African Media Coverage

July 16-31, 2008

UGANDA: Daily Monitor
“ICC warrants: S. Sudan watches”
Published: July 17, 2008

On a board at Juba University, somebody has pinned up a BBC news clip of the upcoming indictment of Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir.

With a marker, the person has circled two graphs. One warns that the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo plans to submit evidence that could lead to Gen. Bashir’s arrest.

The other graph reads that Khartoum has summoned foreign ministers to warn them that any indictments could escalate the war in Darfur, and across the entire Sudan.

Read the full article here.

SOUTH AFRICA: Mail and Guardian
“There’s no peace for us to keep”
Published: July 18, 2008

With the world fixated on recent events at the International Criminal Court and how they will affect the situation in Sudan, it is important to remember what is happening in Darfur today.  As force commander of what is destine to the world’s largest peacekeeping operation, I am deeply concerned about the deteriorating security situation here. Peacekeeping has become a deadly business in Darfur.

Late at night on July 9 my peacekeepers were given a task they should never have had to perform.  At the village of Dar as Salam in North Darfur they collected the bodies of their fallen colleagues, which had been extracted from nearby Um Hakibah.  In the harsh light of pick-up truck headlights they placed their colleagues in body bags for the helicopter flight to our headquarters in Al Fasher.

Read the full article here.


SOUTH AFRICA: The Citizen
“Justice or realpolitik?”
Published: July 21, 2008

All the opposition groups in Darfur celebrated when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced on July 14 he was seeking the indictment of Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir for genocide, but almost everybody else had a problem with it.  They don’t doubt Bashir is a ruthless dictator who is guilty of ordering many thousands of deaths.  They just think that putting him on an international “wanted” list is unwise.

Tanzanian foreign minister Bernard Membe, speaking on behalf of the AU, said: “We are asking the ICC to re-examine its decision… If you arrest Bashir, you will create a leadership vacuum in Sudan.  The outcome could be equal to that of Iraq.”  Membe and many others fear the indictment, far from ending conflict, could reignite the much bigger civil war between northern and southern Sudan.

Read the full article here.