Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir arrived in Egypt yesterday on Wednesday in a show of contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is seeking his arrest for war crimes in Darfur.
Bashir was met at the airport in Cairo by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during a one-day visit. It was his second trip outside Sudan since the arrest warrant was issued on March 4. Egypt is a neighbor and close ally of Sudan and has been one of the most vocal opponents of the court decision.
On Monday Bashir made a brief visit across the border to Eritrea, which remains diplomatically isolated because of its repressive regime.
While the aim of the visits was to further underline Bashir’s defiance of the international community — he immediately expelled 13 foreign aid agencies from Darfur when the warrant was announced — they carried little risk of arrest.
Neither Egypt nor Eritrea has ratified the Rome statute of the international criminal court (ICC), which itself has no police force and requires member states to make arrests on its behalf.
Ali Youssef Ahmed, head of protocol at Sudan’s foreign ministry, said: “The president has said before that the arrest warrant is not worth the ink that it is written with — and this is the message of this trip.”
But a decision on whether to attend the Arab summit on Sunday in Qatar, which would require Bashir to cross international airspace, will test his resolve. Immediately after the ICC warrant was issued, Sudan’s government said Bashir would attend.
However, senior Sudanese officials and Islamic scholars have been urging him not to travel to Doha, saying it carries too much risk, even though among Arab states only Jordan is an ICC member.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassem al-Thani, who visited the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, on Tuesday, said that while he had come under international pressure not to receive Bashir, an invitation had been extended.
“We respect international law and we respect the attendance of President al-Bashir and welcome him. It is a purely Sudanese decision,” he said.
Bashir is accused of orchestrating the counter-insurgency campaign in Darfur, which is mainly directed at non-Arab civilians thought supportive of rebel groups that challenged the government in 2003. More than 200,000 people have died during the conflict, mostly through starvation and disease.
After being formally accused of war crimes by the ICC prosecutor in July, Bashir embarked on a charm offensive to win support from neighbors and countries in the wider region.
Both the Arab League and the African Union oppose the arrest warrant, arguing that it could jeopardize peace efforts in Darfur.
The UN security council can suspend the ICC indictment, a position favored by Russia and China, both strong trade partners of Sudan. But the remaining three permanent council members, Britain, France and the US, have indicated they would block any such move. The trio argue that Bashir has shown little appetite for ending the conflict peacefully.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS