Terror in the west of Sudan is far from concluded. Following the celebration of an apparently successful referendum for South Sudan, we should not forget the deals the Obama administration was obliged to cut so that voting could take place as scheduled, and what further deals will be required going forward to ensure the secession vote is respected by the Khartoum regime.
In the words of one local human rights activist, the new North Sudan is going to be a very nasty country. This matters because of the company president Bashir keeps: he gave shelter to Osama bin Laden for five years in the 1990s, and he considers Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Hamas and Hizbollah to be his closest ideological and political friends, despite claiming to be an ally of America in the war on terror
There is some irony in the criticism of ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo for issuing his request for a warrant of arrest for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) was previously criticised for moving too slowly and for not targeting high levels of the government. How sensitive to a politics of consequence, then, should the Prosecutor be?
Despite the common claim that China can’t be moved by international pressure from human rights or advocacy groups, the campaign to link genocide in Darfur to Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games has thoroughly belied this notion. It is a campaign which must not give way to political expediency.
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