IT comes as no surprise that the Sudanese government together with a significant proportion of the population in the north deeply resent the intrusion of the United Nations into their affairs.
A week ago, the Security Council voted that suspects indicted for war crimes in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur province should appear before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Yesterday, the ICC was given a secret list of 51 suspects accused by a UN inquiry team of war crimes in the province. The list is believed to include a number of Sudanese government and army officials, as well as Janjaweed militia and rebel leaders.
The country has already been forced against its will into a peace agreement with southern rebels — an agreement which is likely to result in the south gaining independence in six years’ time. In the view of the man in the street, at least in Khartoum, the agreement was largely the result of pressure by Washington. Once more outsiders are dictating terms to the country.
Accordingly, people and government have set their faces firmly against cooperation with the ICC. The view is that if anyone should be put on trial, it should happen in a Sudanese court. Sudan’s President Omar Bashir is reported as having sworn that he would never hand any Sudanese national to a foreign court, and there have been angry demonstrations on the streets of Khartoum.
In normal circumstances, it would be impossible not to sympathize with the government in Khartoum. But these are not normal circumstances. People have died in Darfur in their tens of thousands — and are still dying. By the UN’s own figures, 70,000 died between last March and October. Over the two years since the conflict flared up, as many as 300,000, possibly even 400,000, are thought to have perished and more than two million have been forced to flee.
No one in their right mind suggested that the international community keep out of Bosnia or Kosovo. The same has to be applied to Darfur, a humanitarian catastrophe on a far greater scale. At the very least, if, as the Khartoum government insists, it has not supported the genocidal Janjaweed militias, then events are clearly beyond its control; the international community has a duty to intervene.
Khartoum will simply not be allowed to defy the international community on this issue. Sanctions, so far avoided by the UN, which in fact has bent over backward to avoid demonizing Sudan (to Washington’s annoyance), will be the inevitable result. As for Khartoum’s attempts to present the court move as Washington’s doing, hoping thereby to rally international anti-American sentiment to its defense, they will not work either. Washington was in fact opposed to using the ICC. It wanted a special African court. International sentiment is wholly on the side of the people of Darfur. It is time that Khartoum faced up to that fact and made moves to settle the problem before Darfur explodes into a full-scale secessionism.
