ICC refers Malawi to UN over Sudan's Bashir
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has referred Malawi to the UN Security Council for refusing to arrest Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir.
Malawi hosted Mr Bashir in October in defiance of an ICC arrest warrant for him on charges of genocide in Darfur.
Malawi said Mr Bashir enjoyed presidential immunity, and it would not violate African Union policy by arresting him.
Three other African countries have already been referred to the Council.
Sudan's President Bashir announces austerity budget
Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir has announced that he will introduce economic austerity measures following South Sudan’s secession.
Most of Sudan’s oil lay in the south and the two countries have not agreed how to divide future oil revenues.
The president told MPs that a three-year “emergency programme” would include issuing a new currency.
He also promised a more open society where people would be free to express political views without fear of arrest.
“Our government is keen not to curb freedom of speech. No-one from today will be arrested for expressing his political views,” the president said in his speech to parliament in the capital, Khartoum.
Consultations on a new constitution - a key opposition demand - would also begin soon, he said.
It would be an inclusive process involving opposition politicians, religious leaders and university professors and the new constitution would be put to a referendum.
Last December, President Bashir said a new constitution would make Islam the only religion in Sudan and Sharia the only law.
The BBC’s James Copnall in Khartoum says that Mr Bashir’s opponents will be sceptical about the promises of greater political freedom.
But our correspondent says that perhaps President Bashir has decided that only greater openness and inclusiveness - or at least the impression of it - will keep his country united through what could be a very tough period.
Sudan Official Resigns Post Over Assault at Border Town
NAIROBI, Kenya — A top Sudanese minister resigned in protest on Tuesday over the northern Sudanese military assault on the border town of Abyei, as worrisome signs emerged that the area was descending into chaos.
Luka Biong Deng, minister of cabinet affairs and an influential southern politician from the Abyei region, said he was quitting because he had lost all faith in Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
“I came to a conclusion that the way you are leading Sudan is making you not only a liability to the Sudanese people and your party, but also to the continent and indeed to the world at large,” Mr. Deng, a member of the unity government between the north and south, told Mr. Bashir in his resignation letter.
Mr. Deng also said there had been “barbaric attacks” on civilians in Abyei that resulted in “massive displacement of thousands of people.”
Clear portraits of what exactly is happening in Abyei are difficult because most residents fled, along with aid organizations and many United Nations employees, before northern troops took control of the town on Saturday.
Since then, thousands of militiamen allied with northern forces have been swarming into Abyei, burning down huts and looting stores and warehouses, including United Nations warehouses, according to United Nations reports.
Fighting erupts in southern Sudan
A rebellion by former pro-Khartoum fighters in the Upper Nile state of south Sudan against giving up their heavy weapons has sparked two days of clashes, leaving 20 people dead and at least 24 injured.
The fighting around Malakal airport, close to the border with the north, began on Thursday when loyalists of Gabriel Tang, who commanded a pro-Khartoum force during the 1983 to 2005 civil war, objected to surrendering their heavy weaponry.
The dead included two children and a Sudanese driver for the UN’s refugee agency, officials said.
The Tang loyalists are deployed alongside regular Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF - the northern army) in so-called Joint Integrated Units (JIUs) with former Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) forces that patrol the town under the peace agreement that ended the civil war.
In reality the units are far from integrated and the component elements effectively operate as separate forces.
The northern troops are shifting their equipment back home as the south gears up for its expected international recognition as an independent state in July following its overwhelming vote for secession in last month’s landmark referendum.“The number of dead has risen to 20, and this could change at any moment,” southern army spokesman Philip Aguer said on Saturday.
“Searches are continuing and many are wounded … Both sides were firing mortars and heavy machineguns.”
The military warned there was a risk of more clashes as the country divided its forces before the south became independent.
Peter Lam Both, Upper Nile’s information minister, said fighting had also erupted in three other areas of the state on Saturday morning - Paloich, Malut and Maban.
Sudan: Violent Response to Peaceful Protests
(Juba) - Sudanese authorities used excessive force during largely peaceful protests that began on January 30, 2011, Human Rights Watch said today. The government should immediately release protesters detained by national security forces and investigate the reported killing of a student who took part, Human Rights Watch said.
Inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, thousands of Sudanese students and their supporters gathered in Khartoum and other northern cities on January 30 and 31 to call for an end to National Congress Party rule and government-imposed price increases. Similar protests were reported on February 1, and activists called for the protests to continue.
“The Sudanese government should not use violence to cut off peaceful demonstrations and political expression,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The people of Sudan, like people everywhere, have a right to protest repression.”
By this logic, today’s hot spots such as Iraq and Afghanistan are not simply “America’s Wars.” Rather, they are to some extent the unexploded ordinance left over from old European wars, with their fuses lit on slow release. Indeed, the United States had nothing to do with the Sykes-Picot and other agreements that parceled the Levant into French- and British-allied monarchies, or the Congress of Berlin, which drew suspiciously straight lines on Africa’s map. Some of these haphazard agreements created oversized or artificial agglomerations like Sudan, which threw together heretofore independent groups of Arabs, Africans, Christians, and Muslims into a country one-fourth the size of the United States but lacking any common national ethos or adequate distribution of resources to sustain commitment to unity. Others did the opposite, like the British officer Henry Mortimer Durand, whose infamous line divided the Pashtun nation between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This growing cartographic stress is not just America’s challenge. All the world’s influential powers and diplomats should seize a new moral high ground by agreeing to prudently apply in such cases Woodrow Wilson’s support for self-determination of peoples. This would be a marked improvement over today’s ad hoc system of backing disreputable allies, assembling unworkable coalitions, or simply hoping for tidy dissolutions. Reasserting the principle of self-determination would allow for the sort of true statesmanship lacking on today’s global stage.” Breaking Up Is Good to Do
The Daily Show weighs in on the “Is Clooney Helping?” debate.
via Wronging Rights
Naming A Nation: Southern Sudan
“The current government in the region, called the Autonomous Government of Southern Sudan, has already set up most of the institutions needed for sovereignity, but it still does not know how the new state will be called.”
(click through to read full article)
That leaves just a few months for some of the most contentious issues in Sudan’s recent history to be resolved. The parties will have to decide who becomes a citizen, a tricky question since tens of thousands of southerners now live in the north. A security arrangement along the border will have to be worked out — as will the actual border demarcation itself. It’s also not clear yet how north and south Sudan will share oil wealth, much of which will be concentrated in the new independent state. But perhaps most controversial of all is the status of Abyei, which lies along the disputed border. Oil rich, ethnically diverse, and politically explosive, Abyei was supposed to hold its own referendum this week over whether to be in Sudan or the new Southern Sudanese state. Disputes over who would be able to vote, however, have delayed the polls. Clashes have broken out there in recent days between settler and nomad populations, the former preferring to go with the south and the latter favoring the north. The situation on the ground on Monday was reportedly calm, but any further flaring of violence in the area is likely to raise tensions between Khartoum and Juba over an issue on which neither side wants to cede ground.” The Referendum Hangover
As Rob Crilly points out, al-Bashir is right. My real worry for this situation is not that war will break out between north and south - even over Abyei, which I think will eventually be allowed to vote on its own status - but rather than tensions within the South will be played out in the context of an extremely fragile state. Southern Sudan will immediately become one of the world’s poorest, weakest states - albeit one with oil - with a plethora of ethnic groups who don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. That’s rarely a recipe for stability. Add to that the resentment that may build up over the SPLM’s domination of politics within the South and there could be real problems.” Texas in Africa
South Sudan takes first step towards independence
Thousands of south Sudanese today started registering for their long-awaited independence referendum, the first concrete step towards a vote that could split Africa’s largest country in two.
The launch came after northern and southern leaders agreed they would form a “soft border” allowing the free movement of trade and nomads between their territories in the event of separation, as part of a framework agreement to resolve a list of disputes between the two sides.
The referendum on whether the oil-producing region should declare independence, scheduled for 9 January, is the climax of a 2005 peace deal that ended Africa’s longest civil war. It was fought over ethnicity, religion, ideology and oil and killed 2 million people over decades.
Analysts widely expect southerners, embittered by the long war, to vote for secession.
The southern president, Salva Kiir, surrounded by chanting crowds and drummers in the southern capital, Juba, was among the first to sign up for the vote, a witness told Reuters.
“We will vote on 9 January. People must come out en masse. Otherwise people would have been fighting and dying for no cause. The referendum is done only once,” Kiir told the crowd.
Officials with megaphones ranged the streets of Juba in the morning calling on people to register. One unofficial vehicle blared out a pro-independence song: “It’s the promised land and the promised land is coming.”
“We need to separate from these people [the northerners]. They have not done anything good for us,” a Juba resident, Deng Manyual, said after registering.
The pro-independence mood came in the face of a campaign led by Sudan’s Khartoum-based president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for southerners to choose to stay united with the north.
Southern leaders have accused the north of trying to delay and disrupt the referendum to keep control of the south’s oil reserves, and warned there is a risk of a return to conflict. Bashir has dismissed the accusations and promised to accept the result of the referendum.
Southerners are also able to register in the north and eight countries outside Sudan.
In contrast to Juba, the mood in Khartoum was subdued. The referendum commission acknowledged not enough had been done to publicise registration centres, and few southerners even knew the delayed registration process had started.
African Union (AU) mediators said northern and southern leaders signed a framework agreement on Sunday setting out the terms of negotiations to resolve a list of disputes, including how to share out oil revenues and national debt after a split.
In the agreement, both sides vowed not to return to war, to give people the right to choose their citizenship after any split, and to demarcate their disputed border.
“In the event of secession, this will be the longest inter-state border in Africa,” an AU statement said.
“The parties have committed themselves to maintaining a ‘soft border’, which will permit unhindered economic and social activity and interaction.”
The AU did not go into details on the location of the disputed border and said Bashir and Kiir still needed to resolve a row over the ownership of the central oil-producing Abyei region.
Where Millions Need Care, Starting With One
Southern Sudan is still defined by a tribal culture, with groups living in wood huts with dirt floors. Children are not in school. In Juba, the region’s capital city, garbage is piled high, the stores are empty of fresh food and canned goods are covered with dust. Water is dirty. Toilets are mostly nonexistent, or just filthy holes in the ground.
The challenges of providing health care in this setting were so overwhelming that I found myself questioning the mission. What were we doing there? Whom were we helping? Or were we simply assuaging our first-world consciences? Shouldn’t basic needs — roads, water, food, housing — be met before all else?
While such threats might represent political posturing, they match the political reality of the life of southerners in Khartoum, despite the express provisions of the CPA against discrimination. Sharia law has been applied relentlessly to southerners living in the north in contravention of CPA protections for non-Muslims. The government has never worked to integrate the internally displaced people into northern society, instead denying them government services and periodically forcing them to move to ever more distant sites on Khartoum’s periphery. Even individuals who have lived in Khartoum for years outside the camps have been unable to obtain formal permission to own land. As one displaced individual told RI, “Unity has not produced a good situation for us. Why would it be better after separation?” Sudan: Preventing Violence and Statelessness as Referendum Approaches
Sudan's President Bashir defies arrest warrant in Chad
From the BBC:
The trip is the first time Mr Bashir has set foot on the soil of a court member since the ICC called for his arrest on war crimes charges in 2009.
Chadian officials said Mr Bashir, who denies the charges, would not be arrested.
[…]
Despite the issue of the ICC charges against Mr Bashir, the international community is pleased the two countries are now getting on, reports the BBC’s East Africa correspondent Will Ross, because it potentially increases the chances of ending the long-running conflict in Darfur.
[…]
“Chad risks the shameful distinction of being the first ICC member state to harbour a suspected war criminal from the court,” said Elise Keppler of Human Rights Watch.
