A campaign focusing on Darfur and the ICC:

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WHAT Needs to Happen
As stated by the ENOUGH Project: “[The United States must] provide information and declassified intelligence to the International Criminal Court to help accelerate the process of building indictments against senior officials in the [Khartoum] regime for their role in orchestrating mass atrocities in Darfur. The U.S. has the most such intelligence and should come to agreement with the ICC about what information to share.”

WHY This Needs to Happen:
Let the people of Darfur speak for themselves. Here’s Salih Mahmoud Osman, a member of the Sudanese National Parliament and an internationally recognized human rights advocate from Darfur:

“Victims and survivors in Darfur want the international community to support the ICC investigation. In fact, many refugees have said that justice is not only a precondition for return but also necessary for the consolidation of the political process. They believe that accountability is a vital link in building peace and trust–and deterring future crimes.”

“The people of Darfur are not willing to sacrifice their legal right to justice to political bartering…”

What We Do: The International Campaign for Justice in Sudan is working to ensure President Bush’s cooperation with the ICC case on Darfur.

Arguably, the importance of the ICC case can’t be understated. A lack of cooperation on the part of the White House would have dangerous consequences: it would solidify Khartoum’s belief that it has nothing to lose in continuing and speeding up its genocide.

Op-Ed
“Sudan and the ICC: A Question of Accountability”,

Nick Grono and David Mozersky in openDemocracy
31 January 2007
openDemocracy

The Sudanese regime is, by any measure, one of the most brutal and destabilizing in the world today. Its atrocities have not been limited to Darfur. Khartoum has harshly suppressed nascent rebel groups in its east, killing hundreds of civilians in the process. The twenty-year conflict it fought with rebels in the south and centre claimed some two million victims. And it is actively fueling rebellions in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic.

All of this makes it an eminently worthy target of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is mandated to investigate and prosecute such atrocities. The United Nations Security Council obviously thought so when, in March 2005, it referred the case of Darfur to the ICC - with tacit US support. Yet those opposed to the ICC, both inside and outside Sudan, are now fighting a rearguard action. They are arguing, disingenuously, that the ICC is one of the main obstacles to peace in Darfur.

Their reasoning goes something like this. Khartoum has previously accepted a UN peacekeeping force in its south as part of the deal to end the civil war there, so clearly it has no fundamental opposition to UN peacekeepers on its territory; it is only because Sudan’s leaders fear that a peacekeeping force in Darfur will arrest them and bring them before the ICC that they are opposed to the deployment of such a force. Hence the ICC is an unwitting party to the government’s atrocities.

An end to immunity

It is a deeply flawed argument which serves only to give comfort to the regime’s apologists. It is founded on three false premises.

First, Khartoum has long been opposed to an effective peacekeeping force in Darfur, and that opposition pre-dates the ICC referral by at least eighteen months. The Sudan government is determined to wipe out the rebel groups in Darfur, at almost any cost, as it does not wish to share power or wealth with them and by so doing weaken its grip on the state. To suggest that fear of the ICC is foremost in driving its opposition to UN peacekeepers is fundamentally wrong.

Second, even if UN peacekeepers are deployed - unfortunately still a big “if” - Khartoum knows that they will be restricted to Darfur, and with a very limited mandate. That mandate will not authorise them to arrest government officials or hand them over to the ICC. The UN peacekeepers already in Sudan’s south have a similarly limited mandate and area of operations, which is why Khartoum agreed to their deployment.

Third, if the Sudanese regime is genuinely frightened of the ICC, it has a strange way of showing it. Since the ICC has started its investigation, Khartoum not only continued its campaign of atrocities, but escalated it - despite warnings from the then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan that those responsible would be held accountable.

Khartoum does have concerns about the ICC, even if these aren’t at the forefront of its opposition to UN peacekeepers. The ICC may find it easier to make its case if peacekeepers are in place to provide security throughout Darfur. Khartoum is also worried that the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, may end up charging senior government officials and seek to put them on trial.

While it’s highly unlikely that the Security Council would then agree to change the peacekeepers mandate to empower arrest against Khartoum’s wishes (for a start, it wouldn’t get past China’s veto), even the slim possibility is enough to cause the regime to undermine the ICC.

It is doing this by painting the ICC as an obstacle to peace, so as to make it a bargaining-chip in eventual peace talks. Sudan’s leaders, fortified by the fact that the international community has failed to establish any other effective leverage over Khartoum, see the ICC as only currency on the table to “trade” for peace.

This hard line will remain until the international community brings real pressure on Khartoum to alter its policies in Darfur, for instance by implementing targeted economic sanctions against government officials - already threatened and authorised by the Security Council, but never implemented.

Even if this happens, Khartoum will still want to ensure that any eventual peace deal includes immunity from prosecution for its leaders. It is true that in balancing the sometimes competing demands of peace and justice, difficult decisions often have to be made. But in the case of Sudan’s leaders, the extent of their systematic atrocities and their past history of consistently violating commitments weighs the scales very heavily against ever giving them any kind of immunity.

Meanwhile, those outraged by the crimes committed by the Khartoum regime should wholeheartedly support the court and its work in Darfur. The alternative - undermining the ICC and the powerful weapon of accountability it represents - allows the regime to haggle over whether or not it will answer for its conscience-shocking atrocities. The way forward is for the international community to implement the punitive measures it has repeatedly threatened, and force Khartoum to change its policies.

Nick Grono is vice-president of the International Crisis Group
David Mozersky is the Horn of Africa project director at the International Crisis Group