The United Arab Emirates trip: a problem of propaganda
This is the opinion of Cecilia Volk, CSB sophomore
The United Nations recently declared the first official famine since 2020. This is just one effect of the brutal war occurring in Sudan currently. This war is being fueled by players like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who have been involved in sending weapons and money to the opposition party since this paramilitary attempted to seize government power in April of 2023.
Yet, in January of 2025, CSB+SJU took the opportunity to travel abroad to the UAE and engage with the country’s Ministry of Tolerance and Coexistence.
Ironically, the UAE’s Ministry writes that they seek tolerance because it “is essential for enriching human life…[and allowing people to] embrace and celebrate the diverse cultures of the world.”
It begs the question of how the UAE stands for these qualities when they have been supporting the paramilitary group in Sudan called Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which started the civil war against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
So far international Genocide watch suspects ten million Sudanese have fled their homes since April of 2023, making one out of every eight internally displaced persons in the world Sudanese.
Contributing to these events is far from “enriching human life”. This has led to students and faculty expressing concern about why our school decided to lead an excursion there.
If our CSB+SJU community is seeking to create connections around the world and gain a deeper understanding of culturally different perspectives on tolerance, the UAE was the wrong place to visit.
Sure, an opportunity paid for by an international education, training, and development organization is tempting, but it leads us to question why. Traveling to the UAE on a trip is understandable, but traveling there with the specific goal of demonstrating and experiencing Benedictine values is not comprehensible.
The country’s actions and deep-rooted history go against many cherished values that were emphasized on the trip.
One of many articles accessible online about the Civil War in Sudan states, “Sudan is key to the UAE’s strategy in Africa and the Middle East, aimed at achieving political and economic hegemony while curbing democratic aspirations…It is the primary importer of Sudan’s gold and has multibillion-dollar plans to develop ports along Sudan’s Red Sea coast. By supporting the RSF in Sudan, it has undermined the democratic transition that followed the 2019 ouster of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s dictator for 30 years.”
The Guardian article lays out the actions of the UAE, and continues with the effects that have come with supporting the RSF, “The pattern of targeting civilians, torching villages, and committing mass murders and sexual violence has been witnessed in all the areas that came under RSF control. RSF has committed genocide, crimes against humanity, widespread war crimes, and ethnic cleansing”.
The UAE supports this corruption, so why was it deemed ok to take a trip with 10 students to a place actively contributing to genocide and ethnic cleansing among other things? So, though I admit I originally, naively, applied for a FREE trip to the United Arab Emirates, I was fortunate not to move up in the interview process as I quickly found the trip as a whole to be concerning.
Though each student who got to attend brought back positive stories, something I caught onto was the fact that what they saw and heard in the UAE was a sugar coating on the country.
I am a firm believer that this trip was a learning experience for this institution, potentially the school needs to utilize well-educated professors with specialties in International relations before a trip to gain a deeper understanding of the countries visited.
Overall, being educated about International affairs is important, and it was a misuse of time and funds to go to the United Arab Emirates to study Tolerance and Coexistence when the country is funding a horrific war.