Sudan best suited to prosecute Darfur crimes – minister
Jan 31, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — The Sudanese can do a better job prosecuting crimes in Darfur than anyone else, Sudan’s justice minister said Wednesday, asserting that international courts have no valid reason to investigate suspects in the area.
Justice Minister Mohamed Ali al-Mardi made the assertions as a team from the International Criminal Court was in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, to pursue investigations into what the United Nations and others describe as war crimes and crimes against humanity in the vast area of western Sudan.
“We as a government are willing and able to try all perpetrators of offenses in Darfur, and for this reason the ICC has absolutely no right to assume any jurisdiction,” Justice Minister Mohamed Ali al-Mardi said in an Associated Press interview.
Al-Mardi declined to comment on specifics of the ICC mission in Khartoum, the fifth visit by a delegation from the court.
Some top Sudanese officials are believed to be on the list of suspects that the United Nations Security Council handed to the ICC in 2005 for it to investigate. Many observers believe that Khartoum’s fierce rejection of a planned U.N. peacekeeping force to deploy in Darfur is linked to the government’s fears these peacekeepers would help chase down war crime suspects.
In The Hague, where the court is based, officials said they would not comment on the investigation. But they confirmed that ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo intended to present his first cases to judges in February.
Sudan is not a party to the Rome statute that governs the ICC, and the international court could only intervene if Khartoum was refusing to investigate the allegations itself, al-Mardi said. The minister pointed to the three special courts created by the Sudanese government in Darfur to prosecute crimes.
“Our judges are qualified, experienced and impartial,” he said. “They’ve passed sentences of imprisonment and of capital punishment against civilians, and even against the military, for crimes committed in Darfur.”
Al-Mardi did not specify how many suspects the courts had tried in connection with the ongoing violence, and said Sudanese judges would not discuss this issue with the media.
Human Rights Watch and other international rights watchdogs say Sudan does little more than “pay lip service” to prosecuting perpetrators of atrocities in the region.
The wide gap between what aid groups report in Darfur and what Sudanese courts have achieved illustrates this.
The Sudanese judiciary, for instance, says it received complaints for about 36 rapes in the whole of Darfur for 2006. Eight perpetrators were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to five years, and each received 100 lashes, the judiciary says. Whippings are stipulated under Sudan’s interpretation of the punishment for rapists under Islamic law.
Meanwhile, aid groups working in Darfur say rape is a daily occurrence and that cases last year number in the thousands.
The United Nations says more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million made refugees by four years of fighting, rape and plunder in Darfur.
The U.N. and others accuse the government of having countered local rebel groups by unleashing militias of Arab nomads known as the janjaweed who are accused of atrocities against farmers from the region’s ethnic African tribes.
Washington and others have labeled the counterinsurgency campaign of violence as genocide.
“Allegations that the government has been arming or masterminding militias known as the janjaweed are absolutely false,” al-Mardi said.
He said armed groups of mostly Arab tribesmen in the region were part of regular army forces, not militia, but conceded that “maybe other people misrepresent themselves by wearing police or army uniforms to commit crimes.”
“This is human weakness, it happens everywhere, not just Darfur or Sudan,” he said.
Like other high-ranking government officials, al-Mardi says the violence plaguing Darfur is not ethnic strife, but stems from rebels exploiting the traditional clashes between mostly nomadic cattle herders and sedentary farmers who compete for the region’s scarce resources.
The minister says only local courts made of tribal elders and village leaders can make rulings legitimate in the eyes of the people using traditional means such as blood money paid by perpetrators to a family’s victim in compensation of crime.
“The native administration knows the customs and traditions, we rely heavily on them to solve problems,” al-Mardi said.
Suleiman Baldo, a Sudan expert at the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New York-based rights group, says this system is far gone.
Like many other observers, Baldo says the government massively armed the Arab tribes in Darfur, creating the conditions for an ethnic cleansing that has displaced millions but also destroyed the balance of power between tribes _ and hence the legitimacy of traditional courts.
“It is criminally disingenuous of the government to say it relies on traditional justice, because its policies have destroyed that system,” Baldo said in a phone interview.
He said the Sudanese judiciary was only going after “the foot soldiers” of the violence in Darfur, and had shown no sign of investigating the “highest circles of power” where the campaign was planned.
“The ICC, by its mandate, will prosecute only at the high levels, it will remain complimentary to what Sudan’s judiciary achieves,” he said.
Some 50 names of suspects were handed over to the ICC by the U.N. Though all the names remain secret, the U.N. has separately imposed sanctions on four individuals suspected of war crimes: a high-ranking government official, a general, a militia chief and one rebel leader.
While many activists await the ICC prosecution’s finding, Baldo said only justice handed down at the local level will pacify Darfur, because the absence of any form of accountability is at the root of the violence.
Despite the presence of African Union peacekeepers in the region and U.N. efforts to also deploy, intertribal fighting is increasing even beyond Khartoum’s control, he said.
“The entire region is on the verge of collapse,” Baldo said. “The government has a historical responsibility to fix what it created before it is too late.”
(AP)