The International Criminal Court (ICC) has added three genocide counts to the charges against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir over the war in Darfur, in a move hailed as a “victory” by rebels.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that [Bashir] acted with specific intent to destroy in part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups,” said a new warrant issued on Monday — the court’s first for genocide.
Khartoum dismissed the move as a “political” decision by The Hague-based court, but the rebel Justice and Equality Movement described it as a “victory for the people of Darfur and the entire humanity.”
“It will give hope to the people of Darfur that justice will be made,” spokesman Ahmad Hussein told reporters.
In Khartoum, Sudanese Information Minister Kamal Obeid said that the “adding of the genocide accusation confirms that the ICC is a political court.”
“The ICC decision is of no concern to us, us the Sudanese government. We focus on development,” Obeid said in a statement to the official Suna news agency.
In March last year, the ICC issued a warrant for Bashir’s arrest on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, its first ever for a sitting head of state.
However, that warrant did not include three genocide charges requested by prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who then appealed the court’s decision.
In February, the ICC appeals chamber ordered judges to rethink their decision to omit genocide, saying they had made an “error in law” by setting the burden of proof too high.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was “deeply concerned by the nature of charges against president Bashir,” spokesman Farhan Haq told a press briefing in New York.
Ban urged the Khartoum government “to provide its full support to the work of the ICC and address issues of justice and reconciliation,” he said.
In Monday’s decision, the court said there were reasonable grounds to believe that villages and towns “were selected on the basis of their ethnic composition” for attack by Sudanese government forces.
“Towns and villages inhabited by other tribes, as well as rebel locations, were bypassed in order to attack towns and villages known to be inhabited by civilians belonging to the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups,” the court said.
It also appeared likely that “acts of rape, torture and forcible displacement were committed against members of the targeted ethnic groups,” the court said.
The prosecutor had presented evidence of government forces contaminating the wells and water pumps of villages inhabited by these groups, who were also subject to forcible transfer “in furtherance of the genocidal policy,” it said.
“One of the reasonable conclusions that can be drawn is that ... the conditions of life inflicted on the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups were calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a part of those ethnic groups,” the decision said.
As president and commander-in-chief, Bashir likely “played an essential role in coordinating” a common plan to this end, the judgment said.
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