Wednesday, 07.16.08
Not So Invincible
ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images
Sudan: A Microcosm of Africa's Ills
April 1986
Robert Kaplan describes how hostile neighbors and militant rebels imperiled Khartoum's new regime.
Genocide in Darfur: Crime Without Punishment?
February 2005
Last September, Jose Miguel Vivanco was savoring a victory. Chile had just extradited the former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori to Peru for human rights violations, and the Americas’ director of Human Rights Watch was energized. With his office darkening into evening, I asked Vivanco why dictators believe they’ll rule forever. “I think there is something that makes you feel untouchable, that you are invincible,” said Vivanco, adding that unfortunately these egoists know how to stall their arrests by gaming competing national interests. “It’s a question of politics,” said Vivanco.
On Monday, the game heated up for Sudan’s President Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir after Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, requested his arrest warrant for genocide in the Darfur region, where 300,000 have died since 2003. Rallying against the prosecutor’s recommendation, the “invincible” Al Bashir pumped his fists in the air to the cheers of supporters in Khartoum. Much of the rest of the world, meanwhile, from United Nation’s Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and President Bush to representatives from Russia, China, and the African Union, fretted that the warrant request would disrupt humanitarian work, bring reprisals against U.N. peacekeepers, or otherwise further destabilize Darfur, etc.
For all the scripted anger in Khartoum and the handwringing elsewhere, there’s a touch of stage craft to Moreno-Ocampo’s request, of course. In 2005, when the Security Counsel empowered Moreno-Ocampo, its Resolution 1593 recognized that states “not party to the Rome Statute have no obligation under the statute.” In fact, Sudan did not sign the ICC treaty and is technically not bound to its court, unlike, say, Liberia and Serbia. But Khartoum is worried and playing something of a double game: though it says that it doesn’t recognize the ICC, it nonetheless seeks to undermine the court’s jurisdiction by claiming to have established a domestic court to try similar crimes, thereby arguing that the ICC cannot act in its capacity as “a court of last resort.” By accepting the logic behind the ICC’s charter, that strategy may yet backfire by pulling Sudan further into the court’s judicial gravity, exposing Al Bashir to prosecution, and making him the first sitting chief executive to be hauled before the permanent court.
But whether such an arrest would end up triggering significant unrest is an open question. Slobodan Milosevic’s supporters swore to fight tooth and nail just before Serbia handed him over to the Hague where he died manipulating prescription drugs to fake an illness. Liberian supporters of Charles Taylor warned “chaos and bloodshed” would follow if their warlord was given to the Sierra Leone tribunal. As Taylor’s trial moves forward, there’s been barely a peep. Fujimori’s Fujimoristas rallied at Lima’s international airport, waiting to embrace El Chino on his extradition from Chile, but he was taken instead to a military base. His supporters (30 percent of the electorate) have settled into a grumbling acquiescence as his trial airs daily on Peru’s television. International justice may be slow and unwieldy, but its imprimatur can have a powerful calming effect.
Flawed diplomacyRobert Dreyfus compares Sudan to Zimbabwe and blames US policy for worsening the situation. |
Empty gestureDaniel Hannan denounces the ICC's action as a blow to national sovereignty that is more about flaunting the institution's power than helping Sudan. |
Test caseJonathan Tepperman defends the ICC but warns that the court's credibility is on the line. |
Not above the lawIan Williams argues that prosecuting the leaders who authorize crimes against humanity is a moral imperative. |
