THE HAGUE: Sudan could be plunged further into turmoil if the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for President Omar Bashir on genocide and war crimes charges, the country’s foreign minister said yesterday.
Deng Alor said peace efforts in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region and a peace agreement that ended more than two decades of conflict in the country’s south — Africa’s longest civil war — could unravel if the court orders Bashir’s arrest.
In July, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo asked judges to issue an arrest warrant for Bashir. Prosecutors allege Bashir leads a campaign of genocide in Darfur. Judges are expected to announce their decision within weeks.
At the time, observers warned that going after Bashir was a high-risk strategy that could harm peace prospects in Darfur and hinder the full deployment of a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in the region.
An arrest warrant “could generate some internal political instability, further political instability,” Alor told reporters in The Hague after meeting his Dutch counterpart, Maxime Verhagen.
Meanwhile, residents of a refugee camp in Darfur complained to peacekeepers yesterday about the threatening presence of government troops amid fears of a new attack after a deadly clash last month.
A raid by soldiers into the impoverished Kalma camp in southern Darfur on Aug. 25 left 31 people dead, including women and children.“The government is still surrounding us,” resident Abdelrahman Omer told AFP. “We have not seen any (peacekeeper) patrols, and people are frightened.”
The joint African Union-UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur, which launched permanent patrols inside Kalma after the attack, this week noted “an increased presence” of police five kilometers from the camp. Henry Anyidoho, the force’s deputy special representative, visited Kalma on Wednesday to assess the security situation and humanitarian needs.
