ICC prosecutor urges world to 'stop the bleeding' before Sudan region spirals out of control
NEW YORK CITY: The International Criminal Court prosecutor said Monday that violence in Sudan has continued to escalate over the past six months, with reports of rape, crimes against children and mass persecution.
“Terrorism has become a common currency,” Karim Khan told a U.N. Security Council meeting. “And terrorism is often felt not by people with guns, but by people running around naked and hungry.”
In Sudan, fighting between rival military factions has raged for more than a year. Since it began in April 2023, some 19,000 people have been killed. More than 10 million people have been displaced internally and more than 2 million have fled to neighboring countries as refugees, making it the world’s largest migration crisis.
The country is said to be on the verge of famine as a severe food crisis looms, with many families going hungry for days at a time.
Khan said the ICC was prioritizing investigations into allegations of crimes against children, crimes affecting children, and gender-based crimes. He added that these “serious human rights violations, massive violations of human dignity” were being fueled by “a political triangle that leads to arms transfers, financial support from various sectors, and inaction by the international community.”
His remarks came at the recent semiannual briefing to the Security Council on the court’s work on Darfur. Nearly two decades after the council referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC, the court’s arrest warrants for former President Omar al-Bashir, former ministers Ahmad Mohamed Haroon and Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, and former commander of the Justice and Equality Movement Abdullah Banda Abakaer Nourain remain outstanding.
Khan said this failure to enforce arrest warrants for the indicted individuals had led to a number of unwelcome consequences, including “an atmosphere of impunity and an explosion of violence that began in April and continues to this day; a sense that (the participating nations) can commit murder and rape; a sense that the bandwidth of the (Security) Council, the bandwidth of the nations, is too limited; a sense that we are too preoccupied with other hotbeds of conflict, too preoccupied with hot wars in other parts of the world; a sense that we have overlooked the plight of the people of Darfur; a sense that we have forgotten our responsibilities under the UN Charter; a sense that Darfur or Sudan are lawless zones where people can act according to their worst inclinations, their worst instincts, according to hate and power politics, according to opportunities for self-interest.”
He urged committee members to “substantialally support” the voices calling for justice.
In remarks directed at the two warring factions, the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces, and those who “funded them, armed them, gave them orders and gained certain advantages,” Khan said his office was investigating and “using our resources as effectively as possible to ensure that the events since April last year are conducted in accordance with the principles of international humanitarian law and the imperative that all human life has equal value.”
He said Sudanese authorities were cooperating with ICC investigators who, after “enormous difficulties”, were finally able to enter Port Sudan to collect evidence and engage with General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the commander of the Sudanese army and de facto leader of the country.
“But summer does not come with one swallow,” Khan added, stressing the need for “continued and deepened cooperation with the Sudanese military and the advance of General Al-Burhan and his government.”
He said that “one concrete way to demonstrate such commitment to accountability and lack of tolerance for impunity is to properly enforce court orders”, including the arrest and remand of former Minister Harun to the court.
But Khan said recent efforts to engage with the Rapid Support Force leadership had so far borne no fruit.
Meanwhile, he said ICC investigators had visited neighbouring Chad several times and collected “invaluable testimony” from Sudanese citizens living there as refugees.
He added: “They will meet with Sudanese civil society representatives in Chad, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Europe to collect and preserve their statements and stories, to analyse and piece together what the crimes are and who is responsible for this hell that is being unleashed so stubbornly and relentlessly against the people of Darfur.”
Khan said his office has used technology tools to collect and piece together various forms of evidence from phone calls, videos and audio recordings, which he said are “proving invaluable in piercing the veil of impunity.”
He added that significant progress had been made through the collective efforts of investigators, analysts, lawyers and members of civil society, and that he hoped to soon be able to announce that arrest warrants had been issued for the individuals he believed were most responsible for the state's crimes.
Meanwhile, Khan sounded a broader warning about what he described as a “trapezoid of chaos” appearing in that part of the continent.
He continued: “If you draw a line from the Mediterranean in Libya to the Red Sea in Sudan, and then draw a line across sub-Saharan Africa, and then draw a line across the Atlantic where Boko Haram is causing instability, chaos and suffering in Nigeria, and then draw a line back to Sudan,[we]can see a map and a picture of countries that are destabilized or at risk of becoming destabilized because of this concentration of chaos and suffering.”
He warned Security Council members that in addition to concerns about the rights of the Darfur people, “we are reaching a tipping point where the Pandora's box of ethnic, racial, religious, sectarian (and) commercial interests will burst.”
He added: “They will no longer be vulnerable to the political power of the world's major powers, or even to the power of this council. Real action is needed now to stop the bleeding in Sudan.”
