Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has seen off other challenges in almost 20 years in power and there is no sign that he is going to give in to the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Some supporters of the court's move hope it will eventually persuade Sudan's politicians to hand over their leader in a palace coup, end the festering conflict in Darfur and do more to repair relations with the West.

But many signs point in the other direction, turning Bashir further towards allies such as Russia and China as he strengthens his hold on power.

Some believe the court’s decision could worsen the fighting in Darfur because rebel movements will be emboldened and because Khartoum will feel that there is no longer any point in trying to pander to the West.

There are also concerns over what it could mean for the 2005 peace deal that ended the two-decade north-south war - although officials from the semi-autonomous south have been quick to say, in public at least, that they are standing behind Bashir.

While Bashir remains in power, the arrest warrant means the West has lost one of its strongest negotiating cards with Sudan -- the offer to normalise relations.

The new U.S. administration could still offer Sudan the carrot of removing the country from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. But early statements from President Barack Obama and his team suggest they plan a tougher stance on Sudan.

Some of the 30 African countries who signed the founding statute of the International Criminal Court may start reconsidering their involvement. Many states already feel the court's investigations to date have unfairly targeted the continent.

And there is no sign that Bashir will be arrested. Despite the call from the ICC for all countries to implement the warrant, he plans to go to an upcoming Arab summit in Qatar and intends to join future African summits. While Qatar has not signed up to the statute, if Bashir were to get away with visiting a country that has done so it might seriously challenge the court’s authority.

Was it right for the court to issue the warrant against Bashir? Will it improve the situation in Sudan or make it worse? Could it end up undermining the court? What do you think?

Look down the list of the cases the International Criminal Court is pursuing – Congo, Central African Republic, Darfur, Uganda – and it doesn’t take long to spot the connection.

Of the dozen arrest warrants the court has issued, all have been against African rebels or officials. On Monday, the court begins its first trial - of Thomas Lubanga, accused of recruiting child soldiers to wage a gruesome ethnic war in northeastern Congo. Earlier this month, former Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba was in court for a decision on whether to confirm charges of ordering mass rape to terrorise civilians in the Central African Republic.

The judges are also deciding whether to indict their first head of state, Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accused by the court’s prosecutor of instigating genocide and other war crimes in Darfur. All those being pursued by the prosecutor reject the accusations against them.

There is no doubt there were atrocities in all the conflicts in question - families, villages and countries scarred for ever by murders, rapes, mutilations, kidnappings and burnings.

The question is why the court is only targeting conflicts in Africa, which may have a higher proportion of troubles than other continents, but certainly has no monopoly on evil. Ongoing or recent conflicts elsewhere include Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia-Georgia, Israel-Palestinians and Sri Lanka among others.

"We have the feeling that this court is chasing Africa," Benin’s president, Thomas Boni Yayi, commented last year of the moves to prosecute Sudanese President Bashir. Boni Yayi is no maverick. He is the leader of a peaceful pro-Western country with a record of democracy as good as any on the continent.

One explanation for the ICC’s focus on Africa could be that justice systems on the continent are not in a position to pursue those accused of war crimes.

“The ICC is a court of last resort.  It will not act if a case is investigated or prosecuted by a national judicial system unless the national proceedings are not genuine, for example if formal proceedings were undertaken solely to shield a person from criminal responsibility,” the court says.

But it is far from clear that those who may have committed war crimes outside Africa are being pursued or could be pursued by local justice systems.

Another reason for putting so much weight on Africa might be that it is relatively easy and uncontroversial. Its states and rebel factions are not particularly influential. The conflicts in Africa are not at the heart of any global struggles that could result in major diplomatic ructions.

The risk for the court, though, might be a loss of credibility within the continent and beyond. The attempt by the court’s prosecutor to bring charges against President Bashir has certainly made some African states ponder whether it was sensible to sign up to and ratfiy the 2002 Rome statute that established the court.

African support has been significant. Of those that have become “States Parties”, 30 are from Africa. Compare that to the one (Jordan) in the Middle East. The United States has not signed up. Nor has China or Russia.

Is the court targeting Africa disproportionately or do its actions simply reflect a disproportionate number of war crimes committed there? What will it mean for the court’s credibility if it does not tackle atrocities elsewhere? Should we just be pleased that a start is being made to prosecuting those accused of war crimes, wherever they were committed?

Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was in a jubilant mood when he announced to crowds of supporters that he was declaring a ceasefire in Darfur.

From his body language, you might have thought he had already ended the crisis and achieved his goal of avoiding a possible indictment by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Darfur.

In the build-up to his speech, supporters surged to the front of the crowd waving sticks and punching the air with their fists to show their support for the army officer who came to power in Sudan in a coup in 1989. There was almost a party atmosphere.

Tanzania's foreign minister Bernard Kamillius Membe was greeted with cheers as he announced that Sudan had shown that African countries could look after their own crises.

"The International Criminal Court is an irrelevance," said the Tanzanian minister. "You are masters of your own destiny. Africa does not need outsiders to resolve its conflicts."

But after the celebrations were over, serious questions remained as to what impact the ceasefire and other new measures would have on the festering Darfur conflict and the ICC prosecutor’s hope of putting Bashir on trial.

Diplomats quickly spotted loopholes in the text of Bashir’s speech.

Bashir promised an "unconditional" ceasefire in Darfur – but in the same sentence added that it would come into force "provided an effective monitoring mechanism be put into action and observed by all involved parties."

That amounted to "a pretty big caveat" given the difficulty of establishing ceasefire mechanisms in Darfur in the past, one diplomat told me, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Analysts also questioned why Bashir had not announced any freeing of political prisoners from Darfur, another of the recommendations of the government-backed forum that came up with the proposal to call a ceasefire.

Even some officials appeared sceptical.

“Peace in Darfur will not come until the two sides sit down together and agree the issue,” said one, who declined to be named.

Past ceasefires in Darfur have come and gone bringing little change for the estimated 2.5 million Darfuris driven from their homes by more than five years of fighting.

Will this one be any different, particularly since Darfur rebel groups have said they will continue to fight and have dismissed Bashir’s ceasefire as a public relations sham? What difference could it make in a region increasingly at the prey of bandits? Could it be enough to convince sceptical Western countries to agree to postpone any indictment of Bashir?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that if Sudan changes its behavior and actively supports growing international calls for peace in Darfur, Paris would back suspending any indictments the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Sarkozy made clear there would be strings attached.  In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, the French leader said Sudan would have to “radically” alter its policy towards Darfur, where international experts say at least 200,000 people have died since 2003. It would have to remove a cabinet minister indicted for war crimes in Darfur from the Khartoum government and stop delaying the deployment of international peacekeepers.

Not everyone will laud Sarkozy’s comments on the opening day of the General Assembly.

The New York-based rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) has already chided the African Union Peace and Security Council for calling on world powers to use their power to put the ICC investigation of Bashir on hold to avoid undermining the stalled peace process in Darfur.

“A suspension of the investigation would deny justice to the thousands of victims in Darfur,” said Georgette Gagnon, HRW’s Africa director. “The African Union should reaffirm its commitment to seeing justice done for atrocities and support for the ICC in Darfur.”

According to Western diplomats whispering in the corridors of the United Nations, France is not the only western country that could imagine invoking Article 16 of the ICC statute, which allows the U.N. Security Council to suspend court investigations or indictments for up to one year at a time.  They say Britain may also be open to the idea, though London would have an even longer list of conditions - terms that Khartoum might find very unpalatable.

Some say Washington, which has refused to become a party to the ICC, could also be persuaded.

Privately, some Western diplomats have called the threat of a humiliating ICC prosecution of Bashir an ideal club to beat him over the head with as they try to get the full U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force on the ground in Darfur.  More than a year after the Security Council approved deploying the force, known as UNAMID, only around 10,000 of the 26,000 troops and police have arrived in Sudan.

None of this is good news for ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who has run into snags with another case and has come under fire for his retaliatory dismissal of an ICC employee. Moreno-Ocampo is currently in New York meeting with African and other officials to defend his drive to indict Bashir, whom he accuses of masterminding a campaign of genocide in western Sudan.

He says Bashir’s war crimes began in 2003 and that his orders led to the deaths of 35,000 people outright, at least another 100,000 through starvation and disease and forced 2.5 million from their homes.

What do you think?  Is Sarkozy trying to barter away justice for the victims of genocide in Darfur? Or is a stay of execution for Bashir a small price to pay in the interests of peace?

International prosecutors’ pursuit of Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for alleged genocide has not curtailed his travel schedule. He is in Turkey this week, defiant and saying the move by the International Criminal Court has backfired — his hold on power is stronger than ever.

Bashir gave an exclusive interview to Reuters, his first since ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said he was seeking a warrant for his arrest.

Here are excerpts from the conversation with Reuters:

“The decision of the ICC prosecutor is already soldifying our internal front, the internal front of our Sudanese people, and that is the source of our power and we will fight their
actions.”

“…we don’t give a damn about the precedents set by those going to court.”

“We are not concerned about travelling, ourselves, we have good relations with a number of countries that do not have relations with the ICC.”

Does Bashir’s trip to Turkey (which isn’t a signatory to the ICC) show him to be above the law? How can the ICC respond, with no police force of its own to enforce its rulings even if it does issue a warrant for Bashir’s arrest?

African and Arab states want the court moves put on hold, fearing they would only make it harder to bring peace to Darfur. Oil producing Sudan’s close ally China has also voiced concern at the attempt to put Bashir on trial.

Can the ICC prosecutor prevail?

Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem says Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, is “a screwdriver in the workshop of double standards” for seeking to prosecute the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for genocide in Darfur.  He rejects the term genocide and says the prosecutor is unfairly picking on Africa’s largest country and ignoring war crimes elsewhere.

Moreno-Ocampo accuses Bashir of launching a genocide campaign in 2003 that was intended to wipe out three ethnic groups in Darfur, a desolate and remote region of western Sudan where oil was discovered in 2005. He says the Sudanese leader used mass murder, rape, deportation and “slow death” by starvation and disease to kill tens of thousands in Darfur.  Moreno-Ocampo wants the ICC judges to issue an international arrest warrant for Bashir.

Khartoum rejects the charges and says it will never hand over any of its citizens to The Hague, where the ICC is based. Like the United States, Russia and China, Sudan is not a party to the ICC, though the Security Council referred the issue of Darfur to the court in 2005.

Abdalhaleem says that if the judges decide to indict Bashir it will ignite a “curtain of fire” that will engulf all of Sudan and the region. He has yet to provide details, but U.N. peacekeeping officials say they are worried.

China, Russia, South Africa and others fear an indictment of Bashir would shatter the fragile peace process in Darfur and have vowed to push the Security Council to freeze the ICC investigation of Bashir. The United States, Britain, France and other Western powers say they do not want to tamper with the independence of the ICC and oppose intervening.

The African Union, the Arab League and non-aligned nations have also urged the council to suspend any ICC indictment of Bashir. Russia’s U.N. envoy Vitaly Churkin has said that the countries calling for a suspension comprise roughly two-thirds of the earth’s population.

Those arguing for a suspension say the top priority should be the full deployment of all 26,000 U.N.-African Union peacekeepers (only 9,500 are there now) and a swift end to the 5-year-old conflict in Darfur, in which international experts believe at least 200,000 have died, with another 2.5 million left hungry and homeless.

Richard Dicker, an international justice expert at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, says the opposite is true — nothing could be better for peace in Darfur than to indict, arrest and try the man believed to be responsible for orchestrating the genocide.

What do you think?  Is the West guilty of applying double standards for justice in the developing world?  Do you fear a “curtain of fire” in Africa if Bashir is indicted? Should the world push for peace in Darfur now and worry about indictments later?  Or should justice come first for the victims of war crimes in Darfur, whatever the cost?

First on Zimbabwe, now on Darfur, Western countries have lost out at the U.N. Security Council to African states backed by China and Russia.

A Western attempt to get sanctions imposed on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s government flopped on July 11. Three weeks later, when it came to renewing the mandate of peacekeepers in Darfur, Western countries bowed to demands to include wording that made clear the council would be ready to freeze any International Criminal Court indictment of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide. The United States abstained, but that made no difference to the vote.

The question had long come up in Western countries as to how much Africa mattered to them given what often seemed intractable wars, famine, disease and poverty. From an African perspective, Western countries - often former colonial powers - have sometimes been accused of arrogance, meddling and ignorance of the continent’s realities.

But while Africa’s economies were once dependent on aid and finance from the West, it is China and other Asian countries that are now rushing to invest, helping to drive unprecedented growth. How Africa will deal with the new investment was a key topic at this week’s meeting in Mauritania with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. G8 countries, meanwhile, appear to be falling short on their promises of aid.

Investment from China comes without the conditions that Western countries or institutions might insist on. Meanwhile, China has been very ready to back African friends in diplomatic forums such as the United Nations. Russia is less important as an investor, but has taken a similar diplomatic line.

So how relevant does the West remain in Africa? And if its influence is waning then will that give African countries a chance to do a better job of solving problems their own way? Will it give a freer hand to leaders with little concern for democracy, human rights and government accountability?

What do you think?

      The extradition of former Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadzic on Wednesday to
face genocide charges in The Hague sends
a signal that the international community
means business in bringing fugitives to
justice. 
    Reinforcing the same message, 
Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor
of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia, called again
for the arrest of Bosnian Serb wartime
commander Ratko Mladic. Like Karadzic,
Mladic is accused of  genocide over the
43-month siege of Sarajevo and the 1995
massacre of some 8,000 Muslims at
Srebrenica.

    This ought to ring alarm bells for Sudan’s president, Omar
Hassan al-Bashir, who is also accused of war crimes. But world
leaders are also sending other signals which may ease any
concerns he has that he may soon be arrested.
    Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC)
prosecutor, has charged Bashir with masterminding a campaign of
genocide in Darfur, killing 35,000 people and persecuting 2.5
million. But the U.N. Security Council is divided over his calls
for an arrest warrant against Bashir. Some countries hope the
ICC will halt any genocide indictment in the interests of peace,
fearing any attempt to arrest him could cause more bloodshed.
    Dumisani Kumalo, South Africa’s ambassador to the United
Nations, made this clear on Tuesday as the U.N Security Council
prepared to consider a South African and Libyan proposal that it
call on the ICC’s judges to refrain from taking any action.
    “We are not saying ’stop doing it’ to the prosecutor of the
ICC,” the ambassador said. 
    “We are saying, give peace a chance, can you just give it a
year, let’s see UNAMID deployed,” Kumalo said, referring to the
U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur.
    UNAMID’s mandate expires on Thursday and Britain has drafted
a resolution on extending the mandate until July 31, 2009. But
South Africa and Libya want to insert a paragraph calling for a
suspension of any ICC moves. Such moves suggest Bashir, who
denies the charges against him, is unlikely to be arrested any
time soon. 

   If arrested, Bashir would follow prominent figures such as Karadzic,
late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, former Liberian President
Charles Taylor and Congolese former rebel warlord and vice-president
Jean-Pierre Bemba into the dock.
    Taylor is accused by the U.N. -backed Special Court for Sierra
Leone of orchestrating rebel atrocities during Sierra Leone’s
1991-2002 conflict. Milosevic died in detention in 2006 before a
verdict was reached in his trial on genocide charges. Bemba is
accused by the ICC of leading Congolese rebels in a campaign
of rape and torture in the Central African Republic in 2002 and
2003. 
    The chances of Karadzic or Milosevic being arrested and
brought to trial initially seemed slim, but political changes in
Serbia — namely the appointment of a Western-leaning government
keen to join the European Union — helped secure his arrest.
    Bashir’s arrest is more complicated as he is a sitting head
of state. It also appears to depend heavily on political will
and political change — but are there any signs of this? Should 
Karadzic’s arrest and detention give Bashir any real cause for
concern?

On Friday I wrote that the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor was readying a genocide charge and arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.  It came to pass today. A defiant Khartoum has said it will not bend to the court and has warned of an eruption of violence; the opposition too has said the warrant could threaten peace. Is this a case of justice versus peace and do the two have to be irreconcilable?

Here’s Friday’s blog:

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court are readying arrest warrants for senior Sudanese officials, possibly even President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, sources at The Hague court have told Reuters. The Washington Post said it understood Bashir would face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Would the world’s first permanent international criminal court be wise to take on a serving president? There is a precedent - another war crimes court in The Hague, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia,  issued an indictment for Slobodan Milosevic while he was still president.

Milosevic did finally appear before the court to answer the charges, although his trial was cut short by his death. Supporters of that court said bringing top commanders to justice was essential if the Balkans were to find lasting peace.

But Sudan is not Serbia. Sudan expert Alex da Waal has warned that going after Sudanese leaders could embolden rebels in Darfur and reignite conflict. International aid organisations operating in Sudan fear a backlash.

Would it be wiser to work with Sudan’s leaders for peace rather than pursuing them through the courts? And what chance of securing arrests even if warrants are issued?