KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan’s president defied calls to arrest him for war crimes on Saturday, defending his decision to expel aid groups and dancing in front of crowds wearing traditional feathered head dress.
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir addressed crowds of supporters on the fourth day of demonstrations after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for him, charging him with masterminding atrocities in Darfur.
Bashir defended his decision to shut down 13 foreign and three local aid groups over accusations that they passed information to the court’s prosecutors. Aid groups deny working with the court.
“These humanitarian organizations are just thieves,” he said, referring to the aid groups. “They take 99 percent of the money and spend just 1 percent on the ground.”
The president poured scorn on legal moves against him.
“If people want to fight us, they shouldn’t pass resolutions through the U.N. Security Council or the ICC. They should come and fight us face to face.”
Sudan’s Ministry of Information said Bashir would continue to rally supporters with a visit to Darfur on Sunday.
Saturday’s rally in Khartoum was billed as a demonstration organized by Bashir supporters from semi-autonomous southern Sudan and Bashir wore southern costume during the demonstration.
But the event coincided with calls from South Sudan’s ruling party for the Khartoum government to reverse its decision to expel aid agencies.
“DEVASTATING IMPACT”
Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) spokesman Yien Matthew told Reuters the expulsion would have a devastating impact on tens of thousands of displaced Darfuris.
“People in Darfur who are displaced are dependent on these humanitarian agencies. It could be catastrophic … We are hoping they will change their minds,” Matthew said.
The comments were the first from within Sudan’s political system as the SPLM is in a national coalition government with Bashir’s dominant National Congress Party.
Matthew said the Bashir had taken the decision without consulting his southern political partners. “They are aware of (our disapproval) and yet they are still continuing.”
The SPLM fought northern Sudan in a two-decade civil war that ended in a 2005 peace pact that created a semi-autonomous government in the south, set up the north-south coalition and promised a referendum on southern independence in 2011.
The expulsions on Wednesday and Thursday drew international condemnation and U.N. agencies in Sudan on Saturday said the closures would seriously damage humanitarian operations in northern Sudan.
The United Nations said in a statement that the expulsion of high-profile organizations including Oxfam, Save the Children and two branches of Medecins Sans Frontiers, removed 40 per cent of the humanitarian workforce in northern Sudan.
“It is not possible, in any reasonable timeframe, to replace the capacity and expertise these agencies have provided over an extended period of time,” it said.
U.N. agencies rely on aid groups to deliver much of their food aid and other assistance to people on the ground, so the expulsions will also hit programs run by the World Food Program and other bodies. The expulsions did not affect agencies in southern Sudan.
The leader of Darfur’s rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) Khalil Ibrahim told Reuters the expulsion of aid groups amounted to another war crime as it would deprive Darfuris of food and assistance. “I call on the Security Council to punish this government,” he said.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The International Criminal Court’s decision to pursue a sitting head of state on war crimes charges puts others around the world on notice, but it’s also raising questions about which leaders are being targeted.
African and Arab nations say they will support Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, fearing the warrant issued against him Wednesday will bring even more conflict in Darfur, where up to 300,000 people have died since 2003, and further destabilize Sudan.
And they question why only Africans have been charged since the ICC — branded “the white man’s court” by Sudan’s information ministry — began its work six years ago. A temporary court, the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, indicted Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 while he was still president of Yugoslavia.
The chairman of the 52-state African Union has accused the court of “double standards,” asking why no cases have emerged from conflicts in the Caucasus, Iraq or Gaza.
“The African states were the strongest supporters of establishing the ICC. It wouldn’t have been possible without them. But there has been a significant shift in the past year,” said Christopher Hall, senior legal adviser to Amnesty International.
Outside Africa, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo is investigating possible cases in Colombia, Georgia and Afghanistan as well as a Palestinian request for charges against Israel for its actions in Gaza.
In Africa, those considered possible targets of the court are leaders in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Chad, Ivory Coast, Rwanda and Central African Republic.
Even among the Africans, the court’s choices are questioned. Why is it prosecuting former Congolese warlord and vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba for alleged crimes his fighters committed in Central African Republic, and not the ousted Central African leader who invited Bemba’s forces?
Why not the many other Congolese warlords whose forces all are accused of gross atrocities, including those of President Joseph Kabila? And what about the leaders in Rwanda, Uganda and other African countries that sent troops to Congo?
“It’s a very uneven path,” said Reed Brody, legal counselor for Human Rights Watch. “We’re still in a situation where if you are powerful or protected by the powerful you can avoid a reckoning.”
South African Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said African leaders are behaving shamefully and dismissed concerns that the court’s action would impede promoting peace.
“Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor?” Tutu asked in a column in The New York Times. “Rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard.”
Al-Bashir’s presidential adviser, Mustafa Osman Ismail, branded the world’s first permanent international court to investigate war crimes “one of the tools of the new colonization” aimed at destabilizing the sprawling oil-rich nation.
Sudan is Africa’s biggest country, covering an area the size of Western Europe and bridging the continent’s northern Muslim Arabs and southern Christian and animist Africans in a union riven with conflict since independence from Britain in 1956.
In Darfur, the war began in 2003 when rebel ethnic African groups, many of them Muslim, took up arms against the Arab-dominated government they accuse of discrimination and neglect. Up to 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have been forced from their homes in what the United States calls a genocide.
Those who argue that amnesty is a more powerful weapon for peace, though, point to Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, who defaulted on a peace agreement after the court issued an arrest warrant against him.
In recent months, Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army is accused of killing more than 1,500 civilians in northeast Congo and driving some 100,000 from their homes.
“There is a balance between attaining justice and sustainable peace,” Uganda’s Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa said Wednesday.
While another rebel leader, Bosco Ntaganda, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, Congo chose rather to treat with him and integrate his fighters into the national army. The move appears so far to have diminished the most powerful rebel threat in eastern Congo.
Sudan has reportedly said that African nations opposed to al-Bashir’s arrest warrant would pull out of the ICC in protest, but none had done so as of Thursday.
Thirty of the court’s 108 member states are African. And every indictment it has brought acted on requests from African members — Uganda, Congo and Central African Republic. Al-Bashir’s arrest warrant is the exception, initiated by the U.N. Security Council.
That in itself shows hypocrisy, critics say, given that three of the council’s five permanent members — China, Russia and the United States — refuse to join the international court.
The precedent set by the court Wednesday could extend to former U.S. President George W. Bush, amid charges his officials were the architects of criminal detention policies that led to torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo detention center in Cuba. But that is an extremely remote prospect. The Security Council is unlikely to order that while Washington is a veto-wielding permanent member.
“The world’s justice looks with one eye,” complained Taher Nunu, spokesman for Hamas, the Islamic militant group that Israel has been battling in Gaza.”
