Bashir says Sudan armed Libyan rebels

October 26, 2011 (KHARTOUM) – The Sudanese president Omer Al-Bashir has shed more light on his country’s backing of the Libyan rebels who ousted Muammar Gaddafi after months of fighting, saying they were fully armed by Khartoum.

Al-Bashir made the revelation while addressing a rally held on Wednesday’s afternoon in his country’s eastern town of Kassala, where he inaugurated an international road linking Sudan and Eritrea.

Brandishing his stick and addressing the crowd in the presence of his Eritrean counterpart Isaias Afewerki and the Emir of Qatar Hamad Bin-Khalifah al-Thani, the Sudanese leader said that Libya under Gaddafi played a strong role in destabilizing Sudan through supporting rebel groups in the Western region of Darfur and former southern rebels who now rule the newly independent state of South Sudan.

He went on to say that the ousted Libyan regime had supported the Darfur rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) which, according to Al-Bashir, “made it all the way to Khartoum with Libyan weapons, vehicles and fund.”

Al-Bashir said his government had clutched at the opportunity to bring double retaliation on its Libyan counterpart for supporting the attack on Khartoum.

“Our weapons reached the revolutionaries in Misrata, Al-Jabal al-Gharbi and Zawiya,” Al-Bashir declared, adding that “the forces that liberated the [Libyan capital] Tripoli were armed 100 percent by Sudan.”

Sudan previously accused Chad of being behind JEM’s attack on Khartoum which occurred in March 2008. Following a thaw in long-strained ties between Khartoum and Ndjamena last year, however, Sudan refrained from repeating the accusations.

In his address, Al-Bashir said that “God took care of many of the tools of conspiracy against Sudan,” in reference to the killing of Gaddafi last week.

Sudan’s military support to Libyan rebels was conducted in secrecy until the rebels advanced on Tripoli and appeared to be on the verge of victory, at which point Sudanese officials began to disclose the support.

The Sudanese support was later confirmed by the head of the rebels’ National Transitional Council (NTC), Mustafa Abdul Jalil, who said in August that Khartoum’s support had helped them to “liberate some cities.”

Bashir downplays ICC’s arrest warrants

Al-Bashir did not omit to pour his usual scorn on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its prosecutor Louis Moreno Ocampo, saying that the arrest warrants they issued for him had failed to prevent him from travelling.

After performing his famous dance, Al-Bashir said that Ocampo had challenged him to travel to a place farther than Eritrea which he visited in the wake of the first arrest warrant in 2008, but he accepted the challenge and traveled to Qatar despite warnings by some people of the American presence there.

“I told them Americans cannot touch a strand of my hair if the invitation is coming from Shaykh Hamad,” he said.

The ICC charges Al-Bashir with committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur where his government’s forces waged an abusive counter insurgency in 2003 and 2004 against rebels accusing it of marginalizing the region. Darfur conflict led to the death of 300,000 people and displacement of more than 2.7 million, according to UN figures.

Despite the ICC’s arrest warrants, Al-Bashir has travelled to several countries in Sudan’s Arab and African milieu, including some member states of the ICC.

However, Al-Bashir was forced to cancel a number of planned appearances in countries such as Uganda and the Central Africa Republic.

(ST)