Posts Tagged ‘Sudan’

Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir at the 21st Arab League Leaders Summit in Doha, Qatar, March 30, 2009. (Ammar Abd Rabbo)

(TRENDS magazine, April 2009)

Arab League summits are easy to overlook. But as the situation in Sudan careened towards a new disaster last month, leaders from across North Africa and the Middle East appeared set for a memorable gathering this time – albeit for unsettling reasons.

The trouble started when President Omar al-Bashir’s government ordered 6,500 aid workers at 13 organizations to leave Sudan, after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against al-Bashir on Mar. 4. According to the United Nations, those vacating aid groups will leave more than a million people in Sudan without food, water or medicine.

“The situation has already gone from bad to terrible,” says Brian Steidle, a former military observer with the African Union mission in Sudan’s Darfur region. “Hundreds of thousands are expected to die in the next couple of months.”

Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor with the Yugoslavia and Rwanda war crimes courts, believes the reaction by al-Bashir’s government constitutes a serious breach of international law. “His conduct since the arrest warrant indicates criminality at a huge level,” Goldstone says, adding that Khartoum appears to be taking, “a sort of revenge.”

Since 2003, the UN estimates at least 300,000 people have died in Darfur, mainly as Arab militias and government forces have attacked non-Arab, Muslim Africans. About 2.7 million survivors have fled their homes, many taking shelter in huge camps within Sudan that rely on humanitarian aid for basic supplies.

The Arab League has responded to the ICC indicting al-Bashir, but not to Sudan banning humanitarian groups. In a statement, the League simply expressed “deep dismay” at the ICC’s warrant, denouncing it as an affront to Sudan’s sovereignty and requesting that the UN Security Council postpone it for a year.

Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, also reaffirmed al-Bashir’s invitation to the organization’s annual summit on Mar. 29-30. Qatar, the event’s host, said it would ignore the ICC’s request to turn over al-Bashir – in spite of mounting evidence that Khartoum has orchestrated the mass killing of civilians.

“I personally have seen government troops in the process of looting, in the process of burning. I’ve seen them attack villages,” says Steidle, who presented photos and other proof of government atrocities he collected in Darfur to the ICC’s chief prosecutor.

And while the Arab League closes ranks to defend al-Bashir, the organization and its members have been appealing for international intervention in Gaza. After the recent Israeli invasion there, the League sent in legal experts to search for evidence of war crimes. Saudi Arabia also asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to probe whether Israeli forces used depleted-uranium weapons.

“The Arab League, I think properly, has tried to fight impunity in Gaza,” says Kenneth Roth, managing director of Human Rights Watch. “But it’s hard to square that with its stance for impunity in Sudan – it’s that impunity that’s emboldened al-Bashir to go on killing.”

So if Sudan’s embattled president attended the Qatar summit, he likely basked in public support from his peers. In private, however, that support may not hold. “It’s possible that behind closed doors, an option such as an honorable exile in Saudi Arabia or Egypt may be raised,” says Abdallah Schleifer, a veteran Middle East analyst based in Cairo.

Schleifer believes several things are behind the Arab League’s public solidarity with al-Bashir, including defensiveness over perceived meddling by Western countries in Arab affairs, and an obsession with resolving human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories.

In the long run, however, Roth and Goldstone say that indictments by international courts tend to be deeply delegitimizing. “Exactly the same arguments and difficulties were raised when Milosevic was indicted. But he ended up being there,” Goldstone says. “If state cooperation doesn’t come now, there’s going to come a time, it seems to me, when al-Bashir will likely end up in The Hague.”

Meanwhile, the lives of more than a million displaced Sudanese are hanging in the balance, threatening to eclipse Khartoum’s past brutality.

www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress/2009/04/30/aid-and-abetting