Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir danced before thousands of supporters in Darfur on Wednesday, defying a possible arrest warrant for genocide on a heavily protected visit to the war-torn area.
Traveling by plane and in a convoy of army, police and national security vehicles mounted with guns and backed by air support, Bashir was greeted by thousands of supporters in state capitals El Fasher and Nyala.
Civil servants, tribesmen, students, men on camels and horses cheered the head of state, pledging allegiance and slamming a bid from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Bashir’s arrest over suspected war crimes.
PHOTO: EPA
School pupils were recruited for the rally and one government employee in El Fasher said that staff were ordered to a disused land under the sun, where a grinning Bashir danced to nationalist music, jabbing the air with a stick.
His visit comes a week after ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo accused Bashir of instructing his forces to annihilate three non-Arab groups in Darfur, masterminding murder, torture, pillaging and using rape to commit genocide.
Members of those groups — the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa — some of whom belong to Bashir’s National Congress Party, also slammed the ICC move at rallies.
The Khartoum regime is trying to persuade the UN Security Council to freeze possible legal proceedings should ICC judges actually issue an arrest warrant, on the grounds that it could jeopardize peace prospects.
“What Ocampo said about Darfur is lies ... We have to find a solution to the Darfur crisis,” Bashir told around 300 people made homeless in the five-year conflict, who officials said were returning from El Fasher to their villages.
In Nyala, the president accused France, where one of the main Darfur rebel leaders Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur lives in exile, of damaging peace efforts and ordered the release of 89 children arrested after a rebel attack on Khartoum.
“I order the authorities to release those children and take care of them and take care of their education,” Bashir told a crowd of thousands.
Two weeks ago, the special UN envoy on human rights in Sudan, Sima Samar, urged the government not to prosecute the “child rebels,” recommending that they be treated as victims of war.
An Arab League official said Sudan had agreed to set up special courts to try alleged human rights abuses in Darfur that will be monitored by the UN, the African Union and the Arab League.
If Sudan holds viable trials of those accused of crimes in Darfur, the ICC automatically drops its charges. Khartoum previously promised to try alleged Darfur war crimes, but credible trials have failed to emerge.
The UN says that up to 300,000 people have died and more than 2.2 million have fled their homes since the conflict erupted in February 2003. Sudan says 10,000 have been killed.
The war began when African ethnic minority rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime and state-backed Arab militias, fighting for resources and power in one of the most remote and deprived places on earth.
His first visit to Darfur since last year, Bashir is visiting El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, today.
He is scheduled to inaugurate development projects and hold talks with state officials, local leaders and political party representatives.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS