IJCentral: International Justice Central

The International Criminal Court’s judges on Monday charged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with orchestrating a bloody campaign of genocide against Darfur’s three main ethnic groups, the first time the Hague-based court has accused a sitting head of state of committing the most egregious international crime.

The three-judge pretrial chamber issued a formal arrest warrant for Bashir—the second time it has done so—on three counts of genocide. They include the crime of targeted mass killing, the causing of serious bodily or mental harm to members of a target group, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction. “There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. al-Bashir acted with specific intent to destroy in part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups,” the judges concluded.

The decision provided a degree of vindication to the United States, which has stood largely alone in characterizing the killing in Darfur as genocide. It also gave a boost to the court’s Argentine prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, whose pursuit of the Sudanese leader has generated intense opposition from other African and Arab leaders. Moreno-Ocampo suffered a setback this month when his case against another alleged war criminal, the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, was suspended for a second time.

Sudan’s U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, dismissed Monday’s ruling as a politically motivated effort to undercut prospects for peace in Sudan and vowed never to surrender Bashir. “We condemn this in this strongest terms; it will only harden our resolve,” he said in an interview. “This court’s objective is to destroy chances for peace in Sudan; we’re not going to be bothered by it.”

Moreno-Ocampo said he welcomed the decision, which essentially reverses a previous ruling by the pretrial chamber to reject the genocide charges. He said the new ruling honors the victims of the mass killing in Darfur, a vast region in western Sudan. It may impose new obligations on states that have signed the Genocide Convention, including the United States, to cooperate with the court in its effort to arrest Bashir, Moreno-Ocampo added.

The court issued a previous arrest warrant against Bashir in March 2009, on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Sudan, which has never ratified the treaty establishing the criminal court, has refused to surrender Bashir, who was reelected this year in a U.N.-backed election to a five-year term.

The violence in Darfur began in early 2003 when two rebel groups took up arms against Sudan’s Islamic government, citing a legacy of bias against Darfur’s ethnic tribes. In response, Khartoum organized local Arab militias, the Janjaweed, to help crush the resistance and its followers. The United Nations estimates that as many as 300,000 civilians died as a result of violence or hardships brought on by the forced displacement of nearly 2 million Darfurians.

source: The Washington Post

The big takeaway for me from the trip to Darfur this weekend was that the Special Envoy is facing a communications breakdown.

In a situation like Darfur, where the IDPs in the camps are so networked into the global media and advocacy organizations this messaging problem is no superficial matter - it has a substantive impact on Gration’s work. For example, I would say he spent 85% of his first day in Darfur having to repeat three messages:

1) I never said Sudan should be lifted from state sponsors of terror;

2) I never said sanctions should be lifted from Khartoum;

3) I never said IDPs have to leave the camps now.

And at the end of all that, my sense is that the IDPs still didn’t believe him (in two of the sessions they clapped when he said [ I’m paraphrasing] - I never said IDPs have to leave the camps now and I believe you should only leave the camps voluntarily and when conditions are such that you can do so with your human rights ensured and with dignity. But in one of those same sessions, I had women tell me privately afterwards that they do not accept his apology, do not believe him, and want him to resign.)

In short, while it was vital for him to come to Darfur now and try to correct this, it will take much more than one short stop at a few locations around El Fasher for the IDPs to rebuild any sense of trust in him.

After the trip I went back and read over Gration’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He is right that he never said he thought Sudan should be removed from the State Sponsors of Terror list. But it’s also true that he didn’t say they shouldn’t be removed from it. He didn’t say that sanctions should be removed from Khartoum specifically - but he did talk about needing to reconsider the approach to sanctions in order to assist people in the south and Darfur. On the topic of returns, he never said people should be forced to return. What he talked about was ensuring “displaced people, persons, can return to homes when they want to and where they want to.” I wonder if part of this problem is due to the fact that a man who has spent the majority of his career in the Air force has been put into this environment where not only everything he says, but also everything he does not say, is scrutinized to the -enth degree.

This trip gave the IDPs a chance to vent their anger, but Gration telling them that he did not actually say what they think he said is not enough because they are now too skeptical of him to absorb his efforts at clarification. There is a huge disconnect between him and the IDPs that needs to be fixed. This is especially the case if he wants to pursue his laudable approach of putting civil society at the front and center of any solution - a place they have never been over the course of the past 6 years of Darfur policy.

http://bechamilton.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/img_28301-300x225.jpg
Women weaving baskets at Abu Shok

I wonder if the way forward might involve assigning him a Deputy to manage relations with the IDPs. His job is plenty large enough that you could assign him ten additional people and they would all have work to keep them busy 24/7.  Not only is he dealing with Darfur, but also North-South, the proxy war between Chad and Sudan, the role of neighbors like Egypt and Libya - and that’s even before you get onto the elections and the referendum. Something along the lines of assigning a Deputy to go and spend the bulk of his or her time on the ground in Darfur could be the kind of circuit breaker that is helpful at this point . . .

U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration has been uncharacteristically quiet this week since he returned from his latest trip to Sudan, which included stops in the South, Darfur, and Khartoum, among others. No word yet on his blog or in official State Department releases about how the trip went.

We are particularly interested to hear about the special envoy’s visit with displaced people living in camps in the Darfur region, since General Gration has tended to downplay the humanitarian challenges in the region. Those suggestions were, naturally, not well received among Darfur’s displaced population.

The full story about the visit should be coming out later this week. In the meantime, author Bec Hamilton, who accompanied Special Envoy Gration on the trip, spoke to Public Radio International about the meetings in the camps. Bec, who is writing a book about U.S. policy toward Sudan and the role of the advocacy community, attended the meetings in Abu Shouk and Zam Zam camps as “a fly on the wall to see the special envoy in action,” and she had some interesting insights to share with PRI. Sounds like Special Envoy Gration had to spend a significant amount of time (Bec estimates 85 percent of the first of two days) doing damage control.

Listen to Bec’s interview here.

originally posted @ Enough Project

Two weeks ago at El Fasher airport in Darfur, I watched Sudanese soldiers load up an Antonov bomber, in full view of the U.N. plane I was seated inside. The recent headline-making comments of the outgoing U.N.-African Union force commander, Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, that the war in Darfur is “over,” therefore strike me as overly optimistic. They bring to mind George W. Bush’s similarly premature message of “mission accomplished” in Iraq, which was displayed on a banner aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 behind the president’s podium. As with Iraq, there is a long way to go before anyone involved in Darfur should be congratulating themselves.

Deaths from direct violence in Darfur have decreased significantly from what they were at the height of the conflict in 2003 and 2004, and most aid workers on the ground describe the fighting as having stagnated. But the comments of General Agwai are still misleading. There is no compelling reason to believe that the present situation constitutes a permanent cessation of the war, as opposed to a temporary lull in fighting.

In general, a war is declared over when one side has defeated the other, or if warring parties agree to a peace. Neither scenario exists in Darfur. Although the rebel groups are fractured to the point that almost none of them are likely to threaten the government in the short term (the Justice and Equality Movement being the exception), they have not given up. And the so-called Darfur Peace Agreement, signed by the government and just one of the rebel groups back in 2006, has still not been implemented.

The current “calm but tense” situation may be the byproduct of factors that are fluid, rather than a reflection of any fundamental shift in the situation. Right now it is the rainy season, which makes it difficult for any group to attack by land because Darfur’s dirt roads turn to mud. The Sudanese government is also trying to put on its best face while it waits for the outcome of the Obama administration’s policy review, which is expected in a few weeks, in the hope that the dovish approach of the U.S. envoy, Scott Gration, will win the day. As these and other factors change, we may still see the resumption of hostilities.

Put these considerations together and the foundations of General Agwai’s claim look precarious at best. Moreover, even if the passage of time shows the commander’s assessment to be correct, his comments are small comfort to the 2.7 million Darfuris who remain stranded in displaced-persons camps because it is too dangerous for them to return home. Imagine if, after Hurricane Katrina, U.S. officials issued press statements saying, “The hurricane is over.” They would have been correct, but they would have been missed the point. In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans’ communities were destroyed, the social fabric was ruptured, the city faced a collapse of medical services, and there was breakdown of law and order. In addition, everyone inside the city knew that unless the levees were rebuilt, a new hurricane could wreck the exact same havoc. So too in the case of Darfur.

Many critical humanitarian services that Darfuri civilians relied on have been cut back or halted since the Sudanese government expelled key aid agencies after the president was indicted by the International Criminal Court in March this year. For women and girls, the situation is particularly dire. The organizations expelled were the ones that provided medical care, and psychosocial and legal services to women and girls who had been raped-something that happens with depressing regularity whenever they try to leave the outskirts of the camps.

The men in refugee camps who have visited their villages report that not only does the situation remain insecure, but oftentimes their lands have been occupied by Arab groups from Mali, Niger, and Chad. In short, even when the war ends, much remains to be done before there is peace and security in Darfur

The U.N.-AU force was not deployed to stop a war. However, a large part of its mandate is to protect civilians. With the collapse of law and order, and pervasive insecurity from armed militias throughout Sudan’s western region, those civilians are stuck in camps, bereft of the dignity their self-sufficiency once brought them. They live daily with the knowledge that should those with guns and bombers decide to resume hostilities again, there is very little to stop them. Mission accomplished? Not yet.

Hamilton is the author of the forthcoming book The Promise of Engagement, an investigation into the impact of citizen advocacy on Darfur policy and the situation on the ground in Sudan. She is an Open Society fellow and a visiting fellow at the National Security Archives.

There’s been a curious development at the ICC since I was away that is worth keeping an eye on for those interested in following the precedent-setting decisions of the court’s first trial - against DRC militia leader, Thomas Lubanga Dyillo.

In essence, representatives of the victims are trying to get in charges of sexual slavery and cruel and inhuman treatment that many human rights organizations criticized the Prosecution for not charging from the outset. What is surprising is that the Majority of the Trial Chamber (Fulford dissenting) is considering the request. I started writing a summary and then saw that Kevin Jon Heller over at Opinio Juris has already done the work for me.

It is worth reading Heller’s analysis in full because the implications of where this ends up are significant. While my heart is with the representatives of the victims, my head is not. If the judges get to effectively “add” facts after the Prosecution has presented its case, not only does this impinge on the rights of the accused, but it also means the Prosecution loses its prerogative to determine the parameters of its case.

from Bec Hamilton’s blog

This is recent post from our friend Bec Hamilton after recently returning from a month in Sudan.

Hi everyone

As many of you know I spent August in Sudan. Unfortunately this blog was a casualty of my time there - with the GOS having blocked this site inside Sudan I couldn’t access even the back-end of it to post updates. In many ways it was a blessing in disguise, both because I was so busy with interviews, and because I would have been too paranoid on the security front to write freely anyway.

On the outskirts of Kalma camp, South Darfur

I have so much to share, I’m at a bit of a loss where to start. . .

In Khartoum I did over 30 interviews, almost all of multi-hour length with people including (leader of the Janjaweed), Minni Minawi ( the one rebel who signed the DPA), Lam Akol (Sudan’s foreign minister for most of the period I am
writing on), Hassan al Turabi (hand behind the Bashir coup in 1989), Dr Ghazi (now head of the Darfur file),Rodolphe Adada (outgoing Head on UN-AU in Darfur)  - in addition to many others in government and civil society. I also caught up briefly with Scott Gration before he headed to Juba. I attended the second court appearance of Lubna Hussein - the journalist who faces flogging for the “crime” of wearing trousers, and got sprayed with tear gas following a football match.

After 16 days of being told by External Information, “come back tomorrow”, and right at the point I had decided I needed to head back to Nairobi because didn’t have enough money left to stay in Khartoum any longer, I was given a travel permit to go to Darfur the next day.

Cookers of recycled USAID tins: Sudanese ingenuity at El Fasher market

In El Fasher and then in Nyala I did interviews with all aspects of UNAMID, the few aid workers who were not too scared to speak, and of course with the people I care about most - the IDPs themselves. I also experienced the all-encompassing warmth of close-knit Darfur family life, staying at the home of a Darfuri friend. From 7 months to 70 years, we had grandmother, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters, all living together. We ate dinner off one plate together each evening and slept under the bright stars of the Darfur sky each night. I’m not sure I have ever felt so much love concentrated in one place.

At 4am on Saturday August 22, I was woken by the street band of drummers, serving as an alarm to wake everyone up for sahur (meal before sun rises and fasting starts), on the first day of Ramadan. Like so many I met, I hoped that the holy month of Ramadan would bring peace in Darfur.

In the coming week, I’m likely to be posting a mish-mash of things - from photos, to ‘travelogues’ that I wrote up while practicing the fine Sudanese art of waiting (waiting, waiting), and summaries of the key issues raised in my interviews. As always, time in Sudan puts me through emotions of despair and hope, rage and joy, like no other place on earth seems to be capable of.

Thanks for your continuing readership,

Bec

This Just in!

OSI Fellow and author Bec Hamilton has just announced via Enough Project’s website that she will be giving people a unique opportunity to ask questions about Darfur Policy to the policy makers themselves. She is currently in The Hague and will be interviewing former U.N. Special Representative on Sudan Jan Pronk and current ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo.  By submitting questions to her website you can have an opportunity to have your questions be answered on record.  Here is a bit of the post:

“Sitting talking with the former head of U.N. Peacekeeping in New York last week, it struck me that there are many citizen advocates out there who would relish the opportunity to quiz some of these people on Darfur policy, so I thought of one way to try and share the opportunity…

I recently set up a website where I will post upcoming interviews with people who are willing to take questions on the record from you. I’m in The Hague right now, and two of the people I have just spoken with agreed to take your questions: The former U.N. Special Representative on Sudan Jan Pronk and the ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. If you would like to ask either of them a question about Darfur policy – past, present or future – go to the “Submit a Question” tab on the website.”

Take this opportunity and make yourself heard!