What do you do with an arrest warrant when the police refuse to make the arrest?
That’s the predicament faced by the International Criminal Court. Earlier this year the nine-year-old body, headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands, indicted two Sudanese leaders for alleged war crimes in that country’s Darfur region.That one of the men, Ahmad Muhammad Harun, happens to be Sudan’s minister of “humanitarian affairs” speaks volumes about the low regard that Khartoum has shown for humans in the Darfur region. The other suspect, Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, is a leader of the notorious Janjaweed militia, which has waged murderous raids against civilians in Darfur since a rebel uprising began in 2003.
Unless Sudan turns the men over on its own, the best the court can do is wait for them to step outside of Sudan where they might be spotted and arrested by Interpol. That is, if they ever step outside of their home country.
The trouble is, it’s very hard to prosecute alleged war criminals whose government has not yet lost the war. That is particularly true for a country like Sudan, where the regime often behaves like an outlaw.
Sudan’s oil revenues enable it to resist sanctions and stymie most diplomatic pressure. The United Nations helps prop up the regime with its reluctance to join the Bush administration in labeling Sudan’s actions as genocide. The UN timidity has enabled such eager Sudanese trading partners as Russia, France and China to block embargoes, sanctions or other humanitarian actions that might have real teeth.
A force of 7,000 African Union peacekeepers has proved inadequate. The Sudanese government agreed in April to accept 3,000 UN peacekeepers to help, but it continues to stall the rest of a planned force of 21,000 peacekeepers from the AU and the UN. Meanwhile, the murder and misery in Sudan drag on.
President Bush sounded the right note last month in a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The clock is running out on diplomacy, the president warned. He called on Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to cooperate with UN demands for beefed up peacekeeping forces or face tougher economic sanctions. Sudan could face UN-backed military intervention and a UN-enforced no-fly zone to prevent Sudanese military aircraft from operating in Darfur.
That would be conditioned, of course, on UN approval. Bush says his administration is ready to push for that. Good. The pressure to which Sudan has responded in recent years has come mostly from the United States.
Focused diplomatic pressure from the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks persuaded Sudan, where Osama bin Laden made his home for several years in the 1990s, to provide valuable cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda. Administration pressure also helped to bring peace to southern Sudan in 2005 after 21 years of fighting. Christian conservative leaders here had urged the president to step in. The region’s Christian and Animist majority was being killed, enslaved and otherwise terrorized by slave-raiding militias backed by the Islamic government in Khartoum.
This is a government that views its own citizens’ lives as a small price to pay for it to cling to power. Khartoum can be moved, but not by threats alone.
