Sudan on Friday threatened to expel peacekeepers from Darfur if President Omar al-Bashir is indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“We are telling the world that with the indictment of our president we can’t be responsible for the well-being of foreign forces in Darfur,” Bashir’s adviser, Bona Malual, told reporters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“After that we may ask them to withdraw from our territory,” he added.
ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo accuses Bashir of personally instructing his forces to annihilate three non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, masterminding murder, torture, pillaging and the use of rape to commit genocide.
Last week, Moreno-Ocampo asked ICC judges to issue a warrant for Bashir’s arrest. If granted, which could take several months, it would be the first issued by The Hague-based court against a sitting head of state.
“We reject this indictment totally,” Malual said. “We will not submit our president to any kind of questioning or answering to a body Sudan is not part of.”
On Monday the African Union asked the United Nations Security Council to delay a decision on whether the ICC should indict Bashir.
The AU handed over its peacekeeping mission in Darfur to the UN on December 31, but has so far seen the deployment of only 7 600 troops and 1 500 police.
That figure is barely a third of the projected total of 19 500 soldiers and 6 500 policemen.
Up to 300 000 people have died and more than 2,2-million have fled their homes since the conflict erupted in February 2003, according to the UN. Sudan says 10 000 have been killed.
The conflict began when African ethnic minority rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime and state-backed Arab militias, fighting for resources and power in one of the most remote and deprived places on earth. — AFP