Khartoum on Thursday rejected a deal with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to hand over two indicted officials in exchange for dropping the court’s arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo however ruled out dropping his call for a warrant for Bashir on suspicion of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, a move that some powers fear could derail peace efforts there.
“There will be no direct cooperation with the International Criminal Court and no sending any Sudanese citizens to The Hague,” Sudanese presidential adviser Mustafa Osman Ismail told a forum on Thursday.
The decision to refer Darfur to the ICC came from the UN Security Council so any proposal to resolve the crisis should also come from there, he said.
ICC judges are expected to decide in October or November whether to issue a warrant for Bashir’s arrest.
Moreno-Ocampo asked the ICC for the warrant, accusing Bashir of a campaign of genocide in which 35,000 people were killed outright, at least 100,000 died a “slow death” and 2.5 million were forced to flee their homes in Sudan’s Darfur region.
China, South Africa and others have expressed concern that an indictment of Bashir could damage the stalled peace process aimed at ending the five-year-old conflict in Darfur.
Moreno-Ocampo, in his first public comments since asking for Bashir’s arrest, said this was not a factor for him.
“I am the prosecutor and I have to do my judicial part of the work for the court,” he told reporters. “I kept my independence and I cannot be a political factor,” he said when asked whether arresting Bashir would harm peace negotiations.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offered a different view, saying the ICC also must consider ramifications of its work.
“We must seek to strike the correct balance between the duty of justice and the pursuit of peace,” he said.
Western diplomats in New York have said a deal could be struck to drop or suspend the warrant for Bashir if he agreed to hand over Humanitarian Affairs State Minister Ahmed Haroun and militia leader Ali Kushayb, indicted by the ICC last year.
Sudan has asked Russia, China and members of the Arab League and the African Union (AU) to help it pursue a Security Council resolution suspending a warrant for Bashir for 12 months.
Diplomats in New York say the Arab League and the AU’s Peace and Security Council are expected to call on the Security Council soon to block any ICC moves in the interests of bringing peace to Darfur.
Sudan is likely to get both Arab and African support at the UN. AU officials have expressed concern that the ICC’s first four cases have all focused on Africa.
Senegal’s president said on Thursday that US President George W. Bush had told African leaders at one point that the US might send troops to Darfur if they did not act to halt what he saw as genocide there.
“Myself and other African colleagues tried to dissuade him from this and convince him to leave us to try to sort out this problem among us Africans,” President Abdoulaye Wade said in a statement issued in Dakar on Moreno-Ocampo’s request for an arrest warrant for Bashir.
Meanwhile Bashir has agreed to resume diplomatic ties with Chad, one month after severing them following an unprecedented rebel attack near the Sudanese capital, officials said yesterday.
Bashir accepted the turnaround after an appeal by Wade, who has been trying to broker peace between the two sides, according to a statement issued by top officials from both countries meeting in Senegal.
Sudan accused neighboring Chad of supporting rebels who launched an attack near Khartoum in May that was the closet they had ever come to hitting the seat of Sudan’s government. Sudan cut diplomatic ties with Chad immediately afterward. Chad in turn closed its border with Sudan and halted bilateral trade.
Wade brokered a peace agreement in Dakar in March that was signed by the presidents of Sudan and Chad. The deal was meant to suppress attacks by armed groups operating along their shared border, but it has failed to ease instability in the region.
The statement was issued late on Thursday after a meeting chaired by Senegal, which was attended by Sudanese Foreign Minister Deng Alor and his Chadian counterpart, Moussa Faki Mahamat.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS