Caption: Ocampo said UN Security Council members should implement a strategy to counter Bashir's tactics
The International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor has accused Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of abusing African hospitality and threatening the West as he seeks to avoid arrest on genocide charges.
Kenya chose not to arrest Bashir on the ICC charges when he visited the country on Friday for the promulgation ceremony of the new law.
The ICC, accuses Bashir of war crimes and genocide in Sudan's Darfur region, where the United Nations estimates 300,000 people have died in a humanitarian crisis resulting from a counter-insurgency campaign.
Bashir denies the charges, saying they are part of a Western conspiracy.
"President Bashir is fighting for his freedom using different tactics," ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told Reuters in an interview during a visit to London.
Those tactics included "abusing African hospitality" by going to neighbouring countries, "threatening Western countries with affecting the south (Sudan) and offering carrots to foreign business, to French, American and English companies," he said.
UN Security Council members should implement a strategy to counter Bashir's tactics, Moreno-Ocampo said.
South Sudan is widely expected to choose to split from the north in a January referendum after a 2005 peace accord ended a two-decade-long civil war -- separate from the Darfur violence
ICC judges reported Kenya to the U.N. Security Council for allowing Bashir's visit. The Hague-based ICC has no police force and relies on member states to enforce its arrest warrants.
But last month, the African Union criticised the ICC's warrant for Bashir and called for its suspension.
Moreno-Ocampo said he hoped Bashir would travel further afield so the arrest warrant against him could be implemented "in the air" -- presumably meaning a diversion of his plane.
He said Bashir had kept his plan to visit Kenya secret.
"As soon as the judges informed the Security Council, he left Kenya. So he is a fugitive president ...," he said.
Moreno-Ocampo said he stood by his promise to seek arrest warrants by the end of the year for up to six Kenyans from both sides of the election violence that killed 1,300 people in 2008
No comments:
Post a Comment