The South African government secretly plotted to ensure safe passage out of the country for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir despite an international warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the conflict in Darfur, was able to fly out of Pretoria on June 15 despite a court order blocking his departure.
South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper, revealing what it said was a secret meeting of top ministers to discuss protecting al-Bashir, said he was escorted to his airplane by South African President Jacob Zuma’s own police.
Photo: Reuters
The ICC had called on South Africa — which is a signatory to the court — to detain al-Bashir while he was in the country for an African Union summit.
However, security ministers agreed at a meeting before the Sudanese leader arrived that South Africa would “protect Bashir by any means necessary — even if it meant flouting court rulings and undermining the constitution,” the Sunday Times said, quoting a senior government source.
After the meeting, which was attended by the defense and police ministers and the director-general of Zuma’s office, al-Bashir was given the go-ahead to fly to South Africa and “promised maximum protection,” the source was quoted as saying.
Al-Bashir left on the final day of the summit in Johannesburg, even as the local High Court was still hearing arguments over an urgent application to force the authorities to detain him on the ICC warrant.
The Sunday Times said word had spread that al-Bashir had been tipped off that he must leave, “because the case did not bode well for him,” and he was escorted by members of the Presidential Protection Unit to his airplane at a military air base.
“When people were making noise on Sunday [June 14] that he must be arrested, we just told Bashir to relax, because there was no way he was going to be arrested,” a security service source told the newspaper.
The South African government has come under fire from the ICC, rights groups and several other governments over its failure to detain al-Bashir. A South African court on June 15 gave the government a week to explain why it defied its order barring Bashir from leaving.
Al-Bashir has evaded justice since his indictment in 2009 over the conflict in Darfur, which erupted in 2003 when black insurgents rose up against al-Bashir’s Arab-dominated government, protesting they were marginalized.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing