Defiant Sudan Leader Visits Darfur

Agence France Presse

Published: July 25, 2008 (Issue # 1393)

EL GENEINA, Sudan — A smiling Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir pressed ahead with a heavily guarded tour of Darfur on Thursday, with a rally called to defy accusations that he masterminded genocide in the region.

Wearing a safari suit and sunglasses, and smiling widely, he sat in a giant armchair in the shade at a rally attended by hundreds of loyalists who fanned themselves under the burning sun in the West Darfur state capital El Geneina.

He is the first head of state accused by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on 10 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, gripped by more than five years of war.

He faces a possible international arrest warrant for allegedly ordering his forces to annihilate three non-Arab groups in Darfur, masterminding murder, torture, pillaging and using rape to commit genocide.

On his first Darfur visit in a year, on Wednesday Beshir danced and waved his walking stick before thousands of supporters in El Fasher and Nyala, the two other state capitals under firm government control in Darfur.

“What Ocampo said about Darfur is lies... We have to find a solution to the Darfur crisis,” Beshir told people made homeless in El Fasher.

Beshir has inaugurated development projects and met state and UN peacekeeping officials, but has avoided the sprawling, impoverished camps for the more than 2.2 million people estimated to have been displaced by the war.

In El Geneina, he was greeted at the airport by the strains of the Sudanese national anthem from a military band before his heavily armed convoy guarded by police, army and national security drove to an organized reception ceremony.

The few people who came out onto the streets kept quiet and did not cheer as the convoy swept past, said an AFP correspondent.

Two helicopters circled overhead as children, students, local government employees, tribesmen and women attended an organized rally.

The United Nations says that up to 300,000 people have died and more than 2.2 million have fled their homes since the conflict erupted in February 2003. Sudan says 10,000 have been killed.

The war began when African ethnic minority rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime and state-backed Arab militias, fighting for resources and power in one of the most remote and deprived places on earth.

Beshir’s regime is trying to persuade the UN Security Council to freeze possible legal proceedings should International Criminal Court judges actually issue an arrest warrant, charging that it could jeopardize peace prospects.

West Darfur shares a porous border with Chad. Sudan and Chad agreed to restore relations, severed by Khartoum over accusations that Ndjamena backed a rebel attack on the capital in May, just days after Ocampo’s announcement.

Top Western and Arab diplomats, who on Thursday flew into El Geneina on a UN aircraft, have accompanied Beshir. They include U.S. charge d’affaires Alberto Fernandez and British ambassador Rosalind Marsden.

In Nyala, the president accused France, where one of the main Darfur rebel leaders Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur lives in exile, of damaging peace efforts and ordered the release of 89 children arrested after a rebel attack on Khartoum.

An Arab League official said Sudan had agreed to set up special courts to try alleged human rights abuses in Darfur that will be monitored by the United Nations, African Union and Arab League.

In an interview published on Thursday, the outgoing head of UN peacekeeping justified a reluctance to send large numbers of peacekeepers to Darfur, where a UN-led mission is running at a third of its billed capacity.

“I would say very bluntly that there are good reasons to be hesitant,” Jean-Marie Guehenno told the Financial Times.

“There is not enough of a political process (in Darfur) for a peacekeeping operation to be really successful.”

“The danger is that you go do something and then, if you go into a failure, you compromise an instrument that could make a real difference in other places,” he said.