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Now
That Sudan's Pres. Bashir is Indicted, He Must Be
Arrested Immediately
Friday,
July, 18, 2008
By Tewroh-Wehtoe Sungbeh
Sudanese President
Omar al-Bashir is an African despot whose claim to
fame is the 1989 Islamic-backed coup he led that
overthrew Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, the
dissolution of political parties, the introduction of
Sharia law opposed by a cross section of his people in
the south, and the terror campaign he allegedly fueled
in Darfur since 2003.
Since his
ascension to the throne, President Bashir, who
hasn’t shown much leadership at all has been all
over the place either defending his brutal policies,
or blaming his perceived enemies for the problems he
created in the almost two decades he has been in
power.
A sad
commentary for a leader who came to power to “save
the country from rotten political parties,” but
whose dictatorial leadership style is as rotten as the
political parties he fought against and brought down
to be where he is today.
Pres. Omar al-Bashir
This is not
a surprise to many of us from the region who grew
accustomed to seeing obscure, power-hungry, and often
incompetent military officers with no sense of
civility and zero ounce of democracy in their blood,
often would bash the system they supposedly despised
while wrapping themselves around populist slogans and
rhetoric to stir-up the population only to later
reveal their true dictatorial tendencies after they
are formally challenged by a politician to return to
the barracks.
Like most
African leaders, the Sudanese president is blinded by
raw power. To retain that raw power, he has
successfully blended benevolence and exploitation with
mockery of the system and tyranny, while his people
continues to live in a state of abject poverty in the
midst of incredible mineral deposits that could have
potentially changed the lives of his people, had he
being a visionary leader.
Again, like
most African leaders, President Omar al-Bashir is not
a visionary leader, but a religious fanatic whose call
for an Islamic republic and sharia law in his country
undermine the rights of a huge section of his black
African (non-Arab) population, whose struggles for
human rights, democracy, participation in the
political process and religious freedom gave rise to
what we now know today as Darfur and ethnic cleansing,
the world got to know about from the vocal advocacy of
human rights groups, opinion leaders and from the
powerful lenses of the media, whose persistence
finally paid off when chief prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo
finally filed genocide charges Monday against the
Sudanese leader.
According to evidence submitted by Moreno-Ocampo,
Mr. Bashir is charged with three counts of genocide,
five counts of crimes against humanity and two of war
crimes, a total of ten charges, which accuses him of
“murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture,
rape and attacks on civilian populations.”
The
prosecutor alleges Mr. Bashir intentionally tried to
wipe out a “substantial part” of three tribes
(Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa) ethnic groups in the
western part of the country that once rebelled against
his government in 2003. It is also believed when the
president’s army failed to defeat the tribes, he
sent his “janjeweed” militia on horseback to crush
the movement.
Even as the tragedy unfolds in Sudan, African
Union peacekeepers deployed in Darfur to keep the
peace are coming under constant armed attacks from
gunmen, who shot and killed another peacekeeper
Wednesday, a week after seven peacekeepers were killed
in the same Darfur region.
How long
will this senseless fatal assault on the peacekeepers
continue, and how long will President Bashir, who many
see today as an obstacle to peace in Sudan continue to
show disregard for the people of Sudan and contempt
for the international community before he is ever
arrested to answer to the charges against him?
This is a
question that needs to be answered by the United
Nations and President Bashir, the formal whose
snail-like method of operation could prevent Bashir
from ever being arrested to face trial; and the
latter, who will continue to stall the process by his
constant challenge of the legitimacy of the
International Criminal Court while pursuing his
singular objective of remaining in power to spread
terror in Darfur.
The United
Nations must use its enormous influence to lobby
member-state like China, and perhaps other nations to
drop their stubborn support of President Bashir in the
wake of the indictment that unveiled the cruelty in
Darfur, and must condemn the callousness off a
one-pronged foreign policy that ignores human
suffering in favor of exploiting Sudan’s vast proven
oil reserves.
While it is
true that when tragedy like this happens to innocent
people, there is a tendency to blame those powerful
external forces – in this case China and other
countries that aggressively pushes their own agenda at
the expense of the suffering population. In this case,
however, fingers ought to be pointed also at President
Bashir, who doesn’t seem to care much about the
plight of his people but is only concerned with
holding raw power.
The last
time another brutal African leader who did not care
about the suffering of his people, and was seen as an
obstacle to peace in the west African region was
Liberia’s Charles Taylor, in Calabar, Nigeria at the
time was arrested in 2006 when he attempted to flee
after he was indicted by the International Criminal
Court in the Hague, where he is now on trial for
crimes against humanity.
Even though
it appears as if it took “forever” before Mr.
Taylor even agreed to step down as president and
persuaded to go into exile to Nigeria, and it took
“forever” before he was even indicted, war-weary
citizens of the two countries, Liberia and Sierra
Leone are relieved to know that Charles Taylor is out
of their lives forever.
Other than
overthrowing President Bashir, which perhaps is a long
shot, the Sudanese people and the international
community must rise up and demand that he be arrested
immediately and put on trial to answer to the criminal
charges against him. Anything short of that is a fatal
joke.
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