ICC issues a landmark warrant for Sudanese President

[The Minx]

Link

# Former soldier says he was armed with a Kalashnikov and told to kill
# "Adam" describes taking part in rape attacks on children
# Victims included girls as young as 12, he says

As the International Criminal Court issues a landmark warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir over war crimes in Darfur, CNN's Nic Robertson interviews a man who was told to rape and kill children.

(CNN) -- I wanted to believe the man in front of me wasn't a rapist. I knew he was a former Sudanese soldier, I knew he wanted to talk about rape in Darfur. A humanitarian group working on Darfur issues had introduced him to us. They told us his testimony was important to hear.

Last year in Darfur aid workers told me children as young as five were being raped in the huge displacement camps that are home to several million Darfuris. In some camps, they told me, rape had become so common that as many as 20 babies a month born from rape were being abandoned.

As I sat inches from Adam --not his real name -- I feared the revulsion I knew I would feel at my own questions as I asked about rape and his involvement. I have interviewed rape survivors in Darfur. I have two daughters. I am a human being with a conscience. It would be hard to listen to his replies.

He told me he was conscripted by force in to the Sudanese army in the summer of 2002. He thought he was being taken for six months' national service and then would be released. The conversation was slow going at first. We were both holding off from delving into the sordid details he'd come to discuss. His answers were short, he told me he got no pay from the army, only food and drink.

He said he was rounded up in an army truck from a market in Darfur and trained to kill. He said he was armed with Kalashnikovs and told to "shoot targets." Then, he says, his officers told him "we will be taken to a patrol and then soon after that we were asked to join other people to go and burn and kill people".

That's when he says he realized he wasn't getting national service training, that in fact, he was being forced into war against his will, with his own people. "They are black," he told me, noting the difference between the lighter skinned rulers of Sudan and the darker farmers of Darfur. "I am black," he said, "this shouldn't be happening."

But, he said, worse than being told to kill his own people, was that if he tried to resist, he himself would be killed. "The order is that the soldiers at the front, and there are some people who are watching you from behind, if you try to escape or do anything you will get shot. The order is that we go to the village, burn it and kill the people."

It felt as Adam was beginning to open up a little -- not easy, given the topic, and the lights and cameras all around us. He was beginning to talk a bit more, answer questions with more than one or two words. But it was following a pattern: I'd have to lead the way. We were both waiting for the inevitable. How he came to know of rape in Darfur.

And that's when he said it.

He brought up the rape by himself. He was talking through a translator but his voice was quiet. I thought I heard anger, heard him slow and his voice drop: "I had no choice," he said "but I will say that I didn't kill anybody but the raping of the small children, it was bad" I knew this was going to be difficult and now it had begun.

What happens with the children, I asked. "They cry out," he answered. "And what happens when they cry out?" "Two persons will capture her while she is crying and another raping her, then they leave her there," came his reply.

Silence. "What do I ask now?" I thought. Be forensic. Get the story. This is important testimony, I reminded myself.

And so we continued, Adam describing in detail how soldiers raped girls as young as 12. How officers ordered them to do this to make people flee their villages, run away and never come back. Through all of this, Adam didn't once mention whether he actually had been directly involved in the raping.

He said he tried to desert the army as soon as he could, but was caught and tortured. He showed me the scars where he said he was tied down beneath a tree and officers set fire to tires above him, dripping burning rubber on his body.

Eventually, he said, he did get away, went to his sisters, tried joining the rebels to fight the army. But even there, his troubles were far from over. Incredibly, he said, the rebels didn't trust him; he was kept at their camp and only escaped when it was bombed by the army.

The end of his story, but we weren't really done. One more question.

Had he been forced to rape children?

"Yes I did, they were government orders," came his reply.

How many? "Well it didn't feel like raping, I was feeling very bad but as I was ordered, I had to do something. What I did was take off my trousers and lay myself on top of the girl but I didn't feel like raping, so I lay there for about 15 minutes."

I want to be sure I understand him. "So you didn't actually penetrate the girls?" I ask. No, he says, "because I had no feeling for it, my penis didn't actually wake up, so there was no actual penetration," he replied.

There were other people in the room, the translator, a cameraman, our producer Jonathan Wald, but I had forgotten they were there. My thoughts were entirely locked on Adam.

What more could I ask? I was emotionally drained. There was no way of knowing whether he was telling me the truth. Only in the measure of his voice was there a clue.

Here, sitting on an office chair, thousands of miles away from Darfur, the memories come flooding back. The many, traumatized women and children we've interviewed, distraught families, unable to protect themselves. The pain we put them through, to recount, to relive, their nightmares.

Each time, I've asked myself can I justify the suffering these questions cause? Each time, I tell myself it is only their own accounts that can cast light on the darkened corner of humanity they inhabit. Only their own accounts that can help break their cycle of suffering.

Time and again, though, it seems telling the world their stories has little tangible impact on their reality of their lives. And now I'm face-to-face with a man who says he was part of the suffering, albeit by his own account not complicit and not guilty.

I am left with the thought perhaps Adam's words carry even greater power. If his story is true -- and it mirrors other accounts emerging from Darfur -- then it implicates the government in these terrible crimes.

He says he has trouble sleeping at nights. I can understand why. He is not alone. Aid workers say millions of women in Darfur not only have trouble sleeping at nights, but live in fear of rape 24 hours a day.

[The Minx]

More on this:

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CNN) -- The International Criminal Court at the Hague issued an arrest warrant Wednesday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for a five-year campaign of violence in Darfur.

Bashir is charged with seven counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The warrant does not mention genocide, but the court may issue an amended warrant to include that charge later, ICC spokeswoman Laurence Blairon said.

Five counts are for crimes against humanity and include murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape, Blairon said. The other two are for war crimes, for intentionally directing attacks against civilians and for pillaging.

"Bashir's official capacity as head of state does not exclude criminal responsibility or get him immunity," Blairon said in announcing the warrant.

The ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, filed genocide charges against al-Bashir in July last year, accusing him of masterminding attempts to wipe out African tribes in the war-torn region with a campaign of murder, rape and deportation.

The violence in Darfur erupted in 2003 after rebels began an uprising against the Sudanese government. To counter the rebels, Sudanese authorities armed and cooperated with Arab militias that went from village to village in Darfur, killing, torturing and raping residents there, according to the United Nations, Western governments and human rights organizations.

The militias targeted civilian members of tribes from which the rebels drew strength.

Moreno-Ocampo told CNN's Nic Robertson last year that he had "strong evidence that al-Bashir is committing a genocide." But Blairon said the evidence submitted to judges so far doesn't support that charge.

"In order to speak about a genocide, you need to have a clear intent that a person wishes to destroy, in part or as a whole, a targeted group, a specific group," Blairon said. "In this specific case, the (judges of the) Pre-Trial Chamber 1 has not been able to find that there were reasonable grounds to establish the genocidal intent."

Prosecutors may still return to the chamber if new evidence of genocide emerges, and the court may then decide to issue an amended warrant, she said.

Al-Bashir bears responsibility for the crimes committed in Darfur, Moreno-Ocampo said last year, because he sat at the apex of the government.

"For such crimes to be committed over a period of five years and throughout Darfur, al-Bashir had to mobilize and keep mobilized the whole state apparatus; he had to control and direct perpetrators; and he had to rely on a genocidal plan," Moreno-Ocampo wrote as background for arrest warrant request.

Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Mohammed Taha has long rejected the authority of the ICC, saying Sudan was not a signatory to the court's creation.

"Hence there is no legal obligation or power over Sudan, whether Sudanese organizations or citizens," he said.

Taha also called the charges an attempt to "paralyze" his country. And Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, Sudan's ambassador to the United Nations, said his government would respond through legal, political and "other means."

"The limit is the sky for our retaliation," he said.

About 300,000 people have died in Darfur, the United Nations estimates, and 2.5 million have been forced from their homes.

Last month, renewed fighting forced thousands of people in the southern part of Darfur to seek security and shelter at a refugee camp in the north of the war-torn area, the United Nations said.

The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that fighting in Muhajeria and Shearia between Sudanese government forces, and the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), drove over 15,000 people north to the Zam Zam camp.

[General Havoc]

It is a crying shame that the ICC can have no actual authority. Sadly, this is all just an act of impotent political theatre.