sudanese stakeholders from the conference “fairly outrageous.” The expert noted that many longstanding Sudanese peace advocates and experienced negotiators were not only uninvited but completely unaware the conference was being organized.

The controversial gathering comes just 48 hours after former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband was appointed as the UK’s new foreign secretary in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new cabinet. Notably, Miliband did not mention Sudan or its ongoing civil war in his opening public address after taking office, as the new UK government has prioritized other pressing foreign policy issues including the war in Ukraine, rising tensions with Iran, and the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Miliband’s brother, David Miliband, currently serves as CEO of the International Rescue Committee, a major humanitarian organization operating in Sudan.

Diplomatic sources, however, tell Middle East Eye that some Sudanese and international stakeholders hold tentative hope that Miliband will take a harder stance against the UAE’s role in fueling the Sudan conflict, which the UN has classified as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis. More than a year into the war, official estimates place the death toll at hundreds of thousands, and over 14 million Sudanese have been displaced from their homes.