ICC prosecutor calls on the world to ‘stop the bleeding in Sudan’ before the region spirals out of control
NEW YORK CITY: Violence in Sudan has escalated over the past six months, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said on Monday. There are reports of rape, crimes against children and persecution on a massive scale.
“Terror has become a common currency,” Karim Khan said at a UN Security Council meeting, “and the terror is felt not by people with weapons but by people who are running, very often without shoes and hungry.”
A war between rival military factions has been raging in Sudan for more than a year. About 19,000 people have been killed since the war began in April 2023. More than 10 million people are displaced within the country and more than 2 million have fled to neighboring countries as refugees. This makes it the largest refugee crisis in the world.
The country is on the brink of famine as a severe food crisis looms, with many families already reportedly going without food for days at a time.
Khan said the ICC gives the highest priority to investigating allegations of crimes against and affecting children, as well as gender-based crimes. These “serious human rights violations, mass violations of personal dignity” continue to be fuelled by “the supply of arms, financial support from various sectors and political triangulations that lead to inaction by the international community,” he added.
His comments came during the Security Council's recent biannual briefing on the court's Darfur-related activities. Nearly 20 years after the Council referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC, the court's arrest warrants against former President Omar Al-Bashir, former ministers Ahmad Mohammed Harun and Abdel Raheem Mohammed Hussein, and former Justice and Equality Movement commander Abdallah Banda Abakaer Nourain have yet to be issued.
Khan said such failures to execute arrest warrants against accused persons have led to several undesirable consequences, including “the climate of impunity and the outbreak of violence that began in April (2023) and continues to this day, (in which) the parties to the conflict believe they can get away with murder and rape; the feeling that the bandwidth of the (Security) Council, the bandwidth of states, is too limited, that they are too preoccupied with other conflict hotspots, hot wars in other parts of the world; that we have lost sight of the plight of the people of Darfur, that we have somehow forgotten our responsibilities under the UN Charter; (and) the feeling that Darfur or Sudan is a lawless zone where people can act without restraint based on their worst inclinations, their worst base instincts, the politics of hatred and power, the opportunities to make profit.”
He called on council members to “support the substance” of the call for justice.
In comments aimed at both warring parties, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, as well as “those who fund them, supply them with weapons, issue orders and thereby gain certain advantages,” Khan said his office was investigating the case and “using our resources as effectively as possible to ensure that the events since April last year are subject to the principles of international humanitarian law and the imperative that every human life must be considered equal.”
He said that after “great difficulties”, the Sudanese authorities were finally cooperating with ICC investigators, who had managed to enter Port Sudan, collect evidence and speak to General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, the commander of the Sudanese armed forces and the de facto leader of the country.
“But one swallow does not make a summer,” Khan added, stressing the need for “continued, deeper cooperation with the Sudanese armed forces, with General Al-Burhan and his government leading the way.”
He said that “one concrete way to demonstrate this commitment to accountability and the lack of tolerance for impunity is through the proper enforcement of court orders,” including the arrest of former minister Harun and his transfer to court.
However, Khan said recent major efforts to engage with the Rapid Support Forces leadership have so far proved fruitless.
In the meantime, he said, ICC investigators had visited neighboring Chad several times and collected “very valuable testimony” from displaced Sudanese citizens living there as refugees.
They had met with representatives of Sudanese civil society in Chad, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Europe, he added, “to receive and preserve their reports and stories, to analyse them and piece them together to find out what crimes they reveal, if any, and who is responsible for the hell on earth that is being unleashed so persistently and persistently against the people of Darfur.”
Khan said his office had used technological tools to collect and piece together a variety of evidence from phone calls, videos and audio recordings, which he said was “extremely important in breaking the veil of impunity.”
The joint efforts of investigators, analysts, lawyers and members of civil society have led to significant progress, he added, expressing hope that he would soon be able to announce that arrest warrants had been requested against individuals considered to be primarily responsible for the crimes in the country.
Meanwhile, Khan raised more general alarm about what he described as “a trapeze of chaos in this part of the continent.”
He continued: “If you draw a line from the Libyan Mediterranean down to the Red Sea in Sudan, and then a line to sub-Saharan Africa, and then all the way to the Atlantic, where Boko Haram is causing instability, chaos and suffering in Nigeria, and then back to Sudan, we see the map and the countries that could be unsettled or destabilised by this concentration of chaos and suffering.”
He warned Security Council members that, in addition to concerns about the rights of the people of Darfur, “we are currently at a tipping point where a Pandora's box of ethnic, racial, religious, sectarian and commercial interests is being opened.”
He added: “They will no longer be subject to the political powers of the major states of the world or even to this Council. Real action is needed now to stop the bleeding … in Sudan.”
