The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued its first arrest warrants over the Darfur conflict for a Sudanese minister and a Janjaweed militia leader, court documents released on Wednesday showed.
The arrest warrants charge Ahmed Haroun, Sudan’s Secretary of State for Humanitarian Affairs and a former minister in charge of Darfur, and Ali Kosheib, a principal leader of the Janjaweed militia, with 51 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, torture and mass rape.
The trial chamber said there were ”reasonable grounds” to conclude the pair are ”criminally responsible” for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as the prosecution had demanded in February. The charges focus on a series of attacks on villages in Western Darfur in 2003 and 2004.
”We completed an investigation under very difficult circumstances, from outside Darfur, and without exposing any of our witnesses. We transformed their stories into evidence, and now the judges have confirmed the strength of that evidence,” ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said in a statement.
”The judges have issued arrest warrants. As the territorial state, the government of the Sudan has a legal duty to arrest Ahmed Haroun and Ali Kosheib. This is the International Criminal Court’s decision, and the government has to respect it,” he stressed.
Sudan insists that the ICC has no jurisdiction to try alleged crimes committed in Darfur. However, the case was referred to the court by a United Nations Security Council resolution, which also called on Sudan to cooperate with the ICC.
The conflict in Darfur has caused 200 000 deaths and led to two million people being displaced, according to the UN. Sudan contests the figures, saying that only 9 000 have died. — AFP
