IN the parlance of tough street gangs, Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir, president of Sudan, is going down. Once you strip him of all vestiges and trappings of office, it becomes simply, “Omar is going down.”
By issuing an arrest warrant for the Sudanese leader last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) made good on its indictment of July 14, 2008.
According to the world court, Al Bashir is “suspected of being criminally responsible, as an indirect (co-)perpetrator, for intentionally directing attacks against an important part of the civilian population of Darfur, Sudan, murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians, and pillaging their property”.
Again, in street lingo, Al Bashir is one bad dude. But, this being the first warrant of arrest ever issued for a sitting head of state by the ICC, the genii is finally out of the bottle. From here on end, there will be no respite for bad leaders who use their powers to wantonly victimise their citizens. No rationalisation—I was just trying to put down a nasty insurgency—is going to cut it at all.
Indeed, as records will show, leaders indicted for war crimes tend to fall at some point. In May 1999, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic became the first head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. He was formally transferred to The Hague in June 2001, and nine months later, he sat in front of a judge to face justice. Even as Milosevic was in the dock, another dictator, former Liberian president Charles Taylor was indicted on June 4, 2003 by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone for “crimes against humanity” and “serious violations of international human rights laws”.
By issuing the arrest warrant for Bashir, the ICC is flexing its muscles and telegraphing its jurisdiction over the conduct of sitting heads of state. In effect, the ICC is saying, “We are willing to take on anyone, head of state or not, who is suspected of perpetrating crimes against humanity.”
Naturally, critics of the ICC, especially in Africa and the Muslim world have condemned the Bashir arrest warrant as a charade aimed only at poor Third World countries while ignoring the human slaughter by superpowers like America in Iraq and Russia in Chechnya.
Some have also pointed to the hypocritical treatment of Israeli leaders in the face of the killings in Gaza. Though he has been in a coma since January 2006, many feel that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should be put on trial in absentia for the massacres of as many as 3,500 women and children in the Lebanese camps of Shatila and Habra between September 16 and 18, 1982.
An Israeli court headed by Judge Yitzhak Kahan found Sharon, who was Israeli Defence minister at the time of the massacre, responsible for what transpired in the two nights for allowing Christian Phalanges militias into the Palestinian camps.
Still others suggest that former US president George Bush also must be brought to trial for trumping up the case against a non-existent weapon of mass destruction (WMD) as a pretext for invading Iraq. Sudan’s state minister of information and communications summed it all up when he referred to the ICC as a “whiteman’s tribunal” and the arrest warrant “an insult”.
But make no mistake about the impact of the issuance of the arrest warrant for Bashir. At the very minimum it tells the world that Bashir is a tainted man, one in whose company any self-respecting leader must never be caught dead.
He is a wanted alleged criminal with blood on his hand. He cannot be seen, heard or even accepted among leaders of free nations. Indeed, with time, the chorus of support for the Sudanese leader heard in many African capitals last week will quietly die away, replaced by polite avoidance.
Yes, Bashir can go to Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur, brandishing a sword as he did on Sunday, invoking African liberation against neo-colonialism and such. But what he will no longer enjoy is the camaraderie of the other African heads of state.
They may still pay him lip service, even encourage him to fight to clear his name, but self-preservation will dictate prudence for many leaders.
In time, Bashir will become the sick man of Africa, neither condemned by his peers nor welcome into their august circle, always avoided like the man with the don’t-touch-me disease. On the larger African front, the arrest warrant in the name of Bashir will make many heads of government scrutinise their own human rights records and policies.
The question each leader must ask is: “Is there anything in my past or present that could become the focus of ICC investigation and possible future indictment?”
While the ICC will not send a police posse to arrest indicted war criminals, it does have plenty of patience to wait the suspects out. In the case of Milosevic and Taylor, changes of political fortunes ensured that the long arm of international justice finally caught up with them.
That could be the case with Bashir. More importantly, the issuance of the arrest warrant has effectively pre-emptied any effective lobbying that the African Union and Arab League may wish to carry out on behalf of Bashir.
The new premise is that the leader of Sudan must plead his innocence in front of a world court.
The unsaid part of this proposition is that Bashir cannot walk about as a free man without looking over his shoulders. He is a marked man. And he is going down, going down.
Opiyo.oloya@sympatico.ca
