Region | Sudan
Sudan accuses court of wrecking Darfur peace hopes
Sudan's ambassador to the United Nations said on Wednesday that the allegations his government is involved in crimes against humanity in Darfur are "fictitious and vicious" and harmful to the prospects of peace in the war torn country.
- AP
- Published: 15:55 June 4, 2008
Khartoum: Sudan's ambassador to the United Nations said on Wednesday that the allegations his government is involved in crimes against humanity in Darfur are
"fictitious and vicious" and harmful to the prospects of peace in the war torn country.
Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamed accused International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo of destroying the peace process with his charges and demanded he be held accountable.
"We will never submit any of our citizens to be tried in the Hague. Ocampo is destroying the peace process and we demand that this man be held accountable for what he is
doing to the peace process in Sudan."
Mohamed's comments came a day after Ocampo charged in a report to the UN Security Council that "the whole state apparatus" of Sudan is implicated in crimes against humanity in the western Darfur region.
A delegation of Security Council ambassadors is currently visiting Sudan to salvage the faltering peace process in the divided country that only ended two decades of civil war between the north and south in a fragile peace deal in 2005.
Mohamed said that while the world was calling for peace in Darfur and rebels were going so far as to attack the capital itself, Ocampo had the temerity to make announcements that would only further encourage the rebels.
"This is very serious and we hold him accountable and responsible for destroying the peace process in our country," he said. "It revealed his professional bankruptcy, he deserves no respect, not to say cooperation, because we are not going to cooperate with him in any form," he said.
Sudan's Foreign Minister Deng Alor, however, noted that Sudan has a government of national unity that does not necessarily have a single opinion on the matter.
"Talking as SPLM," said Alor, who hails from the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement, "the SPLM calls for cooperation (with the ICC)."
The report repeats Ocampo's call, first made in December, for the Security Council to demand that Sudan's government hand over two Sudanese men who have been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity.
The treaty that created the court was intended to hold individuals, not entire states, responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. By accusing Sudan's "whole state apparatus" of helping shield criminals, the prosecutor is implicating some of the highest officials of the government.
Mohamed added that as a sovereign nation, Sudan had a perfectly adequate judicial system to try anyone accused of wrongdoing in Darfur and in fact several had already been tried and convicted for wrongdoing in the arid western region where a bloody rebellion has been raging for the last five years claiming up to 300,000 lives.
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