Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir's Travel Days Aren't Over

Sudanese President Omer Hassan al-Bashir cancelled plans to attend an economic conference in Uganda on July 26-28 after statements from Ugandan officials suggested that Bashir might be arrested if he stepped on Ugandan soil.

Bashir's attendance at the Smart Partnership Dialogue in Kampala would have presented the Ugandan government with a dilemma. The Ugandan government is obligated to arrest Bashir if he comes to Uganda, as per the arrest warrant issued last March by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Last July, however, Uganda voted with the African Union states to disregard the warrant.

The ICC has charged Bashir with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity (although as of this writing the warrant for his arrest doesn’t include any genocide charges). The warrant names Bashir as criminally responsible for intentionally directing attacks of murder, extermination, rape, torture, plunder and forced transfer of a significant portion of the civilian population of Darfur, Sudan, According to the charges, Bashir "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three tribal groups in Darfur on the basis of their ethnicity.

The UN says that the conflict in Darfur has displaced an estimated 2.7 million people and resulted in up to 300,000 deaths in the region. .Sudan's government disputes the figures, saying 10,000 people have been killed.

Uganda Responds to Pressure

According to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, nation states, and not the ICC itself are responsible for bringing those accused of war crimes, genocide and other charges to justice. Uganda is party to the Rome Statute.

On July 13, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told journalists in Kampala that Bashir "should know the obligation of Uganda is to arrest him. He should know that before he comes."

In answer to Ocampo's statement, Ugandan International Relations Ministry Okello Oryem affirmed his country's commitment to the Rome Statute and indicated that the Solicitor General's office had already received the arrest warrant for Bashir. "If and when Bashir arrives in Uganda, it is up to the Inspector General of Police to take action," Oryem said.

Khartoum responded angrily, demanding Oryem's dismissal. Although Sudanese official news report that Ugandan President Yoweri Musievini apologized to Bashir for Oryem's comments and provided written assurances that he will not be arrested in Uganda, there was also a veiled threat in the Ugandan president's statement about the incident. “When I want to fight you,” Musievini told reporters, “I insult you, I don’t invite you, I tell you beforehand. We don’t believe in surprise attacks.” The president added, “If there are any other issues, I will tell you ‘Please don’t come here because I cannot guarantee your safety’.”

Apparently Musievini's warning was heeded, and a Sudanese official attended the conference instead of Bashir.

Behind the ICC's Strategy

The Ugandan government's dilemma came against the backdrop of the earliest efforts of an international body to use legal means to combat war crimes and genocide. President Bashir is the first sitting head of government to be charged with war crimes. Initially, it was hoped that issuing a warrant for his arrest would in effect make him a prisoner of his own country, thus deterring other potential world leaders from committing the same crimes.

Back in July 2008, Payam Akhavan, a professor of international law at McGill University in Montreal and a former war crimes prosecutor told CBC News that eventually the Sudanese government might be convinced to deliver al-Bashir to the ICC — just as the Yugoslavian government handed over former president Slobodan Milosevic in 2001 in response to "sustained international pressure."

The Yugoslavian comparison has not held up so far. Although Bashir did cancel his plans to attend the July 2008 Smart Partnership Dialogue (while claiming that the cancellation was unrelated to the ICC charges) and backed out of attending South African President Jacob Zuma's inauguration in May 2009, since March of this year he has traveled abroad seven times, with no repercussions.

However, it is notable that Bashir has only traveled to countries which are not party to the Rome Statute, such as Eritrea, Egypt, Libya, Qatar, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia. The aborted trip to Uganda would have been the Sudanese president's first to a country that is obligated to comply with the ICC warrant.

The American Factor

The impact of Uganda's apparent decision to abide by the Rome Statute may be lessened if other nations do not follow suit. Not only African nations have sent mixed signals regarding implementation of the ICC ruling.

On July 9, U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration set off on a trip that would include stops in Darfur and and Khartoum. “Right now President Al-Bashir is the president of the country and we have to work with him," Gration told Agence France Presse (AFP) in an interview from the Oslo. He added, however, that Bashir still must "do what’s right in terms of facing the International Criminal Court and those charges.”

Some in the American government view a visit to the accused leader of Sudan as incompatible with President Obama's election promises to fight human rights abuses in Africa. A statement from US House representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) claimed that Obama "spoke of ‘ratcheting up sanctions.’ Now, almost six months into the administration, the State Department is still conducting a much vaunted ‘comprehensive review’ of U.S.-Sudan policy. Nothing concrete has emerged. The little that has leaked out in press reports is disturbing.”

Wolf referred to high-level disagreement in the State Department over whether genocide has even been committed in Darfur. "Furthermore, they [U.S. State Department officials] are making overtures to Khartoum which are, at best, naïve," Wolf said.

Those overtures include the possible lifting of sanctions against Sudan and removing that country from the list of states that support terrorism. The US embassy in the Sudanese capital has already announced that it will issue visas for Sudanese nationals after more than ten years of not permitting them.

Building on Small Steps of Progress

The attempt to prevent genocide and war crimes via international legal pressure is a slow and often frustrating process. The ICC has little leverage with leaders who are lauded by a solid group of other states when they choose to dismiss the court's authority. While the use of arrest warrants is meant to virtually imprison the accused, how effective is this method on those like President Bashir who are backed by at least 50 countries in Africa and the Middle East? The only “prison” in which the Sudanese leader finds himself today is one that is expansive and powerful 'prison', where he can bask in the approval of other like-minded international figures. Only when war criminals at large are prevented from going to a destination that they actually want to visit are they somewhat incarcerated.

If Uganda's threat to arrest Bashir is a significant crack in the mostly smooth wall of unified African rejection of the ICC, it bodes well for future success in impacting – and perhaps deterring – perpetrators of war crimes and genocide. This is especially true if Western countries like the US carry through with their commitment to sanction human rights offenders.

On the other hand, Uganda may be a unique case, in that its government has its own reasons for bolstering the authority of the ICC. Uganda was the first country to refer a conflict to the ICC when it successfully obtained indictments for Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel leader Joseph Kony and his top lieutenants. Having made use of those indictments to pressure LRA rebels to attend peace talks in 2008, Uganda can hardly dismiss the ICC's indictments of Bashir.

ICC prosecutors have not given up. In early July, they appealed the ICC tribunal's decision to exclude actual charges of genocide from Bashir's warrant. As the effort to bring the accused criminal to trial continues, hope remains that the gravity of his crimes will not be ignored by the family of nations.

Sources: Al Jazeera English, Al Arabiya, Reuters, Huffington Post, ArabNews.com, EarthTimes, Al Ahram Weekly, The Tripoli Post, France24, Sudan Tribune, CNS News, International News, Dayton Daily News, Zimbabwe Guardian

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Genocide in Our Time: The Year and a Half in Review

  

Alex Alvarez
Northern Arizona University

For anyone who is concerned about the issue of genocide, a look back at the first half of 2009 and all of 2008 is bound to produce as much frustration as it does hope. This past year and a half saw a number of both positive and negative developments in regards to the prevention and intervention of genocide, some of which may well have a lasting impact. The place to begin this review is with a situation that has seen very little change for the better and that is the 21st century’s first and most well known example of this crime, the Darfur.

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In the Darfur region of the Sudan the genocide that began in 2003 has continued unabated, albeit in modified form. The widespread violence and destruction of villages so commonplace during the early years of the genocide has become less common in favor of smaller scale atrocities and attacks on internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. This development is hardly surprising given that most non-Arab villages in the region have by now been destroyed and almost three million people have become internally displaced persons scattered in camps throughout this part of the Sudan or refugees in neighboring Chad. Because of this reality, much of the current genocidal actions of the Sudanese state have been centered on attacking and harassing the IDP camps which are often largely defenseless and highly vulnerable. Because of the dangerousness of this situation and the targeting of aid workers, many international aid organizations have scaled back their humanitarian operations or simply left, which means that not only are the IDP’s subject to violence and harassment from the national government and their paramilitary proxies, but they also face increasing difficulties in obtaining the bare necessities of life such as food, potable water, and medical supplies and assistance. Unfortunately, outside of the Sudan and apart from a few activists and scholars, attention and interest in the ongoing genocide have diminished dramatically. It seems as if the genocide is no longer such a pressing concern. Eric Reeves, a scholar who has continued to call attention to the on-going genocide in the Darfur writes that, “With dismaying predictability, the continuing catastrophe in Darfur commands less and less news attention, largely because it has settled into a grim “genocide by attrition,” defined not so much by massive atrocities – although these continue to occur – as by relentless, if undramatic, human suffering and destruction consequent upon the Khartoum regime’s deliberate exacerbating of insecurity confronting civilians and aid workers.” And so, the genocide and the suffering continue with diminishing attention and no effective intervention strategies on the part of the United Nations or the international community.

One notable exception to this lack of action in regards to the situation in Darfur was the recent indictment of the President of the Sudan, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir. Coming to power in 1989 after leading a coup and usurping the power of the previous government, al-Bashir has been in power ever since. On July 14, 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, filed numerous charges against Omar al-Bashir that included ten charges of war crimes, three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity, and two charges of murder. Essentially, this indictment contends that al-Bashir is criminally responsible for planning, coordinating, and implementing a counter-insurgency campaign against the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement in the Darfur region of the Sudan and that part of this operation involved attacks on the civilian population of the area by the military, the police, and militia groups known as the Janjaweed.

These are not the first charges brought against Sudanese officials by the ICC. In 2007 Ahmad Muhammad Harun, a former government minister, and Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, the ostensible leader of the Janjaweed militia, were also indicted and issued with arrest warrants for their complicity in the violence in the Darfur. In response to al-Bashir’s indictment, on March 4, 2009 the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir. Of striking significance is that this is the first time that a sitting head of state has ever been so charged. While former heads of state, such as Slobodan Milosevic have been called before the bar of justice, the issuance of an arrest warrant for a head of state while still in office may well prove to be a significant milestone in the development and application of international human rights law. Interestingly, even though the arrest warrant lists al-Bashir as an indirect perpetrator or indirect co-perpetrator for various crimes, including intentionally directing attacks against civilian populations and civilians, pillage, murder, torture, and rape among other crimes, genocide was not included by the judges of the ICC, although one judge wrote a dissenting opinion arguing that al-Bashir could be charged with genocide. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor, did in fact appeal to have the charges of genocide reinstated, but the pre-trial chamber ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the notion that al-Bashir exhibited specific intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group which in this particular case would be members of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit tribes. Not surprisingly, the Sudanese government has rejected the legitimacy and appropriateness of the arrest warrant and al-Bashir has referred to the charges against him as lies. Given the unwillingness of the Sudanese government to serve the warrant, the only real effect at present is to prevent al-Bashir from traveling internationally [Ed. to some locations], as that would expose him to the risk of arrest. [Ed. note: See this GPN post for a list of the considerable travel Bashir has undertaken since the ICC conviction, where in each case he has been received with the honor due a head of state and not as an accused murderer.]

Elsewhere in Africa, genocidal related violence also continued to take its toll of victims during 2008 and 2009. In the Eastern Congo, for example, this kind of violence has been the dominant reality for many years. The contemporary conflict has its beginning in the 1994 Rwandan genocide when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Paul Kagame won the civil war and overthrew the genocidal Hutu regime that was responsible for the deaths of between 800,000 and 1000,000 of its own citizens. Consequently, about a million Hutu refugees streamed across the border into the neighboring country of what was then called Zaire and now the Congo. Among these were many soldiers from the ousted Hutu government, various local and national politicians, ordinary civilians, and even members of the infamous Interahamwe militia. Many of these refugees had been active participants in the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi and the camps they fled to soon became rife with violence as many of the former genocidaires began victimizing their fellow refugees. Some even began to organize raids back across the border into Rwandan territory. Eventually, the Rwandan army of the new government invaded in 1996 and set off fighting that has continued sporadically to the present day. This incessant fighting has destabilized this entire portion of Africa, killed millions (up to 5.4 million according to one educated guess), and internally displaced another estimated million. One significant and perverse feature of much of the violence has been the particular targeting of women for various forms of sexual assault. In fact, gender-based violence is so extreme and pervasive in this region that one United Nations officer commented that it is more dangerous to be a woman in the affected areas than it is to be a soldier, while a reporter for the New York Times labeled the eastern Congo as the rape capital of the world. In January of 2009, the Congo allowed portions of the Rwandan military to enter the country in a cooperative effort to eliminate the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an organization responsible for much of the violence in the Congo and which is largely composed of former genocidaires and refugees.

Another positive legal development that took place in the summer of 2008 was the apprehension of the former leader of Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, who was finally taken into custody in Belgrade after many years of being on the run. A former psychiatrist and poet, Karadžić formed a Serbian political movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1989 known as the Serbian Democratic Party in order to try and prevent Bosnia from seceding from Yugoslavia. Ultimately, when Bosnia did in fact declare independence in 1992, Karadžić and his party took over the portion of the country in which Serbs predominated and declared it to be the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, later renamed the Republika Srpska. From 1992 to 1996 Karadžić served as the nascent Republic’s first president. Aided and abetted by Slobodan Milošević in Serbia, the Serbs of the newly formed Republic under Karadžić’s leadership engaged in a campaign of violence and terror that soon became known as ethnic cleansing. Subsequent to the atrocities, Karadžić was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against humanity, war crimes, breaches of the Geneva Convention, and the illegal transfer of civilians because of their religious or national identity. Essentially, the indictment contends that he was responsible, as the primary military and political leader of the Republika Srpska, for the siege of Sarajevo, taking U.N. troops hostage, many massacres including the infamous one that occurred after the fall of Srebrenica and which the ICTY is defining as a genocide, internally displacing many hundreds of thousands, as well as the imprisonment of thousands of others in concentration camps throughout the territory they controlled. Eluding the authorities for years, Karadžić had grown a long beard and ponytail and had been living openly in the Serbian capital of Belgrade under the alias of Dr. Dragan David Dabić, a supposed expert in alternative medicine, bio-energy, and macrobiotic foods and diet. After his arrest on the 18th of July in 2008, Karadžić was remanded into the custody of the ICTY on July 30 where he is in the pre-trial stages of his prosecution.

One last noteworthy event that took place during the time period under review was the release of the report of the Genocide Prevention Task Force. Chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and former U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Cohen. The task force was convened by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United States Institute of Peace. The purpose of this exercise was to try and develop a framework to help guide the U.S. government in dealing more effectively with potential and actual genocides and mass atrocities. The report highlights the need for strong leadership on the part of the President, Congress, and the American people in responding to budding crisis situations that may lead to genocides. The report also emphasizes the importance of early warning systems in order to identify impending hotspots of genocidal activity with enough advance notice to develop effective intervention strategies, especially preventive diplomatic initiatives that may help dissuade genocidally inclined leaders and regimes. The report also stresses the importance of military options when preventative strategies have failed and the importance of the international community in developing multilateral efforts to prevent and intervene. Given the preoccupation of the current administration and Congress with the economic meltdown and its consequences, nothing much has yet come of the report, and it remains to be seen whether this blueprint will have any lasting impact in terms of how the U.S. government confronts the reality of genocide around the globe.

In essence, then, most of the progress in fighting genocide in recent years has usually taken place in the legal arena. While the arrest and prosecution of genocidaires is an important aspect of any genocide intervention regime, it must be pointed out that these are almost always post-genocide. They only occur after the violence and killing have been perpetrated. Clearly, much more progress needs to occur around the issue of early identification and prevention. Unfortunately, 2008 and 2009 did not see any real progress on this front.

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Dr. Alex Alvarez (alex.alvarez@nau.edu) earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of New Hampshire in 1991 and is a Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. From 2001 until 2003 he was the founding Director of the Martin-Springer Institute for Teaching the Holocaust, Tolerance, and Humanitarian Values. His main areas of study are in the areas of collective and interpersonal violence, including homicide and genocide. His first book, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide was published by Indiana University Press in 2001 and was a nominee for the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences book of the year award in 2002, as well as a Raphael Lemkin book award nominee from the International Association of Genocide Scholars in 2003. His other books include Murder American Style (2002), Violence: the Enduring Problem (2008), and Genocidal Crimes (2009). He has also served as an editor for the journal Violence and Victims, was a founding co-editor of the journal Genocide Studies and Prevention, was a co-editor of the H-Genocide List Serve, and is an editorial board member for the journals War Crimes, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity: An International Journal, and Idea: A Journal of Social Issues. He has been invited to present his research in various countries such as Austria, Bosnia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Dr. Alvarez also gives presentations and workshops on various issues such as violence, genocide, and bullying.

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