NEW YORK - A "people's tribunal" of human-rights activists, international lawyers, and a well-known Nobel laureate met in the shadow of the United Nations yesterday for a mock trial in which a former Darfurian now living in Northeast Philadelphia testified of atrocities and Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir was pronounced guilty of genocide.

Since 2003, Sudan's western province of Darfur has been the scene of wholesale slaughter and displacement, in which millions of Darfurians of African heritage have been killed or driven from their homes by Arab-descended Janjaweed militias and armies loyal to Bashir.

Systematic rape and looting by the Janjaweed marauders, who typically arrive on horseback after helicopter gunships have strafed villages, are part of what critics say is a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing about which world leaders have said a lot but done little.

Yesterday's exhaustive five-hour proceeding - in which Bashir was tried in absentia by participants who played the roles of prosecutors, defense attorneys and a five-member panel of jurists that included Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka - was reminiscent of the political "teach-ins" of the 1960s, in which guerrilla theater was used to educate and mobilize the public.

If the trappings inside the klieg-lit "courtroom" at the U.N. Church Center were mostly theatrical, the vivid testimonies - led by a Darfurian immigrant now living in exile in Northeast Philadelphia - were deadly real.

Jarelnabi Abbas Ageed Abu Sikkin, 21, known to his friends as "Jar," was granted political asylum in the United States a year ago. He lives near Cottman and Rising Sun Avenue with two Sudanese friends.

In Sudan, he was a university student in accounting. In Philadelphia, he is learning English and devoting full time to raising awareness about Darfur through the local chapter of the Darfur Alert Coalition.

In the room where about 125 people participated, Jar's eyes glowed like coals - and occasionally welled with tears - as he recounted the Sept. 9, 2003, Janjaweed raid on his village in which his childhood friend Sharif Hasabala was slain.

Jar's mother and several sisters are living in a refugee camp in Chad. His father, uncles, brothers and brothers-in-law all were killed.

Jar escaped by running away to a refugee camp that put him in touch with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. From that borderline refugee camp, he went to Egypt and eventually to the United States.

While he recognizes that a mock trial has no legal authority, he said he wanted to testify so he would not be considered guilty of inaction when his future grandchildren ask what he did to try to end the suffering.

Other witnesses included representatives of Physicians for Human Rights; a member of the State Department's Atrocities Documentation Team, which in 2004 investigated the Darfur killings, concluding they amounted to genocide; and a Slovenian peace activist who was accused of spying and jailed for a time in Sudan after entering the country without a visa on a mission to document mass rapes.

While an indictment of Bashir is pending before the U.N.-affiliated International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, it could be years before the court rules.

Visible through the picture windows behind the judges was the long row of flagpoles on the U.N. Plaza, resplendent with national colors.

Two Canadian defense lawyers assigned to represent Bashir's interest staged a feisty defense. While the witnesses - some of whom testified anonymously, fearing retribution - clearly had witnessed some horrible deeds, the evidence, often mingled with hearsay, simply did not support a finding of direct liability by Bashir, the defense lawyers argued.

In the end, the judges roundly rejected that argument.

Saying Bashir could no longer escape the world's judgment, Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, pronounced him guilty, adding: "How long must sovereignty triumph when people are being driven, bleeding and raped, from their homes?"