Bashir should face charges, says SPLM official

KHARTOUM, Sunday

Sudan’s president should surrender to the International Criminal Court to face war crimes charges, an official from the junior government coalition party said on Saturday, raising tensions ahead of April elections.

It was the first time such a call had been made by a senior member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the former southern rebels who signed a 2005 peace deal with President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and joined him in coalition.

Send shock waves

It will likely send shock waves through the SPLM’s governing alliance with Mr Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) which is already fragile due to delays in implementing the accord.

“Bashir has no option but to respond to what the (ICC) is putting up. He has to go. If he does not go up he will be taken there,” Edward Lino, the SPLM’s candidate to be governor of Khartoum and its veteran head of intelligence, told Reuters in an interview.

“There are many dignitaries who were taken and he is not an exception. For the good of the country Bashir should take leave and then go to (The) Hague,” he said.

Sudan is to hold its first multi-party elections in 24 years on April 11. Polls will be held for the national presidency and parliament, the south Sudanese presidency, state governorships, the southern parliament and state assemblies.

President Bashir was indicted last year for war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sudan’s seven-year rebellion in Darfur. He rejects the court’s sovereignty and has expelled 13 aid agencies, accusing them of providing the ICC with information.

Sudan’s north-south civil war was separate from the Darfur conflict which, despite multiple peace deals, still festers on in the vast desert west. The United Nations estimates 300,000 Darfuris died and more than 2 million fled their homes in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

The SPLM had been careful not to provoke Bashir’s dominant NCP on the sensitive issue of the ICC.

But on Saturday in a further affront, SPLM presidential candidate Yasir Arman challenged Bashir to stand down from the presidential poll to encourage southerners to vote for unity in the 2011 referendum. “We call the NCP for a new partnership where Bashir would step down from the candidacy and there would be a national consensus coalition,” Mr Arman told reporters in Khartoum. Bashir is keen to win the presidential vote to legitimise his government in defiance of the ICC. (Reuters)