Bashir’s plan to attend summit in Turkey blocked by EU

ISTANBUL, Monday

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir pulled out of an Islamic summit in Istanbul today — a trip that the European Union had objected to because of his indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

President Bashir, against whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity in Sudan’s Darfur region, had announced plans to attend a meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) today.

Sudan’s state news agency Suna reported that President Bashir had postponed his trip to return to Khartoum to discuss a deadlock over election laws with his coalition partners, the former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement.

Turkey, which has deepened economic ties with Sudan, has not ratified the statute that established the ICC and had said it had no plans to arrest Mr Bashir.

But the mainly Muslim country, which is seeking EU membership, had come under pressure from Brussels to drop Bashir from the guest list.

International Crisis Group analyst Fouad Hikmat said the decision showed how much the ICC warrant had hindered President Bashir’s movements.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to venture out beyond the immediate neighbourhood, or maybe the Gulf. His people don’t want to take any risks. Once he’s in international airspace, he is in no man’s land,” he told Reuters.

Earlier, in comments reported by the state-run Anatolian news agency, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan had denied that President Bashir was responsible for genocide in Darfur and said he would be more comfortable talking to Bashir than to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I wouldn’t be able to speak with Netanyahu so comfortably but I would speak comfortably with Bashir. I say comfortably: “What you’ve done is wrong.” And I would say it to his face. Why? Because a Muslim couldn’t do such things. A Muslim could not commit genocide,” Anatolian reported Erdogan as saying.

The ICC indicted Mr Bashir in March on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but stopped short of including a charge of genocide. The United Nations says as many as 300,000 people have been killed since conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003, although Sudan rejects that figure.

Mr Erdogan’s comments could further damage Turkey’s already strained ties with Israel, which have worsened since Israel’s December-January offensive in the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

President Bashir has travelled to African countries since the ICC issued its arrest warrant in March.

The campaigning group Human Rights Watch had said that Nato member Turkey’s international image would fall if it did not bar Bashir.

“Turkey’s international image will plummet if it welcomes a man wanted to answer for some of the most heinous abuses against civilians in the world today,” said Elise Keppler, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Programme.

Turkey is not a state party to the ICC and thus has no legal obligation to arrest al-Bashir as a result of the warrant.

At the same time, the UN Security Council - in resolution 1593, which referred Darfur to the ICC in March 2005 - urges all states to cooperate with the ICC. Turkey became an elected member of the UN Security Council for two years in January 2009. In addition, Turkey has for some time sought membership in the European Union.

All EU member states are parties to the ICC, and are strongly committed to the court and accountability for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. (Reuters)