The most pressing issue in Sudan today is the looming threat of more violence directed at UN peacekeepers. Yesterday, UN agencies in Khartoum and the Darfur states voted on whether to reclassify the region as a phase 4 after 7 peacekeepers were killed and 20 were wounded in a well-planned ambush by men on horseback and in well armed 4x4 vehicles.
See more on this incident in this article from the July 10th article By Stephanie McCrummen in the Washintgon Post - 7 Troops Killed in Sudan Ambush : Gunmen Besiege Peacekeepers in Northern Darfur
The International Criminal Court is on the verge of indicting and issuing a warrant of arrest for the president of the Sudan. The implications of such an action are debated in this article from this July 11th Memo From Africa section in the New York Times
The Pursuit of Justice vs. the Pursuit of Peace
By LYDIA POLGREEN and MARLISE SIMONS
DAKAR, Senegal — When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, reported to the United Nations Security Council last month, he painted a dire tableau of death, rape and dispossession in Darfur, saying the entire state apparatus was involved in a five-year campaign of terror there. His target, it seemed, was Sudan’s president.
On Thursday, the prosecutor’s office said it had prepared its second case involving war crimes in Darfur, a region of Sudan. Now analysts, diplomats, aid workers and United Nations officials are bracing for the increasing likelihood that Mr. Moreno-Ocampo will ask the judges for an arrest warrant for the president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
The indictment of a sitting head of state in a war-torn country would not be unprecedented: Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia were both charged by international war crimes courts while in office.
But the complexity and fragility of Sudan’s multiple conflicts have led many diplomats, analysts and aid workers to worry that the Sudanese government could lash out at the prosecutor’s move by expelling Western diplomats and relief workers who provide aid to millions of people displaced by the fighting, provoking a vast crisis and shutting the door to vital diplomatic efforts to bring lasting peace.
The dueling objectives have exposed a growing tension: between justice and peace, that is, between the prosecution of war criminals and the compromises of diplomacy.
Darfur, in many ways, is in freefall. On Tuesday, seven peacekeepers were killed in an ambush, sending shockwaves through the already demoralized international peacekeeping force there.
“It is escalating every day,” said a senior United Nations peacekeeping official in Darfur. “The government wants us to fail. We are doing our best, but we are under attack everywhere.”
Aid groups are struggling to provide basic assistance, as they face increased banditry and harassment. Last week Sudanese authorities expelled several staff members of the aid group Doctors Without Borders. Hijackings of aid vehicles in Darfur have become an almost daily occurrence, peacekeeping officials say.
Beyond that, in southern Sudan, the embers are cooling after a fierce battle in May over the disputed oil-rich town of Abyei that displaced 50,000 people. Tensions remain extraordinarily high between the sides, which fought a 20-year civil war that ended in a fragile peace accord in 2005. A government of national unity is holding, but only just.
Many argue that the added strain of war crimes charges against the head of state would push an already precarious nation over the edge.
“It is certainly going to close off all sorts of options for diplomacy and leave us very few options other than condemnation and isolation,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Other analysts and activists argue that it could increase pressure on the Sudanese government at a critical moment — when peacekeeping forces in Darfur are increasingly under attack, the peace agreement with the south is in danger of collapsing and the aid effort in Darfur hangs by a thread.
“I think it is absolutely imperative to go straight to the top,” said John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration official who co-founded Enough, a group that seeks to end genocide. He argued that concerted pressure by the international community had changed Sudan’s behavior at times.
Sudanese officials declined to comment, saying they would wait until the prosecutor made his announcement. But in the past, the Sudanese government has rejected the legitimacy of the court, arguing that Sudanese courts are capable of prosecuting any crimes. The international court has already brought criminal charges against two senior government officials, but the government has refused to hand them over. One was even given a promotion.
In the short term, a request for Mr. Bashir’s arrest could have a potentially devastating impact on the people of Darfur. Representatives of the Sudanese government have long said that they view the entire aid and security apparatus in Darfur as accomplices of the international court, bent on regime change.
Aid organizations say they are under intense scrutiny by Sudan’s intelligence agencies, which monitor their communications and tightly control their visas and permits to work in Darfur. Several foreign aid workers have been expelled at least in part on suspicion of providing information to the International Criminal Court.
The government already accuses nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations “of passing information to the I.C.C.,” said one senior aid official in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. “There is quite strong concern they will expel U.N. staff and possibly entire agencies.”
Diplomats are also worried about the impact an indictment might have on efforts to revive peace talks in Darfur, which have been stalled for the better part of a year, and on efforts to prevent the complete dissolution of the strained 2005 peace deal between the north and south.
For months, talks have been taking place between the United States and Sudan, with American officials trying to persuade Sudan to improve security in Darfur and strengthen the peace agreement with the south.
In exchange, Sudanese officials would get better relations with the United States, something they have sought for years, according to diplomats and analysts. But that process would be much more difficult if Mr. Bashir were formally charged with war crimes, Western diplomats said.
Diplomats have predicted dire consequences from arrest warrants before. When Mr. Milosevic, then Yugoslavia’s president, was first indicted in 1999 — during the conflict in Kosovo — German, French and Russian politicians said it would put a fatal obstacle in the way of peace negotiations. When he was transferred to The Hague, diplomats worried it would destabilize the region.
Similarly, when the Special Court for Sierra Leone unsealed its arrest warrant for Mr. Taylor, then Liberia’s president, in 2003, in the midst of intense fighting there, diplomats and others involved in peace negotiations privately warned of disastrous consequences. Kofi Annan, then the United Nations secretary general, was furious and reportedly told his aides it was a threat to the peace process.
Both leaders ultimately fell from power, and the role the indictments played in either prolonging or shortening conflict has been much debated.
More recently, diplomats have complained that arrest warrants hampered a peace deal with the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has ravaged northern Uganda for 20 years.
Led by Joseph Kony, the rebel group has kidnapped thousands of children and turned them into soldiers and sex slaves. Mr. Kony agreed to take part in peace talks, but only if the international arrest warrants against him were lifted. The Security Council, which has the power to suspend prosecutions, was reportedly ready to agree if Mr. Kony signed.
“But he failed to appear,” said Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch. “It turns out that the rebel group used the talks as a screen to beef up its depleted ranks.”
The argument that peace trumps justice might be more compelling in Darfur, human rights workers argue, if there were a peace process achieving results there. But peace efforts are at a virtual standstill. Previous efforts to bring the fractious rebel groups together to negotiate ended in failure.
Still, the short-term risks of seeking an indictment are grave, said Alex de Waal, a Sudan expert at the Social Science Research Council in New York.
“Bashir is paranoid; he feels the world is out to get him,” Mr. de Waal said. “He is prone to irrational outbursts and could respond in a very aggressive way.”
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