Well, it's happening. Finally. And amen.
I said most of I wanted to say about how the United States should respond in my American Prospect piece but there is one key point worth making--so key, in fact, that I will put it in italics.
If handled with the proper diplomatic touch, this warrant will make peace in Darfur and Sudan more, not less, likely. Othersdisagree. They argue that the ICC is an impediment to peace because it gives Bashir little incentive to work with the international community. The problem with that line of reasoning, though, is that it ignores the fact that Bashir was never a credible partner for peace. This is because from the start of the conflict until today, Bashir never faced external political pressure sufficient to budge him from an unrelenting hostility toward international efforts for peace in Sudan.
The ICC warrant is such a critical development because it gives the international community a chance to change this prevailing political dynamic. It is a brand new tool to with which to pressure Bashir.
One specific way this warrant can be used to good political effect is in support of the rapidly crumbling Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which Bashir signed in 2005. The CPA was a peace agreement between the central government and southern Sudanese rebels (not Darfuri rebels) but it nonetheless paves the way for the democratic transformation of Sudan. The problem, though, is that the central government has not lived up to its obligations under the CPA--and is working to undermine national elections called for by the CPA later this year. (Check out this report from the International Crisis Group, which explains how the central government is using armed proxies to change the demography of key regions to gain electoral advantage.)
The international community--and by that I mean mostly the United States, western countries and the Security Council--suddenly has a new tool at its disposal to press Khartoum into taking credible steps toward the full implementation of the CPA. And if Bashir does demonstrate a new found commitment to the CPA, the Security Council can --as it is wont to do under the ICC's charter -- suspend the warrant.
To make this work, the United States needs to make the ICC warrant central to its Darfur diplomacy. This means pressing as many countries as possible to pledge to support the warrant, including countries that could be considered Sudan's allies in Africa and the Arab world. The more isolated Bashir becomes, the more willing he may be to strike a deal.
I imagine that this kind of utilitarian view of the ICC may make some of my friends in the human rights community somewhat uncomfortable. But for now, I think the overwhelming priority for all of us who are concerned about Darfur should be peace. Accountability can come later. The international community needs to take advantage of the golden opportunity that just landed on its lap.
UPDATE: This landed in my inbox from the ICC: "Following press articles published today, the International Criminal Court (ICC) wishes to inform the media that no arrest warrant has been issued by the ICC against President Omar Al Bashir of Sudan. No decision has yet been taken by the judges of Pre-Trial Chamber I concerning the Prosecutor’s application of 14 July 2008 for the issuance of such a warrant." I guess we'll have to wait just a little bit longer.
Photo from Flickr user Ammar Abd Rabbo
I woke this morning to find an email from the International Criminal Court's press shop vigorously denying that ICC judges had made a decision to issue the arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al Bashir. If the ICC is not ready to make the announcement regarding Bashir, why would officials at the United Nations -- who were the sources for the New York Timesscoop--reveal this info?
The UN is pretty leaky place in general. Hundreds of member states have hundreds of different agendas, which sometimes differ from the UN secretariat. There is a very real chance that a diplomat in the know couldn't hold his or her tongue. But, it's also no secret that a number of UN officials are frustrated with the ICC's pursuit of Bashir--not on principal, but because UN officials worry that the arrest warrant could disrupt peace efforts and result in attacks on UN personnel in Sudan.
Don't get me wrong, as a blogger and journalist I'm very pro-leak. I'm just curious as to why "officials at the UN" (which could mean secretariat staff or member state diplomats) would want to jump the gun on this?
UPDATE: On further reading, it seems that the NYT item that broke this story was datelined The Hague, not United Nations. This would suggest that the leak came from ICC, not UN sources, which adds another layer of intrigue.
Judges at the International Criminal Court have decided to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, brushing aside diplomatic requests to allow more time for peace negotiations in the conflict-riddled Darfur region of his country, according to court lawyers and diplomats.
It is the first time the court has sought the detention of a sitting head of state, and it could further complicate the tense, international debate over how to solve the crisis in Darfur.
For some background, here's a 2008 video of Bashir dancing in Darfur:
Claudia Rosett, in a facetious commentary on why the United Nations should move to Elkhart, Indiana, seems to demonstrate a command of the facts that could politely be described as tenuous.
She cites the cost of the UN Headquarters renovation (known in UN circles as the Capital Master Plan) at $2 billion. It is actually $1.88 billion, but I won't nitpick over an error of $120 million. The more egregious error is the insinuation first, that the U.S. is paying the entire bill, and second, that all expenditure on this renovation is a waste of taxpayer money.
In fact, the U.S. share of the renovation costs is the same percentage it pays for the UN's regular budget: 22%. Now that is a large percentage, and comes out to roughly $414 million for the entire project. But consider that nearly every single contract and every single purchase related to the renovation has gone to an American company, and you'll see that more than $610 million have already gone into the American economy as a direct result of this project—and the project will continue until 2013. That's nearly a 68% return on investment for U.S. taxpayers with still more to come.
In other words, it's a stimulus!
All of this information is readily available, along with cost details for each expenditure, on the UN's Procurement website. Have a look yourself.
Many feel that peacekeeping has become a panacea, with the deployment of United Nations forces considered proof that the Security Council is paying attention to a crisis, whether the troops are effective or not. The Council has a tendency to just keep extending missions once approved.
As a result, the number of personnel on peacekeeping missions has grown to 113,000 soldiers, police officers and civilians assigned to 18 missions, from 40,000 in 2000.
In the past few months alone, the Security Council has voted to take over a European mission deployed in Chad, to beef up the force in eastern Congo and to contemplate deploying a new force in Somalia. The peacekeeping budget has ballooned to $8 billion.
That's pretty much the fundamental dynamic that is squeezing UN Peacekeeping at the moment. Making matters worse is that fact that so few P-5 members have troops committed to peacekeeping missions. For example, if you look at the Darfur mission, which is arguably the highest profile peacekeeping mission today, you'll hardly see any troops from the P-5. This creates a vicious cycle of sorts: because P-5 members don't have their own troops in harms way, they have less of a stake in the mission's success. And because they don't have a direct stake in the success of the mission, they are less willing to do the heavy diplomatic lifting that is often required to shepherd through a lasting peace agreement.
Fortunately, it seems that the crisis in UN peacekeeping is getting far greater attention these days. Susan Rice even listed fixing peacekeeping as her top priority during her Senate confirmation hearing. Whether or not this means we can see greater US participation in UN peacekeeping (beyond, that is, funding the bulk of the missions) is still up in the air.
Fresh off proposing -- to a chorus of mostly unenthusiastic "ummmms" from other African heads of state -- for the umpteenth time in his long career his dream of a "United States of Africa," the "Leader," Libya's president, the-former terrorist-organizer-turned-nuclear-weapon-renouncing-friend-of-the-United States (of America, that is), Isratine-brewer, and now chairperson of the African Union has set his sights a bit farther east.
Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi has said he would like a United States of Africa to include "Caribbean islands with African populations".
Col Gaddafi, speaking in Tripoli as the African Union's (AU) new chairman, said this could include Haiti, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.
Given Gaddafi's penchant for bestowing clever names on his fictional geopolitical creations, one can only assume that he would call this new entity the "United States of Afribbean."
The green and blue scrubs are the same as on TV, the concentration as intense as in any operating theatre. But beeping high-tech monitors are conspicuous by their absence. In remote areas of Darfur, the ICRC's Flying Surgical Team performs life-saving operations under the shade of a baobab tree, with the simplest equipment.
[snip]
"We can operate anywhere," says Lizzie [a nurse on the ICRC's Field Surgical Team (FST)], "as long as we can hang a mosquito net. And if we have to, we can just hang a mosquito net between our two trucks." Those of us brought up on TV programmes full of high-tech operating theatres will have trouble imagining a surgeon working under a baobab tree, but that is the usual setting for most of the FST's operations.
Writing in The Nation, Barbara Crossette notes that the Obama administration will be faced with two early "tests" of its approach to international human rights norms and institutions: 1) whether or not to participate in the forthcoming anti-racism "Durban Review Conference" in late April; and 2) whether or not to join the Human Rights Council.
Boonstra has got the debate around the review conference pretty well covered. For now, I want to focus on the Human Rights Council, because although as both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton never definitively said whether or not they would seek to join the Human Rights Council, some of their current subordinates have expressed strong opinions in the past. One of them is the new Undersecretary of State for Policy Planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter.
First, some background on the council: In 2005, pretty much everyone agreed that the old Commission on Human Rights should be scrapped. Too many countries could join the commission too easily and human rights abusers would routinely join the commission simply to order to avoid condemnation by it. In 2006, the UN General Assembly voted to create a new Human Rights Council to replace the discredited commission. In the new council, a smaller number of countries would be elected to the council by a 2/3rd vote, and all member states would come under periodic review.
The United States was one of only a small handful of countries to vote against creating the new Council, arguing that membership was not restrictive enough. In its remaining years in office, the Bush administration declined to run for a spot on the Council and took a fairly hands off approach to its work.
A number of foreign policy and human rights experts disagreed with the Bush administration's stance. As I mentioned earlier, one of those prominent foreign policy experts was Slaughter. At the time, she bemoaned the administration's decision in post on TPM Cafe, "The job now is to get ourselves elected and work to get other countries who are serious about human rights elected while blocking in [Human Rights Watch executive director] David Roth's words, 'governments that systematically repress their people.'" [Emphasis mine.]
I happen to agree. The United States is better off working through the council than pretending it does not exist. Soon, though, the Obama administration will have to decide one way or the other. The next round of Council elections are in May.