The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's leader, Omar al-Bashir. It is the first time that the ICC has leveled criminal charges against a sitting head of state.
Bashir is charged with two counts of war crimes, and five counts of crimes against humanity. The president is accused of directing attacks against an important part of the civilian population of Darfur. Such attacks have included murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians and pillaging their property. The UN estimates that 300,000 people have died in the six-year conflict; millions more have been displaced.
China, which buys most of Sudan's oil and provides it with weapons, urged the ICC to suspend its case, saying it risked destabilizing Darfur. The U.S. State Department said that "those who have committed atrocities should be brought to justice". The EU also welcomed the decision, as did human-rights groups.
The Sudanese government, which had said it would ignore any ruling, reaffirmed it had no intention of cooperating with the ICC. "The court is only one mechanism of neo-colonialist policy used by the West against free and independent countries," Sudanese presidential aide Mustafa Othman Ismail said. In response to the ICC's action, Sudan revoked the registrations of 10 foreign aid agencies hours after the arrest warrant was issued.
"With this arrest warrant, the International Criminal Court has made Omar al-Bashir a wanted man," said Richard Dicker of the New York-based group Human Rights Watch. Amnesty International called on any country visited by President Bashir to detain him.
Bashir, however, will probably not have to fear traveling to many African and Arab countries, where there will be little chance that he might be arrested. Most African and Arab leaders are aghast at the arrest warrant. If a fellow president can be arrested and tried for brutalizing and killing his own people, then many of them might not be safe either.
The ICC's next step is to send a request to the Sudanese government for the arrest and surrender of Bashir-- but nobody is expecting that to happen. In 2007, the ICC issued arrest warrants against two other Sudanese citizens-- Humanitarian Affairs Minister Ahmed Haroun and the Janjaweed militia leader Ali Abdul Rahman-- and Sudan has so far refused to hand them over.
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