On the Dangers of Politicizing Chemical Weapons Prohibition Mechanisms and Trading in International Accusations for Poli| Sudanow Magazine

To international organizations, disarmament bodies, and institutions of international law,

The most dangerous threat facing the international justice system today is not merely the violation of its governing rules, but their transformation into instruments of political blackmail by actors who lack any viable state-building project, and therefore substitute it with the internationalization of accusations and the commodification of stigma. In this context, it is telling that Dr. Abdalla Hamdok knocks on the doors of the International Criminal Court seeking redress, only for the Court to reject his request.

Within this framework, grave concern arises from the actions of Sudanese political delegations that neither represent the state, nor possess legal authorization, nor enjoy popular mandate or real domestic weight, yet seek to drag the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) into a complex internal conflict through extreme allegations related to the use of chemical weapons—without meeting even the minimum internationally recognized procedural and legal requirements.

First: A Chemical Weapons Accusation Is Not a Political Opinion

Under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), an allegation of chemical weapons use constitutes one of the gravest accusations in international law. It is not treated as:
• a political statement,
• a media narrative, or
• a bargaining chip in negotiations.

Rather, it is subject to precise and rigorous pathways, including:
• a formal request by a State Party or a competent UN mechanism,
• an independent technical investigation,
• material evidence secured through a verified chain of custody, and
• laboratory analysis conducted by OPCW-designated laboratories.

Accordingly, any attempt to bypass this methodology through partisan delegations or political organizations constitutes a violation of the spirit of the Convention and undermines the credibility of the Organisation before it harms the state concerned.

Second: Politicizing the Organisation Undermines Its Credibility

Opening the doors of international organizations to non-institutional claims advanced by parties politically involved in the conflict transforms a neutral technical body into an arena for settling political scores.

This trajectory does not harm Sudan alone; it:
• threatens the neutrality of disarmament mechanisms,
• weakens global trust in the Organisation’s reports, and
• creates a dangerous precedent that allows any failed political actor to internationalize a local conflict.

International organizations are not a refuge for those who lost their domestic battles due to intellectual poverty and the harvest of their own actions.

Third: Allegation Without a National Pathway Equals Political Criminalization

Leaping directly to international platforms without:
• engaging the national judiciary,
• demanding independent internal investigative mechanisms, or
• even respecting the principle of complementarity,

constitutes a criminalizing act against the state itself. It is not a defense of civilians, but an attempt to smear a central sovereign institution—the Sudanese Armed Forces—at a moment of existential threat to the state itself.

This is not a human rights endeavor; it is a fully-fledged hostile act that objectively serves external agendas seeking to strip the national state of legitimacy in favor of rebel forces, while encouraging further atrocities by those rebels so long as their crimes are whitewashed.

Fourth: Those Who Trade in Stigma Forfeit Political Legitimacy

Anyone who uses the gravest international accusations—chemical weapons—as a pathway to power demonstrates:
• an absence of national conscience,
• a lack of ethical responsibility, and
• unfitness to manage public affairs.

Selling the nation’s narrative to the highest bidder is not politics. Politics is not practiced by burning a country’s reputation, nor by inviting sanctions, foreign interventions, and external projects as shortcuts to the throne—as practiced by Samoud and Ta’sis.

Fifth: A Message to International Organizations

The responsibility of international organizations does not end at investigation; it includes safeguarding their mechanisms from politicization.

Therefore:
• rejecting non-institutional allegations,
• refusing to treat partisan delegations as substitutes for states, and
• enforcing strict procedural standards

are not negative stances, but legal and ethical obligations essential to protecting the regional and international system itself.

Conclusion

At one of the darkest moments in Sudan’s modern history—while the country bleeds from a war ignited by rebellion, paid for jointly by the state and society, and now threatening the entire region—some politicians have chosen to shift their struggle from the political arena to the realm of international criminalization, not in defense of truth, but as an investment in stigma.

A delegation from the Samoud organization, including Khalid Omar Yousif, Bakri Al-Jak, and Najlaa Karrar, traveled to The Hague—home of the OPCW—calling for the formation of an investigative committee against the Sudanese Armed Forces, and claiming possession of “documented reports and material evidence” of chemical weapons use in the ongoing war.

The issue here is not the right to allege; international law does not prohibit reporting. The catastrophe lies elsewhere. International justice was created to protect human beings, not to become a commodity in the marketplace of politics and its bidding wars.

It was therefore unsurprising that the practical response of the Head of the Executive Office was clear: forming an investigative committee is a highly complex procedural matter, accompanied by a clear indication that what was being presented did not constitute an institutional pathway, but rather an attempt at pressure through another gate (Germany within the Organisation).

Put more simply: the Organisation knows well how to verify claims, and it does not need lessons from amateur politicians.

Those who seek to trade in the pain of peoples, criminalize their homelands, and demonize their armies in pursuit of power or the approval of an external patron must be confronted by law—not by courtesy.

States are built through national responsibility.
Those who possess nothing but international denunciation deserve neither a place in the country’s future nor the trust of a people ravaged by rebellion and its sponsors.

Whoever lacks a state-building project—and instead, through an exhausted political conflict, trades in the reputation of his country’s army and the suffering of his nation through the reckless weaponization of chemical accusations—forces us to ask not:
Is the accusation true?
but rather:
Whom does it serve?

The painful answer is that such behavior aligns perfectly with the agenda of the regional sponsor of the rebellion, which since the outbreak of the war has sought to:
• tarnish the Sudanese Armed Forces,
• strip them of national and international legitimacy, and
• redefine the conflict as a “crime of state” rather than an armed rebellion.

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