The International Criminal Court (ICC) plans to seek an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo will seek the warrant on Monday. It would be the first time the Hague-based court has sought to charge a sitting head of state with those crimes, the Post reported, citing diplomats and UN officials.
But some UN officials are concerned that Moreno-Ocampo’s move could complicate the peace process in Darfur and trigger a military response by Sudanese forces or proxies against UN and African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, the Post said.
Sudan’s UN ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad warned the newspaper of “grave repercussions” if Ocampo indicts Bashir.
On Thursday the office of Moreno-Ocampo said he planned to unveil a new case involving crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region next week, but it did not give the names of those to be charged.
His office said, however, that the case would cover “crimes committed in the whole of Darfur over the last five years.”
The tribunal will then decide whether to issue arrest warrants or summons for the individuals to be named.
Mohamad told the Post that ICC charges against Bashir or other Sudanese officials would “destroy” the international Darfur peace process.
“Ocampo is playing with fire,” he said. “If the United Nations is serious about its engagement with Sudan, it should tell this man to suspend what he is doing with this so-called indictment. There will be grave repercussions.”
The move comes two days after seven UN peacekeepers were killed and 22 were wounded in an ambush of a UN convoy in Darfur.
UN officials in Sudan said that the Janjaweed — state-backed Arab militia — were suspected of carrying out the attack, while the Sudanese government blamed the attack on rebels in Darfur.
The Post said that representatives of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members — China, Britain, the US, France and Russia — met with UN officials on Thursday on the safety of Darfur peacekeepers in the wake of the attack.
It said that peacekeepers are already being moved to safer areas, and that the UN was distributing food and equipment in preparation for a possible disruption of supplies to the force by Sudan’s government.
“All bets are off; anything could happen,” one UN official told the newspaper.
“The mission is so fragile, it would not take much for the whole thing to come crashing down,” the official said.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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