KHARTOUM, 5 April 2005 — Sudan was on a collision course with the United Nations yesterday after refusing to surrender suspected Darfur war criminals to the International Criminal Court for trial as demanded by the Security Council.
Branding Thursday’s resolution demanding prosecution in The Hague of 51 named suspects, including senior officials, a violation of its sovereignty, the Khartoum regime insisted its own courts were competent to try them.
President Omar Bashir solemnly swore “thrice in the name of Almighty Allah that I shall never hand any Sudanese national to a foreign court.” And Information Minister Abdel Basit Sabdarat said the government would launch “an extensive diplomatic campaign” to explain its defiance of the world body.
A UN commission of inquiry in January found that Sudanese government forces and militias had committed gross human rights violations in the suppression of a two-year-old ethnic minority uprising in Darfur.
They included the killing of civilians, torture, rape and pillage. Resolution 1593, passed by the Security Council by a 11-0 majority, overrode strong opposition from Sudan to impose international trials for the 51 suspects identified by the UN commission.
UN special envoy Jan Pronk warned Khartoum against taking the path of defiance of the international community.
“I advise the government of Sudan to work together with the ICC,” Pronk told a news conference late Sunday.
He rejected Sudanese claims the resolution was an affront to its sovereignty, saying it was the “outcome of a long discussion in the UN for measures against specific persons in Sudan.” He said he had advised the government on several previous occasions to “bring violators of human rights to justice but there was no response.”
Meanwhile, one of the main rebel groups in the troubled western Sudan region of Darfur yesterday rejected a planned summit in Egypt this month to discuss the two-year-old conflict.
“Those mini-summits do not serve the cause of Darfur nor that of the Sudanese people,” Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) chief Abdel Waheed Mohammed Nur told AFP.
Egypt is to host a summit in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh on April 20 with leaders from Chad, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan to try to find a solution to the Darfur crisis. But Nur said he considered such summits were “damaging because the Sudanese government exploits those mini-summits like a mark of support which only increases its stubbornness.”
A similar five-way meeting over Darfur - also without the presence of the rebel movements - was held in Libya in October last year but did not produce any results.
The Sudanese government crackdown on an uprising launched by rebel groups in Darfur in February 2003 has led to what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst continuing humanitarian crisis, with tens of thousands dead and 1.6 million people displaced.
