THE INTERNATIONAL CITIZENS’ TRIBUNAL FOR SUDAN

IN THE TRIAL CHAMBER

• 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

THE OPENING ADDRESS FOR THE PROSECUTION

By

Hon. David Kilgour, J.D.

Honourable Members of this International Citizens’ Tribunal:

My Canadian colleague David Matas and I will divide the time allocated for the opening statement by the prosecution; law professor Beth Van Schaack from California will deliver the closing statement. Differing members of our prosecuting team will conduct witness examination-in-chief and cross-examination.

The sole issue today is whether this adjudicative body will find beyond reasonable doubt that the accused, Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, is guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity as specified in the indictment and contrary to a host of treaties to which Sudan is a state party or is bound by customary international law.

The prosecution also says that these crimes violate the founding principles of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as expressed in the Rome statute, which mirror those of this tribunal, and The Genocide Convention of 1948. Our witnesses will provide direct evidence from their varying perspectives as to the guilt of the government and various other forces under the de facto control of the accused. He is in command and control of, and criminally complicit with, those who bomb, rape and murder specifically targeted Darfuri civilians and is thus guilty of terrible crimes against humanity.

We are not reflecting here on the history of Sudan as the largest nation in the world’s oldest and largest continent. If the military dictator being judged today were from Burma/Myanmar, Europe, North America or anywhere else, our trial procedures today would be done precisely the same way. A génocidaire today is an international criminal everywhere on our shrunken planet; all of them must know clearly that the peoples of the world will not tolerate such crimes in the 21st century after the terrible ravages of the past one.
Deadly Racism

Which of us anywhere on earth were not taught by our parents, teachers and spiritual leaders that all human beings must be treated with respect? As you will hear, religious conflict is not the major factor in the violence in Darfur because all of its residents share the same Muslim faith.

Ethnic racism is clearly the motivating force or gasoline; the agents of the accused, considering themselves “Arabs,” have bombed, shot, burned and raped untold numbers of what they deem to be the “Non-Arab” civilian community in Darfur. Earlier, both communities lived together for centuries in relative harmony before the deadly racism card was played by the accused and others in Khartoum and beyond it.

The slaughter of civilians by government forces and militias - often the most notorious Janjaweed, which were mobilized, armed, equipped and given impunity by the accused and his government - acting in concert continues unabated after fully 3 ½ years in Sudan’s western province of Darfur.  Since signing a peace agreement with the government in May, and joining war with it against non-signatories, the former rebel leader Minni Minawi stands accused of presiding over forces so abusive that they are now being called “Janjaweed 2.”

Two and a half million residents of Darfur have been forcibly displaced from their villages and another 200,000 have taken refuge in Chad.  Approximately 80 children alone are now dying daily in Darfur in what the United Nations has termed a “man-made catastrophe of an unprecedented scale”.

The estimated death toll among the African community as a whole across Darfur already exceeds hundreds of thousands, either murdered or dead of starvation and other violence-related causes.

Genocide Survivors Letter

This tragedy is made even worse by the reality that Rwanda’s similar catastrophe occurred only a little more than a decade ago. Only last month 120 survivors of previous genocides, including the Holocaust and the 1994 one in Rwanda, released their letter to the European Union (EU) countries:

“Survivors of genocide, from the Nazi Holocaust to Rwanda, called on Friday (20 Oct ’06) for EU sanctions to stop the Darfur conflict, saying so far the EU has done almost nothing to stop mass killing in western Sudan. ‘I didn’t survive a Nazi concentration camp to sit back while genocide is repeated,’ said Holocaust survivor Martin Stern… ‘Europe can play a leading role in stopping this slaughter but it has to act now,’ he added.”

Rendezvous with ICC

Depending on what happens here today, the accused and key members of his regime (51 of whose files have already been sent by the UN Security Council to the International Criminal Court in The Hague) will realize that they all have a rendezvous eventually with that court. It should be noted that some of the 51 alleged war criminals are rebel leaders.

The accused has vowed not to send anyone from Sudan for trial there, but other ex-dictators, including former Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic, found themselves in dockets indicted for similar crimes against humanity.

Today’s proceeding should therefore cause at least some genocidaires in Sudan to end or reduce their personal roles in the destruction of surviving members of their deemed enemies in Darfur.

Admittedly, the Bashir regime is showing little outward sign of concern. Only last week, it dismissed as “lies” a scathing UN report by the High Commissioner for Refugees (the Canadian Louise Arbour), which said that recent government-backed militia raids in West Darfur had killed 60 civilians - 27 of them under the age of 12. An eyewitness had told the BBC that the Janjaweed attackers declared, “We are the Sudanese government. We’ve been sent by President Omar al-Bashir.” Marian Yehya told the same broadcaster that her three-year-old son, Adam, was machine-gunned to death in front of her eyes.

“Arabs” comprise about a third of the population of Darfur; let me here pay respect to the majority of them, including the Abhala, who have refused to join the accused’s war and have resisted severe harassment by the Janjaweed, well aware, as the writer Julie Flint puts it, that “good relations with their non-Arab neighbours are more important than an alliance with an uncaring government hundreds of miles away.”

Thank you.