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.
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.
RSS