The Hill Op-ed: The case against Sudanese President Omar al Bashir Posted by John Bradshaw on Apr 05, 2013
This piece originally appeared on The Hill. The tenth anniversary of the genocide in Darfur has focused renewed attention on the crimes that the Sudanese regime has committed against its people and the pending International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for President Omar al Bashir and other Sudanese officials. But the fact that the regime’s crimes extend far beyond Darfur and continue to this day has remained under the radar. Every day, the regime is brutally targeting its own civilians in its South Kordofan and Blue Nile states through regular aerial bombardment and the deliberate burning and destruction of civilian structures. Substantial evidence now exists proving that these tactics — honed in Darfur and the long civil war with the south — constitute atrocity crimes that meet the formal legal definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is time for the U.N. Security Council to fulfill its responsibility to protect victims of atrocity crimes and expand the ICC’s mandate to allow the prosecutor to investigate charges against Bashir and his henchman beyond the narrow Darfur authorization. While most of the world has been distracted by other events, human rights groups have steadily accumulated evidence of crimes in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have released report after report decrying the situation. Now, groups like the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) and Nuba Reports are combining satellite imagery with on-the-ground reporting and legal analysis, to make a case for action. The internationally-accepted Responsibility to Protect doctrine demands action in these types of situations. Among other steps, it allows the Security Council to refer the situation in South Kordofan and Blue Nile to the International Criminal Court. In the meantime, the UN should establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate, document and legally characterize the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan’s two southern states. What evidence have human rights groups already been able to see and document? Reporting confirms destructive acts by Sudanese government soldiers, the Central Reserve Police, also known as Abu Tira, and government-backed militias including the deliberate burning and looting of hundreds of civilian structures: churches, mosques, marketplaces, and schools. Imagery also shows the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations in a number of villages and the deliberate burning of at least 26 villages and 292 square miles of fields and grasslands in the two states. If tied to compelling legal analysis, this evidence, gathered through a combination of cutting edge technology and old school human rights reporting, can now be taken to the next level. There is already enough evidence to demonstrate that atrocity crimes that fall under the ICC’s scope are happening in South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Satellite images document state actions that match the Geneva Conventions’ definition of war crimes, including intentional attacks against civilian populations; intentionally attacking buildings used for religious services, schools, and hospitals; and pillaging or looting a village. Reports also support a finding that state attacks against civilian populations are widespread and systematic enough to pass the threshold for characterization as crimes against humanity. The evidence is available. We need to make sure the International Criminal Court gets jurisdiction over the question. The United Nations should immediately establish a Commission of Inquiry into situation in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. Using SSP’s and other human rights groups’ evidence as a starting point, the Commission of Inquiry could gather additional evidence to support another Security Council referral to the ICC. Even before this commission is established, members of the international community must endeavor to collect as much evidence as possible of ongoing crimes from refugees and other victims. Bashir’s regime governs by marginalizing the populations living at the country’s peripheries. As a consequence, the people in South Sudan, the East, and Darfur have violently opposed the central government’s rule for decades. The government’s brutal response to the Sudanese opposition’s efforts to secure a more inclusive society is now infamous. Sudan’s own armed forces and state-sponsored proxy militias have been indiscriminately attacking civilian populations on the periphery for years. Now, these atrocities, which were previously committed unobserved, are being monitored and documented. The era of impunity for atrocity crimes committed unobserved in remote areas is coming to an end. The model of melding new technologies of satellite imaging and commonly available cell phone video with on-the-ground reporting has already produced evidence that no regime can deny. The U.N. and the ICC should mark the tenth anniversary of the Darfur genocide by continuing to move forward toward accountability and justice for all the people of Sudan who have suffered under the Bashir regime. Photo: Match Battalion Member Torches Village; Credit: Eyes and Ears Nuba. Disqus Login About Disqus Like Dislike 4 people liked this. Glad you liked it. Would you like to share? Facebook Twitter Share No thanks Sharing this page … Thanks! Close Real-time updating is enabled. Comments for this page are closed. Showing 4 comments FilipHolm 1 comment collapsed CollapseExpand I think what he meant was that the situation has been slightly disguised as random acts of merciless killing on behalf of the government, when really there's actually a civil war going on between african rebel forces and state troops. This doesn't make it less atrocious though, whatever the situation, civilian areas are being targeted and major crimes have been commited by the government. There's always two sides to an argument, but I wouldn't think twice about a prosecution for Al-Bashir. ALike 6 days ago 0 Like F El-C 1 comment collapsed CollapseExpand I Adam are you saying that none of what we hear about alBashir and his men are true. There is no rape, bombings, burning of farms, starving people and genocide? I'm not being rude or anything just trying to understand. I feel like everything that I have heard is wrong. If you can please give me an answer, thanks for taking time to read this. Have a good day. El-C ALike 1 week ago 0 Like F Ibrahim Adam Sudan 1 comment collapsed CollapseExpand No, it's not an "excellent article", 'Emendes'. And here's why: John Bradshaw’s argument about South Kordofan and Blue Nile states may look, smell, and sound like a clear slam dunk; but it’s actually the typical distortion and oversimplification of all things Sudan beloved by The Enough! Project and US activist groups. The accusations leveled at Sudanese President Al-Bashir of “war crimes”, “crimes against humanity”; “indiscriminate bombing” “deliberate burning” etc in So-Ko and Blue Nile states – both those made in this op-ed by The Enough Project and supposedly backed up by satellite imagery from its sister organization, the Sudan Sentinel – deliberately side-steps the all-important, crucial contextualization of the standard theatre of conflict between a country’s army and guerilla movements. What’s that?? It is that the SPLM-North rebels in South Kordofan and Blue Nilestates have not been fighting from some ‘4th dimension’, but like all armed non-state actors do and have done since time immemorial (e.g. see recently Hamas, Taliban, Iraqi insurgents etc), the SPLM-North rebels have been locating themselves in civilian areas (#usinghumanshields) to try to level the (military) field against the (larger and better resourced) Sudanese state forces – a situation moreover that leads to the ‘fog-of-war’ that exists in each and every conflict since the year dot – e.g. see US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, readers, just take a look at this shot from The Atlantic magazine about the war in South Kordofan’s Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile state; see this link here: http://t.co/lUSenycsBh A lucky shot? Hardly. Get the picture now – literally? Precisely. Put starkly, the Enough Project and other US activist groups are just ‘layering’ to build what looks like a conclusive cut-and-dried case of war crimes etc in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states against President Bashir. SSP and other human rights groups “evidence” and “on the ground reporting” is seriously compromised, too, because it’ has almost likely been infected by politically-finessed (anti-Sud govt bias) testimony. The timing of Enough Project’s op-ed also has to be questioned, coming now as it does when peace talks between the Sudanese government and the SPLM-North rebels are set to take place imminently (brokered by the African Union). It seems that Enough’s op-ed has timed to deliberately nix those peace talks – which have the support of virtually all ordinary Sudanese people and the international community (including the US government), and is seen as the only viable way forward to achieving a sustainable and fair peace deal for South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. It’s also difficult to ignore that even those right here in the Sudanese mix (neither the SPLM-N rebels nor ordinary folk in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states) are calling for a “commission of inquiry” etc, let alone referring President Al Bashir to the ICC. And on that note, finally, let’s not also ignore the supreme irony of an American advocacy group like Enough!once again calling for the ICC to bear its’ teeth, yet again, only in Africa – while the US government still refuses to join the Courtbecause it fears giving any international body legal jurisdiction over its own troops – aka one rule for the powerful, another for the weak; see this article here: http://tinyurl.com/cjq9rk6 So that’s international justice and the “internationally-accepted” Responsibility to Protect, touted by John Bradshaw and others??? Wow. I Adam, Sudan ALike 1 week ago 0 Like F Emendes 1 comment collapsed CollapseExpand Excellent article. In addition, U.S. & others shld be ighten econ. sanctions & help South Sudan become stable & assist democratic opposition within Sudan. His fall will see him at the ICC. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "South Sudan Info - The Kob" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
