ICC Adds Genocide Charge Against Sudan’s Al-Bashir

By Maram Mazen and Antony Sguazzin
July 12, 2010
Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-12/icc-adds-genocide-charge-against-sudan-s-al-bashir.html

July 12 (Bloomberg) -- The International Criminal Court issued a second arrest warrant against Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir for responsibility of genocide in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, the court said on its website today.
Al-Bashir was charged with three counts of genocide against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, the Hague-based court said. The court had issued a warrant against Bashir on March 4, 2009, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The three counts announced today include “genocide by killing, genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm and genocide by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction,” the court said.
Al-Bashir has ruled Sudan since coming to power in a military coup in 1989 and won election in April in the country’s first multiparty vote in 24 years. As many as 300,000 people have died, mainly through illness and starvation, and more than 2.7 million have been displaced in Darfur since February 2003, according to the United Nations. Sudan says that the death toll is about 10,000.
The violence began when rebels seeking a larger role in Sudan’s political life and a bigger slice of the country’s expanding oil wealth attacked the government. The authorities in Khartoum, the capital, responded by deploying army units and state-backed Arab militias known as the Janjaweed.
Oil Producer
Sudan is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest producer of crude oil, pumping about 490,000 barrels a day, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Most of the fields are in Southern Sudan, which is scheduled to vote in January in a referendum to decide whether to become an independent nation.
The criminal court was established under the 1998 Rome Statute, a treaty signed by representatives of more than 100 states during a UN conference. Sudan, like the U.S., is not a signatory to the statute.
Fathy Sheila, spokesman of Bashir’s National Congress Party, did not answer calls seeking comment.
--Editors: Karl Maier, Vernon Wessels