NATO Lust for Darfur Oil and Uranium Reaches a Climax: Hague court prosecutor seeks arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir

Editor's Note:

Readers can research the real reasons behind the Sudanese civil war in Darfur by searching the relationship between Darfur and oil and uranium. They will find tens of thousands of articles written about the subject.

Basically oil companies in NATO countries and supporters of Israel have been leading the efforts to destabilize Sudan in order to control the oil and uranium there, particularly to dislodge the Chinese companies from the region.

President Omar Al-Bashir has not cooperated with the Zionist-Oil alliance, which explains these continuous campaigns against him and his government.

Nothing of this is mentioned in the following article, which represents the average corporate media unit  in NATO countries.

Where has this prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, been when Israeli war criminals were killing Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims for the last sixty years, particularly since 2000?

Is he going to proescute Olmert, Barak, Natanyaho, and Peres next?

Or it's just a campaign to justify more invasions of countries which have oil and uranium?

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Luis Moreno Ocampo

Education:  University of Buenos Aires, School of Law
 

Born:  Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 4, 1952
 
Biography: 

Assistant Prosecutor, 1983-1988. General Prosecutor, National Criminal Court of Appeals Criminal and Correctional Matters, focus on great number of public corruption cases and military cases, 1988-1992. Visiting Professor: Stanford University, 2003; Harvard University School of Law. Founder, NGO Poder Ciudadano. Member, Advisory Committee of Transparency International. Chief Prosecutor of the Court, Elected by Assembly of the States Parties of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, April 21, 2003.(Retired)

In 1992, Mr. Moreno-Ocampo established a private law firm, Moreno-Ocampo & Wortman Jofre

Hague court prosecutor seeks arrest warrant for Sudan president

International Herald Tribune

By Lydia Polgreen and Marlise Simons, July 11, 2008

Dakar, Senegal

When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, reported to the United Nations Security Council last month, he painted a dire tableau of death, rape and dispossession in Darfur, saying the entire state apparatus was involved in a five-year campaign of terror there. His target, it seemed, was Sudan's president.

This week, the prosecutor privately informed Security Council members that on Monday he would ask the judges at the court in The Hague to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, diplomats said. They said that the prosecution plans to bring charges of crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur, a region of Sudan. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, was also informed out of concern for the security of UN peacekeepers in the area, the diplomats said.

The prosecutor's office has called a news conference for Monday to disclose its plans.

The indictment of a sitting head of state in a war-torn country would not be unprecedented: Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia were both charged by international war crimes courts while in office.

But the complexity and fragility of Sudan's multiple conflicts have led many diplomats, analysts and aid workers to worry that the Sudanese government could lash out at the prosecutor's move by expelling Western diplomats and relief workers who provide aid to millions of people displaced by the fighting, provoking a vast crisis and shutting the door to vital diplomatic efforts to bring lasting peace.

The dueling objectives have exposed a growing tension: between justice and peace, that is, between the prosecution of war criminals and the compromises of diplomacy.

Darfur, in many ways, is in freefall. On Tuesday, seven peacekeepers were killed in an ambush, sending shockwaves through the already demoralized international peacekeeping force there.

"It is escalating every day," said a senior United Nations peacekeeping official in Darfur. "The government wants us to fail. We are doing our best, but we are under attack everywhere."

Aid groups are struggling to provide basic assistance, as they face increased banditry and harassment. Last week Sudanese authorities expelled several staff members of the aid group Doctors Without Borders. Hijackings of aid vehicles in Darfur have become an almost daily occurrence, peacekeeping officials say.

Beyond that, in southern Sudan, the embers are cooling after a fierce battle in May over the disputed oil-rich town of Abyei that displaced 50,000 people. Tensions remain extraordinarily high between the sides, which fought a 20-year civil war that ended in a fragile peace accord in 2005. A government of national unity is holding, but only just.

Many argue that the added strain of war crimes charges against the head of state would push an already precarious nation over the edge.

"It is certainly going to close off all sorts of options for diplomacy and leave us very few options other than condemnation and isolation," said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Other analysts and activists argue that it could increase pressure on the Sudanese government at a critical moment — when peacekeeping forces in Darfur are increasingly under attack, the peace agreement with the south is in danger of collapsing and the aid effort in Darfur hangs by a thread.

"I think it is absolutely imperative to go straight to the top," said John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration official who co-founded Enough, a group that seeks to end genocide. He argued that concerted pressure by the international community had changed Sudan's behavior at times.

Sudanese officials declined to comment, saying they would wait until the prosecutor made his announcement. But in the past, the Sudanese government has rejected the legitimacy of the court, arguing that Sudanese courts are capable of prosecuting any crimes. The international court has already brought criminal charges against two senior government officials, but the government has refused to hand them over. One was even given a promotion.

In the short term, a request for Bashir's arrest could have a potentially devastating impact on the people of Darfur. Representatives of the Sudanese government have long said that they view the entire aid and security apparatus in Darfur as accomplices of the international court, bent on regime change.

Aid organizations say they are under intense scrutiny by Sudan's intelligence agencies, which monitor their communications and tightly control their visas and permits to work in Darfur. Several foreign aid workers have been expelled at least in part on suspicion of providing information to the International Criminal Court.

The government already accuses nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations "of passing information to the ICC," said one senior aid official in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. "There is quite strong concern they will expel UN staff and possibly entire agencies."

Diplomats are also worried about the impact an indictment might have on efforts to revive peace talks in Darfur, which have been stalled for the better part of a year, and on efforts to prevent the complete dissolution of the strained 2005 peace deal between the north and south.

For months, talks have been taking place between the United States and Sudan, with American officials trying to persuade Sudan to improve security in Darfur and strengthen the peace agreement with the south.

In exchange, Sudanese officials would get better relations with the United States, something they have sought for years, according to diplomats and analysts. But that process would be much more difficult if Bashir were formally charged with war crimes, Western diplomats said.

Diplomats have predicted dire consequences from arrest warrants before. When Milosevic, then Yugoslavia's president, was first indicted in 1999 — during the conflict in Kosovo — German, French and Russian politicians said it would put a fatal obstacle in the way of peace negotiations. When he was transferred to The Hague, diplomats worried it would destabilize the region.

Similarly, when the Special Court for Sierra Leone unsealed its arrest warrant for Taylor, then Liberia's president, in 2003, in the midst of intense fighting there, diplomats and others involved in peace negotiations privately warned of disastrous consequences. Kofi Annan, then the United Nations secretary general, was furious and reportedly told his aides it was a threat to the peace process.

Both leaders ultimately fell from power, and the role the indictments played in either prolonging or shortening conflict has been much debated.

More recently, diplomats have complained that arrest warrants hampered a peace deal with the Lord's Resistance Army, which has ravaged northern Uganda for 20 years.

Led by Joseph Kony, the rebel group has kidnapped thousands of children and turned them into soldiers and sex slaves. Kony agreed to take part in peace talks, but only if the international arrest warrants against him were lifted. The Security Council, which has the power to suspend prosecutions, was reportedly ready to agree if Kony signed.

"But he failed to appear," said Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch. "It turns out that the rebel group used the talks as a screen to beef up its depleted ranks."

The argument that peace trumps justice might be more compelling in Darfur, human rights workers argue, if there were a peace process achieving results there. But peace efforts are at a virtual standstill. Previous efforts to bring the fractious rebel groups together to negotiate ended in failure.

Still, the short-term risks of seeking an indictment are grave, said Alex de Waal, a Sudan expert at the Social Science Research Council in New York.

"Bashir is paranoid; he feels the world is out to get him," de Waal said. "He is prone to irrational outbursts and could respond in a very aggressive way."

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