A curious consensus has emerged in the Middle East to support Sudans President Omar al-Bashir, seen as a victim of Western malice, regardless of his innocence or guilt.
From Iran to Saudi Arabia, the message is the same: the arrest warrant for Bashir issued this month by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity in the Darfur conflict is an affront to Sudans sovereignty.
Some echo Bashirs line that the Hague-based ICC is a tool of imperialists who covet Sudans oil, gas and other resources, or voice concern that the indictment could cripple peace efforts in the Darfur region and further destabilise the country. Others decry the perceived double standards in international justice where alleged war crimes by Israel against Lebanese or Palestinians, or by the United States in Iraq, go unpunished.
But hypocrisy cuts both ways.
Many of the Middle Eastern powers that cry foul over the indictment of Bashir have skeletons in their own human rights closets and fear the legal precedent set by the ICC.
"Thats why they are in solidarity with Bashir. They are acting in their own self-interest, for self-preservation," said Hisham Kassem, an Egyptian rights activist. Such solidarity is nothing new. Arab leaders have rarely, if ever, criticised their peers for human rights violations.
They were silent when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein massacred restive Kurds in the 1980s, for example. But the United States and its European allies also let those atrocities go virtually unchallenged - they viewed Saddam as a bulwark against Iran.
The Iraqi government that emerged after a US-led invasion in 2003 tried and hanged Saddam for some of his crimes. Nevertheless, Baghdad does not back the ICC arrest warrant against Bashir and has lent its weight to an Arab League effort to persuade the UN Security Council to defer it for a year.
"This is a very serious precedent to have an arrest warrant issued against any president, not only in the Arab world but in the world as a whole," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, who is a Kurd, told the Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. Saudi Arabia promised to "stand by Sudan in facing anything that could threaten its sovereignty and territorial unity".
Similar responses, couched in stronger language, came from Saudi Arabias regional adversaries, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. Syria called the ICC action a "flagrant violation of Sudans sovereignty and blatant intervention in its internal affairs".
In Tehran, the English-language daily Iran News said it was "a ploy by Western nations set on grabbing Sudans oil". Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah accused the ICC of being part of a "new ring of conspiracy" aimed at Sudan.
"It is a big scandal for those who hide their eyes from the massacres in which hundreds of thousands of lives are lost in many Arab and Muslim countries, but chase a president with unproven accusations and unverified investigations."
International experts say at least 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in 2003. Sudans government puts the death toll at 10,000. Many of Bashirs defenders assume the evidence for war crimes is false or concocted by the West. Such charges by Arab leaders resonate in a region where hostility to outside meddling is ingrained, especially if it looks Western-inspired.
Comments
Comments are closed.