War crimes president 'will not surrender'

A top adviser to Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir said the man wanted for war crimes in Darfur would never surrender to the International Criminal Court.

Ghazi Salahuddin Atabani also complained that the pursuit of al-Bashir had been complicating president’s travel plans.

Since the court issued an international arrest warrant against al-Bashir in March, he had travelled outside Sudan several times without being arrested.

But the president did not appear at the United Nations General Assembly’s top-level debate this year.

The international court has no police force and relies on countries to execute the arrest warrants, even those like the US that have not signed up to the court’s charter, because even non-signers are obligated as UN members to co-operate.

The court’s decision was “limiting the movement of the president”, Mr Atabani said in an Associated Press interview.

“He has to study of course any particular (travel plan) on its own merits,” he said.

“Give himself up? No way. No way. Because they have to convince us that there’s a real case there. There’s no real case. It’s all politics. If there is a case, it should be tried in Sudan.”

Al-Bashir is the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal since it was established in 2002.

The court accused him in March of orchestrating a campaign of murder, torture, rape and forced expulsions in Sudan’s western Darfur region, but said there was insufficient evidence to charge him with genocide.

The Darfur conflict began in February 2003 when ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government in Khartoum, claiming discrimination and neglect.

UN officials say the war has claimed at least 300,000 lives from violence, disease and displacement. They say some 2.7 million people were driven from their homes and at its height, in 2003-2005, it was called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Repeating long-held government claims, Mr Atabani, the leader of Sudan’s parliamentary majority and a senior member of al-Bashir’s National Congress, called those numbers “guesswork”.

“No one has employed scientific methodology in trying to assess the numbers,” he said. “We believe the number is much, much less than that. We don’t have our own figures of course, because we haven’t conducted our own survey or our own study.”

Mr Atabani also disputed the US assessment, by both the Bush and Obama administrations, that the conflict in Darfur had been “genocide”.

“Even the ICC ... has dropped the genocide charges against Mr Bashir. So that shows you that the United States is isolated in its position,” he said.

Mr Atabani also spoke for Sudan yesterday during the UN General Assembly’s top-level debate, telling other nations that “nobody can be more keen on containing the bloodletting and achieving peace than the Sudanese themselves”.