La stratégie séparatiste des Emirats arabes unis

Writing in Le Monde, Jean-Pierre Filiu outlines the separatist strategy of the UAE in Libya, Yemen and Sudan where it has backed violent factions with local agendas that undermine any possibility of national reconciliation and stability: Haftar and the east in Libya, southern separatists in Aden, and of course the genocidal Darfur militias (chiefly the RSF). Translation by AI (Claude):

The “Sparta of the Middle East,” as the United Arab Emirates has sometimes been described, has distinguished itself for more than a decade through a highly militarized and particularly aggressive foreign policy. Such a strategy bears the mark of Mohammed Bin Zayed, the current president of the federation of emirates, and is driven by an obsessive hostility toward the “Arab Spring,” that wave of popular protest that made the dictatorships of the region tremble in 2011.

While the strength of such a strategy may lie in its counter-revolutionary coherence, it leads the United Arab Emirates to support secessionist movements in numerous theaters, accentuating the fragmentation of the concerned states instead of guaranteeing some form of authoritarian restoration.

. . .

The Sudanese tragedy thus brings to a climax the disaster that the UAE’s separatist strategy represents in terms of mass suffering for the populations concerned and the disintegration of the regional order.