Waltz With Bashir
Why the Arrest Warrant Against Sudan's President Will Serve Neither Peace nor Justice
Article Summary and Author Biography
The ICC's latest move against the Sudanese president will harden Khartoum's stance, push Darfuri rebels to make unreasonable demands, and raise expectations in Sudan -- complicating efforts to secure peace and justice.
ANDREW NATSIOS is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and was U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan in 2006–7.
Essay
While the crisis in Darfur simmers, the larger problem of Sudan's survival as a state is becoming increasingly urgent. Old tensions between the Arabs of the Nile River valley, who have held power for a century, and marginalized groups on the country's periphery are turning into a national crisis. Engagement with Khartoum may be the only way to avert another civil war in Sudan, and even that may not be enough.
Author Interview
This week, Andrew Natsios answers questions submitted by readers about what the United States and others can do to bring peace and humanitarian relief to Sudan.
Comment
Ahead of last weekend's secession referendum in Sudan, Andrew S. Natsios and Michael Abramowitz wrote on the prospects for compromise and reconciliation between the country's north and south.
Two weeks ago, the judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced what many had long clamored for: an order for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whom it indicted in July for the atrocities his government committed against the people of Darfur. As the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and then the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, I have interviewed enough people in Darfur over the past six years to know that Khartoum committed terrible crimes, particularly in 2003-4, when it tried to crush an insurgency through ethnic cleansing, ordering the burning of villages, mass rape, and the summary execution of young men it feared might join the rebel movement. The question now is not whether such crimes were committed -- they were -- but what consequences the ICC's latest action will have for justice, peace, and stability in Sudan. They will not be good.
Within days of the court's announcement, Bashir ordered the expulsion of 13 U.S., British, and French nongovernmental organizations on the grounds that they had been providing information about war crimes to the ICC. Unlike most war crime indictments, which are served against former heads of state, this ICC warrant was issued against a sitting head of state who controls an army, a ruthless internal security force, and a growing group of internal and external allies. Bashir had means of reprisals at his disposal, and he was swift to use them.
This was a predictable response. After the Bush administration developed plans in March 2007 for a new sanctions regime against Khartoum -- of my design and at my urging -- Bashir responded by, among other things, suspending oil payments he was required to give to the government of southern Sudan under the terms of the 2005 peace deal that ended the civil war between the north and south (known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement). He also cancelled the withdrawal of northern troops from the south, in violation of the CPA, and remobilized the Arab militias that committed some of the worst atrocities in the south during the 1980s and early 1990s.
The past is prologue, and with Khartoum already retaliating against the humanitarian relief effort in Darfur, one can only fear that its response to the arrest warrant will also include more stonewalling of the international peacekeeping troops there and perhaps retributions against the south...
