Sudan president leaves Nigeria after demands for his arrest
Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir has left Nigeria after demands for his
arrest on war crimes charges, an embassy spokesman said Tuesday,
although he denied the departure was due to the controversy.
Bashir had been attending an African Union health summit which was due to end on Tuesday.
“He
has left. He left in the afternoon (on Monday),” Mohammed Moiz,
spokesman for the Sudanese embassy in Nigeria, told AFP. He said Bashir
had left due to another engagement.
The embassy spokesman said
Bashir, who had arrived on Sunday, returned to Khartoum, but gave no
further details on the other engagement.
Nigeria’s presidency
defended welcoming Bashir to the country for the summit scheduled for
Monday and Tuesday despite war crimes charges against him, saying it
cannot interfere in AU affairs.
The Hague-based International
Criminal Court in 2009 and 2010 issued two warrants against Bashir for
war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide over the conflict in
Sudan’s Darfur region.
Since Nigeria is a member of the ICC, it technically has a legal obligation to arrest suspects wanted by the court.
Some
African Union members and officials have criticized the Bashir
indictments, and the body has passed a resolution calling on members not
to cooperate with the warrants.
Rights activists harshly criticized
Bashir’s visit and said they were planning to go to court to try to
force Nigeria to arrest him.
Bashir has previously visited ICC member
states, including Chad, Djibouti and Kenya, but countries like South
Africa and Botswana have ensured he stay away.
Human Rights Watch has said the AU resolution to ignore the warrants has “no bearing on Nigeria’s obligations as an ICC member.”
Hosting
Bashir is an “affront to victims” of the Darfur conflict, said Elize
Keppler of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch.
The
court has been accused by some of unfairly targeting Africans, while
others have argued that the arrest warrants against Bashir complicate
peace efforts.
Rights activists say that the vast majority of current
investigations came about because the governments where the crimes were
committed asked for the court’s involvement or the UN Security Council
referred the situation due to the gravity of the crimes.
“How can the
court be targeting if they are responding to direct requests from
governments affected or the council?” Keppler said.
She added that
“even though the claim of targeting flies in the face of the facts, it
continues to have great resonance in public debate likely due to the
damaging legacy of colonialism, and it is being leveraged and
manipulated to undercut efforts to give access of African victims to
justice.”
Government forces and local Arab militias were pitted
against rebels drawn mainly from non-Arab populations in the conflict in
the Darfur region.
In 2008, the United Nations estimated that 300,000 people had died because of the conflict, but Khartoum disputes the figure.
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