It was a rare success for international courts struggling to resist a rising tide of official lawlessness. Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, a leader of the notorious, government-backed Janjaweed militia that committed genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region from 2003 to 2005, was jailed for 20 years last week by the International Criminal Court (ICC). He had been found guilty on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Although hundreds of militia were involved, Abd-al-Rahman, also known as Ali Kushayb, is the first person to be convicted of atrocities in Darfur, now again the scene of terrible violence in Sudan’s civil war. The ICC has charged former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir with genocide and war crimes. Ahmad Harun, a former minister, faces similar charges. But both men have evaded arrest.
When I interviewed al-Bashir in Khartoum in 2011 — he was overthrown in a popular uprising in 2019, after which the army seized power and the civil war erupted — he scoffed at the genocide allegations.
His government and its Arab militia allies had fought insurgents, not Darfur’s people, al-Bashir said. The West was imposing a double standard. He insisted he had done nothing wrong.
Speaking in 2008, Harun, whose non-ironic job title was “minister for humanitarian affairs,” said much the same thing.
“I have no regrets,” he told me, rejecting an ICC arrest warrant alleging his complicity in up to 200,000 deaths in Darfur as politically motivated. “What I have done was legal, it was my responsibility, it was my duty.”
Arrogant claims to have broken no laws, to have no case to answer, to be doing your “duty,” go to the heart of a growing contemporary problem — official impunity. Guilty or not, neither al-Bashir nor Harun believed they would ever face international justice, and so far they have been proved right. In this belief they are no different from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This unsavory trio are variously accused of atrocities by the ICC, the UN and human rights monitors. Each is alleged to have overseen the cold-blooded killing, mistreatment or mass abduction of noncombatant civilians. All three flatly deny wrongdoing. All claim their actions are justified, no matter what the law, public opinion or simple moral decency might say. All smugly believe they are untouchable.
Netanyahu is fighting on multiple fronts to save his career and avoid jail. Like Gaza, his personal reputation is already in ruins. Israel’s prime minister wants his long-running trial in Jerusalem’s district court on fraud and bribery charges to be halted in the “national interest.” He would prefer to prove his innocence, he claims, but in an act of public-spirited magnanimity, to heal the nation’s divisions, he says he is prepared to accept a pardon.
The nerve of the man.
Netanyahu has persistently, cynically exploited those same divisions to cling to power. Chock-a-block with chutzpah, he is also resisting a full, independent inquiry into his government’s disastrous security failures preceding the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman, among others, accuses him of orchestrating a “whitewash” to save his skin.
Yet it is Netanyahu’s contemptible bid to dodge a reckoning with the ICC over Gaza — where his government is accused of genocide — that most dramatically illustrates the pernicious impact of official impunity. Rather than defend himself in court, Netanyahu hides behind US President Donald Trump’s skirts in Washington or skulks at home to avoid arrest. In Gaza, meanwhile, hungry children continue to suffer — on his orders.
If Hegseth, the Pentagon’s new GI Joe action man, swapped his too-tight trousers for a looser fit, perhaps he would feel less bloody-minded. He has somehow convinced himself that killing dozens of unidentified people on boats in the Caribbean, on unsubstantiated suspicion of drug smuggling, is desirable and legal — and not an unwarranted act of brutality.
Various spurious justifications are advanced. The US says it has obtained “intelligence” that proves its claims (though not from the UK, which frowns on extrajudicial killing and is refusing to help).
The victims, deemed to belong to “foreign terrorist organizations,” are legitimate targets, it argues. Judges and lawyers can say what they like. For Hegseth, Trump’s foppish hitman, only one man’s opinion matters.
Both Trump and he believe they can do whatever they want and no one will call them to account. When a video emerged showing survivors of a US attack being deliberately killed in a second strike, members of the US Congress belatedly started asking questions, but the Pentagon is being less than frank. Who cares? Not his boss. Whatever Hegseth does “is OK with me,” Trump said last week.
That is what impunity looks like. That, right there, is an end to the rule of law. That is the world’s most powerful state saying it no longer respects basic rules that, imperfectly yet crucially, hold human society together.
Off the coast of Venezuela, US forces, killing at will and seizing oil tankers, act just like Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa or Yemen’s Houthi rebels, randomly firing missiles at Red Sea shipping. Impunity spells anarchy.
Little wonder that Putin — another thug on the run from the ICC — reckons he, too, can get away with murder. Indeed, in his infamous 28-point Ukraine “peace plan,” Trump sought immunity from prosecution for Russia’s president. He is also trying to destroy the ICC with sanctions.
What kind of example is now set by the US? How can the UK and Europe still pretend it is a like-minded ally, even a friend?
Marauding abroad as they do at home, Trump’s lawless, lethal enforcers are the new Janjaweed, and like Ali Kushayb, Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Hegseth and all the other smirking killers must one day be held to account by a court.
Simon Tisdall is a foreign affairs commentator.
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