JERUSALEM (06.03.2009): For et par dage siden – den 4. marts – udstedte Den Internationale Domstol i Haag en arrestordre på Sudans præsident Omar al-Bashir ”for forbrydelser imod menneskeheden” i forbindelse med Khartoum-regeringens brutale krig i Dafour-provinsen i den sydvestlige del af landet.
Man må vel tage hatten af for Den Internationale Domstols modige og formentlig kontroversielle skridt. Det er mig bekendt første gang en international arrestordre bliver udstedt imod et regerende statsoverhoved, og skridtet vil uden tvivl have betydning for international rets gennemslagskraft i fremtiden. I den aktuelle sag vil arrestordren formentlig ikke få den store effekt. Sudan er ikke noget der bare minder om et demokratisk land, og arrestordren vil næppe svække al-Bashir internt. Og blandt Sudans samarbejdspartnere i den arabiske verden er der så mange stats- og regeringschefer med blod på hænderne, at de ikke skal have noget af at pågribe og udlevere den sudanesiske præsident til retsforfølgelse, hvis han skulle komme forbi på et officielt besøg eller en arbejdsfrokost. En sådan praksis vil nemlig kunne få et slemt epidemisk omfang i denne del af verden.
Det handler Khalid Medani’s artikel ”Wanted: Omar al-Bashir – and Peace in Sudan” i Middle East Report Online om.
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero030509.html
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Wanted:
Omar al-Bashir – and Peace in Sudan
By Khalid Mustafa Medani
Middle East Report Online
March 5, 2009
For the first time, the international community has indicted a sitting president of a sovereign state. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan stands accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague of “crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed in the course of the Khartoum regime’s brutal suppression of the revolt in the country’s far western province of Darfur. Having indicted two other figures associated with the regime in 2007, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo began building a case against the man at the top, and on March 4, the court issued a warrant for Bashir’s arrest.
By all accounts, the court’s decision to pursue a war crimes trial against a current head of state is an important historical precedent for the cause of international justice. If the decision makes even one other person in power control the impulse to quash dissent with violence, it will have been worthwhile. Few think, of course, that Bashir will be taken into custody any time soon. Sudan is not party to the Rome Statute creating the ICC, and even UN Security Council Resolution 1593, which referred the Darfur matter to the court in 2005, says that Khartoum has “no obligation under the Statute.” The real debate pertaining to Sudan at the moment is whether this indictment will actually be useful in forwarding peace negotiations and ending the war in Darfur. Human rights organizations and other proponents of the ICC option, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, cite the heightened pressure that Khartoum will presumably now feel to resolve the conflict through political rather than military means. On the other hand, critics, including the African Union and the Arab League, argue that Bashir’s incentive to resume peace talks will be reduced.
What is missing in this debate is the question of how to bring about a durable resolution to the Darfur crisis in the long term. Bashir, after all, is a single leader among many others responsible for the mass murders in Darfur. The problem for Sudan, and for the people of Darfur, is much larger than the president. His arrest -- should it transpire -- would be a first step toward achieving a semblance of justice for the thousands murdered at his behest. But even trial and punishment for Bashir would not temper the authoritarian nature of the regime in Khartoum or halt the horrific violence against the Darfuri people. What is needed is vigorous international diplomacy to boost the prospects of clean elections in 2009 and to extend the provisions of Khartoum’s peace deal with the rebels in the south to the rest of the country.
Deflecting the Outrage
The level of the violence is down from the plateau it reached from 2004, when former Secretary of State Colin Powell famously labeled the regime’s counterinsurgency “genocide,” to May 5, 2006, when Khartoum signed the Darfur Peace Agreement in the Nigerian town of Abuja. Starting in 2003, unwilling to accede to rebel demands for greater autonomy, Khartoum organized and armed bands of “horsemen with guns” (janjaweed) to wage a scorched-earth campaign in Darfur, while warplanes of the Sudanese air force bombed and strafed indiscriminately. The revolt has not yet been quelled, and the toll upon civilians has been appalling. According to (possibly conservative) UN estimates, the war has taken over 300,000 lives and displaced over 2.7 million people, many of whom languish in refugee camps in neighboring Chad or equally squalid tent cities for the internally displaced. Nor has the violence abated after the 2006 accord, despite Bashir’s October 2008 statement, “There are no problems and life is very normal.” Fighting between government-backed militias and rebels, as well as among rebel groups, killed well over 1,000 people in 2008, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said an additional 230,000 people were displaced between January and October. UN figures for 2008 also show escalating attacks on humanitarian aid workers, with 11 staffers killed and 36 wounded. UN estimates, the war has taken over 300,000 lives and displaced over 2.7 million people...
For a long time, Khartoum denied any role in the depredations of the janjaweed, ascribing reports of violence to tribal disputes. But extensive eyewitness testimony, and government documents obtained by Human Rights Watch in 2004, proves definitively that the militia raids were ordered by the regime. The previous year, the regime had released from “house arrest” one Musa Hilal, leader of thuggish precursor gangs to the janjaweed, and directed him to muster the troops. Khartoum’s next strategy for deflecting the growing international outrage over Darfur was to scoff at it, pledging to ignore any attempt to bring the tools of international justice to bear. It was no careless clerical error when the regime switched the portfolio of Ahmad Haroun, one of the two figures indicted by Ocampo in 2007, from minister of interior to minister of state for humanitarian affairs.
But as momentum built for an indictment of Bashir himself, Khartoum mounted a diplomatic offensive at the Security Council, arguing that the measure would endanger ongoing talks regarding both Darfur and southern Sudan, as well as the lives of aid workers serving the displaced. Khartoum asked the Security Council to invoke Article 16 of the Rome Statute, which allows the world body to defer action on ICC charges for up to one year. Not surprisingly, the regime found support for its position in letters sent to the Security Council by the Sudan Workers Trade Unions Federation, which (as in many other Arab countries) is an arm of the state, and the Sudan International Defense Group, a “non-governmental committee” established by the regime for the express purpose of lobbying the UN about the ICC decision. The regime has also found backers in neighboring presidential palaces, where there is little enthusiasm, to put it mildly, for the Bashir precedent. Egyptian state radio, echoing a common refrain of Khartoum’s, blasted the “double standard” whereby Sudan attracts the ICC’s scrutiny while Israel’s “massacres and genocide” and “the former US administration’s violations in Iraq and Afghanistan” do not. Toward the end of February, Bashir traveled to Cairo to extract another public denunciation of the ICC’s intervention from Egyptian President Husni Mubarak himself.
Knack for Survival
To be sure, and regardless of who is right about the arrest warrant’s immediate effect, the ICC decision against Bashir represents a remarkable symbolic victory for the people of Darfur and their supporters. Ocampo would win even more friends in Darfur and in Sudanese opposition circles if he requested authority to apprehend ‘Ali ‘Uthman Taha, the second vice president of Sudan who managed the Darfur file from 2003 to 2004 and is widely believed to be the official who unleashed Musa Hilal and his minions on “the zurga,” a racist epithet that Khartoum and the janjaweed use to describe “the blacks” resident in Darfur. Taha is named several times in Ocampo’s application for arrest of Bashir, and an Associated Press story in 2008 posited that he is next in the prosecutor’s crosshairs. Perhaps in response, the second vice president (a southerner has been first vice president since 2005) has mostly been keeping a low profile, “under the ICC radar” as Sudanese wags put it. He did surface at the end of February in Turkey, where he asked the Ankara government to use its seat on the Security Council to invoke Article 16. …the arrest warrant… against Bashir represents a remarkable symbolic victory for the people of Darfur…
It is important, however, that the agenda of those concerned about Darfur not stop with arrest warrants. In particular, supporters of justice for Darfur should focus on assisting civil society organizations in advance of parliamentary elections scheduled to be held by July, by the terms of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed between Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement of the south, to ensure that these contests are free and fair.
Understandably, the human tragedy of Darfur has eclipsed nearly all else in Sudanese affairs, and it may sound odd to speak of elections when the ruling National Congress Party, the face of the junta that staged a coup in 1989, has monopolized political power for nearly two decades. One should not, however, underestimate the vibrancy and resiliency of democratic forces in Sudan. There are a number of popular opposition parties planning to vie for control of Parliament, including the Umma Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and a range of Darfur-based parties, including the two major rebel factions, the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement. The ruling party will certainly win a majority in the next assembly, but the coalition in opposition could be considerably strengthened if regime vote-rigging efforts are kept to a minimum. Many Sudan watchers dismiss the opposition parties because they seek to reform rather than overthrow the existing regime, but in the opposition’s view, they are merely engaging in the politics of the possible. The regime has exhibited quite a knack for survival, having broken a previous power sharing agreement with the Umma Party in 1999 without penalty and then successfully ousting Hasan al-Turabi, the Islamist thinker once thought to rule in condominium with the generals. Since 2001, the regime has been further emboldened by newfound oil wealth and enlistment on Washington’s side in the “war on terror.” The prominence of Sudan hawk Susan Rice among candidate Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers led to speculation that Obama would reverse the slow “normalization” of relations with Khartoum, but as ambassador to the UN Rice will execute rather than fashion policy, and there is no indication yet that Sudan policy will change dramatically.
Where to Go from Here
In addition to calling for the arrest of Bashir, therefore, the international community should also ensure the full implementation of the CPA. The CPA’s central principle is the importance of holding free and fair democratic elections. As the agreement notes, this is the only way to safeguard the fragile peace in southern Sudan and -- here is the pivotal point -- to resolve conflicts in other “peripheral” regions of the country, including Darfur. In the last week of February, clashes between government forces and the army of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement claimed 50 lives, 14 of them civilians, according to the UN, in the southern town of Malakal. Malakal, adjacent to the hydrocarbon treasures of the south, is only the latest flashpoint in a simmering confrontation between the signatories to the CPA. It is a troubling sign that the peace in the south is precarious -- more so because developments in south Sudan are inextricably tied to the Darfur crisis. Like the 21-year war in the south, the conflict in Darfur is rooted in Darfuri grievances over the distribution of national resources and political representation at the center. In fact, the real reason Khartoum has been waging the war in Darfur is precisely that Darfuris have called for the expansion of the CPA beyond the southern region to Darfur and all parts of the country, including the north and the east.
By Bashir’s calculation, the ICC decision is not the end of the road. His primary objective is to consolidate the junta’s power by expanding oil production in Darfur and elsewhere. Only a genuinely democratic transition stands in the way of this objective. The ICC’s warrant for Bashir’s arrest will have little effect in resolving the larger problem in Sudan: the lack of participatory politics. Only if this warrant is followed by a concerted effort to support free and fair elections will it fulfill its promise.
Otherwise, the end result of the ICC’s intervention, as the critics say, could be to further marginalize of the people of Darfur, threaten the CPA and undermine the struggles of civil society organizations bridging ethnic divides. The arrest warrant is to be applauded for its boldness and its implications for the future. Most Sudanese, however, are more desirous of a long-term peace that would usher in a period of political stability and economic advancement for their beleaguered nation.
(Khalid Mustafa Medani is an assistant professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal and an editor of Middle East Report.)