ICC needs US support

  Hussein Solomon

In July 2008, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir became the first sitting head of state to be accused by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

According to the charge sheet, al-Bashir "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups" in Sudan's Darfur region. (It should also be noted that arrest warrants have already been issued by the ICC against Sudanese officials Ahmed Harun and Ali Kushayb for their involvement in the ongoing carnage in Darfur. Khartoum has refused to hand anyone over.) In this campaign of ethnic persecution, which began in February 2003, 300,000 lives have been lost and 2.2 million people have been displaced.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, laid out in stark detail the brutality of the war currently being waged in Darfur: "The most efficient method to commit genocide today in front of our eyes is gang rapes, rapes against girls and rapes against 70-year old women. Babies born as a result have been called Janjaweed babies and this has led to an explosion of infanticide. Al-Bashir is executing this genocide without gas chambers, without bullets and without machetes. The desert will do it for them ... hunger is the weapon of this genocide as well as rape."

The mixed international reaction to these charges was predictable but still disappointing. Both the African Union and China made clear that they wanted the charges against the Sudanese president dropped, arguing that they would undermine any prospects for sustainable peace in the Sudan. Such arguments are fallacious in the extreme since, for some years, it has been increasingly evident that there is no peace to keep in Darfur, while the Sudanese government has also undermined the provisions of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement thus risking war between the north and the south, as we have recently witnessed in the oil-rich town of Abyei.

The position of the AU is whole-heartedly supported by Khartoum, which has been stressing flawed notions of "African solutions for African problems" despite knowing full well that the AU has neither the capacity nor the political will to deal with the likes of al-Bashir or Robert Mugabe. Moreover, the more than four million Congolese who have perished in the conflict in that blighted country eloquently reflect the AU's record in conflict resolution.

As for Beijing's complicity in shielding Sudan's president from international justice, the significant trade relationship between Sudan and China hardly needs to be pointed out. Sudan is one of China's main exporters of oil. China, meanwhile, is a major arms supplier to Sudan.

The European Union, together with various international non-governmental organizations, has been generally supportive of the ICC and the charges against al-Bashir. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner have made it clear that Sudan should comply with the decisions of the ICC. Meanwhile, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have been supportive of the ICC decision, believing that it is "an important step towards ensuring accountability for human rights violations in Sudan".

What has been disappointing in the pursuit of international justice is the reaction from the United Nations and the United States. The UN secretary general has distanced the UN from the ICC, noting that the court is not a part of the UN. As for the US, while it has agreed that war criminals should be exposed and brought to trial, it is hesitant to allow the ICC's jurisprudence to extend over any heads of state.

This is an unfortunate position. If the US wants to be taken seriously as a superpower intent on promoting human freedom and democracy, then this ambiguity has to end. A good place to start would be to be a part of the ICC. Historically, we have seen how the absence of the US from the League of Nations after World War I damned that organization into irrelevance. With the likes of Moscow and Beijing supporting al-Bashir, it is morally incumbent upon Washington to stand up for the morality and the ideals it so loudly proclaims.

The most interesting reaction, however, emanates from Khartoum itself. In the immediate aftermath of the charges being announced, Sudan reacted furiously, with a senior official threatening to turn Darfur into a graveyard. However, it is clear that al-Bashir has been rattled by the charges and has engaged in a multi-pronged offensive. The first front was a diplomatic offensive targeting Sudan's allies in the Arab League and the AU to help pressure the ICC not to go ahead with the charges, as well as seeking and getting the support it needed from Beijing. The second front of the offensive was to mend ties with Sudan's western neighbor Chad, after Khartoum accused Ndjamena of backing a rebel attack on its capital in May 2008.

The third front of the offensive was internal. During the course of July and August, the Sudanese president reached out to the political opposition in Khartoum, sought to foster closer ties with the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the south, embarked on a tour of Darfur and promised various development projects to alleviate the lot of the people there. Thus, whatever the international reaction to the ICC charges is, they are already creating a more responsive posture on the part of Khartoum to its long-suffering people--something the US with its sanctions and the UN with its moral authority have thus far been unable to do.- Published 14/8/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org

Professor Hussein Solomon lectures in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.