Last year in a clear signal to the genocide perpetrators of Sudan, the ICC chief prosecutor charged dictator Bashir with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to Darfur.
Now in a world exclusive we can reveal that next week the ICC will issue and arrest warrant for Bashir, head of Sudan’s despotic regime. He will be charged with Genocide against his people and his arrest warrant will be enforcable immediately.
The signifficance of this ICC step although a bold one and unprecedented against a sitting head of state…pales when considered in the context of the bold and truly humanitarian actions of the incoming Obama administration.
The incoming US president-elect Barack Obama will act swiftly to fulfil his campaign pledges to take more robust action in Darfur and by extension of the ICC mandate in Southern Sudan as well. “I will make ending the genocide in Darfur a priority from day one,” Obama had said and he meant it throughout his campaign.
Finally Sudan’s dictators in Khartoum are growing fearful. Their fear of direct confrontation with the US and Washington’s new policies for Sudan are being fuelled by the very real expectations that the International Criminal Court, backed in this instance by the US, will issue an arrest warrant for Bashir within the coming weeks.
Hillary Clinton, was endorsed as secretary of state yesterday, and she told the US Senate: “There is a great need for us to sound the alarm again about Darfur. It is a terrible humanitarian crisis compounded by a corrupt and very cruel regime in Khartoum.”
Clinton said the Obama administration, which takes office on Tuesday, ”was examining a wide range of options, including direct intervention in support of a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force, known as Unamid, which has struggled to make an impact after beginning operations last year”.
“We have spoken about other options, no-fly zones, other sanctions and sanctuaries, looking to deploy the Unamid force to try to protect the refugees but also to repel the militias,” Clinton said. “There is a lot under consideration.” Clinton has previously asserted that the US has a “moral duty” to help Darfurian civilians.
The US accuses Khartoum’s leadership of committing genocide in Darfur. Washington has eschewed direct military involvement since the crisis erupted in 2003, despite growing pressure to act from Sudanese insurgents, exiles, and evangelical Christian groups.
But in a surprise move last week, President George Bush ordered the Pentagon to begin an immediate airlift of vehicles and equipment for the peacekeeping force.
Alain LeRoy, head of UN peacekeeping operations, told the Security Council last month that violence in Darfur was intensifying and stepped-up international involvement was urgently required to avoid a descent into “mayhem”.
Influential US-based pressure groups such as the Save Darfur Coalition and Enough are meanwhile demanding that US president-elect Barack Obama act swiftly to fulfil campaign pledges to take more robust action.
“I will make ending the genocide in Darfur a priority from day one,” Obama said in April. He has also previously backed a toughening of sanctions and said the US might help enforce a no-fly zone.
Obama is Sudan’s National Congress party’s and Bashir’s worst nightmare, in Khartoum. The dictator and his cronies genocidaires wanted John McCain and the Republicans to win. They thought they were pragmatists. They think the Democrats are ideologues. They haven’t forgotten it was the Democrats who bombed them. That was the retaliatory US cruise missile attack on a suspect pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in 1998, ordered by President Bill Clinton after al-Qaida attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Sudan provided a base for the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, from 1991 until he moved to Afghanistan in 1996.
Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, is especially alarmed by Obama’s selection of Susan Rice, a former Clinton national security council adviser on Africa, as a cabinet member and US ambassador to the UN. Rice has spoken passionately in the past of the need for US or Nato air strikes, or a naval blockade of Sudan’s oil exports, to halt the violence in Darfur. Referring to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, she said: “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”
Bashir felt only “fear and loathing” for Rice and had told aides: “I don’t want to see her face here,” the source said.
Khartoum’s concerns about American intervention extend to southern Sudan, fuelled by reports, denied by the US, that Washington is arming the separatist Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
The SPLA is the military wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement with which the north fought a 30-year civil war. Salva Kiir, the SPLM leader and Bashir’s likely rival in elections due later this year, received red carpet treatment by Bush at the White House last week. However the most important is the 2011 people’s referendum for creating an independent state in Southern Sudan. Something most people have already voted on with their feet. However Bashir and his military cronies will attack Southern Sudan in a continuation of the 50 year war to prevent the country from splitting apart…
That is where it’s tricky for the South. War is inevitable unless the US intervenes early and decisively. Even then the low level warfare in the borders now will intensify… and the humanitarian catastrophe of Darfur will be replayed in the Southern Sudan’s border areas…
The Sudanese government knows the US does not arm the SPLA. They also know that they are already heavily armed. But the y also know that the US does helps with strategic advisors and also training for the SPLA. The US advisors help with logistics, planning, infrastructure and strategic long range plannning and so on.
But in the event of a war there are great deficiencies…And here is where tthe SPLA does need also a serious air defence. There are contigency plans for this with the US now. Thus in the event of the inevitable conflict; whether to provide air defence to the south will be a key question for the Obama administration and a crucial test of it’s commitment to a liberated Sudan.
