THE INTERNATIONAL CITIZENS’ TRIBUNAL FOR SUDAN

IN THE TRIAL CHAMBER

New York, 13 November 2006

• JUDGMENT
• Judgment (Judge Michael Newton)
• Judgment (Judge Gloria White-Hammond)
• Judgment (Judge Obang O. Metho)
  
• Opening Statement for Prosecution Matas
  
• Opening Statement for Prosecution Kilgour
  
• Opening Statement for Defense
  
• Closing Statement for Prosecution
• Closing Statement for Defense

PROSECUTOR
v.
OMAR HASSAN AL-BASHIR

JUDGMENT

The Office of the Prosecutor:

Mr. David Kilgour
Prof. Beth Van Schaack
Mr. David Matas

Counsel for the Defendant:

Mr. Kelly Dawson
Mr. Garry MacDonald

The International Citizens’ Tribunal on Sudan hereby pronounces judgment on the defendant, Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan.

The principal crimes listed in the Indictment, Crimes Against Humanity, Genocide, and Violations of the Laws and Customs of War, are the main elements of the joint criminal enterprise directed by the defendant. The acts of subordinates by which the defendant and his associates carried out the enterprise run the gamut from mass murder to rape to pillage to enslavement. The span of time during which these acts were committed covers sixteen years, from 1990 to the present. The scenes of these crimes ranged over much of the territory of Sudan, from the villages of the Beja people in the East to the towns of Darfur in the West, from the homes of the Dinka and Nuer in the South to the mountain habitats of the Nuba peoples in the center. For a longer span of time than in any other case in modern history, Sudan has been subjected to serial genocide, serial crimes against humanity, and serial war crimes.

Two guiding motives intertwine to drive the joint criminal enterprise described at this Tribunal. First, President Bashir and his partners in the enterprise have acted to insure that the central regime, installed in a military coup in 1989, maintained and expanded Khartoum’s grip on the country’s resources, both political and economic. Second, this regime has sought to exterminate, uproot, and reduce to desperate conditions the non-Arab peoples of Sudan while suppressing non-Arab cultures and in other ways promoting the Arabization of the country. Obsessed with the need to have their status as Arabs recognized, the leaders of Bashir’s regime have spread their own distorted notion of Arabism, given special privileges to Arabs migrating to the country, forced abducted non-Arab Dinka children to take Arab names, imposed their own intolerant version of Islam, and promoted a racist Arab-supremacist ideology incompatible with mainstream Arab traditions elsewhere.

1. They have practiced policies of “divide and rule,” setting one opposition group against another with consummate skill. They have then used agreements with one group, such as the North-South Comprehensive Peace Accord of September 2005, as hostages to prevent any attempts to interfere with their depredations elsewhere, especially in Darfur.
2. They have exploited and distorted the Islamic notion of jihad, mobilizing Muslims to carry out attacks on civilians and armed formations by representing such actions as holy war. The attacked populations were often Muslims themselves; but applying their own distorted theology, the al-Bashir regime claims that these people are “not true Muslims.”
3. They have tightly controlled access to areas in which their criminal activities were underway, such as the Nuba Mountains, and now Darfur, turning away reporters by visa refusals, arrests, and threats of harm or death.
4. They have rendered humanitarian operations all but impossible in many areas, subjecting aid organizations to delays, financial exactions, and terror.
5. They have disguised their crimes as “counter-insurgency” operations to suppress “terrorism,” “tribal clashes,” or  “ethnic disputes” over land and water.
6. They have systematically distracted and deceived the United Nations and the Organization of the Islamic Conference and have so distorted the truth, that several U.N. Resolutions even called upon the al-Bashir regime to disarm the Janjaweed militias when, in actuality, these militias were directly armed by the Sudanese government and carried out their attacks with Sudanese government bombing and air raids.
7. They have mastered the art of playing for time, producing strategic delays and postponements enumerable times, while hundreds of thousands of people die, and millions of refugees are forcibly displaced from their homes.
8. They have enlisted the aid of global oil companies who fear losing their investments if the al-Bashir regime is overthrown.
9. In response to threats to bring them before the International Criminal Court (ICC), they have instituted sham judicial apparatuses, including the Darfur Special Court and the Judicial Investigations Committee, in an attempt to preclude jurisdiction by the ICC.
10. They have sponsored phony conferences on counterterrorism while at the same time cooperating with international terrorists.
11. They have dominated policy making by regional organizations such as the African Union while manipulating, subordinating, and abusing its manifestly incapable uniformed monitoring forces in Darfur, and ensuring that the African Union force lacks the mandate to prevent the murders and rapes being committed against innocent civilians in Darfur.

To allow crimes such as those in the Indictment to go unnoticed and unpunished is to grant justification to those who argue that a centralized, Arab-dominated state in Sudan is better than a “failed state,” however destructive of pluralism and tolerance. But who defines failure? And who judges whether life in a failed state can be better than one in a repressive state, where all central institutions seem operational but citizens are neither free nor safe? The Bashir regime has employed indiscriminate armed force to impose a single identity, a single religion, and a single set of institutions upon the whole of Sudan. The cost has been millions of human lives.

When challenged by peoples it has neglected or harassed, the Sudanese government has consistently provided an unequivocal response: unrestrained, genocidal attacks by aircraft and ground forces upon civilians.

Not to denounce the crimes listed in the Indictment, crimes of which President Bashir is the leading perpetrator, is to reject the seriousness of the threat posed by Sudan’s genocide to the variety in the world’s mosaic of independent cultures. The crime of genocide, after all, encompasses more than killing or forced deportation. It includes any grave threat to the survivability of a culture. The imposition of Arabic in Darfur, supported by serious penalties for the use of an indigenous language like Fur, is only one instance of this assault upon a culture. In the case of Darfur, African cultures partly dependent upon symbiotic exchanges between non-Arab farmers and Arab herdsmen in a functioning multi-cultural society have been destroyed by the attacks ordered from Khartoum.

To Bashir’s primer on how a criminal regime can succeed in its projects, successfully defying the United Nations as well as the initiatives of individual governments, committing crimes against humanity in an atmosphere of fear and impunity, this Tribunal must present a counter-primer.

The supreme test of a government is its ability to align itself with internationally accepted standards of justice. If justice is the first condition of humanity, the goal that distinguishes human society from that of animals in which only the strong rule and no one recognizes rights, then the Bashir regime must be held accountable to justice. Currently accountable only to the narrowest of Sudanese Arab elites, the members of the joint criminal enterprise described in this trial have so far benefited from impunity, but they have not tasted justice.

Since the members of the Khartoum regime whose crimes have been examined at this trial have shown no indication that they will bring themselves to justice, it is the responsibility of others to do so. Those of us who fail to take that step risk becoming, in the eyes of history, collaborators with that criminal government.

Sudan’s double identity as an Arab regime and an African regime, its membership in both the Arab League and the African Union, suggests the first places that judgment should be rendered. When a member of a family misbehaves, it is the duty of other family members to bring the miscreant into line.  The Arab family has steadfastly refused to call Sudan to order.  It has failed to call for Bashir’s judgment for mass murder under the sacred laws of Islam.   Indeed it has placed obstacles in the way of sanctions and his generally refused to allow stories and statements critical of Sudan to appear in its press.

Nor has the African family, represented by the African Union, taken a seriously critical stance.

The United Nations has not been much more forthright or forceful. It has passed many resolutions with high-sounding words, but has failed to enforce them. When a deviant member of the family of nations flouts, indeed revels in the abandonment of the most basic norms of human decency, is there really justification in evoking the excuse that protocol requires the permission of that same arrogant and defiant entity to accept U.N. peacekeepers in its territory? When that family of nations, in its majesty assembled, declares its responsibility to protect citizens of any country whose human rights are being violated, can it consider its responsibility a serious matter if it requires the consent of the violator to stop the crimes? Are the boundaries of countries - boundaries now being crossed by Sudan in its attacks upon Chad - sacred walls? Shall the empty words of diplomatic abstractions always drown out the cries of human suffering? How long must sovereignty triumph while men are murdered and women and children are driven bleeding, raped, and starved from their homes?

In conclusion, this Tribunal recalls the admonition of Justice Robert Jackson, who addressed the opening session of the first international tribunal at Nuremberg on November 21, 1945: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” The wondrous mosaic of cultures that patterns world civilization, with some tiles shining brightly and others, as in Sudan, dangerously faded by tyranny, will be broken forever if the crimes of Omar al-Bashir and his regime go unpunished.

We, the judges of the International Citizens’ Tribunal for Sudan, find the defendant, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, GUILTY AS CHARGED.