KHARTOUM, 2 April 2005 — A UN agreement to try Darfur war criminals at the International Criminal Court boosted hopes of an end to political stalemate in the Sudanese region where thousands have died in two years of conflict marked by mass rapes and torture. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana welcomed the move, saying “reconciliation in Sudan requires an end to impunity in Darfur.” “The submission to the International Criminal Court will now contribute to this,” Solana said.
Darfur rebels, whose two-year-old uprising against marginalization by Khartoum has been fiercely repressed by government forces and proxy militias, welcomed the move. “This resolution is a victory for humanity and the Sudan Liberation Movement,” the movement’s spokesman Mahjoub Hussein said in a statement calling for international arrest warrants to be issued for suspected war criminals.
In the Eritrean capital Asmara, the chairman of Darfur’s other main rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), offered a similar reaction, saying the resolution “will support the ceasefire on the ground.”
“It will reflect positively on the behavior of our troops on the ground,” said Khalil Ibrahim, adding that the JEM was ready to help the ICC because “we know the names and whereabouts of the criminals and what they have done.”
But the Sudanese government criticized the resolution, passed 11-0 by the UN Security Council, as unfair and said its own judiciary was competent to try suspected human rights violators. It hinted, however, that it would not attempt to obstruct the process. The Hague-based tribunal’s prosecutor Moreno Ocampo yesterday formally took note of the UN resolution and said he would begin making “arrangements that will be necessary for us to carry out our work”.
Officials and commentators said the ICC referral, the second UN resolution on Darfur in three days, finally offered an accountability mechanism that could prompt the warring parties to look harder for a solution.
The Sudanese government, which was already slapped Tuesday with another UN resolution imposing sanctions on suspected war criminals, criticized the escalating international pressure.
“Justice here is a great good used in the service of evil,” Sudan’s UN Ambassador Elfatih Mohammed Erwa told the council in a scathing speech after the vote. “We regard the resolution as an unfair, ill-advised and narrow-minded one,” State Foreign Minister Naguib Al-Khair Abdel Wahab told AFP in Khartoum. “Nevertheless, the government of Sudan, through its competent ministries and authorities, shall thoroughly study the resolution and decide on an action to be taken in relation to it,” he added.
A Sudanese government legal expert suggested that Khartoum would abide by the decision if its own accountability process was deemed insufficient by the international community.
“We will try to prove that the Sudanese judiciary is competent and capable of trying anyone who is accused of violating human rights, international humanitarian law or any other crime committed in Darfur or anywhere else so that we can avoid interference by the ICC,” said the chairman of the parliamentary legal affairs committee, Ismail Al-Hajj Moussa.
