Human rights activists have welcomed the request by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Tuesday that it issue summonses against a senior Sudanese government official and an Arab militia leader who allegedly played key roles in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Darfur since 2003.
The request — which is directed against Khartoum’s State Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, Ahmad Muhammad Harun, and a leader of the government-backed Janjaweed militia, Ali Mohammed Ali — came almost two years after the United Nations Security Council asked the ICC to investigate atrocities in Sudan’s western-most region where as many as half a million people have perished over the past five years.
The dead have mostly been members of African ethnic groups.
The proposed summons against Harun is considered particularly significant, as it marks the first time the ICC has taken formal action — albeit still short of an official indictment — against a sitting member of any government.
“It is particularly important that the prosecutor is proceeding against a senior minister in the Khartoum government,” according to Nick Grono, vice-president of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), who praised the move by the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo.
“This is the first ICC prosecution of a government official, and it is a clear indication that the government of Sudan — at senior levels — has played the central role in planning and carrying out the atrocities in Darfur,” he said.
‘No prospect for justice’
Other activists were somewhat more restrained in their praise, noting the length of time taken by the prosecutor in responding to the Security Council’s request and his failure so far to act against more senior figures in the regime against whom substantial evidence of responsibility for the violence has already been compiled and made public, notably by Human Rights Watch.
“What we have at present is the public naming of two particularly vicious actors in the Darfur genocide, but with no prospect for extradition, justice — or deterrence,” said Eric Reeves, a leading activist.
“It is a very small step, and the prosecutor’s application [summons] does nothing to make explicit the role of senior members of the National Islamic Front [NIF] regime in orchestrating, and … sustaining, genocide in Darfur,” he said, noting that Khartoum has already dismissed Tuesday’s announcement and rejected any cooperation with the ICC, including the arrest or extradition of the two individuals for further questioning.
Reeves expressed concern that Tuesday’s move could also provoke “increased hostility and recklessness on the part of the regime, especially toward international humanitarian agencies” active in Darfur. Since last summer, the number and seriousness of attacks, notably by Janjaweed forces, against relief personnel have increased, forcing several organisations to consider withdrawing from the region altogether.
Since the violence began in Darfur in February 2003, about two million people have been forced from their homes by Janjaweed and government attacks and now depend largely on foreign emergency assistance. The vast majority of the victims have been members of three African ethnic groups — the Fur, the Magalit and the Zaghawa.
Successive efforts at stopping the violence over the past several years, including the deployment of a small African Union monitoring force and a peace accord between Khartoum and one rebel group negotiated by the UN and the AU last May, have failed to restore security to the region.
More recently, Khartoum has rejected the deployment of a larger, combined AU-UN force authorised by the UN Security Council on August 31. While the United States, which has accused the Sudanese government of “genocide” against the African peoples in Darfur, has repeatedly threatened to impose tough sanctions against the regime in order to force it to accept such a deployment, Khartoum has remained defiant.
Pressure on regime
The original referral of the violence in Darfur by the Security Council to the ICC — a global tribunal established by the 1998 Rome Statute in order to hear cases involving genocide, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity — was designed in part to exert additional pressure on the NIF regime to stop the violence. After an initial investigation, Moreno Ocampo officially opened a case in June 2005.
Tuesday’s request will be presented before a pre-trial chamber of ICC judges who will have to decide whether the prosecutor’s evidence against the two men is sufficiently strong to provide “reasonable grounds to believe” that they are responsible for the alleged crimes, in which case the court can issue formal summonses against them.
However, before issuing those summonses, the chamber must also find “reasonable grounds to believe” that the defendants will, in fact, appear before the court, an issue that remains highly doubtful given Khartoum’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation to date and its denunciation of the request on Tuesday.
“So far we haven’t seen any willingness from Sudanese officials and Janjaweed leaders to appear before this court, and we are hard-pressed to believe a summons will bring these two men to The Hague [where the ICC is based],” said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Programme. He expressed some consternation that Moreno Ocampo did not issue arrest warrants, rather than a request for summonses.
More investigation needed
Human Rights Watch, which praised the move as a “first step” toward ending impunity for atrocities in Darfur, also called for the prosecutor to continue his investigation, particularly of those higher in the chain of command.
In a December 2005 report entitled Entrenching Impunity: Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur, the group named 22 individuals, including President Omar El Bashir, second Vice-President Ali Osman Taha and the then-interior and defence ministers, as well as Harun and Ali, also known as “Ali Kusheib”, as responsible for the government’s and Janjaweed’s abuses.
The report, which was based on government documents and eyewitness reports, is considered the most authoritative account of the government’s role in a scorched-earth campaign directed against the region’s African population.
“While the individuals identified today are important, the ICC prosecutor should move up the chain of command to target those senior Sudanese government and military officials responsible for the most serious crimes in Darfur,” Dicker said on Tuesday.
Amnesty International issued a similar appeal and called for Washington and other members of the international community to “support the ICC’s work by sharing evidence and by putting pressure on the Sudanese government to force these [two] individuals to surrender [to the court’s authority]”.
Haroun, who occupied the post of deputy interior minister during the period of the worst ethnic cleansing between 2003 and 2005, is alleged to have had a direct coordination role for Khartoum in Darfur and participated in official meetings where he allegedly incited Janjaweed and army forces to attack specific targets, according to Human Rights Watch.
Ali was a major leader of the Janjaweed militias in west Darfur and was allegedly responsible for the summary execution of scores of men around Mukjar, Garsila and Delieg in early 2004. — IPS