Diary

21 February 2009

Khartoum

Along the stretch of highway leading to the international airport in Khartoum there are illuminated signs of Sudan’s President Omar el-Bashir alternating with those of Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court who has indicted him. The country waits to see if the ICC will issue an arrest warrant for its leader, the first for a sitting head of state. It marks a turbulent time in this turbulent country. Bashir has already been indicted on ten counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, although it is speculated that the last might be dropped. If a warrant is issued, a state of emergency could be declared and a defiant government that does not recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC would strengthen its grip on power. Already people are being arrested and fear pervades the streets. Sudanese men and women who work for NGOs have been beaten; the government believes they are providing evidence against Bashir.

There is an election scheduled for July 2009 (although the government threatens to cancel it), and a referendum scheduled for 2011 to decide the future of the country. After Africa’s longest-running civil war came to an end in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the semi-autonomous government of South Sudan was established. The next step will determine whether or not the south becomes independent. The south is landlocked but has oil; the north, where power is concentrated in Khartoum, has the sea. Is it better for Sudan to remain as one country, with access to the northern African countries, and a part of the Muslim world, or should it be allowed to fragment into a clutch of small African countries? What are the other consequences: another civil war? conflict in the east? The Sudanese are also perplexed that Darfur has grabbed the headlines when the numbers of dead from the north-south civil war totalled millions: Bashir has not been indicted for crimes in that conflict. But Darfur is what everyone talks about. At a British embassy reception I had an interesting conversation with a gay (illegal here) Sudanese man. ‘The Sudanese,’ he tells me, ‘are the most racist people in the world.’ His family comes from one of the ruling northern tribes. ‘If I told my father I wanted to marry a Darfurian [all ironies aside], he would kick me out.’

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