War Criminals Must Face Justice

They came at dawn, some turbaned, others with ragged military uniforms riding galloping horses and pickup trucks across the hard gravely desert of Darfur. Clouds of fine sand billowed behind their relentless advance on the defenseless camp of refugees. Then the killing and rape began in a mad drug-like induced frenzy. Women and children screamed and fled but were mowed down, then a hundred or more blood thirsty killers were on foot stabbing, clubbing and raping the men and women. This was no isolated incident but one of many since 2003 when the Darfur region of Sudan was found to hold vast resources of oil to which the inhabitants had ancestral rights. ABCO corporation a government agency - which is 37 percent owned by Swiss company Clivenden whose CEO Friedholm Eronat, holds a British passport said that there were large resources of oil in the region.

The Arab government in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, decided it was time to get total control and drive the indigenous people off the land and wipe them out completely so they could never come back and claim their historic rights to the land and the oil. Since 2003, the killings and ethnic cleansing have gone on relentlessly, committed by forces of the Muslim Arab Government of Sudan and a government equipped and paid Arab militia, called the “warriors of horse and gun” or in Arabic the Jingaweit (Janjaweed).

As a result of years of campaigning by concerned humanitarian and church groups for justice for the victims, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has now formally charged Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He has applied for an arrest warrant. This is the first time a sitting president has been charged and not before its time. Tyrants and dictators, who commit torture, abductions and assassinations must be brought to justice and answer for their crimes . The International Criminal Court is the hope of the helpless victims of brutality and inhumanity. It should be expanded and cover crimes committed with impunity where whole communities are victims of human rights abuses and the violator is above the law.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor for the International criminal court said that Omar Hussein al-Bashir “master-minded and implemented” a military plan that was in effect genocide when he unleashed his troops and militia to wipe out ethnic tribal groups. He “purposefully targeted civilians” and killed as many as 35,000. “His motives were political” and his alibi was a “counterinsurgency”, “his intent was genocide”, the prosecutor said.

Evidence gathered by human rights and relief organizations and journalists visiting the area and interviewing survivors all point to a systematic war of extermination to wipe out the non-Arab ethnic tribes that have occupied these barren and remote parts of the Sudan. This genocide is aimed at the Muslim people of Zaghawa, Massalit, and Fur ethnic groups. More than 2.5 million people have been made homeless or internal refugees and many fled the atrocities to refugee camps.

They are still attacked there, supposedly protected by the poorly armed and supplied African Union UN peacekeeping force but who themselves have been ambushed and killed. They don’t have a single helicopter and little or no military aid supplied by the rich western nations, and last week, the UN security renewed their mandate at the last minuet.

This move against a sitting president by the international criminal court has strengthened its standing in the world and it is seen as the only hope for bringing war criminals to justice. The arrest of Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic last week is another strong message to the world of political killers and maniac leaders. He is held responsible for the massacre of 8000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 and many other horrific war crimes such as genocide, murder, and inhuman acts against innocent unarmed civilians, systematic assassinations, running concentration camps where inmates were starved beaten and the women raped and killed. His arrest comes 13 years after he went into hiding.

When will the masterminds behind the systematic torture and assassinations of Filipinos be likewise brought to justice?