Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, accused of war crimes, has left South Africa one step ahead of the law, according to reports from various news organizations.
The media reports say that al-Bashir left the country Monday even as a South African High Court was considering whether to order his arrest.
And a report from Sudan’s state news agency, SUNA, appeared to confirm the president’s departure from South Africa. The agency reported that Sudanese Foreign Minister Ibrahim Ghandour would hold a press conference at the airport Monday evening “following return of the President of the Republic.”
A judge had ruled Sunday that al-Bashir had to stay in the country while the issue was decided. The judge also ordered all ports in the country to prevent the Sudanese leader from leaving. But lawyers arguing in court for al-Bashir’s arrest said the ports of entry and exit did not obey the judge’s order.
The Sudanese leader’s plane had been relocated earlier from Tambo International airport to Waterkloof military base. And the alleged war criminal apparently slipped through the net.
Court proceedings were underway
His apparent departure came as the High Court was considering a request by the International Criminal Court to arrest him on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
He had been in South Africa attending a two-day African Union summit.
The court proceedings began Monday morning, then went into a one-hour adjournment. South African state lawyer William Mokhari said that the best information the government had was that al-Bashir was still in the country.
But Isabel Goodman, a lawyer from Southern Africa Litigation Centre, said ports of entry have not been responsive to the court’s order.
“There remains a very real risk that President Bashir will leave,” she said, urging the judge to hear the matter as quickly as possible.
The judge said that, when the court reconvened, he wanted to be informed of which ports of entry had not complied with the emergency order to block ports of entry and exit. But it was too late, and that issue will now take on even greater importance.
The ICC charges stem from Sudan’s conflict in Darfur.
That conflict began in 2003. The government of Sudan has been accused of repression of Darfur’s non-Ariab population and ethnic cleansing.
The international debate over al-Bashir’s fate had been intensifying Monday, with a United Nations rights organization saying he should be arrested during his visit to South Africa, while a parliamentary committee said he should go free.
In the balance hung the International Criminal Court’s six-year quest to arrest al-Bashir.
U.N. official: South Africa must comply with treaty
On Sunday, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria barred al-Bashir from leaving the country while hearings determined the fate of the ICC arrest warrant, a spokesman for the legal team seeking his detention told CNN.
Judge Hans Fabricius wanted to determine whether it was legally acceptable for Pretoria to allow al-Bashir to visit South Africa without arresting him, and key in that decision would be determining if the South African Cabinet’s decision not to comply with the ICC demand could trump an international treaty, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper reported.
But that became for the moment a moot point
Earlier Monday, the chairman of South Africa’s Portfolio Committee on International Relations and Cooperation, Siphosezwe Masango, had said he was concerned about al-Bashir’s possible arrest.
“This is an opportunistic act only meant to pit African leaders against each other in the name of international law,” Masango said in a statement. He urged the leaders gathered for the summit to concentrate instead on regional trade, xenophobia, the development of Africa’s infrastructure and other issues.
He said the ICC appeared to target African leaders and, if the trend continued, his committee might have to recommend that the government re-examine South Africa’s membership in the international court.
But the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, warned that member states must follow ICC rules.
“It is of deep concern to me and my office when court orders are issued by the ICC in respect of the serving head of state of Sudan, and state parties to the Rome Statute openly flout them,” he said Monday at a meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland. The Rome Statute was a treaty that established the International Criminal Court.
“In this regard, we await the ruling of the Pretoria High Court this morning, as it assesses the request submitted by the ICC,” he said.
The state-run South African Government News Agency had said that there was no official government response to “the reports that dominated the media on Sunday” and addressed the issue only in the last paragraph of a story about the Johannesburg summit getting started.
Sidiki Kaba, the Senegalese justice minister who serves as president of the assembly of states parties to the Rome Statute, expressed “his deep concern about the negative consequences for the court in case of nonexecution of the warrants by States Parties and, in this regard, urges them to respect their obligations to cooperate with the Court.” South Africa should “spare no effort” to arrest al-Bashir, Kaba said in a statement.
South Africa has twice before threatened to arrest al-Bashir — in 2009 ahead of President Jacob Zuma’s inauguration and in 2010 before the World Cup, according to the Southern Africa Litigation Centre. He attended neither event, according to news reports.
Berfore the summit, the center wondered whether al-Bashir or Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi would attend. The Muslim Lawyers Association filed a warrant with South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority demanding Egypt’s former military chief be arrested on charges that he committed war crimes during the 2013 overthrow of President Mohamed Morsy.
El-Sisi faces no ICC indictment, but Egyptian Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb attended the summit instead, according to numerous media reports.
Devastation in Darfur
The summit poses a tricky situation in that the African Union invited all but one of the continent’s leaders — the Central African Republic’s Catherine Samba-Panza — to the summit and has “adopted an official policy which requires its member states not to cooperate with the ICC as it is regarded as biased against Africa since all its indictments to date have been against African individuals,” the Southern Africa Litigation Centre said.
Al-Bashir, a former Army colonel who came to power via a 1989 coup, stands accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, the updated 2013 ICC arrest warrant states.
Arrest warrants from 2009 and 2010 outline the case against al-Bashir and allege that during the Darfur conflict he ordered the military, police and Janjaweed militia to attack three ethnic groups deemed sympathetic to rebel outfits with “the specific intent to destroy in part” those groups.
As part of that campaign, the warrants say, the Sudanese president ordered the rape, murder and torture of civilians and the razing of villages.
The U.N. has estimated that as many as 300,000 people have been killed in the Darfur conflict since 2003, a tally the Sudanese government says is inflated. Another 7 million are in need of humanitarian assistance, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates.
On Wednesday, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations told the Security Council that the ongoing violence in Darfur was having a “devastating” impact on civilians. More than 78,000 civilians have been displaced this year alone, the U.N. reports.